My Feminine Side

I wasn't always this femme.

This may not be obvious from superficial appearances. Most poignantly, I remember getting dressed up for the big dances in high school- hair, nails, makeup, clothes, the whole nine yards. I was inevitably in tears by the end of the night.

I ended each of these evenings feeling worthless- a two-penny princess in a polyester gown. I felt like a fraud and a failure. Some perceived shortcoming, some social faux pas, or maybe just the shine coming off my night, left me a mess by the time I stood in front of the mirror, scrubbing the mask of makeup off my face, reducing my anxiety and aspirations to so much soap scum on porcelain.

My bipolar relationship with dresses, in particular, is a saga that defined in many ways my transition out of girlhood. It was a dress that prompted my self-starvation, a dress that brought me to tears on my boyfriend's couch, a dress that defined the struggle with my femininity.

The process of selecting a dress, wooing it for months in the privacy of one's bedroom (I'll just put it on for a minute to see how it looks. Perhaps pin my hair up a bit for effect...) and finally wearing it out on the intended occasion is a bit like the swing of a baseball bat. You wind up, put all your strength into the preparation, and unless connect perfectly in at the crucial moment, the execution feels flat and anticlimactic.

And how could a girl fail to be disappointed in her own execution? With the epic hopes that I, in my high-school naivete, set on these evenings, how could the mediocrity of adolescent reality fail to disappoint?

And so, throughout the evening, the panic and self-loathing would build up inside me. I was failing to live up the skin of femininity in which I had clothed myself; I was inadequate to the job. I could not be what a woman was supposed to be. I could not be a woman.

These days, I wear makeup nearly daily and wear skirt or dresses infrequently but happily. I haven't bought a formal gown in years, and I feel better for this fact. But the truth is that on a day to day basis I express femininity in ways that would have sent my adolescent self into self-deprecating hysterics.

The thing is, I'm not expressing femininity.

I wear makeup for many reasons- a nerdy interest in this intersection of art, science, and personal aesthetics, for one. But the importance of that pales to the ritual significance it has for me.

I transform my appearance in the course of 15 minutes every morning- I use exactly the right tool for the job, I experiment with new ideas, and I come out looking good. Additionally, during this 15 minutes, I am focusing exclusively on myself. I am the only thing that matters during this ritual. And each morning, I come out looking the way I need to feel- put together, confident, and competent. In short, using makeup makes me feel powerful, creative, and in control every morning for the low cost of a quarter hour's time and some pretty-colored powders.

My adolescent self felt wretched when she couldn't achieve her own ideals of femininity. Today, she has had revenge. Today, I am not a feminine person. I am a person who has taken the trappings of femininity, once laden with the burden of inadequacy, and has subverted them for her own uses, her own personal rituals of self-confidence and power.

What once controlled me, I now control. Where once I ached to embrace and embody femininity, I now take that which I can use, that which pleases me, that which strengthens me.

I wasn't always this femme. In point of fact, I'm the least femme I've ever been. These days, I'm a woman with one more tool to get what she wants and needs.