Jaye Robin Brown
Summer of fifteen. Baby fat disappeared. Curves tucked out and in just like the actresses on the big screen. Of course I had my own personal problem areas, but I reveled in my reflection. Somehow, after the breakouts cleared up and the training bra upgraded to an underwire, I’d started looking like the older girls I’d always admired and crushed on. I was woman. Hear me roar.
But it wasn’t long before I discovered a problem with the roar. It brought unwanted attention. Roaring, to me, was about finding a place inside of myself where I was feeling like a grown-ass woman. But to others, that roar wasn’t about who I was, but how I looked.
My fifteen-year-old summer was when my father decided I could have two swimsuits instead of one. Such a minor memory. A yearly trek to the bathing suit shop while on a family beach vacation. My first try-on of a real eensy-weensy bikini, stepping out of the dressing room and having loads of eyes on me, and my father saying to my mom, “Why don’t you get her two suits this year instead of one?” It remains, a niggling memory, the moment when the man I loved more than any man in the world saw me not for the bright creative sparks shooting off inside my head, but for the pleasing composition of my physical form. A first blow. A first shrinking in of myself. I forgave him, of course, because like so many men, his was an unaware tic, something so ingrained he didn’t even realize he was doing it.
But, as a girl, it didn’t take long for me to figure out we are not considered our own. There’s a certain privilege men, some women, and the media carry, the right they feel to cast their gaze upon us and judge us fit or unfit based on the culmination of our physical parts. I saw it in the recent presidential election. Where a man judged his incredibly smart, talented, and capable daughter on her physical appearance, as if that were the pinnacle of her success. Or, more realistically, the pinnacle of his success. This bothered me as a teen. It continues to bother me now.
Growing up was complicated. I was raised in Deep South Alabama, where gender roles remain stronger than other areas and there’s a rigidity that follows this form. You look like that? Well, then, you act like this. Not to say all women in the South are quivering mice, far from it. My mother has a PhD in marketing from a time when women just didn’t do that. Yet she still fixed my father his breakfast and supper every single day while he sat and read the paper. She would argue that she loved and loves doing this for him, and I’m sure that’s true, but I also think there’s a cultural norm at play. A level of expectation that is as subconscious as breathing.
My feminine complexity was deeper than simply wanting to look like a girl. Turned out I wanted to buck some sexuality roles, too. What I didn’t know in my teen years, because I didn’t know it was allowed or possible, was that I was a lesbian. I had no lesbian role models. My parents had no lesbian friends. The closest I got were the two sisters who owned the riding stables where I took lessons. They had a “friend” who lived on the farm with them. My mother decided I would switch stables around the time I hit puberty. I still wonder if this was because, at some level, she knew and feared for my “corruption.”
There were close calls with self-discovery during my teen years. The younger neighbor girl who I built a fort with in the woods. As we lay on the pine straw and took turns tickling each other with the feathery fronds, I had the kind of breathless (and groin) feeling other friends were having with boys. A sleepover with a schoolmate where we practiced kissing after dark and I didn’t want it to stop. An older neighbor who wanted to show me her room and my stomach lurched with excitement, before my mother interrupted by calling me back home. Tiny moments of titillation and rapid breathing when I found a girl attractive. But how was it even possible? I looked like a girly-girl. I was the kind of girl who would be with a boy. The male gaze told me so.
It was in the way the construction workers who pulled up outside my school catcalled me, a teen girl in a school uniform. It was the boat owner at the marina where I worked, who put his hands on me during a tour of his boat and when I stepped away, his blithe “I thought you wanted it,” simply because I was dressed in my everyday boat-washing uniform of shorts and bikini top. It was the fraternity boys on the beach at spring break with their white score cards, numbered 0–10, that they would flash at passing girls from their low beach chairs, absolutely self-righteous in their actions even when they left us humiliated. I still have a visceral reaction to this memory.
I spent so much of my late teens and early twenties confused. I dated more boys than I should have. Being objectified as a teen had left me feeling like hooking up was the way to prove I was someone. By using my femininity to prove how desirable I was, I could be the Southern belle, the popular girl, the daughter I thought my father wanted. Even if I was unhappy inside. Even if I felt lost. Even if I was so much more than the way I looked on the outside.
Besides, being queer was confusing. Even though the guys were leering and whistling and totally willing to get with me, the lesbians didn’t notice me. At least not many. Because I didn’t conform to those norms either.
And for a while I was okay with that. The girls I allowed myself to date in college were more questioning than queer and the one girl who was truly ready to be my girlfriend scared the shit out of me. I wasn’t ready to be out and she was. I preferred the girls who wouldn’t challenge me. One early girlfriend even said to me, “Once we finish with our husbands and our families we can find each other and live on a goat farm.” That made sense to me at the time, putting off my true desires for something more socially acceptable. Passing was super easy. Being queer was not something feminine, Southern girls did. My father would hate me. My mother would wonder where she’d gone wrong. So I thought I’d just fake it until I made it. If I could pretend for long enough, maybe I would somehow, magically, change.
With those early patterns stamped hard onto my psyche, I tried everything I could to make my square peg fit in that round slot. I could conform and proved it by finding a very nice guy with a very good job who loved going to hear bands as much as I did. I thought, maybe this is what marriage is? You find a nice guy who is your friend, and even though your heart doesn’t go boom, boom, boom, you marry him, because he’ll be a good provider and never abuse you or your future children.
How wrong I was. Because even in marriage it was still there. The same nagging voice inside my psyche that I was living a wrong life. My husband was a gym rat, obsessed with his own physical looks, and so I became obsessed with mine. Was I thin enough, coiffed enough, pretty enough? I stayed on guard and insecure every single day. I judged myself by male standards. I felt like my whole world revolved around how I looked instead of who I was. I was miserable.
So I went into counseling. All I knew was I was terribly unhappy and self-medicating in ways that weren’t good for me long-term. I still couldn’t name my gay. I’d married a boy. I had long hair. I liked to wear makeup—that meant I was straight, right? But what did it mean that I still thought about the girls I’d known and wondered if being married meant I could never be with another girl again? I wondered if I did, would it be cheating?
When I did finally fall hard in love, in a way that made not coming out way more difficult than coming out, there was no turning back. I bought a book called From Wedded Wife to Lesbian Life after my husband and I separated and I remember asking my partner, after reading the personal essays and looking at the pictures of the women therein, “Do I have to look so butch?”
She laughed, but at the same time there was this kind of strange unspoken thing happening. All of the trappings of femininity—makeup, heels, a little cleavage, the perfect accessories—became suspect to her. Was I going to leave her for a man? Was I really gay or just biding my time? Was some guy at work flirting with me? I’d been so happy and relieved to finally name my gay, but now I felt like the way I looked was, once again, interfering with who I was.
It was incredibly frustrating and at times infuriating. Heteronormativity, especially when it comes to feminine women, is the standard. And the fact that the assumptions came from both sides of the spectrum could definitely nudge a girl into giving up her favorite pair of heels forever.
But what I discovered in the process of discovering myself was that I still loved being a feminine girl. I loved the perfect pair of earrings or the shimmering necklace that accentuated my collarbone just right. I loved a simple blush, lipstick, mascara combo for every single day. I liked feeling pretty. Not for men. Not for women. Not for some societal standard, but for me.
I suppose, as girls, we have a choice. We can choose to rebel against the male gaze and stop wearing makeup. We can stop messing with our hair. We can wear clothes that hide our femininity. But what if you like all that girly stuff? What if that stuff fills you up on some fundamental level and you like looking in the mirror and seeing all of the girl that is you? Do we stop simply because eyes are watching? Or because other eyes say tone it down?
Some girls do. They find it easier to take their femininity down a notch to avoid the stares and assumptions or accusations. Some girls pick and choose the moments to let it shine and go all out only for a special occasion or a special person. Some girls choose to buck gender conventions and standards altogether. Each choice made from a place of personal power and desire is valid. But we should be able to own our femininity, if that’s our choice, without risk and without reprise. And fear of, or actual, objectification should never be a reason to hide our truest selves. We simply have to remember we are not objects.
Our femininity is beautiful. The way we choose to dress, whether in pink and sparkles, plunging necklines and short skirts, or a men’s department shirt and baggy jeans, isn’t about sending some kind of message to the world. It’s not saying I want it or I’m vapid or Don’t take me seriously. It’s about choosing the things that make us feel whole and complete and beautiful—inside and out.
So while we may never be able to avoid the male gaze or society’s ideals of the right or wrong way to woman entirely, we can acknowledge that it’s no one’s right to cast eyes upon you and categorize you as an object. Dress how you want for you. Choose to be feminine but at the same time buck gender roles or sexuality assumptions if that’s who you are. There’s no single right way to girl. And no one has the prerogative to tell you how to do it or judge you for your choices.
Go out and roar.