The Cruel Arithmetic of Womanhood
This is a hill I'm willing to die on
It's obvious but undersaid. Prevalent but always glossed over. Why? because we manage to carry it well, it's reduced to footnotes in everyone's story.
Here's to celebrating unconventional paths and striving to do your best, even if all the odds are stacked against you.
You can be a math genius, an Excel expert, or a superior prompter for AI-generated calculations; I guarantee you wouldn’t fully understand the cruel arithmetic of womanhood.
Let’s dive into a few: #1
(You + Your Girlfriends) = (Fun times) - (Sleepovers + anything your brother the same age is allowed to do)
Rebellious girls are born from doing baseline things like wanting sleepovers or coming back a little later from a play. To me, this was labelled as ‘for your own safety ’, and while it was relevant, the paradox doesn’t escape me that it’s completely okay to have an arranged marriage at 23, with a boy you met 4 times and are supposed to have the biggest sleepover of your life.
The math is really not math-ing here.
Multiple choice with no right answer
(2.a) Marriage + Kids = Career derailment
(2.b) Marriage + Kids + Career Advancement = Maybe-not-a-great-mom
This is advanced-level arithmetic. I have no personal experience at this level, but the things I’ve heard and observed are disgusting.
Society prides itself on punishing mothers:
- for choosing to have kids and dedicate their lives to them
- for choosing to have kids and choosing their careers at the same time.
All while some fathers get away with the bare minimum while apparently changing the world with mediocre emails and driving ‘economic engines’.
Oh, but we’ve made so much available for women and accommodations in their careers for this, but if you really, really look, it’s just the bare minimum.
Societal Syntax Error
Set of Multiples
3.1 Medical conundrums
You are not allowed to suffer from a non-threatening condition.
In fact, how dare you?
They won't fully believe you until you get mildly aggressive and bring your own research and drive to the conversation.
Commonly used approaches to the problem:
Contraception - you figure it out.
Postpartum - you figure it out.
Endometriosis - you figure it out. Take a tablet for the pain.
PCOS - you figure it out.
Acne - here are expensive products
Everything else - Just.Lose.Weight
3.2 Emotions don’t equal weakness
Here are hormones that are so special, they make you cringe and cry, but also help you grow a human inside you.
But the comment “Women are too emotional” is overused.
I'll go ahead and correct it for you: Women are too emotionally intelligent for your limited personality to comprehend.
3.3. Misaligned growth graph
Drawing from personal and cultural experience.
18 = no boys, please
18+ 4 = marriage material.
24 = enjoy your life
24+1 = start thinking about kids now.
30 = getting old for marriage
30 + 4 = We can’t take your advice at home because you are still young
35+2 = must be married with at least 1 kid.
40-3 = too young to lead.
Sounding more like millennium prize problems to me and somehow ONLY applicable to women.
Women’s Characters + male authors/directors = whose growth exactly?
Over the last little bit (mainly after reading Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay), I have paid more attention to how female characters are portrayed.
Many written by men, intentionally or unintentionally, exist to allow the male character’s development. Their growth is hinged on the pain or loss or failure of a female character.
I recently finished reading Covenant of Water, a brilliant story, with complex characters and magnificent prose. It was supposed to be the story of a matriarch, but you can tell it’s written by a man. Halfway through the book, while I was absolutely captivated with all the characters and their struggles, something was missing in how Abraham Verghese worded the true struggles of women in there. And how with each struggle there was an immediate shift to the male character and his development, response or need for growth.
On the contrary, when I read a character written by a woman, the difference is stark. One that had me in a chokehold was Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale. Women in war whose story doesn't exist to illuminate a man's experience. Kate Quinn has written women defined by their competence and moral complexity. Maggie O’Farrell’s Marriage Portrait captures fear that is not dramatic or performative. It's quiet, constant, and rational. These authors do something I personally think Verghese didn't fully do with his matriarch: they let the woman's fear, resistance, and perseverance exist for her own story, not as context for establishing the growth of anyone else’s.
In Conclusion:
We continue to apologize for being empathetic, for never backing down, for juggling motherhood and careers, for showing up to shoots and meetings and playdates and conferences and sporting events with the most debilitating period pain.
We add LOLs or do that make sense at the end of our sentences for fear of being judged or misunderstood. Sometimes, to make room for fragile egos.
Society and its sad little rules have made us believe to get ahead, we need to be better than other women. It tries to make you internalize: you can't succeed if other women are already doing something you want to do.
Most importantly, we’ve been conditioned to believe that if you don't succeed at something, the problem is always you.
With all of the odds steadily stacked against us, we don’t want to back down.
We are coming for you, math problems.
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