“It is such an unsettling feeling, you know,” I told my husband this afternoon. The day was unseasonably bright and warm and we turned our faces to the sun. A cup of tea, a coffee and the leisure of French Saturday made this moment a perfect one for sharing confidences.
“When I am with men,” I shared “when I relate with them without flirting, without a slightest sexual connotation, when I am simply their partner – I feel strange, both comfortable and … unwomanly.”
“What does make me a woman? The sexual aspect, the motherhood? Without it — what does it mean that I am a woman?
“But you know,” I continued, “I do not feel like I’m a woman, of course I do not feel I’m a man, I almost feel like something else, something that includes both male and female, something that goes beyond those distinctions. Frankly, I think of myself as “it.”
It does feel very real, much more so than defining myself as only one or the other.
But it is quite unsettling.
I never really thought of femininity in these terms. Thank you for bringing this point up.
How have you thought about femininity? I ask, because when I started looking at what makes me feel like a woman I realized that … I don’t know really.
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