The Just-Enough Woman
No matter how much of a girly-girl I am, I will never feel feminine enough.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a bizarre relationship with femininity, but not in the “I hate makeup and fashion, I just want to play sports” kind of way. Judging from how my husband reacts when yet another package from TheRealReal shows up on our doorstep (I swear it’s a good deal! That $40 skirt was $500 retail!) he probably wishes that I had a little more of that in me.
But no, I am not a tomboy—I think I’d need to be able to run a mile without passing out, or perhaps correctly throw one singular ball to qualify. I have no gender dysphoria, or any desire to be perceived as “not a woman.” If anything, it’s more of a gender dysmorphia—the opposite scenario—where I’m a cisgender straight woman, I want to be feminine, all my interests and desires and aesthetics are feminine, but I don’t see myself as feminine and I’m always pleasantly surprised when other people describe me as such. I feel locked out of femininity in an intangible way. I am an amorphous, blobby entity doing its best impression of a feminine woman and failing.
I can’t fully articulate why I feel like this. Factually speaking, nothing about me is clearly masculine. I’m average height. I’m thin. When other people hear that I feel this way, they either don’t know what I’m talking about, or they think I’m fishing for compliments because I want people to reassure me that yes, I am just a tiny, fragile, girlish little wilting baby deer with anemia and nobody could ever mistake me for big and tough. I swear, it’s not that—I know that this neurosis is silly. But I also have a feeling I’m not the only woman who experiences femininity this way.
