When I was a very little girl, I reveled in pink everything, and in frilly dresses. By the time I reached adolescence, I disdained "girly" things and performative femininity because they felt too constricted.
During and after puberty, I struggled to love my increasingly feminine body. I liked myself, but the messages I heard from my local and national culture about female bodies and female minds left me feeling very ambivalent. I felt like I needed to prove that I wasn't one of those women (no woman is, really; but I didn't know that then). In many ways that attitude endured into adulthood.
But then something happened. I met a series of amazing women, some of whom revel in performative femininity, and others who don't. And I discovered feminism. Not the caricature of feminism that I was told about in disapproving tones as a child and young woman, but actual feminism, which is far more complex and inclusive than I had imagined.
I got plugged into more than one network of women who taught me by word and example that womanhood and femininity don't have to be constricting. Rather, womanhood and even performative femininity can be powerful and celebratory. They taught me to interrogate and resist those cultural messages that told me there was something (oh so many somethings) wrong with my femaleness. These women continually love and support and challenge me. They help me grow.
My life has followed a course I never could have expected and did not plan. I cannot imagine how I could have navigated that course and remained spiritually whole without my beloved women friends. I need them like I need oxygen and like I need chocolate.
(I love my guy friends too, and the amazing men in my family who love and support and challenge me. But they are more like icing on the cake! They are a wonderful bonus.)
As Leslie Knope says:
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