Being a woman is more than what everyone else wants
No matter the age you come at womanhood you quickly realise there are as many ways to woman as there are women on Earth. Whatever your culture and society you will be expected to behave in a certain way, dress appropriated, at least think about having kids, and find a nice man to have those kids with. Of course most women subvert those expectations to a degree, but the reality is that those pressures never fully go away. Indeed, everyone internalises what idea of womanhood their society has set-up be they male or female, and it is how we adapt and cope with that internalisation that shapes the women we become and are.
As a film Barbie attempts to exorcise those expectations of western ideals of womanhood, using the framing of real life motherhood and girlhood to counterpose the desired woman that Mattel project onto their dolls. It does a decent job of unpacking patriarchy and plastic assumptions, and in the end Barbie is unloosed on the real world to shape her own womanhood. Every woman in reality does the same, having to tread their own path through the minefield of social expectations and personal goals. Be this woman, just not that extreme version of self, do not kiss her, yes sleep with him, but not with that gal with the penis. You know, internalise the homophobia and transphobia because babies.
The cookie cutter image of womanhood shattered the moment the first MysSpace page blew out a million eyeballs in glorious technicolour. To be a woman was suddenly more than what Vogue or The Times beauty section told you to be. Yes, if you lived on a council estate or trailer park or in the projects you might aspire to an approximation of a magazine cover, but you would never get a splash in Elle or Woman unless you flogged your soul for a few quid. To be woman in the pre-digital age was to be woman as they saw fit. Suddenly, in the space of a few years the lived reality of womanhood became more than what the magazines and Corrie told you it should be. It became what you said you wanted to project onto the world.
Tik Tok and Instagram both slam versions of womanhood onto our screens that hypnotise and make us scroll. Girl bosses, femme boys, trans women, butches, sword lesbians, fitness chicks, holiday queens, stay at home moms, drag idols, the world suddenly projects womanhood as those woman see fit. Hold my sword said the sword lesbian as she rescued the princess becomes a matter of meme and cosplay. No longer is everything so rigidly heteronormative or vanilla; for better or worse the queering of womanhood marches out of the fringes into the mainstream as boldly as Kristen and Cara holding court Artemis style.
Your womanhood becomes what you suffuse, yet the laundry still needs to be done. Cats need feeding, children need to go on the school run. Or none of those things. Womanhood becomes what we shape it to be. Be you assigned at birth or egg cracked at 50, womanhood is this visceral thing that can from burka to bikini, hijab to skin head, Manila to Manhattan and all things in between. This multiplicity of woman is rich, textured, far more than the label implies. It is the moments after we take the picture, in the decisions we make on the quiet away from Facebook or Reddit post. It is the loves we lose, the people we fall head over heels for, the U Hauls we take to destinations unknown. It is also the lessons we learn, clothes we chose, and friend we make, keep and lose along the way.
There is no one way to be woman; queer womanhood, motherhood, Mormon lady on the porch, all ways to be woman in a world that desperately wants to put us back into the bottle. However you arrived at your womanhood is your own unique journey, unexpected, enthralling, at times painful, you have shaped yourself in ways every other woman has and no other woman has. It is a thing so personal that to describe what it is to be woman takes just a few words and all the words. It is being alive, being afraid, being joyous, bleeding, healing, knowing, fizzing, just doing your own thing beyond all the Barbies, and Caras and Kristens. It is being enough for yourself and no one else.
