Femininity is a Void

The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli (1781)

A quick note on language: I use she/her pronouns here when speaking broadly about femininity, but this piece is meant for anyone who resonates with those experiences, regardless of gender.

If the themes here speak to you, I recently explored them further during a panel discussion on Shingai Njeri Kagunda’s Just Keep Writing podcast, which pairs well with this essay.

Enjoy!

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I am exhausted from being a woman who wants to exist.

I want life to grant me the same passion and seriousness that I grant it. I want to live in my body without the constant threat of erasure—not just when I’m Good™ or successful or performing femininity adequately, but even in my ugliest, most shameful, most sordid grasps at being human. I want my humanity to mean something when I am fucking up your mind with my writing and when I am full of incandescent rage. Sometimes I get so angry—at traffic, at the world, at America, at myself, at old men who leer at me at the gas station—that I feel as if none of the good things I’ve ever done or thought or sought after mean a thing because the fury inside me is like fire in a windstorm, and you know what? I want full dominion over all of it, and I don’t care if you think that makes me a cunt. I might be.

I am also brilliant and kind and creative and driven. But—first and foremost—I’m a woman (and a Black woman in America, at that). So, without my consent, I’ve also been tasked with taking up the mantle of an exorcist. Regularly, the world’s shadow finds its way to me when I’m not looking, demanding release or alchemy.

When I cannot or will not comply, the shadow cracks and stretches and growls in a show of force, in an effort to draw out obedience in me, and in all women/femmes who can’t or won’t comply. We who are, like Isis or Sophia or Mary, simultaneously known and unknown, seen and not seen. Misunderstood, endlessly fixated on. The metaphorical “Virgin.” The Bride of God.

To be feminine is to touch the Void. “The air around her becomes a whirlpool,” writes Susan Griffin of this living liminality in Woman and Nature. “…a devouring hole, an abyss. Death. Destruction. Darkness without light. Nothingness.”

The world conjures two versions of you that coexist at all times. The first is the real you. Maybe she’s confident. Maybe she’s stubborn, but has a decent heart. Maybe she’s none of those things. Regardless, she’s you, and at some point, she’ll have to contend with the false version of herself that is constructed by society to feed the Void, to further the comforts and insecurities of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

So the Real You is sacrificed, and the Void regurgitates your skeleton, the False You, the Soulless You, to perpetuate itself: your confidence becomes arrogance. Your stubbornness makes you a villain. Your sensitivity makes you hysterical. Your imperfections are no longer evidence of your humanity, but invitations to demonize you. “She is mutilated, she is damaged,” (Griffin). “Her every act is an act of mutilation, of distortion. She is a plague. A disease.”

This is the Void.

Of course, some women really are diabolical, and we should hold them to the same standard that we hold terrible men. But, like most truly evil people, they’re few and far between. For the rest of us, there seems to be a kind of monstrousness that the Void attempts to besiege us with. It reaches out, wraithlike, aiming to trap us in an unholy kingdom of delusions, projections, and pure fantasy.

You are most likely not a bitch, or vile, or hideous, or dumb, or incapable, or broken, or lacking, or unforgivable, or wrong (all the time!). But I’d bet money that you’ve been a victim of the Void.

While the dominator culture has always lobbied the brunt of its vitriol onto women/femmes, the political landscape of the last decade has created a particularly ripe breeding ground for misogyny. The Trumps, Tates, and countless, interchangeable bastions of the “Manosphere” have risen in what I believe is a retaliation against the #MeToo Movement. Patriarchy vomits up such infinite, juvenile hatred of women/femmes that we can’t even speak to our own abuses without being chastized for poorly conforming to the very system that perpetuates them.

Simultaneously, a remarkable thing has been happening: the Feminine is hearing the call of Her own soul. Across education, the labor force, and leadership, women are making significant advancements. Many of us are reexamining our relationships to (or capacity for) dating, marriage, and motherhood, increasingly seeking fulfillment beyond tradition even as many men double down.

The result is a fraught cultural landscape—one where women/femmes have, largely, elected to align themselves with the broader spiritual evolution out of and away from the dominator model and into a more introspective, communal, integrated reality, even as the conditions of patriarchy persist. To be alive to witness this evolution is a gift, but it’s also terrifying: you have a group of folks who are building something new, clashing with a separate group who have hitched themselves to something that, more and more, no longer exists.

And when humans feel like the earth is being ripped up underneath us, our first instinct is usually to lash out. To rail against whatever’s disturbing us. To deepen the Void.

As such, lately, I’ve been wondering how to exist in a world that wants to wave away my desires for liberation. How can I stand in the fullness of my humanity, my intellect, my griminess, my averageness, my brilliance, my courage, my confidence, and my strength in a society that seeks to prioritize and propagate illusions?

In my efforts to untangle this, I’ve written a personal philosophy in the form of 5 applicable tenets. I anchor myself inside them for every wounding, every cold dismissal, every projection, every misunderstanding, every threat that arises when I won’t comply, every effort made by the Void to force its illness into the grooves of my psyche. I’m sharing them here in the hopes that they might help you, too:

RULES FOR NAVIGATING THROUGH THE VOID:

1. Practice Compassion Without Self-Abandonment: Maintain relationships with those who are ready, willing, and able to reciprocate what you offer—but always practice compassion, even if it needs to be from a distance. Compassion will liberate you from the density and anguish of resentment. Love while holding the line. Love yourself. Then rest.

2. Build a Tolerance for the Void: Remember that women/femmes who fully embody our power, intuition, artistry, sensuality, and depth are regularly offered to the Void because we disrupt business as usual. Learn to thrive there. Learn to reclaim and create limitlessly from this space, to defang it and rebuild it in your image. Find strength in that uncertainty.

3. Follow the Triad of Emergence—Fear, Surrender & Faith: So I’ve given you the ingredients. Here’s how you combine them: embrace fear as a tutor, then follow it. Whatever scares you, whatever gives you pause, whatever drums up that feeling of oh-shit-no-wait-I-can’t-actually-do-this inside of you is the key to your liberation—it helps you push back against the insecurities the Void has instilled in us since we were children. Then, surrender to the fear. Let it guide and instruct you. And throughout it all, maintain faith—no matter what, and against all odds—that you will make it to the other side.

4. Let Self-Actualization Be Your Ultimate Goal: When you follow and apply the tools of the Triad, self-actualization becomes imminent. The more you surpass yourself, the less monstrous and insidious the Void is, and everything in your life—every friendship, partner, job, hobby, habit, etc.—is measured against your capacity for expansion. Ask yourself, “Is this helping me become myself, or is it causing me to shrink myself?”

5. Remember that Some Will Follow, Some Won’t: Develop a tolerance for misunderstandings, for moments of isolation, for grief. Your role is not to carry everyone. It’s to model the possibility of liberation for others. Some will follow. Some won’t. Continue to show up and do the work, and the chips will fall as needed.

The sooner we begin to acknowledge that systems of oppression occupy the soul just as intensely as they do the tangible world, the closer to liberation we’ll be.

Until then, my advice is to let yourself feel it. All of it.

Because to be a woman or to feel aligned with the journey of womanhood is, at once, visceral, terrifying, grotesque, and beautiful. It is the very antithesis of the Void itself, despite how voraciously the world casts us into it. It is every peak and valley of humanity collapsing in on itself, dually holy and awful, strange and stinging with clarity.

I’m exhausted, yes.

Still, I’d pine for my femininity and carry it like a vow in every lifetime.

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