There’s no perfect or seamless way to start this so I’ll just go. I am this thing I call Ciara and I am constantly reacting to stimuli, some internal, some external. It is the internal that I am more interested in because what is it? Of course that’s a false binary, every binary is a false binary. This internal isn’t me because there is no independent “I,” rather everything I have heard people say, seen people do, and intuited people to believe. How did I get here? How did I come to be sitting on the bench of a gender neutral bathroom of the Center for Ecological Resistance Studies in Atenas, Alajuela, Costa Rica? See this is where it gets tricky because I could give you the materialist answer about student loans the rise of College Culture and the study abroad machine that I am currently enmeshed within. Something about ideology. Something about how the study abroad office administrator is equal to the propagandist in reproducing a certain kind of reality and actually even more so because real power lies in cool and wanting and having an amazing experience.
Then there’s the answer that I guess would trace through the threads of my internal. That nice little me me me world I live inside. Let’s work backwards. Gender neutral bathroom, couldn’t sleep (racing thoughts in bed about future + life + gender (I’ll get to this)), last couple of weeks here, came in January, I felt close to neutral about the fact that I would be coming here if I’m remembering correctly (this is not ironic detachment I promiiise), now come to think of it I hardly remember making the decision to apply, but I did, and before that I suppose I chose to study abroad in the spring semester of my junior year because that’s what everyone else was doing, and I guess I also went to college because everyone else did, but at 16/17 I really was sold on the whole liberal arts thing because at the time it felt so different from my New York City surroundings. This passage of time where everything stacks on top of each other is hard to wrap my head around, it makes me confused. Am I not more my 17 year-old self now than I was at 17 because I am living out the path that unfolded as a result of her decisions, a life she could not have predicted? And in this timeline we’re working with here, I have to follow the same logic through that I had no agency because I had no idea what would happen as a result of these decisions while making them. But really, more than that, they never really felt like decisions at all. It happened so slow, they weren’t forks in the road so much as soft nudging, but by who if not me? At a fork in the road you must choose a path, but if you’re walking down the street kinda veering to the side with maybe notice but little thought, it’s not really a decision, right? I’m unsatisfied by the notion that I had complete agency, but also with the notion that I had none. Yet it does feel like these things happened to me not as a result of some will to action but as an inevitability of time. Not fate, more like random sorting. Something had to happen. This was it. The only logic I can pin down here is Something Must Come To Pass. This is a force we’re all subjected to. Am I just describing gravity?
Earlier, while I was laying in bed unable to sleep, the fact of the existence of the penis came to my mind in a way it never has before. I pictured it, how could it always be there? Even as I sit here it just exists, no big deal. So many of them in fact. And this is… such a defining trait?
It confused me. This is why I pee so much and care about sulfates in my hair and cry in group project meetings and get scared of dogs? Thinking about it this way it almost felt like a disappointment. A shake of the cosmic dice and I was born without the key to confidence and strength. It’s positively Greek, the vulva is just the gash left by a penis violently ripped away. A wound. Is this why it bleeds? Why I bleed? My penis was taken away? Actually that sounds Freudian, ancient tribal women braiding beautiful patterns in their pubic hair to hide their ultimate shame, the absent phallus. Since gender’s not real* we need an angle, a lens through which to hold on to some semblance of understanding the gender-flavored stimuli all around us. Even more so now that we’ve started to realize gender isn’t real. Let’s call it Missing Penis Theory. Since this is my way of grasping onto the pieces of stimuli that look feel smell taste etc. like gender, it is my gender.
Missing penis theory is most salient when it comes to clothes and exercise. Let’s start with the less complicated one. I’ve cared far too much about how I dress since, oh, 7th, 8th grade. Once I discovered the whole Art Hoe thing it was over. I’ve been chasing perfection that doesn’t exist ever since. Every time I think I’ve found the right look I pick something else to fixate on, some ideal that once achieved will display my… “ness” to the world. That adjective (which itself always changes) that encompasses all goodness, all value. Quite Artistotelian, no? Well regardless, when I’m starting to get that nervous sweating after one too many clothing changes for a meaningless occasion, I hear my missing penis calling out to me. Oh if I were a boy, I’d throw on the first thing I see and walk out the door right? I’d probably own like five shirts or something. Please don’t think I’m so dense as to not have considered that I can just be a woman that throws the first thing on. I’ll lay it out: if I am to be a woman I want to be a woman who is playing the game, if I wasn’t playing the game, I would rather just be a man, I am not a man, so I am relegated to being a woman who is playing the game. I guess that means to play the game is technically what I want, but not really. There are many men who care an awful lot about what they wear, this I know. I believe the difference is in the tone. A man wears a decent, middle-of-the-road outfit. He looks good. He is a well-dressed man. A woman wears a decent, middle-of-the-road outfit. Maybe no one riots or spits on her in the street, but there’s that funny little feeling deep down inside that I and many other women would rather just avoid. The path I (and many other women) have chosen to avoid that feeling is to pour a not-insignificant amount of our energy into our appearance. This absorbs much of my time, money, and mental energy, a fact of which I am deeply ashamed. I think shame becomes a theme here. So when I’m forty minutes, three tops, six necklaces, two pairs of shoes, one skirt, and two pairs of pants** deep, there’s that thought: where did my penis go?
I'm going to skip over the whole body image thing because that story has been told. We all know women must be perfect or kill themselves trying or feel awful for the rest of their lives, nothing new. I have a different angle in mind, what’s been on my mind more is pure physical strength and ability. As I have tried to force a shift in myself from caring about how my body looks to caring what it can do, I have come to feel more and more the strength deficit. Keep in mind that I am not making universal observations or declarations about how some kind of collective We experience gender, this is not “men are stronger than women”. Rather, my personal interactions with the gender-flavored forces at play are colored by a strong question of why. I know that I err on the side of nihilism here, and I think we’re all too used to having to describe our own lives and selves as situated within some kind of universal reality.The gender stimuli which shape and interact with my thoughts and feelings result in a tension I cannot resolve, which defines my experience of gender in my own internal world. Also keep in mind that these words constitute an imperfect approximation, I use phrases like “I experience” knowing that this does not encompass the Truth of the matter. For the sake of making some amount of sense I dumb myself down. Do you remember how we used to play at recess, when boys and girls had the same abilities? When I could beat a boy in a race? Childhood removes the humiliating adult realities brought about by puberty, as we become sexual we become ashamed. When I play a game in a group of adults masquerading as children now, at twenty, I am humiliated. When the men are so strong and tall what am I meant to do? I descend into an absurdism in the face of a meaningless category. What would Camus have had to say if he had had this affliction? I can leave men to ponder the meaninglessness of the universe, and I can ponder the meaninglessness of a vagina, a 5’4 stature. Just as random biological evolution under the watch of a Godless, careless universe did not satisfy the absurdists, random biological sexual dimorphism under the watch of a Godless, careless universe does not satisfy me.
*you know.
**obviously it isn’t just clothes, it’s makeup-hair-skin-body-height-voice-personality-worldview-etc, but I chose clothes for simplicity’s sake and because they truly do have a special place in my heart as much as I may try to rid myself of that quality.