A woman: Too much, yet too less of a person

Women are often told that they are emotional. Society has always found ways of showing us, women, how our emotions rule us and are in constant battle against our fulfillment, how our feelings make us weak and unlike man we cannot separate them from our daily life. We feel too much, sympathize too much, we love too much, we are a maternal figure dedicated to feed men, love them, carry their sorrows, clean up their mess and we must do all of that with a smile on our faces, never complain, never be ill or sick, never get upset or mad when our husbands, brothers, fathers or any man fails to do the only thing we asked them to do and if we dare speak out, we become naggy annoying creatures, high maintenance, we require too much, we are never satisfied and we are never happy. We are too much.

In a parallel controversy, men’s anger is never perceived as an emotion, it is perceived as strength, a source of power and fear to others, their anger isn’t only embraced by them but by all society and it is channeled to bring them all the respect and dominance that could exist, contrarily to women’s emotions that are always bad, out of control, unmanageable and a handicap until it has become fit to label us as emotional creatures. And it is only when we have accepted that we are emotional, following a successful series of tricking us into believe that this is our given nature, the hand that shook ours stabbed our backs and this label, initially given to us by society, is now used against us.

In the same controversy, men are never too much, they are easy to talk to, easy to deal with, easy to be with and easy to be around. Men never complain, men are the figure of being cool, from which derivates the cool girl trope used in films, music, books and all type of art made by men from their male gaze, the girl we all, in a certain phase our lives, aspired to be so we could seek some male validation.

The concept of the cool girl doesn’t fail to remind us of the “pick me girl” and though she annoys all of us, we must admit that somehow she is a victim of an environment that holds dearly the male attention and validation, the pick me girl, whether the hyper feminine one who only eats salad, loves pink, doesn’t have body hair and only wears skirts or the tomboy one (the cool girl) who is “practically one of the boys”, never wears make up and loves rugby to death, is a reflection of her own insecurities. And in spite of the fact that she is hard to be around because of her constant feeling of superiority from “other girls”, we should find ways of teaching her that her internalized misogyny does not make her special, rather than shaming her for what is a deeply rooted social construction, especially in a time where the pick me girl became a description for, basically, any girl we don’t like.

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.” Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

When all a woman wants once she sees a man is to get married and have kids, men only want to get to know you and have fun because life is too short to be wasted by commitment and moves very fast to be trapped in some woman’s silly dreams and aspirations of stability and building a home together.

Women want to commit and they want stability, men want adventure, they want challenges and they want their life to be spicy. Men don’t settle, only women want to do that.

When women work hard for their exams and stay late all night up studying, men come unprepared and pass the test.

When women work hard, men work smart, when women practice to be good, men are naturally gifted, talented and skilled.

When women wake up 2 hours earlier to get ready, all a man does is wake up 5 minutes sooner and be all ready.

A woman is ALWAYS pictured making enormous efforts while a man is given results without moving a finger.

“I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, Wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man” Taylor Swift

Men never change, only women do and shape their lives into fitting men’s perspective of what is a great woman is supposed to be.

We are just too much and we do too much!

At the other end of the spectrum, and to the male perspective, we are either good girls or bad girls, a good girl gone bad, or a bad girl transformed and redeemed to be good.

As women, we can never have it all, we are either the blonde, slutty, stupid, popular, sexual and sensual bombshell persona OR the calm brunette who doesn’t like to party, sleeps by 9pm, wifey material, studious, intelligent and conservative reserved persona.

We are either the boss girl women who work all day long or housewives trophies that do nothing but have yoga classes in the morning and Pilate classes the afternoon.

We are either the good girl girlfriend or the manipulative crazy psycho paranoid hysterical ex girlfriend.

We are either hot or smart, either cool or serious, and as much as women are labeled to be too much as previously stated, they are resumed into one personality trait and untitled to only one label to which they must hold on to and if we dare act differently to what we were externally shaped to, we are viewed as a new person or as if the old us has died rather than a continuity and a complementarity of a same self.

This male gaze of separatism that looks upon us women seem to make us believe, as already said before, that we cannot possibly have it all and the whole concept has been already used in several cinematic and television projects, in which two women play roles completely different, not only mentally but also physically and in which the physical appearance tends very often to dictate the mental status (gentlemen prefer blondes 1953, clueless 1995, legally blonde 2001, mean girls 2004, gossip girl 2007 etc)

The conflict between two different feminine figures seems to have originated initially from the observance of real life events, as life imitates art, because the Blonde versus Brunette trope seems to be familiar to one we have witnessed in the sixties, “Marilyn Vs Jackie” and John F. Kennedy and with no doubt to many other ones that precede and follow this one, but the one thing in common is that the prize to win in every female “dispute” is a man.

This dichotomy and contrast we witness and that has been instituted among women, for men, against women, makes women doomed to not win because we’ve all heard it since we were kids, ”she’s smart but she’s not pretty”, “she’s really fine but no brain.” And when we grew up, we heard things such as “Well, he did not marry her because she was too slutty” although the man in question has dated that same person for years OR “Well, he cheated on his wife because she was always good that it was boring and men love everything exciting and new”.

Society has always been obsessed of finding ways to limit us and yet make us be too much in that category we are limited at and attributed to.

Aggressive Vs soft

Assertive Vs overly shy

The whore Vs the wife

The fucker Vs the baker

The hooker Vs the hugger

Sex Vs virtue

Beauty Vs Brain

The other woman Vs the woman

“So what you’re saying is: everything is society’s fault and we as individuals never need to take responsibility for anything?” Bojack Horseman

All of those stereotypes that I am personally fed up with and that make men both idolize us and objectify us, glorify us and yet reduce us and to which we have always made detrimental decisions of how we want to be and live our lives, must come to an end and that would happen if we acknowledged, all of us, men and women, the toxicity of this social constructivism in which all of play a role in, therefore, to change and break this vicious circle, this alludes to a very major element and that is viewing ourselves as a part of this society and that our acts and actions do matter, which implies sharing our thoughts with people whom we judge need it, is a our responsibility rather than someone else’s.

Again, I couldn’t find a good way to end this blog but I feel like there is a crucial and very intriguing question that we have to ask ourselves today that we live in the 21st century and in which the movement of feminism has made it places I am personally very proud of and to which we should all be grateful for. However, we cannot close our eyes on some very late waves of feminism that tend to only criticize rather than help to correct and other ones that diminish men the same way women were diminished before and it is clear that with such behavior, no balance would result and the thing is, those so called feminism advocators are not feminists but entities that serve their own agendas.

Sometimes, it seems like men are doomed to being the bad guys, with a feminist's perspective. They were born within a society that cherishes and adores men with all their qualities but mainly with all their flaws. Our internalized misogyny does as matter of fact do nothing but help their behavior. If men are born into a society in which they were taught from day 1 that they are special and superior and growing up they find themselves in another society that blames them for it, I think a normal reaction would not be as perfect as we’d like to think.

I am not saying that we should make excuses for men, because we live now in a time where nobody is excused for being a jerk as information is available for everyone, but may be this question can help us view things from another perspective that could lead us to potentially understand men’s irrational fear of feminism and therefore approach this matter in the healthiest of ways, especially when the movement is spoken for sometimes by some people who are very less qualified to speak for it and represent it, although it seems a bit idealistic and utopian to live in a society in which “the woman vs man” disagreement doesn’t exist anymore and I suppose that this contrast of sex would have been surely a great way to bring the best of each other if the two sexes were given the same opportunities and judgment in life.