Why is Womanhood so misunderstood, even by women?

Whenever you look at a woman, what do you see?

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As well as I was growing up, I used to ask the exact same question to all the women I knew:
“Do you feel like a woman?”, and the answer was frequently the same.
“I just am”.
I always wanted to understand what it was supposed to feel like.
Was it even a feeling at all? I remember thinking about it all the time, whenever someone said the word “girl” with and adjective attached to it; everyone seemed so normal about it.
If a whole idea, full of stereotypes and rules, was enough to define me, could you say you were talking about me at all?

I never really enjoyed Wonder Woman. It took time.

At a certain point in our lives, we become aware of the social constructs that surround us, but for me, there was always something else.

“Why does the female hero always fight a female villain?” I used to ask.

It didn’t make sense to me. To every final battle, there was only one female counterpart to fight back, the only female hero from the main team. Non ironically, that female hero would have an unnecessary and undeveloped romantic relationship with the main male hero, who’s actually receiving his fair share of compliments. I bet you have seen this a thousand million times.

I would see my girl classmates self-restraining from trying anything, because, what a surprise, everything was masculine.

“I can’t do that, because I’m a girl.”

Every single detail in the world I was living in was delimited by it. Everything had a “girl version”, easier and simpler, like a second-hand club.

Being a woman was simply not being a man, only that.

I was in rage, frustrated, and I felt like something was wrong all the time. Why couldn’t they see that nobody saw us as equals? Why were they fine with it? Femininity was a second-hand club, or at least, that’s what I used to think.

Go back in time, I remember watching shows and never identifying with any girl I could envision, not even once. Written like an extra, so plain that you couldn’t see the experience in them, the feminine one. They were made not to be men, but that didn’t mean anything in itself. I couldn’t see their dreams or ambitions; they just were.

But being a man didn’t have to be something; it was the status quo.

I had fallen for the trap, the one where you have to turn being a woman into something important, because you are not a man. One step at a time, slowly seeing through the rage, I finally found nothing.

And I decided to join the club.

Woman wasn’t a compendium word anymore; it meant a wide spectrum full of humans with their own story.

It doesn’t have to mean anything at all, but it does. It found a community where I could see myself surrounded by an experience, and it started to feel safe, finally allowing myself to not be a man.

I never really liked Wonder Woman until I noticed she would hug me like I was her sister; then, it started to mean something.

Society faces many issues in portraying the feminine experience; it often sees it as something separate, just as I once did. Next time, I will witness women being sexualized and marginalized in stories, and it will no longer say something about me, but the world I live in.

And thank god I can see it now.