“All delusions, without exception, are created as a result of self-centeredness. When you’re free from self-centeredness, delusions won’t be produced.”
Me: wise sage, give me what I need to banish the darkness from my mind
Pharmacist: here’s your antidepressants.
Me: no curse of mine shall befall you from my dying breath
Pharmacist: thank you
I love how this post implies that the pharmacist is just used to you by now
If you stop wearing makeup, stop getting manicures, stop plucking your eyebrows and dyeing and heat treating your hair and fastidiously putting on night repair serums and pinching your feet into pointy heels and sucking yourself in with spanx and wearing impractical lingerie and bleaching the tiny hairs above your lip, the world won’t stop.
You’ll be the same strong, compelling, lovely woman you always have been. Just as radiant, just as worthy of love and desire and respect. Other people may treat you differently, but that doesn’t alter your value as a woman. Your value transcends your conformity to femininity.
why is femininity here being equated with artificiality?
Because baby girls aren’t born wanting to wing their eyeliner and restrict calories and defer to men. Femininity consists of a set of behaviours that is socially-imposed upon women to demarcate women’s social class. That’s why so many aspects of femininity are actively harmful and restrictive. Femininity isn’t simply about expression, it is an all-encompassing role imposed on a class of people. The failure of female people to conform to this role leads to violence and discrimination.
This post isn’t calling women fake, it’s drawing attention to the fact that femininity isn’t inherent to women, and isn’t a natural state of being. Femininity as we know it is enforced by men, assisted by female self-policing. If patriarchy did not exist, and little girls weren’t socialised into femininity from birth, then femininity as we know it would not exist.
