The Perfect Woman, or What Actually Is Femininity?

Imagine living in a matrix. You are pure consciousness – separated from your body and culture. You know nothing about your appearance, genitals, or reproductive abilities. No one has programmed any social norms into your head, such as: “girls are naturally more obedient” or “women are more sensitive.”

Who do you feel like? If you are a woman, what does that indicate?

“But this is a completely abstract situation,” you think. And you’re right. We are not able to disconnect from our bodies, just as we are not able to treat the culture we live in as transparent (whether this will be possible in the future thanks to technology – we’ll wait and see). Nevertheless, I sometimes like to think about such quasi-philosophical threads, to learn something new about myself.

Okay, now the next question: do you like being a woman?

Despite the limitations I am (painfully) aware of, I love the physical possibilities that being a woman gives me – my body shape, my erogenous zones, my multi-orgasm. I don’t plan on becoming a mother, so I treat my menstrual cycle as an unnecessary necessity, but I admire the female body’s ability to bring new life into the world. I am absolutely disgusted by the term “weaker sex.”

A similar, unpleasant reaction in my body is caused by any attempt to squeeze us all into one uncomfortable pigeonhole. As if each of us were a copy cast from a mold called "WOMAN" or at least should feel obliged to replicate this pattern, established by who-knows-who for who-knows-why.

Because why be a copy when you are already an original?

What does the perfect woman look like?

“The ideal woman is beautiful” – the answer to the title question, sounding a bit like a little kid’s statement, is in fact the opinion of most of us. The ideal woman is inseparably associated with unearthly beauty. Whether it should be so is a topic for another discussion. Now let’s focus on another issue.

Beautiful – what does that mean?

In ancient times, in Greece and Persia, there was a fashion for eyebrows to grow together. The gap was filled with animal hair or dyed. Medieval women valued bloated bellies, which were supposed to suggest pregnancy, and breasts were tightly bandaged to hide "sinful physicality" (the ideal woman at that time was Mary, the eternal virgin and mother at the same time). In the 14th and 15th centuries, attention was paid to high foreheads, which is why women removed their eyelashes, eyebrows, and hair on their temples and generally around their faces. Three hundred years later, a woman seemed most attractive just before fainting, so the skin was bleached with powdered lead and horse manure, the veins were painted blue, and rouge with the addition of harmful mercury was applied to the cheeks and lips. In the 2000s, orange-tinged tans, thin, pronounced eyebrows, and tattoos above the buttocks became popular.

The canon of beauty does not depend solely on the times in which we live. The place on the map also matters. In Western culture, the cult of a slim figure has been prevalent for years, but in Mauritania, Samoa or Kuwait, as well as in many other places in the world, obesity is attractive, understood as a symbol of prosperity. In India, it is widely believed that a beautiful woman should be so rounded that no bones are visible. A large butt is considered a symbol of femininity in South Africa. In China, small female feet arouse desire, while residents of Cambodia, Papua New Guinea or Tanzania have been observed to be attracted to women with large feet. Americans value a wide, snow-white smile, unlike the Akha ethnic group from Thailand or some residents of Laos and Vietnam, who associate white teeth with animals and demons, which is why blackening teeth, for example with spices, is popular in those regions. Celebrities you know hide their use of aesthetic medicine, claiming that their beauty is the result of a combination of genes, training, and drinking lemon water in the morning. At the same time, Iran has the highest number of nose plastic surgeries in the world, and even girls who have never had any surgery wear a patch on their face – it is not only a shapely nose that is appreciated, but also the very fact of striving to have one. Korean women can spend a lot of time and money to make their faces resemble the shape of an inverted triangle as much as possible. Kayan women, living on the border between Burma and Thailand, optically lengthen their necks with heavy, spiral hoops that crush the collarbones, pull the chest down, and deform the ribs. Masai women from southern Kenya cut their earlobes to make them resemble the shape of a vagina . Over the years, the ears get longer, indicating the age and social status of the owner. Meanwhile, in Japan, the cult of youth reigns supreme, and all signs of aging are carefully camouflaged.

These are just a few of the many examples that clearly show that one and only right ideal of female beauty… does not exist. There is no such thing as objective beauty. Each of us has a different taste, dependent on a number of different factors.

From this point of view, the frustration associated with not fitting into the contemporary canon of beauty – so very limited – does not make much sense. The only thing we should take into account is our own preferences, because although they are equally variable, at least they are ours and perhaps to some extent adapted to our natural physiognomy ;)

Do you feel like a woman?

First of all – before being a woman, before being a human being – I simply feel like… myself.

If I were to answer the question from the beginning, the closest I could come to it would be to say that I feel like a woman because I identify with the experiences of other people who are socialized as women. We are connected by a community of experiences.

I’ve been wondering lately if men feel something similar. I suspect they do, but the fact that we’ve always lived in a patriarchal culture makes a difference. While patriarchy harms us all, it’s women who are forced into a man’s world, not the other way around. The experience of victimhood naturally brings people together (and history has many other examples).

There is one more issue that interests me: Given that there are more options than just two genders, that people are much more interesting and complex than we once thought, do we really need all these labels?

I understand that they were helpful in the past, in the era of words, but now we have come to the era of images, which allow us to show something for which we previously lacked words. And I mean not only the seven colors of the rainbow, but the whole range of shades in between.

Who cares about setting clear boundaries and creating divisions? Is it just about the difficulty of finding one's way in a less defined reality, or maybe about what is always the point when it is not clear what it is?