‘I’m not like other girls. I’m more like one of the guys’. This is my voice. This is me speaking, before I discovered feminism. My hair changes colour every couple of weeks. I prefer writing and reading to applying fake tan, watching Zoella, or spending hours getting ready. I’m different, dammit. I’m not like other girls. How many of us are guilty of uttering those words? The poisonous phrase that immediately degrades other women, whilst elevating and separating us from them.
Who are these ‘other girls’ that we’re so keen to distance ourselves from? Many women might have a couple of the tastes or characteristics we associate with stereotypical femininity, but no woman is in and of herself a stereotype. There’s no such thing uniform ‘femaleness’. The idea that femininity is characterised by weakness or triviality is a patriarchal construct, and ties into the misogynistic belief that women are somehow lesser than their male counterparts.
As women, we grow up in a world where we are already ‘other’. The man, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote in the key feminist text The Second Sex, “represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general”. Maleness is considered standard in politics, finance, science, sport, and tech. Many music genres are dominated by men. Men are rarely relegated to the status of ‘sexual object’ and don’t have to use their sexuality as a tool to gain traction within various industries.
