Falling Out of Love

For those who don't know, I've got a new job that fortunately allows me some time to read and write. I'll say more about this later, but first, a passage I wrote today in between busy moments:

“Separate but equal” is a practical impossibility. So to achieve equality, women must fall out of love with womanhood. There must be no “women's mysteries,” no goddesses of feminine realms that punish any male onlooker for daring to intrude. If men are ignorant of women's lives, of our daily hardships and rites of passage, it is because we veil ourselve in decorum and propriety. We shut others out of our inner lives, assuming they will not understand, will not sympathize, will not be interested.

Men of this age, raised to see their sisters as equals in law and in fact, do not regard us with the curious mixture of fear and disdain that their fathers and grandfathers felt when they spoke of the mysterious, dangerous, chaotic world that was the life and mind of a woman. They could not empathize with women because they saw us as wholly different from themselves, with baffling biological functions, irrational and unpredictable behavior, and a power over them that they felt they could not control. We now know that the differences between us come more from culture than anything else, and our culture is changing.

There is no more reason to hide behind petticoats and facepaint and secrets and segregation, and whispering huddles in school hallways that turn quiet the moment a boy walks by. No reason to hide behind closed doors while feeding our babies or discussing our bodies. A woman can go to work in slacks and flat shoes and bare face and short, unstyled hair. She can go on a date in jeans and sneakers and unshaven legs. She can belch, eat heartily, and fully enjoy sports and crass jokes and carnal pleasures – but only if she lets go of that old notion, that cultural shackle, that is the feminine mystique. When she does, when she fully pronounces her personhood as much as her womanhood, she will find the men in her life appreciative of her honesty, her friendship, and the opportunity to let go of some of the pressures on them to be paragons of manhood.

But falling out of love with womanhood does not require being unfeminine. We needn't fear the loss of our intuitions, our subtleties of thought and feeling, our grace and beauty and appreciation of same. We needn't fear for our children's mothers or the state of our homes and kitchens. For as we fall our of love with womanhood, men are graduall falling out of love with manhood. They find no insult in what was once known as women's work. They are not threatened by their own need for gentleness, for empathy, for beauty, and for family. We are slowly reaching an age when femininity and masculinity are not categories we are born to, but a spectrum of choices that all are free to explore.

Womanood can no longer be a mystery. What can be a mystery is the individual spirit, the capacity of each person to invent her identity as a woman, as a man, and as something the world has never seen before. What can be a mystery is our innermost selves, male and female, free to share or to keep secret our dreams and thoughts, our joy and anguish. To achieve equality, must realize there is no womanhood. There is no manhood. There are – we are – people, as simple and as complicated as that.