Thoughts on Women

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My fellow women, we are not a monolith.

You, maybe, weren't created to do physics or change a tire or fly an airplane or study theology or design a building or fix a faucet or run at a 300 pound linebacker or lead a church or serve in the military or be president or an astronaut, but that does not mean that I was not created to do any of those things. When you say that I wasn't created to do everything a man can do, you cut me off from a world of possibilities, a world which is difficult enough to get into in the first place. Lord knows it's hard enough to stay in.

Please don't tell me what I was created to do based on my gender.

I get what you're saying by sharing this post. I do. I understand the value of femininity, the strength in our perceived emotional depth, in our creativity, in our motherly instincts and care, and in our natural grace and beauty. I agree. Women have a unique culture that does not need to be conflated with the male culture. There is great value in "women's things". We're often relegated to the side, we're not the target market, we're devalued and put away because we're not men and that is unfair. We have no need to be men. We are us and that is more than sufficient.

But we are not a monolith.

Nor are men.

I firmly believe that there are not things that men were created to do and things that women were created to do. I don't believe that the task list of the care of creation and the redemption of the world was split by gender. There are things that humans were created to do, individual humans with their individual abilities and strengths and weaknesses, that were not dolled out in exact correlation with reproductive organs. When you share this picture, when you say these things, you're participating in a binary that our daughters and sons are just going to have to tear down when the time comes for them to have this realization. Well, those of us who can have daughters or sons. Because if women are created to do all the things a man can't do, the only thing I can think of that we were truly made for is to have children by natural birth. If I can't do that, what was I created for? Am I not a woman?

Let us not separate ourselves by the ideas we've inherited about how a person should behave based on their body. Let's allow ourselves to do the things that we are best able to do, which may be exploring the universe or cooking a meal or telling a story or raising a child. Men should be good at that. Women should be good at that. Let's see the worth of all traits, those that are traditionally masculine and those that are traditionally feminine.

That's what you mean, when you share this picture, I think. You want us, as women, to value traditionally feminine things instead of adopting traditionally masculine things. While I have minimal interest in being bound by your traditions, I do understand them and the role they play here. But by continuing to separate the world into things women can do and things men can do, you're limiting everyone. Let's shed that limitation. Let's see our value as women and the value in the things women have done and let's move forward. Let's open that door, the door to things women do and the things women can do, to everyone.

That's all I've ever asked a man to do for me, to hold their door open. It's time we returned the favor.