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How to be a dangerous woman
Justine Musk’s Tribal Writer blog is one that I find always worth reading. Today’s entry is particularly good:
How to be a dangerous woman (in fiction and in life):
I can’t help thinking that the whole ‘strong woman’ thing is a kind of decoy: a conversation that keeps us busy but doesn’t actually achieve anything.
The conversation is framed in a way that underscores and reinforces the idea that men are men and women are….not.
It also denies the fact that women have always been strong, birthed babies and held dying children and endured oppression and fought for the rights of others (and sometimes even themselves) and waited for husbands and sons to come back from wars and managed households and worked in factories and lived in the streets and nursed the sick and dying and worked the fields and kept families together and survived domestic violence and sexual violence and started businesses and reinvented themselves and carried water for miles and so on and so on: they saw work that needed to be done and they did it, and they continue to do it.
But that kind of female strength isn’t glamorous or even all that visible or acknowledged. These are not the tasks that win prizes or promotions or partnerships. Meanwhile, slaying vampires and kicking werewolf ass — while wearing tight leather pants – is supposed to be ‘empowering’, in the same way that the strong stoic bare-chested pirate confessing his innermost feelings to some virginal thing who has changed his nature forever is supposed to be ‘romantic’. It’s a very pretty story but it’s a sidestep of reality. It’s a play at feeling powerful without the work and risk and cost involved.
A powerful woman learns to embrace the contradiction of herself, to work it instead of being pulled apart.
A powerful woman figures out how to rock being herself, instead of letting others define her identity and her reality.
A powerful woman owns her story and creates her own meaning, which fuels motivation and resiliency.
A powerful woman develops capacity for risk and tolerance for failure, and her ability to learn from failure.
A powerful woman defines her own vision and values. She lives her vision, and not a state of constant reaction.
A powerful woman develops her selfhood instead of sacrificing it, piece by piece and bit by bit, to others.
A powerful woman is not afraid to raise the level of her ambition.
A powerful woman knows that at some point she needs to be where the boys are…and where the girls aren’t.
A powerful woman knows her worth. She asks for it.
A powerful woman defines the problems that intrigue her and sets about to solve them and make her contribution.
A powerful woman is a lover and a fighter.
She’s maybe a little bit dangerous.
It’s good to be a little bit dangerous.
Yes.
Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.
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That was very inspiring and awesome to read. Thank you so much for sharing! What a simple, but mind-blowing concept: women have always been strong.
Kind of changes the way I wanna write my heroines. :)
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