What Makes a Woman? - Sex~Kitten.net

As a young girl, I bought the whole 'menstruation magic' and felt that marked my status as a woman. I was desperate to be on the rag before my cousin, a year younger. I did 'win' but the award was very unfulfilling. Not only was the period a bummer, it sure is meaningless in our society.

I wished I was part of some other culture where ceremonies were held. Where once I reached this mark, I was treated as a woman, with all those rights. There are cultures like that, but America, and especially my parent's home, was not one of them.

Biology let me down, I was still a kid living in their house.

So I began to look for other ways to mark my status of womanhood.

Leaving high school, entering college, I was all too aware of my insecurities. I knew enough to know I was still not a 'real woman' and I had no idea how I would become one, let alone mark it. Since biology had let me down, and I was still a virgin, I didn't believe sex was the answer.

In my 20s, I had my own job, and various apartments with female roommates. I paid my own bills, or half of them anyway, and learned about responsibilities in a way that college doesn't teach you. In college, your folks still hold your hand, if not your purse strings.

I figured that a mark of my maturity, my success, might lie in financial areas. I had no interest in cars (I didn't even have a license yet), no grand love of expensive toys. I knew in retail that getting a home was out of the question - and wasn't that a sign of 'family' anyway? Surely I ought to be a woman before I did that...

So, in my simple 20s brain, the object of my desire, the one thing that I felt I must own, and also could not afford, was a silk dress. Opulent, luxurious, a symbol of femininity, impractical, flirtatious, decadent, a bit out of reach but something I could achieve if I worked for it, and in my mind it all seemed to me to be the object to mark my arrival at real womanhood.

(Sure, now it seems trite, simple, and reduces the definition of a woman to materialistic means of creation rather than some wondrous internal passage - and it sure leaves alot to be desired on the 'feminist' forefront, but at the time, it all made sense. Remember, I was young.)

In fact, I bought my first silk dress at age 25. I also had to return it, 3 weeks later, when I discovered I was pregnant.

I then spent the next few months reconciling myself to the fact that I could have a silk dress later. I wouldn't be a woman until after I had my child, and slimmed back down again of course, but I would obtain it someday.

But before I did that, I would give birth. Giving birth was not a good marker. That was, again, biology. I pushed out a kid. "Ouch," but so what?

Others advocated that being a single mom was the marker of being a woman. But I argued that was biology, and rotten circumstances...

But within the first few months, I found a marker alright. I had the flu, a bad stomach flu, and had to change my daughter's flu diaper. Being single, there was no one to take any shifts in parenting duties. I changed those diapers, several times in one day. Each time I managed to make it through the changing without barfing on baby.

A stomach & a will made of iron, that was proof I was a woman.

Of course, since then, I have found that just as I am not stuck in one definition of myself as a woman, which may all likely boil down to my inability to answer 'what makes a woman,' I have found other milestones in my process of becoming a woman.

Other times I have felt I reached womanhood (in order of their 'arrival'):

When I have acted as an advocate for my children in times or extreme circumstances.

When I have curbed anger in the face of stupidity.

When I graduated from college as a single parent.

When I took my first & only solo vacation.

When I bought my first vibrator, complete with asking directions from the clerk.