Venus Bites
On cunning feminine rage, and when women transmute their weaknesses into power.
He likes me like this— soft and tender he likes me, his graceful dancer swaying to the rhythm of the wind and laughter to dirty jokes and pleasantries he likes my naked pink shade of vulnerability, when I unfurl and bloom just for him, to his tune a predator now, and prey too soon— How he shifts his weight on top of me How he learns what he devours don't come for free Strong jaws and sharp teeth my venom loves to consume deceit and I like him like this— Reckless and naive, when he looks down on me what he is: a big silly fly lured right in
se.
We’re a couple of years ahead now—
Previously, I talked about gender biases from the perspective of my eight-year-old self as an answer to this week’s prompt:
“When did you realize the world sees men and women differently?”
The sheer idea had settled in me in quite a heavy way, having to know that there is a glass ceiling above me as a girl before I could even properly articulate what “glass ceilings” are. As a dreamer, it wasn’t easy having to make my tiny body accept the limitations of what she wanted to do, or that she would need to bear a thicker type of skin if she wanted to be bold and go against the grain.
There are a ton of things a woman is expected to be, including what she can’t be, and you will find that those things shouldn’t overlap. To quote America Ferrera’s monologue in Barbie:
“It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong.
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people.
You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining. You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood—but always stand out and always be grateful.
But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that, but also, always be grateful.
You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It's too hard! It's too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out, in fact, that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don't even know.”
As a kid, I understood that there is an expectation from women and girls to be all-accommodating; to always be kind, understanding, forgiving, willing to be complacent, or be used—and if she isn’t, she’s “different”, as if it’s not normal to have strong boundaries and will to protect it. As a kid, I felt quite defeated by this notion. I wanted to be strong, smart, creative, and independent, not having to rely my wellbeing to the hands of boys and men. I wanted to be good enough on my own. And I thought that these expectations to be small was a curse that I would never learn to escape from.
Then, years passed by.
What I had always thought to be weaknesses, I have learned are strengths.
We’re a couple of years from where we left off now, and still, the young, feminine rage inside of me festers and simmers—like an aged soup set forever to boil. However, a shift in perspective happened that transmuted this hot, ever-simmering soup of rage into something more useful; I have learned that there is beauty in being the underdog. While we are constantly being underestimated and undermined, I find that we are also being given the power of stealth and time. Almost always, no one minds the woman in the race. We’re somehow always invisible—after all, we’re just girls. The expectations imposed on us to be kind and all-forgiving are the same things used to pigeonhole us into something that needs saving and help, like we don’t know what we are doing unless we enlist the help of a man. We pose no threat.
"Oh, don't worry, she's just a girl”
“She won't know”
“She won't get it”
“She'll let you off the hook”
“She's kind”
“She won’t mind”—
There’s somehow a strange need to use it for their advantage and to our detriment, and for the very things they imposed on us be the weapons they would use to undermine us, but isn’t there some power to that? To have the opportunity to play your cards close to your chest because they don’t think you’re a threat? To have no one look while you study the arena and adapt into spaces they didn’t think you would? To have a warm welcome to be vulnerable and delicate, but secretly hold a power in your chest that is just biding its time for when it needs to protect you or bring you to the finish line?
In truth, I don’t have some big, epiphanic answer to this, other than that we can find a pro to all the cons we’ve been conditioned to weigh. In the end, they are all just cards, and what are we but players? And I think, as women, we hold more power than we were made to feel. Perhaps one other thing we need to squash is the idea that the gameplay was set to have us on the losing end, but view it instead as something that’s only building a sharper, more cunning version of ourselves. If you think about it, because of how much we have been able to adapt in this patriarchal society for centuries, we have been able to form stronger and more resourceful foundations than men. Like us, men have high expectations to meet, too. They have to be strong and highly logical in their approaches. They aren’t encouraged to be vulnerable like we were, and hence, haven’t had the chance to build strong emotional foundations within themselves and their peers. If they get to the top, they expect from each other an unrealistic idea of getting there by themselves, void of any help. And everything feels like a competition, even when it’s not. Perhaps that is why they find resources in us—the women. The ones who can be vulnerable, who can make them feel like they’re something, who can be a safe space. All of that is good, but oftentimes, we are taken for granted, if not abused. So we learn to adapt in a game they recklessly look over. While they refuse to learn from the women and instead use them to their advantage, we are learning their gameplay, forming better versions of ourselves, and only strengthening the tools and the bonds we already have.
A lot of this feels quite nuanced, but I think all this is just a girl finding the bright side to the cards she has been dealt with, and maybe someday, the playing field might just tilt to a more even footing—better yet, just cease to be a playing field at all.