The basic bitch: a lifelong struggle with relating to Generic Womanhood

I

In 1999, I smugly recorded in my diary that on non-uniform day at school, I'd been one of only two girls in my form not to wear head to toe sports brands. Aged 14, my favourite outfit consisted of cord flares (Gap; too big as I'd misread the label and looked at the US sizing), a bottle green velvet jacket (Camden Market) and cherry red Dr Marten boots (£30 in the sale. £30). The girls who tended to wear head to toe sports brands and mock my cord flares, were 'trendies': the basics of the late 90s. In 1999, trendies wore Kickers or Fila sweatshirts with bootcut jeans and listened to boy bands and UK garage. I inked Kula Shaker lyrics onto my homework diary in metallic gel pen; they did the same with the lyrics to Sweet Like Chocolate. 

In 2004, I was a student. The trendy, transported into the campus environment, had evolved, and my best friend and I, angsty and awkward, were by now referring to them as 'generics'. Generics wore Miss Sixty jeans and sometimes their boyfriend's sports stash. They had super-straight hair and made a lot of noise in the dining hall. They were your rag reps and your Christmas ball committee and they sniggered behind their hands whenever the Christian Union rep made an announcement about something. They didn't write angry letters to the student magazine when the Union bar ran a Playboy-themed night. They chatted loudly in the corridor about how they were definitely cutting back on carbs. I only had two small potatoes with dinner this evening. Do you think that's ok?

It's 2014 and the trendy who became the generic has now evolved into the 'basic', or the 'basic bitch'. Despite the origins of the term, it's come to to define a particular sort of young white woman. The basic likes Uggs and seasonal beverages and posting dubiously-attributed Marilyn Monroe quotes on Facebook, while watching Sex and the City and scrolling through her 'wedding inspiration' board on Pinterest. Should you wish to find out, Buzzfeed et al can give you examples of what a basic posts on Instagram, the sort of texts she sends, how she treats her boyfriend and what she gets up to on a girls' night out.

The US-centric stereotype doesn't always translate, but the idea of the basic is universal. And as Noreen Malone wrote in this piece for The Cut last month, it's taken off because it 'feels restrained, somehow'.

'You don’t quite have to stoop to calling someone a slut or a halfwit or anything truly cruel. It’s not as implicating as calling someone tacky — the basic woman is so evidently nonthreatening she doesn’t even deserve such a raised pulse. Basic-tagging is coolly lazy. It conveys a graduate seminar’s worth of semiotics in five letters. “So basic,” you think, scrolling through your Facebook feed. “She’s basic,” you offer to a friend, commenting on her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. It was a word we’d been looking for.'

Malone sums it up perfectly when she describes the basic as 'the woman who fails to surprise us'. She buys into what society and capitalism tells us it means to be a woman today. She's unoriginal, and she doesn't care. What's noticeable about the current usage of 'basic' is that it doesn't simply describe unoriginal patterns of consumption; it also describes patterns of thought and modes of expression. Feminists can be 'basic'. Mothers can be 'basic' (witness the rivalry between Mumsnet and Netmums and the stereotypes the former has of the latter). Fashion and lifestyle bloggers who don't necessarily buy in to generic consumerism but actually see themselves as pretty 'alternative' can also be 'basic'.

II

As if you couldn't have guessed it, from my tales of 1999 and 2004, I have to confess to a lifelong struggle with all that is basic. At the age of 14, major aspects of my personality and behaviour were little more than a construction to throw other girls off the scent and give them something to talk about. If they're mocking my clothes and my taste in music, at least they're not mocking the way I look or the fact I don't have a boyfriend. It was only in recent years that it became clear to me exactly what I'd been up to, diverting their mockery at the same time as inwardly marking myself out as better than them. If you grew up being given funny looks by all your popular, incredibly generic peers, if you ever felt like a tortured soul or called yourself 'indie' or wrote in your journal that you were pretty misunderstood, really, you've probably had a lifelong struggle with relating to all that is basic. Sooner than you know it you're 30 years old, and you're still avoiding basics and rolling your eyes when they pop up in your Facebook feed.

Those of us who can't deal with 'basicity' have a tendency to (inwardly) mark ourselves out as 'not like Those Women'; those generic ones over there. In a hangover from our school years, we categorise and separate out. We're more unique, more interesting, more special. Today the tables have turned, and the basic is no longer queen. She may subscribe to all that is on-trend and acceptable for women, but she's no longer cool. What I believe is an uncomfortable truth for many of us as feminists, however, is that decrying basic culture is kind of problematic. We know it, and we do it anyway. Noreen Malone started to explore this and hit the nail on the head when she concluded her piece saying:

'And so the woman who calls another woman basic ends up implicitly endorsing two things she probably wouldn’t sign up for if they were spelled out for her: a male hierarchy of culture, and the belief that the self is an essentially surface-level formation.'

When you're calling another woman basic, you probably haven't got to know her very well. And it's fairly reliant on your perception of what society sees as 'things for women' as inferior. Ouch. I'm not going to pretend I'm the first person to feel conflicted about the popularity of the word. In fact, the thinkpieces about it have been numerous. Anne Helen Petersen, for Buzzfeed, described women being dismissive of all things basic as little more than class anxiety, citing the term's origins as having class connotations and explaining its current usage in the same way:

'Unique taste — and the capacity to avoid the basic — is a privilege. A privilege of location (usually urban), of education (exposure to other cultures and locales), and of parentage (who would introduce and exalt other tastes). To summarize the groundbreaking work of theorist Pierre Bourdieu: We don’t choose our tastes so much as the micro-specifics of our class determine them. To consume and perform online in a basic way is thus to reflect a highly American, capitalist upbringing. Basic girls love the things they do because nearly every part of American commercial media has told them that they should.'

Petersen ends her piece by telling us that mockery of the basic woman is 'troubling' and 'regressive':

'To call someone “basic” is to look into the abyss of continually flattening capitalist dystopia and, instead of articulating and interrogating the fear, transform it into casual misogyny.'

Responding on Thought Catalog, Anna Dorn vehemently disagrees. Calling out basicity, as she sees it, is 'rooted in female empowerment'. She gets the argument that deriding other women as 'basic' for choices they have made in the vacuum of patriarchal society is misogyny, but she doesn't ascribe to it.

'...basic-bashing is not about punishment. It’s about women rising up. It’s about women saying – We can be real people with real thoughts and opinions. We can wear our natural hair. We can be loud and curse and be offensive. We can say fuck heels because they hurt. Basicity is about giving power to the fringes, because basics – the walking embodiment of male subordination – ultimately have all the power.'

She concludes that '...basic-bashers can’t be misogynistic because we don’t stand to benefit from patriarchy.'

III

Both Petersen and Dorn are partially correct. As women, defining ourselves as superior to basics is somewhat rooted in anxieties surrounding consumption and class - even when we write off feminists as 'basic' because their commitment to the cause goes about as far as reading Lena Dunham's autobiography and thinking that a women's magazine running a feature on feminism 'is everything'. But it's not the full story. It's about buying in to expectations that we'll always define ourselves in opposition to some other group of women. Not like those women, thinking this, supporting that and wearing those clothes. Writing off women as friends and sisters because our opinions are superior or because they haven't reached a certain level of consciousness yet, sealing ourselves off and sneering at the Other. Radfems vs libfems vs funfems vs whitefems.

When we differentiate ourselves from all that is basic, we're representing all that is real and diverse and exciting about being a woman on the fringe when it is, indeed, what is generic and safe that has the power. Every woman who's ever felt free to be the person she really is knows that. Generic and safe is the ideal, and when you don't fit the mold you're often made to feel bad about it. Being able to say 'That's not me and I don't care' is liberating. But defining 'basic-bashing' as feminist praxis? 21st century empowerment as declaring that we're not like other girls and effectively writing off those generic specimens of womanhood as people who matter? It's indisputably problematic.

It's here that disagreements over the nature of sisterhood are bound to come in. Feminism doesn't mean liking all other women, or even being able to relate to them, but sneering at other women and calling it empowered shouldn't even come into it. Call it what it is: an extension of the way women have always been socialised to relate to other women, judging them and eyeing them up as competition and fuelling our anxieties about being interesting and clever and real.

Having always written off that which we now call basic, I've felt challenged in recent weeks not to buy into that any longer. Don't like particular women for particular reasons? Fine. Name them. But basic-bashing isn't about women rising up. It's upholding the status quo and shutting women out of potential opportunities to learn, grow, and identify with one another,

#FaithFeminisms - Where we've come from vs where we must go

Reading so many stories of women coming to find their feminism alongside, or as part of, their faith this week made me realise the details of how it happened for me had become slightly hazy. I've told people the tale so often now: I went to university as a lifelong Anglican who'd never been taught a single thing about gender and religion, but also as one who had also started identifying as evangelical. In the following years, I slowly began to learn that some people didn't believe women could be church leaders, and that they also believed in rigid gender roles. I struggled to feel as if I fit in at church, feeling as if people wanted to cram my personality into a box marked 'Biblical femininity' and do away with all the bits that made me who I was. I'd started to pick up the messages from leafing through books and from coming across blogs aimed at Christian women. Even though I'd grown up far removed from the US evangelical culture of the time, it was starting to affect my life. When I got engaged, more than one person told my husband-to-be that they didn't think I was right for him and advised him to reconsider. I was the young woman who was Too Much, with the wrong sort of upbringing and the wrong sort of ambitions.

What I'd forgotten over the years is how much this hurt. These days I tend to consider myself quite privileged to have come to faith and grown up outside the sort of Christian culture that has caused so much pain to so many. Looking back at my Livejournal (yes, my Livejournal) from the time it's filled with accounts of news stories I found that worried me intensely: The Silver Ring Thing trying to raise its profile in the UK; people I knew starting to talk approvingly about Mark Driscoll; conservative blogs on 'Biblical womanhood' that named as 'selfish', among other things, working outside the home, eating disorders, and 'giving in to PMT'. I worried about what would be expected of me as a married woman, and I didn't know what to do. I knew something wasn't right, but I worried that the problem was me. In 2007 I was writing about asking God to show me where the problem lay. Was I displeasing Him? Was I, as ever, Not Good Enough?

Enter my discovery of egalitarianism, and I know many of you know where that led me. Reading back into my story today has reminded me not to forget the place I came from. Yesterday, I told someone how strongly I feel that as a community of women, as Christians and feminists we must tell our stories, but also move past the incessant going over of those 'moment of realisation' posts, the posts about how yes, indeed, faith and feminism are compatible. They give us warm fuzzy feelings but do they move us forwards? I remember today the women who will be reading through the #FaithFeminisms posts this week with a growing sense of excitement and a sense of sisterhood, the feeling that they're not alone and the problem isn't theirs to 'get over'. I was there once, and then everything changed.

For the rest of us though, when we've been here a while we can be tempted to get tired of it all. At a time when discussions about the feminist movement often seem to be centred on its 'toxic nature', an incessant cycle of call-outs, fall-outs, and the drawing of lines in the sand, it's easy to hold up our hands and step back. Are these our people after all? Aren't they, well, a bit angry? But if we disengage and seek solace in the safety of our own privileges, of evangelical subculture and its respectability, I don't believe we'll be the women we're called to be. It's easy to take the 'I'm all right' route, stay content in our progressive crowd and forget about all those for whom things are very much not all right. Even as more progressive voices make themselves heard, there's still an emphasis on watching our tone, being careful not to be 'divisive' and being careful not to upset conservatives or men. Often, it seems as if the message is: you'll never win them over unless you play it safe and play nice and make sure that men get to take centre stage too. 

I believe what we're called to do instead is bring the very best aspects of our faith to the feminist table. Foster understanding, demonstrate love, and stand against injustice. Demonstrate true sisterhood. Don't be tempted by performative social justice activism that prioritises call-outs, ideological purity, and ejecting people from the fold over recognising people's humanity and discussing problematic behaviour in a productive way. We feel saddened by the performative gatekeeping of Christianity, with its 'farewells' and smackdowns. Let our feminism not fall prey to the same problems. This week I've seen people better known by the mainstream movement and from outside the movement altogether exclaim how open and welcoming they've found #FaithFeminisms. I've always found this to be the case and I hope they're values we hold on to.

I've met some of the very best people I know thanks to being a young woman with an internet connection and a lot of thoughts and feelings about faith and feminism. At the beginning, it seemed that patriarchal Christianity had the monopoly on the popular books and the websites I was seeing and the messages I was getting. Today, women I am proud to call my friends have published books on egalitarianism and feminism. I've been involved in networks of women working together and supporting each other as we navigate what it means to practice faith and feminism. I'm a founder member of one of them. I'm involved in a group that's trying to get another one off the ground. Once we felt silenced, now there is a definite voice that has the power to speak to the church and to the secular feminist movement. And we can build on this by coming alongside each other and doing what, as Christians, we're supposed to work at doing best: creating real and productive community - those that support, those that organise, those that lead - no longer voices in the wilderness but a movement for change.

This post is part of #FaithFeminisms week. Do read the amazing posts that have been written by other women.

The Fifties: a warning from history

I purchased The Fifties Mystique, Jessica Mann's new memoir-cum-warning, at the weekend after reading her piece for the Guardian entitled "What do you mean, the good old days?" The article was an intriguing read, discussing how Mann feels that today's women are wrong to wish for a return to the supposedly simpler or happier times before the massive societal changes that the 1960s and 1970s brought, and the new opportunities and choices they afforded women. Mann remembers this so-called golden age, and doesn't remember much of it with affection. It's less "the golden age" and more "The Fifties: a warning from history".

As the country has struggled with recession and assorted economic woes in recent years, the newspaper or magazine feature about the women who simply long for the "good old days" has become a bit of a cliche. The unhappy career woman who's sick of slogging her guts out at the office in return for little in the way of fulfillment. The woman who's found she can't "have it all". The middle class stay-at-home mother who has found new joy in making cushion covers, baking and wearing floral dresses. The women who idolise the 1950s as a time when they could "just be women". We keep hearing about this fad called "the new domesticity" and it's possible to track down a plethora of articles discussing whether it's fun, empowering, or a step in the wrong direction for women.

I suspect that much of this "new domesticity" fad has a great deal to do with trends in "women's interest" journalism and selling products to affluent families rather than anything else. It's about marketing a lifestyle over encouraging a genuine interest in what it involves, and I think it's also possibly on its way out as a fad, as people grow tired of ditsy print cake tins and Kirstie's Homemade Home and circular debates about cupcakes and what is and what isn't "feminist". 

But "new domesticity" aside, Mann says she is concerned that too many of today's women are wishing they lived in the past without realising what this truly would have meant for them, and for society in general. She quotes one woman as saying "I'd love to be a captive wife," one describing the post-war years as "prettier and nicer", and another, commenting on the unfairness of having to "bring home the bacon as well as cooking it". What she sets out to do through telling the story of her early life, is make people more aware of the limitations and frustrations of the era she describes in terms of its greyness, boredom, bigotry, hypocrisy and obsession with deference, while warning them not to be complacent about gender equality.

Several times, she refers to reading Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique as an important turning point for her, because it led her to realise that she was not alone. Mann had a happy marriage and loved her young children, but she was also bored and frustrated, and felt that there must be "something more" out there for her to get involved in and challenge herself. I've been reading The Feminine Mystique this year, and while I don't agree with all Friedan's assertions and see the limitations of the book, it's fascinating as a book that really hits you with just why the women's liberation movement was so angry. It's a bit fashionable these days to sneer and smirk at those ranting second wavers, and for the more conservative critics of feminism to disapprove of their unbecoming behaviour, their supposed desire to do away with "the family" and their imagined anti-children stance. Maybe fewer people would sneer if they read through some of the quotes I ended up highlighting as I read the book.

Mann is correct in saying that things today have changed to the extent that there are obviously a lot of things that many people take for granted, things that don't figure in their nostalgia for the post-war years. Ignorance and complete shame about sex and bodily functions would be one of them - from anatomical terminology to the female orgasm to contraception, Mann describes the weirdness of being totally in the dark about it all - from the antenatal classes that would start with a discussion on "How did baby get there?", to a problem page in a women's magazine that featured a letter from a mother of four asking how she could prevent having any more children. The printed answer was that she should send a stamped addressed envelope to the magazine to receive a personal response - the point being, of course, that it would have been beyond the pale for the magazine to print advice about contraception.

Another of these things that has changed beyond recognition is the position of women in public life and in the workplace. While it's obviously not ideal even now, we've moved beyond the "good old days" when women didn't have a place in public life, and a job was something you did to keep you occupied until you got married, and many jobs were simply out of bounds. Mann remembers applying for jobs and being told "Certainly not - we don't take women". She remembers never learning about the achievements of women in history at school, the uncomfortable attitudes that still faced women who went to university and took their studies seriously. The issue of women and education is something that Friedan looked at extensively in her book, and I don't think I'll forget how completely miserable I felt reading through the descriptions of accepted thinking on women and learning from the time.

Being "too bright" was supposedly a hindrance, as was wanting to "compete with men" in terms of having a job and being able to manage money. A girl who "got serious" about her studies would be "peculiar, unfeminine", while young women undergraduates told Friedan that it was most important to them to "graduate with a diamond ring on your finger" and to not be "too educated" because that wasn't what men wanted. Personal ambition for the middle class woman acceptably extended to a husband with a good job, a lovely house and a brood of beautiful children. There was little sense of sisterhood among most women because they were set up to be in constant competition for a man. It hadn't always been like this - both Friedan and Mann contrast the 1950s glorification of the housewife with the "new woman" heroines of magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, and focus on its relationship with consumerism and post-war backlash. The women of the 30s and 40s were described in terms of their dreams and ambitions. Romance was often a factor in their lives, but they were portrayed as being adventurous, being involved in a variety of jobs, being pioneers and standing up for their beliefs.

By the 1950s, dreams and ambitions were described in terms of the happiness brought by a new pair of curtains or a kitchen appliance; fulfillment was a compliment bestowed by a husband following the purchase of the latest shade of hair dye; feeling depressed was solved by deciding to have another baby. Ultimate joy was realising that you were best off in your role as the "little woman", who didn't tax herself by attempting to go back to college or understand the family finances. I think you'd be hard pressed to find many women today who could identify with any of that, despite the media's insistence on wheeling out panic pieces entitled "Do men REALLY want an intelligent woman?" or "Men: still threatened by successful women" every so often.

More alien to most women today (whether it's a feature of their own lives or not) would be the concept of having no personal ambition, no sense of self, no right to want time alone or time for personal development. Mann highlights the more open, confessional, talk-about-everything culture of the 21st century, and this is often particularly evident in the books, websites and self-help articles that encourage us to get the job we really want, achieve the goals we're really passionate about, take up new interests, have a career change, sort out our relationships, find ourselves. Mann remembers how talking about feelings, or expressing discontent with your lot in life was simply not done, particularly if that involved feeling miserable about being a housewife and mother. And gender equality was old hat, the preserve of terrifying yet slightly comical 1930s spinsters in tweed suits.

By the end of The Fifties Mystique, Mann has dealt engagingly with her own early years as an evacuee, schoolgirl, student, young wife, mother and finally, a woman looking for "more". She turns her efforts to encouraging today's women not to look at inequality and their dissatisfaction and see turning back the clock as the answer, but to look towards the problematic issues of the 21st century that are causing it instead. She mentions the stressful long hours culture of work today, the still-elusive dream of shared parenting and equality in relationships, the admonitions that we "can't have it all" that discourage women and fuel judgmental attitudes, the "old-fashioned sexism" of biological determinism (quoting Natasha Walter's excellent Living Dolls), the one-sided and exploitative approach to women's sexuality and appearance, and the fact that as during the 1950s, mothers are still to blame for everything.

"The history of women in the last one hundred and fifty years could be described as two steps forward, one step back, as when they took useful roles during the Second World War and were herded back to domesticity afterwards. Those who take hard-won rights for granted and have choices and chances once undreamed of, should recognise that the price of women's liberation is eternal vigilance," she writes.

In her article for the Guardian, Mann writes about her daughter's complaint that today, not working outside the home and enjoying motherhood is looked upon with scorn. What I see is the wider issue that most of our choices, as women, are looked upon with scorn. To work, or stay at home. Have a "career", or a "job". Have children when we're 20, or when we're 30. Send them to nursery while we work, or spend all our time with them. Pursue personal interests, or have none. Be open about enjoying sex, or be open about having issues with it. Society sets us up to judge the choices of others, creating "wars" and "catfights" rather than encouraging us to press for change. And it is this that often prevents us from seeing the bigger picture, so keen are we to assert the validity of whatever choices we've made.

Full term

Well, we made it. Today marks the magic 37 week point of my pregnancy. Full term; ready to roll; lock and load. The point at which you know that within five weeks, there will be a baby. Obviously, sooner than in five weeks' time would be nice, because I'm not particularly patient. Said baby is still all up in my ribcage and I'm thoroughly looking forward to the day when I can bend in the middle again and easily turn over in bed. Things I'm also looking forward to include walking at my usual pace, wearing non-maternity clothes, alcohol, eventually getting back into running, not being stared at in public as if I have two heads, and actually meeting the child my body has been working so hard to produce since last August.

I don't feel as if this baby-making thing has secured my womanhood and led me any closer to having a concrete answer to the question "What does being a woman mean?". It has made me certain that I hate "Mommy/Mummy Wars" discussions. It has made me certain that I get irritated by unsolicited "advice" about being a mother, particularly the sort of "advice" that intimates come next month, I will cease to have a life. That's about it so far.

But as is the case with a lot of people I know or whose blogs I read, gender expectations and stereotyping as they relate to babies and children have already become apparent, and given me plenty to think about when I wonder what it's going to be like to bring up a son or a daughter. It starts when, like me, you don't know the sex of the baby you're having, and some people treat you as if you're being difficult, stuck in this ridiculous sexless limbo that means you must be at a loss how to decorate the baby's room, or buy clothes for it. Admittedly, this does depend on the shops you frequent and the attitude you have towards colours, but I've already been informed that red, green and yellow are "boy colours" and that "you can't put a boy in a cardigan with ducks on it" (watch me).

This, of course, is the age of PinkStinks and Pigtail Pals and Hamleys doing away with its "pink for girls" and "blue for boys" signs. All that sort of stuff gets flak from certain news outlets and commentators for the supposed "anti-pink" stance ("girls are WIRED to like pink and that's a fact, people" - or otherwise - "urgh, first world feminist problems"), but we all know it goes further than that. It's not about being "against" the colour pink (I'm certainly not, despite the fact it's far from my favourite colour), but the way it has taken hold as the only option available, while displays of toy domestic appliances leave us in no doubt at which gender they're meant for.

Last month when I asked people about their perceptions of womanhood and femininity, Sarah Ditum told me she'd been pitched into the "war on pink" when she became the mother of a daughter, before it made her wonder just how consistent that made her as a role model - which I think is a really good point.

"That was interesting for a start – to realise that I'd designated 'boy things' as neutral and 'girl things' as optional extras, even though a lot of my identity and personal happiness is vested in [enjoying fashion, makeup, and other 'feminine' things]," she said, adding that she has no problem helping her daughter understand that these are things that make her comfortable with her identity as a woman, even though she doesn't necessarily see them as synonymous with "femininity", or necessary.

"It's impossible to be truly neutral," she said. "Instead, I hope that I can at least introduce them to the way gender is made at the same time that they are learning its codes."

I think part of doing this in a positive way is obviously about how gender is modelled within the family, and this is partly why I've been recently featuring guest posts from blogging friends who practice egalitarian relationships and shared parenting. It was interesting to read this piece by Jill Filipovic for Comment is Free last week, entitled "How gender equality is the friend of the family". Filipovic highlighted some recent research from the US that shows women now, more than ever, consider job success and satisfaction extremely important. Yet the research also found that there's also been a significant increase (since 1997) in the percentage of both men and women who see being a good parent as a top priority.

"Both men and women spend more time, and more quality time, with their kids than ever before – even more time than at the height of the stay-at-home mother," she writes.

"Dads who also balance work and family mean working moms aren't under quite as much pressure to be full-time employees and over-time parents, and so young women now can reasonably expect to have a fulfilling career and also be great moms. And dads, relieved of the burden to be the sole financial provider for their entire families, can recognize that their contributions to their kids can go far beyond the monetary, and include the tough but fulfilling emotional work of parenting, as well."

Filipovic adds that naturally, there is still a long way to go, in terms of equal pay, in terms of differences according to class privilege, in terms of the division of labour in the home. This much is true and must not be forgotten, but it was good to see a piece that didn't fall for all the usual "Having It All" or "Mommy Wars" clichés, or highlight some research claiming to show that women are more unhappy with their lives than ever - thanks, of course, to modern society making them feel they have to subvert traditional gender roles.

I'm left wondering how my own perceptions and opinions might change in the next few months. For now, I await the arrival of the baby.

Some recommended reading: blogs that deal with motherhood and parenting issues. I've been reading a fairly limited list, but these are the ones I go back to.

- PhD in Parenting

- Balancing Jane

- Adventures in Boogieville

- The Feminist Breeder

- Emerging Mummy

- C. Jane Kendrick

- The Achilles Effect

- Blue Milk

- More Than Toast

- Itsmotherswork

- Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Womanhood: what does it mean?

What does being a woman mean? What makes a woman a woman? C. Jane asked me this a few weeks back after she'd watched Miss Representation and was mulling over a lot of thoughts about how what she'd seen. The makers of this documentary want it to be a call to action to women and girls, encouraging them to challenge the limiting way they're portrayed by the media and in public life, so they can realise their full potential and women who have a great deal to offer society, rather than women whose worth is dependent on their looks and sexuality, or fulfilling certain stereotypes.

I think most of us can identify with this. We talk about it - the expectations society has of us, the way it pits us against each other and the way it denigrates women who don't measure up. Someone replied to Courtney to say that for them, becoming a mother was the ultimate expression of womanhood. Not everyone agreed - where does that leave women who can't have children, or don't want to, or would like to but don't have any yet? This is the problem with trying to define it with particular life experiences and characteristics - inevitably, someone will feel left out or hurt.

I'm someone who struggles to articulate what "being a woman" and "femininity" mean to me. I'm not even sure if I know. And I wondered if other women feel the same - so I asked them. Here follow the thoughts of some of the women who follow me on Twitter.

One thing that was immediately obvious was the negative feeling associated with the idea of "femininity".

"Womanhood is a state of being a woman. Femininity is a 1950s advertising stereotype that some try to impose on women. I've been accused of being unfeminine by another woman because I liked beer and football and I was outspoken. I don't want her version of femininity, it's bobbins." 

"I feel like womanhood embraces all it means to be a woman, whatever that looks like. Almost a rallying call rather than a label. For me femininity has a lot more baggage. It's a standard used to judge women by. Too feminine, not feminine enough..."

"I feel like 'femininity' is so often a by-line for stifling stereotypes."

"Womanhood is the cultural destiny ascribed to biology. Femininity is when I play along with it. Feminism is when I spit in its eye."

"Femininity is a state that I feel other women achieve and I've never quite managed. It's only a concept to me, not reality. I've always been quite 'unfeminine' (short hair, tomboy etc) and didn't want to be stereotyped by it, but felt like I was failing by not being able to do those feminine things even though I didn't want them. Very confusing."

"Womanhood means the biology bits. Femininity, the way I signal it through clothing, appearance and manners. Being a woman feels unavoidable. Being feminine is something I work at."

"I've always felt excluded by the terms feminine/femininity because it is something I have never felt/wanted to be."

I very much identify with these statements. As a teenager and a woman on the cusp of adulthood, femininity was something I didn't have much of. I wasn't bothered about grooming and adornment. I didn't have "curves". Boys made fun of the way I looked and girls sneered at my clothes (teen bullying, eh?). The accepted line of thinking was that I looked "like a man". I remember sitting in my room in my first year at university, overhearing someone who lived on my corridor discussing this fact just outside the door. People giggled in response. Femininity was something I didn't have, and that made me a failure.

Eventually that phase of my life was over, but I had something new to worry about: "Biblical femininity" (whatever the hell that was supposed to be). I gathered from various sources that I wasn't joyful and outgoing enough. I was too outspoken and opinionated. I had no interest in other people's children and certainly didn't have the "gift of hospitality" - I liked to be left alone. That made me a failure. That phase of my life is over as well, but it just goes to show how much that word, and that concept are used to put us into little boxes, and beat us about the head when we don't fit into them.

In the same was that "femininity" is seen as something limiting, "womanhood" seems, for some, to be something unattainable and far-off, something for "grown-ups" that's dependent on having the job, the car, the house and the partner. How much of that is down to women's magazines and the like, or what society - and our families - expect we should be doing by the time we've reached a certain age?

"Womanhood is something I associate with grand dames, matrons and majestic older ladies. Manhood seems just a sexual euphemism to me. Womanhood is a combination of experience, power and knowledge."

"There seems to be a transition period for all faab people between 'girl' & 'woman' - an interim period, where there's a too-grown-up for girl, not 'grown-up' enough for woman (maybe not ALL female people, but many). Seems like there is an unattainable aspect i.e. a woman can raise a child, have a job, love a partner and DIY a doily..."

"It feels sometimes that I have spent my life trying to be a woman that I think I am meant to be, rather than the person I really am who just happens to be a woman."

There was also a definite third category of responses - and these are the statements I most identify with at this point in my life. To me, being a woman doesn't make me feel special. It doesn't make me feel more spiritual or more blessed. It just happened. I don't feel I have to act a certain way to be a woman. I want to embrace who I am and celebrate womanhood, but I don't think womanhood has to look like anything in particular, and I think that when we attempt to make it so, things start to go wrong.

"I am passionate about teaching and enabling young women, but other than that, being female is almost incidental."

"Womanhood is something I am, femininity is something I wear. Femininity is not inherent to me, not an essential identity."

"I find defining myself problematic as humans are contradictions & far too complicated to label. However in terms of my passion to see women realise and released to fullfill their potential, I am passionate about women. I celebrate my being a woman in that I have managed to do grow and achieve and find value and security, but ironically that security has led me not really be bothered about my womanhood."

That third statement sums it up perfectly for me. Finding value and security in my identity meant I stopped bothering about womanhood and "femininity" as a concept and realised that it doesn't mean a set of achievements, rules and behaviours, clothes or hair or what men think of me. For me this seems like the right conclusion to arrive at. When womanhood does signify those sort of things, it will always leave someone feeling inadequate.

When I look at the women of the Bible, they fulfilled many different roles and displayed many different characteristics. That's why it leaves me baffled when my religion tells me that being a woman is about ticking certain boxes. It's why I feel baffled when people get so very distressed at the idea of men and women being "equal" because they think that means "the same" - because that would never do. It shocks and appalls. Because when you take away the "differences" that aren't really "differences", the "differences" that are more assumptions and stereotypes, what are you left with? The way I see it, the answer is "not as much as most people think". Although we are told in scripture that there is a distinction, it reveals little about any personality traits we must supposedly have as a result. I'll always remember reading an extract from a book, which claimed that Genesis 1 gives us a portrait of  "a woman's inherent softness". Just in case I'd been missing anything, I double checked. The creation narrative seemed to be oddly lacking in any mention of, or allusion to, "softness". This is what happens when ascribing stereotypes goes a touch too far.

So how can we focus on a positive concept of womanhood? How do we make sure that all women feel included in this - that there are no accusations flying around of either trying to box us in, or hating on "traditional" femininity - which is of course embraced by many? And what implications does it have for the way we raise future generations?

I plan that this will be the first of a number of posts exploring this subject.

Being a woman: without the bad bits

When I was younger and struggling with depression and issues surrounding self-image, I used to have this niggling feeling that other young Christian women had it all figured out. They looked joyful. They looked glowing. They smiled a lot. Even if they didn't conform to society's standards of what was 'hot', they always looked radiant. It used to make me feel worse, because I wondered why I didn't feel like that, and worried about what must be wrong with me as a result. Why could I not grasp that whole 'made in God's image' thing? Why did I not feel like smiling more?

Clearly this was mainly brought on by my state of mind. I should have noticed that the summer I was at a particular Christian festival and I wasn't the only person in the seminars on working through self-harm and depression. But, you know.

A few years down the line, getting to know more young Christian women brought me to a major realisation: the realisation that they didn't have it all figured out. I had moved on and come to a lot of new conclusions along the way. So it surprised me, in a way, when people I knew would feel worried about how their figure looked in a particular outfit, or competitively talk about feeling so full after choosing a low calorie option in a restaurant, or worry about which guys might be showing an interest in them and agonise over whether to ask someone out in case it somehow contravened 'the rules'.

I'm not saying that to be cruel. It just came as a bit of a surprise to me, that despite all the teaching about self-worth and imago dei and not buying into all that worldly stuff, young women were still being drawn in to the performed femininity that the magazines, the rom coms and the women's pages in the tabloids require us to 'do' in order to feel acceptable. Comparing themselves negatively to other young women who seemed more confident, more popular, more attractive - which never achieves anything. Worrying about how the guys saw them. I found that when I looked at it all through my feminist lens, it was much more clear to me just why all that was a colossal waste of time and energy, and I wondered why the church's schtick on empowerment and self-image and womanhood wasn't, for a lot of people, cutting through the way society was telling them to behave. On the surface it was all good. Underneath, the familiar concerns were there.

Does this mean that more work is needed to tackle this at the root - the battleground that women face and the choice they may feel they have to make? The choice between being a woman who rejects all the crap and might not be a 'proper girl' as a result, and being a woman who buys into it all and feels sad and worries but is performing the more miserable side of modern femininity, with its rules and restrictions and judgments, and is therefore acceptable. Well, yes, it does. I know from personal experience that it's not as simple as telling young women that don't they know they're made in God's image and are wonderful just the way they are - because a lot of them won't believe it. But I also know that the truth will set them free.

This post by Sarah at Emerging Mummy sums up a lot of what I'm trying to say, but it's not just about body image. A lot of it's about the way we relate to men, and goodness knows that's a minefield of drama even within the church. Especially within the church, even (think of every blog post and book and report you have ever read about single people in the church). Mention feminist concepts to some of the people I've known over the years and the atmosphere would be profoundly uncomfortable. It's not, you know, attractive. Men won't want you if you talk about that sort of stuff. Women will think you're weird and roll their eyes and the conversation will abruptly stall. But it's all been so helpful to me - in conjunction with religion and prayer ministry and other things - in rejecting a great deal of rubbish and setting me free.

How much of a difference could it make to others? I think we owe it to God and to our sisters to lay that stuff aside even sometimes, and remember that it helps no-one, that it just traps us in another box and stops us from being who we're meant to be.

If that means we need to work through some serious stuff, which I know it does for a lot of people, it's important to find someone really helpful and supportive to talk it through with. It's also important that church pastoral teams are able to deal with it. Over the years I've had advice on it all from the less-than-helpful to the brilliant. It doesn't help that some Christian books aimed at women buy into the restrictions of modern femininity wholesale, which I suspect make most women feel either inadequate and condemned (me, once upon a time) or bored of it all and keen to see a book that changes the record because, damn it, we are all individuals (me, now).

Even when you think you've got it all figured out for the most part, toxic influences are very good at making you feel less than you really are and changing your perception of what a woman is, or should be.

Image: here