Woman

I went to the dictionary today and simply typed the word “woman”. I found an interesting definition “a female who is paid to clean someone's house and carry out other domestic duties” and I typed the word man and found one interesting definition “a person with the qualities associated with males, such as bravery, spirit, or toughness: she was more of a man than any of them.”

I am a woman, comfortable in her “feminity”. I love sneakers and lipstick, I love skateboards and nail polish, I love sports and getting my hair done. All of these do not make me any less of a woman than I feel.  My gender does not define me. Being a woman does not simply domesticate me. It does not confine me to the environment of the home/kitchen. I do not even like children, it does not make me any less of a woman. Lately I get this look of absolute horror when I tell people I hate to cook. It’s not that I can’t cook, quiet the opposite, I am a superb cook, I just do not like to cook all the time. That is it. It has nothing to do with my gender. Growing up, I have seen men on my maternal side that cook better than women, It is not strange to me. Why must everything go back to sex?

A man is manly only if he is brave and strong and a woman is womanly if she cooks and cleans well. Really? On what grounds are those statements right? A man can be weak and scared and a woman can be strong and brave. People are different, our genders do not define us. Society has placed this idea in our minds of certain ways a woman must behave and has put standards for men too. Even the dictionary gives a typical example of my argument. And I get this a lot “you a girl, I don’t blame you”, this has angered me more times than I can count. Really, being a girl suddenly turns me into an open book that you know so well that you get to judge my actions based on my sex. Really? And who died and made you an expert at that?

What we must learn as a society to look at in ourselves should  not be our gender, it should be our actions and our ideologies, our mentality and will. Those are things that define us. I was born a girl, a very smart girl who loves sports and reading and hates cooking and domestic work. It deosn’t make me any less normal girl than the girl next door who has conformed to the norms of society and is already married with kids. It is not wrong for a woman to chase her dreams and become a large inspirational figure for young men/women. It is not wrong for a woman to have ambition and to chase education. Society has killed us slowly, we have turned ourselves into machines that bend to whatever it is that is on the mainstream. It is sad that people are so closed minded that in a 21^st century society, it is a seen as a surprise that a woman is running for a political office, who says women can’t lead?

Raise your girls and boys to understand that their genders do not define them, they can be whatever they set their minds to. The women can be soldiers and the men can be chefs and vice versa, either way, society must learn to accept us the way we come, not alienate us and call us strange for not conforming to its norms.