I asked many people the seemingly simple question “What does it mean to be a woman?” Despite the simplicity, many got confused when trying to answer. Here’s some of the answers I received:
“Oh fuck, ok well give me a second…I don’t really know, I don’t know if I know myself. I guess it should be similar to how to define a man. I personally relate to men a lot more than I do women but I still consider myself to be a woman so it’s confusing. I guess it depends who you’re surrounded by.”
“Objectively its just to be a female adult in society.”
“Well I don’t know, I’m not a woman.”
“I think you definitely have some properties to be a woman that are feminine and it’s definitely different than being a man. I’d say to be a woman it’s hard, I’ll give you that.”
“Holy shit, I’ve never ever even considered how I would answer this. Its feminine traits but it’s also being strong and providing. Women are way fucking smarter and better than men. It’s like growing up my dad wasn’t around and I got to see my mom have traits that aren’t traditionally feminine which made me view women a lot different than other people.”
“You have to be strong and smart and independent to be a good woman.”
“Strong.”
“That’s like such a deep question and I don’t know the answer”
“First off, vagina. I think a lot of woman in our generation tend to over extend and over commit. Women are strong but soft, they’re a balance of a lot of different things. We have jobs and are also mothers raising children which isn’t as common for men.”
“I don’t know how to describe that. To be a woman you’re another member of society, you have your own purpose you’re serving like every other member of society on the planet.”
“How would I know that, I am a man? I like women. I look at women as equal as a person, sure they’re the opposite sex but other than that part I don’t know, a person is a person. The women’s movement isn’t new, Queen Cleopatra and Queen Shiba, Margaret Thatcher, there’s women that ruled as dictators. Women can be more emotional and get away with it in our society, if a man started crying in a grocery store everyone would freak out, women are luckier than men in that regard, men suck it up and that stigma and separation will always be there because that’s how it is, men aren’t supposed to show weakness whereas women can.”
“I was going to say the ability to bear children but trans women can’t do that so I don’t know..it also can’t be about chromosomes because of gender identity so I really have no idea.”
Many people related the gender to human experience. By calling it “hard” to be a woman, they defined half the population’s experience of the world into one category. That’s why it is confusing to many to describe, because human beings are different yet by defining ourselves within the construct of a binary gender system we become controlled by what people envision the gender we were assigned as. The confusion of this question to all of the people I asked also shows that this western construction of a binary gender system is so ingrained in our heads as important that we blindly follow, yet have no idea why we do so, and we don’t even know what it means. Others described a sex, rather than a gender; a sex is based off of the anatomy that you were born with, yet gender is based upon personality and human experience, which is why having only two categories of human experience is harmful to our personal development and self discovery. Several people described being a woman as “strong” and “independent” which historically has been a male trait, but today it is something that you would say any good human being must be, which begs the question “why gender?” Some other people said women are completely equal to men, then why separate us? What is unique to experiencing the world under the label of “woman,” and if there is no difference because we are all equal then why not do away with the concept of gender completely? The purpose of asking so many people this question was not to find one definite or correct answer, because there isn’t one. The purpose was to show people that they don’t understand a concept that they act according to constantly in their daily lives, and to force the reader ] to grapple with the fact that we weren’t born to act this way, that society forced this upon the world…but why? What does society get by putting every person into one of two categories?
Binaries: A Utopian Desire For Control Turned Dystopian 