I don't go by "Lady" anymore

This is a new decision, one I find myself talking about with increasing frequency and length. It first popped in a previous post as an innocuous, itchy declaration that edged on subconscious. It's since been growing.

There is a lot of cultural expectation attached to the term "lady".

I am beginning to recognize it as a coded term for compulsory femininity and consumption. The easiest and most apparent way to recognize this is to think about traditional femininity. It's easy for most people who've grown up in highly gendered western culture to conjure up a vision of a lady as someone living in a different time; a role played by Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe. We think of lace and poise. The word dainty comes to mind. There is a level of control, artifice, and illusion (corsets and make up) with which the traditional lady presents her body. While I see nothing inherently wrong with these things, I personally don't make it a habit to treat my body the way a traditional lady would.

The manifestation of "lady" in modern times is definitely built off of these old forms and habits of ladyhood in the form of casual slut shaming & agency discouraging aphorisms: a lady always crosses her legs; a lady always waits for the third date; a lady waits to be courted etc. But these days there are many more confusing and often contradictory standards about being a lady one must appear "ladylike" (aka expressing sexuality) at all times but neither be "too forward" (AKA sexually available on her OWN explicitly specified) terms). The habits surrounding ladyhood have expanded (from corsets to shapewear & eradicating pubic hair) and been branded as "liberating" choice, but women's compulsion to participate in lady culture has remained constant.

There is a set of consumer habits a "lady" is expected to engage in. This is particularly apparent in not just beauty magazines but in places where women gather online like the r/twoXchromosome on reddit or on pintrest. Where lots of cool discussion happens and also a ton of posts about hair, crafting, design, & menstrual cycles. I don't want to discourage women from posting things they like and are proud of, but one of the most common words included in the title and content of such of posts is the word "ladies". Much of the time in this context "lady" is meant to be a call to attention for all of those folks who engage in the consumer and social habits of being of stereotypically feminine and usually heterosexual.

The one thing both that traditional and modern sense of "lady" share is their commitment to deference & to being dependent on men's expectations. The traditional "lady" is extremely direct about this. Whereas the modern "lady" brands her deference and dependence as an empowering "choice" to present in ways that are in line with cultural beauty standards defined by the male gaze.

In a pamphlet put out recently at a GOP event attended by Paul Ryan women were explicitly instructed to be modest, responsive, and gentle in spirit:

All women, whether married or single, are to model femininity in their various relationships, by exhibiting a distinctive modesty, responsiveness, and gentleness of spirit.

The term lady is least often coded as meaning these things so strictly and explicitly, but it still happens all the freaking time in mandates as simple and unspoken as "girls can't ask boys out." 

For both the traditional and contemporary lady standards for the consumer and presentation habits are inexorably tied to both class and race. On some levels fitting into the role of lady means completely masking your  racial and/or socio-economic background. The humor commonplace around a working class dinner table would be deemed "too dirty" or "lowbrow"; The way you learned to eat (with your hands, talking while eating) may be deemed gross or unladylike.  The ladylike women in our fairy tales are valued for being "fair". 

In the past I too have longed to fit this mold, to have an effortless air of "elegance". One of my previous partners used to work in politics. When we'd go to formal dinners we would comment unknowingly about how some of the women at these fancy functions just seemed "better suited" to elegance how I wanted to be a lady like them. Neither of us knew then that the coded language of lady was at work there, telling me I was too "rough" too "unsophisticated".

For me being a lady often means suffering clothes my body does not know how to wear without wrinkling or itching. It means smudging goop on my face. It means apologizing for and suppressing my burps. I means pretending I don't poop or fart. Conforming to such habits usually means being uncomfortable and pretending to like it. 

I used to feel shame about both my gender and my socioeconomic background because of the expectation that I be a lady or else be undesirable. I'm working to no longer feel this way. Crucial to this is no longer being called a lady when I am not asking to be called one. 

Dressing up and behaving like a lady feels like a costume to me on so many levels. It can be fun sometimes, I do like pretending and trying on ways of being and presenting that aren't necessarily comfortable or natural to me (it often opens my mind in awesome ways!) but I refuse to move through the world in a way that feels foreign to me and have others say that it is natural or the way I prefer to be. I can take on the role of "lady" and I can have fun with it and be proud while I am doing it but unless I have explicitly said otherwise I would prefer to no longer be called a lady.

In defense of Questioning: it's the journey that matters

This post was partly inspired by this piece and a very brave (possibly questioning) daughter.

I know, I know, you, dear reader might be thinking something like “Didn't people stop using that term 1998?”, “Isn't 'questioning' for teenagers?” or “Don't we use 'queer' now?”

Well for starters I'll let you know right off the bat I do identify as queer. But I also identify as questioning. We'll have to go back a few years to show how I got to this identity. So here we go.

I've always had an urge to seek out and admit that which I do not know. I registered for advanced classes high school without taking pre-reqs. I didn't mind being confused or getting a lower grade. I was gaining exposure, asking questions that excited me. In college, while studying education I articulated a long standing thought I'd had about schools. I realized they were training students to fear failure and unknowing. Taking risks, and admitting gaps in knowledge are usually punished and rarely rewarded in traditional American education. This punishment/reward system around certainty/uncertainty has been something I've consistently resisted in my life, in and out of schools; in and out of the bedroom. Sure it's more efficient to know for certain, but I'm not always looking for efficiency.

Recently I've come to the conclusion that I'm actually uncomfortable with certainty. I avoid it. Certainty, as counterintuitive as this sounds, makes me nervous. I find unknowing, confusion, and the ritual of questioning incredibly comforting. My intuition tells me it's okay to be confused.

I often talk about being a “late bloomer” sexually. Lately I've been feeling critical of this language, not because I think it is particularly inaccurate, only that it is incomplete. As a bookish teen, I grew up in a loving, crowded family where my only real privacy was inside my skull or between pages. I remember staying up til 2 am just staring at the ceiling, reading, thinking, and imagining. I thought about things a lot, got in good cahoots with my brain. Less so with my body, I was nervously curious, but I had no space or privacy to explore this budding curiosity. There were always footsteps upstairs and you heard every movement though the thin wall between my brother's and my basement “rooms”. In the world of my family there was no such thing as a knock on the door. But more than my nervousness and lack of privacy, I, as a female teenager was taught that my sexuality was only allowed to exist in relation to men. I didn't even know women could masturbate until I was 17. What went through my head during my sparse teenage sexual experiences was something along the lines of “I guess I'll try that.”“Is this what I want?” I knew I wanted sensations but I had no idea what exactly. I was inarticulately curious.

These days things are a bit less murky. I have learned that being explicit matters not just when I share my sexuality with others but that I can have a sexuality independent of a partner and even without having a physical actualization. While things are less murky, there is so much I still don't know. In a lot of ways I am still in a place of questioning an interrogating my sexuality. And honestly, I hope to never stop that ritual of questioning.

One thing I AM beginning to feel certain about is owning my uncertainty. Regardless of the consequences. I AM still questioning. And I really mean this in the good old fashioned teenage questioning. I'd be willing to bet more people than just me identify at least their adolescent sexuality as including more questioning than they felt allowed to say at the time. But questioning is not recognized as a valid sexual state to be in. It's looked at as being inbetween, less than.

The idea of being “sexually confused” holds such a strongly negative connotation in our culture that it's often used to invalidate the actual certainty of folks expressing not-straight attractions. I find this disgusting on two levels. First of course that it seeks to define and disparage another person's experience, but secondly that “sexual confusion” is seen as a temporary or transitional state. My sexuality confuses me all the fucking time and I welcome it. I don't want that to stop. Opening to it's uncertainty is what feels natural to me.

Now, just because I am happily confused, doesn't mean I don't believe other people are exactly what they say they are. I do. I deeply respect the expressed sexual certainty of others. Hell I occasionally envy it. It takes time and energy to figure myself out all the freaking time, but it works for me. I often end up feeling like I'm behind that I have to catch up with folks more certain than myself. It's not easy to know when to chase after certainty, but like any protagonist knows, it's not the destination (certainty) that really matters, it's the journey. My journeys into that which I do not know (sexually or otherwise) make me feel like me. I am questioning.