"Women who've wanted to be perceived as powerful have long found it more efficient to identify with men than to try and elevate the entire female sex to their level. The writers Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Hardwick were famously contemptuous of 'women's libbers,' for example, and were untroubled about striving to 'write like a man.' Some of the most glamourous and intriguing women in our history have been compared to men, either by admirers or detractors. One of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay's many lovers, the young editor John Bishop, wrote to her in a letter, 'I think really that your desire works strangely like a man's.' In an August 2001 article for Vanity Fair, Hillary Clinton's biographer Gail Sheehy commented that 'from behind, the silhouette of the freshman senator from New York looks like that of a man.' A high school classmate of Susan Sontag's told her biographers Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock that young 'Sue' maintained a masculine kind of independence.' Judith Regan, the most feared and famous executive in publishing - and the woman who brought us Jenna Jameson's best-selling memoir - is fond of bragging, 'I have the biggest cock in the building!' at editorial meetings (and referring to her detractors as 'pussies.'). There is a certain kind of woman - talented, powerful, unrepentant - whom we've always found difficult to describe without some version of the phrase 'like a man,' and plenty of those women have never had a problem with that. Not everyone cares that this doesn't do much for the sisterhood."
This is me. How many times have I heard someone in the business tell me that I have a lot of balls, bosses tell me that I "think like a man," significant others claim to find my "wanton masculine side" sexy? I embraced it because I thought it made me stronger - perhaps to them, but to me as well.
Am I part of the problem?
1 comment:
No sweety, you are part of the solution.
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