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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Why can't you *feel* like a woman?

255 replies

polkadotwellies · 05/05/2018 03:07

I might be wrong but after reading some of the threads it seems some woman can't feel like a woman: Womanhood is merely biological.

I am biologically a woman and feel like a woman. I just wonder why that's such a contested concept?

OP posts:
SarahCarer · 05/05/2018 09:55

Fooled not foiled

polkadotwellies · 05/05/2018 09:59

Thanks for your thoughts. Just got home so heading to bed but will definitely catch up tonight with an open outlook.

OP posts:
ReluctantCamper · 05/05/2018 10:12

second what Bloodmagic said so eloquently.

and YY MaterialReality, I was very into sci fi and fantasy. your description of women's roles in those genres is depressingly accurate, or it was in the early 90s.

Thank god for Sherri Tepper, although I tried to re-read her recently and realised that she's a-OK with eugenics, which passed me by as a teenager.

AllyMcBeagle · 05/05/2018 10:13

Does anyone else have that Shania Twain song stuck in their head after reading this thread?

Ekphrasis · 05/05/2018 10:15

Yep. Ear worm.

SarahCarer · 05/05/2018 10:32

Well I have now AllyMcBeagle!

BobbiBabbler · 05/05/2018 10:56

When an abusive man wants to be abusive it is his perception that decides what you are.

Wow... lightbulb moment. Thank you to whoever posted this.

AreWeDoingThisNow · 05/05/2018 11:00

I feel like me.

I'm lucky that I haven't experienced misogyny on a level many other women have, so it took me a long time to see how ingrained it is.

I don't 'perform/present' a lot of the societal expectations of 'femininity' in my appearance, like makeup, dresses, nails, etc. I have a lot of 'typically masculine' interests like motorsport.

I am a woman though, and there are some things I have experienced that only women experience, and even then not all women, so I'm not sure they define womanhood? (I'm talking biological realities, having my stitches checked for infection in my spare room at 5 days pp for example)

For me I think I feel my 'womanhood' the most when experiencing or considering these things, the rest of the time I don't really think about it.

Most of my specifically 'womanly' experiences are faintly unpleasant (not all, but most) so it's generally akin to the was I feel about being asthmatic or a driver, it's just one of my many categories.

SpareRibFem · 05/05/2018 11:09

Most of the time I just feel like me, like a number of other posters the times when I have an experience that is because of my sex. They split into two aspects: biological and social

  • every time I was told I couldn't do something because I was a girl
- When I was told I'd never get a promotion because I was a mother with children
  • When I've been subject to male violence and unable to counter it due to difference in physical size & strength
-when I've bleed so heavily I've been unable to leave my house
  • every time I miscarried
  • when my gynae problems have been dismissed by Drs as something women have to put up with
  • menopausal symptoms

Also

  • When I was pregnant and gave birth to my babies

Whilst I like to get dressed up and put on makeup every so often that doesn't make me feel like a woman, it's just putting on a costume

AltogetherAndrews · 05/05/2018 11:20

The reason the idea of “feeling like a woman” has become offensive is because a group of people who have no idea of the reality of being a woman have decided that “feeling” like a woman is the defining principle of womanhood, which excludes many actual women, including me, who have no feeling of being a woman. I am a woman because of my biology, and because of how I am treated. I only feel like me. But a group of people have decided I’m not a woman because I don’t feel like one. And that my biology is irrelevant. Having actually lived as a woman, I am horribly, overwhelmingly aware of the relevance of my biology.
It would be massively offensive if I were to insist on redefining what it means to be black when I am white. But apparently it’s completely fine for men to redefine me. Fuck that for a game of soldiers.

SarahCarer · 05/05/2018 11:21

There is also consolation in this experience. I feel like a woman when other women echo my language and say affirming words to me and I to them. When we share our experiences and offer each other a hand of support. This is how collective identities work and it translates to other groupings including ethnic origin.

SarahCarer · 05/05/2018 11:24

Cross post there. Yes identifying as a woman when you are a man is very similar to identifying as black when you are white. The difference is that the idea of significantly different black and white brains was thrown out well before the idea of different male and female brains.

LaSqrrl · 05/05/2018 11:24

I think Bloodmagic is onto something:

c) feeling 'girly' or having an affinity (or acceptance of) for the sex based stereotypes which are assigned to women.

I suspect that acceptance of the sex-based stereotypes is what some women claim either "I feel like a woman" or "I like being a woman".

And that is what TRAs have latched onto, that superficial enjoyment of the sex-based stereotypes. That vary from time and place I may add!

Enjoyment =/= innate feelings of being something, they are merely enjoyment of the activity/role.

What the RFs have always said to trans is, if you enjoy twirling around in a fluffy pink frock, knock yourselves out, but it does not MAKE you a woman, and it certainly is NOT what woman 'feels like', as really, most of us don't even do that, nor enjoy that.

SarahCarer · 05/05/2018 11:26

It's hard to imagine an idea like "white people are from Venus black people are from mars" gaining much traction

MadBadDaddy · 05/05/2018 11:26

"Does anyone else have that Shania Twain song stuck in their head after reading this thread?"
If you re-genderise all of the lyrics (ie "Woman! I feel like a man!" short skirts=short shorts, color=comb, etc.) there's only one line in the whole song that looks completely wrong as a 'masculine' sentiment:

"I want to be free yeah, to feel the way I feel"

Which is so odd, b/c that's exactly what you all seem to be saying here!
FlowersCake

MogPlus · 05/05/2018 11:33

"There is also consolation in this experience. I feel like a woman when other women echo my language and say affirming words to me and I to them. When we share our experiences and offer each other a hand of support. This is how collective identities work and it translates to other groupings including ethnic origin."

This.

It's not about our inner womanly spirit connecting, it's about recognising someone walking the same path.

The connection I feel with other women, is the same feeling as when I meet others with the same disability. This doesn't mean I have a disabled inner soul, merely that I recognise my experiences and reactions in them - and feel less isolated as a result.

OddBoots · 05/05/2018 11:37

I have no other frame of reference, I don't know what it feels like to feel anything other than what I am.

I don't know what it feels like to feel like a man, I don't know what it feels like to feel like a guinea pig, I don't know what it feels like to be black,. I don't know if what I see as green looks the same as what someone else sees as green, I don't know if what I feel is feeling like a woman because I don't know how other women feel, I only know how I feel.

This is my only life and experience.

SardineReturns · 05/05/2018 11:38

This is always interesting as many old school feminists, are feminists because they noticed when they were treated "as a girl / woman" when inside they felt like a person. So by definition there was always going to be friction between them and people whose entire state of being is around feeling like a man / woman / boy / girl.

Thinking about it - this can be framed in TRA terms.

I feel like a person - that is my "internal identity" if I must have one (I don't feel that this is a key part of my identity though) -

So every time I get "treated as a woman" or when I was young "treated as a girl" then I am, in TRA terms, being misgendered and subjected to actual violence.

Interestingly, the feminist reaction to being "treated as a girl / woman" when you don't feel like one, is to try and get people treated equitably

And of course when the "treated like a woman or a girl" involves aggression / violence from men or "micro aggressions" in the new lingo (I suppose things like being leered at openly) then that is a whole other ball game.

So logically, all the women who feel like "people" and get rankled / upset when they are treated "as a girl / woman" are in fact under the trans umbrealla and being misgendered?
Similarly with names - many women have for years been expressing dismay anger at being called the wrong names by friends, family, work, and institutions like banks.

In both the above cases women have been told to put up and shut up.
These are essentially the things the TRAs want changed though. The same things.

No wonder so many women are pissed off. We are expected to treat this as new and amazing, when most of it is entirely familiar to us, and yet, somehow, our identical concerns are just not important...

OP - you can feel how you want, obviously. Lots of women don't know what this feeling is though despite Stonewall etc claiming that teh vast majority of people not only have an internal sense of gender ID but that it is "strongly held".

SardineReturns · 05/05/2018 11:39

I mean - not very well expressed -

Is it even an ID to feel like a person?

Surely I AM a person. No ID required.

Ihaventgottimeforthis · 05/05/2018 11:40

Because I am an individual, I just feel what I feel.
I know I am an adult female, therefore I'm a woman, but I just am.
Cripes it seems so trite to read it, but I really can't get away from it. After being told 'woman' is a feeling rather than a biological reality, I don't know if in that alternate world I am even a woman.
But do I feel like a man? Who knows. So in the world of 'your feelings determine your gender identity' what the hell am I?
Quite happy just being me to be honest. As long as I have the rights & protections against harm and discrimination because of my biological characteristics & the circumstances that arise from them.

Waddlelikeapenguin · 05/05/2018 12:14

Raises hat to ReluctantCamper

merrymouse · 05/05/2018 12:24

You can say you 'feel' like a woman, but it is as subjective as saying you 'feel' British. Some people feel British, some people don't, nobody particularly agrees on what it means and it has nothing to do with whether you actually are British.

Greymisty · 05/05/2018 12:26

For me feeling like a woman is those moments that involve pain. I felt my most womanly when my ex tampered with a condom without my knowledge i fell pregnant, miscarried then had medical complications. I watched him carry on healthily not inconvenienced in the slightest. In that period of time I felt more woman then I have ever felt and being womanly was not pretty. It was the biological reality which created the feeling.

Day to day I feel like a human, I have feelings about being a woman and I feel social pressures because I'm a woman. I LOVE being a woman because I like aspects of female culture that society has created, also think women's bodies are more attractive visually. If I had been born a man I'm 99% sure I would have equally loved it but for different reasons.

BeaOnABicycle · 05/05/2018 12:26

Ok, name change for this post only.

I guess the first time I remember getting an insight into what it might 'feel like' to be a woman was when, aged 10+, it became my job to 'help' my mum with the weekly house clean. It was my job to hoover the whole house from top to bottom - my brothers would often be sitting on the sofa watching TV, and as I got close to them, they'd lift their legs up so I could hoover the carpet thoroughly underneath where they were sat.

A few years later, I got more clues when I was targeted for sexual abuse by a (male) family member - I don't recall him checking first whether I 'felt' like a girl/young woman, he just somehow knew that I was the appropriate child to target out of 4 siblings, the other 3 of whom were born male.

In my 20s, I used to get my haircut regularly at my local barbers, never wore dresses, make-up or heels, and yet somehow I was still clocked as sufficiently 'woman' to be subjected to a brutal stranger rape - I'm pretty sure I was 'feeling like a woman' when I had my legs in stirrups after that, as I was fitted with an emergency coil in a bid to ensure I didn't have to deal with a pregnancy. I felt even more like a woman when I was grilled on the stand in court about every intimate aspect of my life by a (male) barrister in a gruelling effort to discredit me & my testimony. It worked as well - the jury exonerated him, following which my (male) rapist was told by the (male) judge that he could leave the court with his head held high.

Within my marriage, I strove to try & create a partnership of equals, without realising for many years that my then husband's many 'mistakes' that somehow left me more or less constantly 1-down, and him very much 1-up, formed a very distinct pattern; I was helped to understand that pattern when I was referred by my Health Visitor to the Freedom Programme, where I sat weekly with a group of people - all also biological women - who'd all had strikingly similar experiences. I'm quite certain that our commonality wasn't due to us 'feeling like women', but because of our biological reality as women, because of the socialisation we'd been subjected to on account of that biological reality.

I could go on - I could talk about the (male) gynacologist who never once looked at my face as he talked at me while performing a painful internal examination - although he did have sufficient decency to look at my then husband when he spoke to him, funnily enough.

Rather conversely, when I trained as a carpenter at a women-only training centre, I don't think I felt like a woman or a man - my experience was that I was just trying to live my best life as me. But when I went to do my site-work placement, despite the fact that I had the same level of skills as the male trainees also on placement from the local college, I was definitely singled out for abuse as a woman - the daily barrage of crude comments about my body, the jokes made about me as a carpenter showing that I was automatically devalued by almost everyone else (all male) just because of my biologically embodied reality, rather than anything to do with my skills or ability. The daily abuse was too much to take & I left, meaning I never actually got the qualification I had, until that point, worked so hard to achieve.

So to me, I really can't get a grip on any idea of what 'feeling like' a woman is that's in any way independent of, or separable from, my experiences of having actually been socialised & treated 'as a woman' for a little over 5 decades. I've never found any commonality I share with other women based on feelings, but I have, over the years, found an enormous degree of commonality based on shared experiences of the embodied biological reality of having been born, raised, socialised and treated by others as 'woman'...

Greymisty · 05/05/2018 12:28

merrymouse nice comparison and sums it up so well.