FEMININE IDENTITY & THE NEW WOMAN

If you are a young girl or a young woman there has never been a more confusing time in terms of forging your own identity.

We are light years away from the old-fashioned dichotomy feminist versus enslaved woman (waiting to be liberated by her sisters), or career woman versus bimbo first, and ladettes later.

In whatever way women try to live their lives they get labelled and pigeonholed. Division is media’s best weapons when it comes to women.

The first division, and the more blatantly obvious, is old women against young women. Both fighting for the right to wear, say and do, or, not wear, say, and do whatever they like.

Is Madonna being too childish for her age? Of course she is, but don’t men misbehave too without being crucified for it?

The good news is that young women and grannies (and anyone in between) are trying to forge a new identity. It might look tiring and undignified to some, but gone are the days when at forty you knew who you were, and all the rest was history. By that age you were past your sell-by date. Ouch! These days no one ever is. We, as women are constantly re-emerging as eternal teenagers in older and older bodies. Men hate it. Maybe they would prefer it if we disappeared altogether once we no longer embody their sexual fantasies.

But odd as it may seem, this constant defining and redefining ourselves has nothing to do with guys. Hurrah! It seems that women are more concerned with what other women think than with what the ‘weaker sex’ thinks.

When it comes to identity what are the things women aspire to? Judging by what we see on magazines and around town it seems that women, more than anything, want to be sexy, well dressed (in whatever fashion and style they choose), powerful, clever, witty and strong.

 

Far from having one ideal of femininity, women are trying to achieve several ideas of identities, all in different ways: some by following extreme diets and sport, others with obsessive beauty regimes (hopefully there is also a healthy and balanced spectrum to these extremes). More and more women are taking up bodybuilding and rate strength as more important than femininity. 

But whatever women are doing they are not doing it for men, or for their sisters, (but I still love this video – Sisters are doin’ it for themselves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drGx7JkFSp4) they are doing it because they want to, and that is that. Bring it on.