Sadly, Girls Rule

I've been reading Naomi Wolf's Promiscuities and today was struck by the realization that I've never felt like a woman. I'm 33, financially independent and sexually active and I feel like a girl. From a physical standpoint I know I don't present as a woman: my body isn't particularly womanly, my face is youthful (although my hair is greying), and with today's culture only clothing options being frumpy, manly or girly, most of us choose the third.

Because that's exactly the problem: this culture. Wolf talks about other cultures in which a girl is systematically and often ritualistically taught how to be a woman, and only when she has proven herself to have completed her education is she considered a woman. She is taught not only how to fuck, to please both herself and her partner, not only how to cook or dress, or take care of children, but how to see the world through the filter of grown womanhood; to no longer see herself as a girl.

Not only has American culture failed at this practice since its incipience, but it's only gotten worse in the last quarter century. Now there are no women. Everyone is a girl, no one wants to get old, no one wants to be boring or matronly or unsexy. No one has received any education that would convince them that womanhood does not have to signify any of these things, and can offer wisdom, security and self-possession besides.

I want to be a woman. I think it's time. I want to have confidence in myself as a grown female, and I think it's something we should all be working toward. Whether or not we ever manage to create an ideal, equal society, women will still have a specific role, and even those of us who don't plan to procreate play at least a part of that role. Things will go a lot smoother if we can all stop feeling (and consequently acting, dressing, talking) like insecure 14 year olds in the face of the quarterback's attention or derision. We are not conditioned to see our sexuality as our own, but instead as belonging to the beholders. Lacking a firm sense of adult identity, we look for it in bed and later in marriage. How can society be expected to function properly if half of its membership (the smarter, more reasonable half) suffers from such insecurity and lack of identity? We fight for our causes and do great work at our jobs and still go to bed at night empty if we haven't got anyone there with us. We run companies and raise children and still worry about whether we're attractive or thin or young enough, whether it will be enough to get or keep a man. Of course we want to enjoy comforting and cozy personal lives, but we should be able to enter them as women who know what they want and what they won't put up with, not as girls who are pretty sure they don't want what they're getting but are afraid to do anything about it for fear of being left alone.

We should have been told long ago that society needs us as much as it needs men, and not only as conception vessels. That our individual identities are too important, both to us and the rest of the world, to submerge in an effort to be somehow more lovable, or just acceptable. As much as anything in human existence can be said to matter, we matter. But we have such a hard time thinking we do, and therefore we are just not confident enough to call or consider ourselves women.

Backformation

Linguists use the term backformation to indicate the creation of one part of speech from another when the first should have followed on the second. A personally egregious example of this is the new use of the verb 'to impact.' There has always been verbal meaning to 'impact' - stuffed into a small space with no exit, e.g. molars, tonsils, colons. But the noun 'impact' means 'effect,' and more recently has come to mean 'greater than normal effect.' With an eye toward making an impact, then, marketers and other business jargon users have created another meaning for the verb impact, 'to affect,' and more to the pragmatic point, 'to affect in a big way.'

Backformation is common, and its enemies tend toward pedantic purism; therefore I pause in my resistance to this instance of the phenomenon. I think what I hate most about it is the laziness with which the jargoneers have latched onto it. Much like with 'amazing,' 'make sense,' and 'throw ___ under the bus,' the problem is not with these words and phrases but with the frequency with which they are used, to the exclusion to all other options. I understand comfort with one's vernacular but vocabularic complacency drives me insane.