Someone asked me recently how I came to my ideas on feminism, womanhood and the patriarchy. We were talking about the younger generation of women and how they are doing ok in their assessments of how the patriarchy continues to oppress women.
I mentioned that I look back on my twenties and I can say I had the right ideas. Between 2012 to around 2020 I screamed into the voids on twitter about all manner of issues regarding women’s rights(among other justice centered subjects). I remember pinning a tweet to my page in 2015 about how I searched a few words with men’s handles before following them back. The words were bitch, women and females. I had been correcting the men around me in real life about saying females since 2014. Something about the context felt icky, not the word itself. Men commented on my pinned twitter post– some upset, others calling me too serious or trying to make light of me keeping my online realm safe for myself and my mutuals. Women thought it was genius and began to follow suit. I challenged women’s ideas about believing they became dickmatized after having enjoyable sex with men. The girls didn’t like that take lol. Roughly around 2018 I tweeted that men were not good people and that certainly got the girls(gender neutral) riled up. With more knowledge I can abridge that statement to say men are not socialized to be good people. I never bought the dream, my true north has always been my sovereignty and autonomy to do what my heart desires in life and it never involved a man. Granted, a huge chunk of my pervasive drive for autonomy had to do with the tight control my mother wielded over myself and my siblings but there were some pivotal moments and themes that led me to asking the questions that strayed me from the same path as the women who came before me.
My parents have been together my entire life, and still are(yuck). I remember a short stint of my dad having a separate apartment from my mom, where me and my older sister slept on the couch. The one instance I remember, my older sister and I slept over. He brought a woman inside in the middle of the night while he suspected we were asleep, but who’s to say that wasn’t my mother, it was dark and I didn’t see the woman’s face at all. My parents eventually married(sometime after I asked them if I was a bastard lmfao) and they bought a house and had the remainder of my siblings. The American dream. Behind the doors of our pink and rust colored home, manicured lawn and two car driveway there were plenty of examples showcasing why marriage likely was not for me. When my mother got frustrated with my father for reasons I never circled back to find out about, she would lecture my older sister and I. Letting us know to never depend on a man and always have our own everything. On the flip side she would brag about only having been with my father and how the house and her car were in her name but he paid the bills on them. My parent’s codependent relationship made for contradicting ideas about what I should aim for once I was of age. My favorite childhood movies were also shit like Aristocats, All Dogs Go to Heaven, The Fox and The Hound, 101 Dalmations and Oliver & Company so by the time I was watching disney princesses I had a variety of fictional stories to pull from and not a bias toward women in distress waiting to be rescued by a charming prince. To add icing to the cake I was discouraged from dating entirely.
By 6th grade I was starting to grow into a true individual and I think my mother panicked. She would dress me in clothes to match hers when she escorted me to my I Have A Dream Foundation outings, when parents were still heavily involved in the processes we had to follow to remain eligible for the program. The quality time we spent together going to and from these meetings made me feel safe and like I could trust her. I had also been open with her about a young man I was vaguely crushing on but it never went further than phone conversations. So when 7th grade rolled around I worked up the courage to ask if I could have a boyfriend. I had my eye on a young man named Eric who I had spoken to once when my class got integrated with another due to the absence of one of our teachers. Eventually one morning I sat at the edge of my parent’s king sized four post bed, watching Arthur and waiting for my school bus to arrive. My dad and older sister were already out of the house towards work and school so it was just me and my two younger siblings under 5 and mom. Just enough privacy to ask the question burning inside of adolescent me: “Can I have a boyfriend?”. I don’t remember her reaction exactly but I remember being told no and then lectured. It was like the sound of Charlie Brown’s teacher but the message was clear and duly noted on my part. I was disappointed but over it by the end of the week, only to find out that the news of my curiosity about having a boyfriend had spread like wildfire to my maternal aunts and grandmother. It was maybe a Friday, two of my aunts and my grandmother were at our house. They called me from my room and began to mockingly question me about my desire. I remember the smug grin on my aunt Shawn’s face when she stated “So, I heard you wanted a boyfriend”. My grandmother then pulled out a stuffed half torso with a flannel shirt and hand at the end of the limb and presented a stuffed boyfriend to me. I was mortified and humiliated. I took the stuffed thing and quietly went to my room where I cried. My aunt Shawn seemed to feel sympathy for me, coming to my door apologizing but I didn’t want comfort from someone who decided to use shame to quell my natural curiosity. I had already taken heed to my mother’s lecture and made no moves towards the young man I had my eye on. In fact he wore dirty shoes the next week and I was instantly turned off lmao. Their shame tactic worked though and I proceeded to be cautious of every other boy who showed interest in me until I was 20.
I took that situation really, really hard. I’ve always been the “sensitive” one. I think they knew that would embarrass me and that was the entire purpose, to plant a seed of doubt and make me question ever dealing with boys and eventually men. My mother had also shown me and my older sister laminated overhead projector images of STDs a few years earlier and was adamant about telling my sister and I that our breasts would fall off if we let boys touch them. I shared with my friend that there were so many contradictions in the way I was brought up I had no choice but to investigate and ask questions before I decided how to move in life. This also applied to the religious aspect of my upbringing. I remember my mother taking my older sister and I to church from very young and my dad not being there. He only attended church with us once they bought a house in Miami Gardens and began to attend Antioch Missionary Baptist Church. From my understanding the lure to get him to participate was new suits, shoes, ties and cufflinks. My father is a truck driver so he was used to a more rugged look day to day. Eventually he stopped attending with us which was another closed door feud and although I left religion due to a specific incident relating to homophobia I think subconsciously knowing my father walked away and he was fine that I could do the same and be ok.
Without the exact language I found myself deconstructing my fears around purity, religious ideals and human connection through curiosity, education and getting outside and just living.
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