Of fabulous old maids and Murphy Brown

Some believe that women are destined to be a royal hot mess. First off, physically, a woman’s body will bleed once a month by the age of 12, sometimes earlier, they say.

I will not expound any further, three letters: P.M.S. One word: hormones. Yes, you get the picture. Second, biases, regardless of race just by being female, they were already born with restrictions dictated by cultures, religions, institutions and society as a whole down to the very family they were born into — all because they were born with a vagina.

I know there might be other items I might have missed, just add it all up and you’ll have a list of all the reasons that paved the way for women to give birth to themselves. They have transformed into Amazons, High Priestesses, Royal Queens, Magdalenes, Madonnas, Alpha Females, Mother Teresa, Wallis Simpson, Amelia Earhart, Janis Joplin, Madame Curie. And the list goes on, lest we forget to throw in Lorena Bobbit into the mix.

But what I said is just so wrong. Women are not destined to be a royal hot mess they were led to believe they are going to be. 

Born equal

We were born equal to men, we just didn’t get to initially play Romeo or Lothario or Valentino that resulted in an unfortunate “delay” of handling opportunities and taking risks. Women were made to wait at the balcony, or at the Empire State building, or by the phone or by the computer, or worse by the door. Women were made to wait because the rest believed it was the proper thing to do.

That’s a result of hundreds of years of human conditioning and role-playing. At present, there are those who say they can no longer defeat that and it’s tiresome to rewrite history. Leave it as it is. They dare say, stick with what’s already acceptable. Let’s just wait. Let’s just freaking wait. 

But here’s an idea. Do you know there’s a lot more that you can do while waiting? While waiting, women can become themselves. We can learn, unlearn and relearn.

We can do so with our hands – we can create, we can build, we can clean up and we can shop for the right clothes, put on the right make-up. We can rebuild our physical bodies even the way we look to be the healthiest version of ourselves. We will work hard to secure a comfortable future where we will be taken care of when we become too old. We owe ourselves that much. 

We can do so with our heads – we can collaborate, we can think of new ways of improving things, we can design and redesign any thing we can get our hands on, we can read more books to learn or we can probably teach others to learn more. We can help and be helped. 

We can do so with our feet – we can go to places to see what we haven’t seen or tasted before. We can create opportunities for ourselves to experience whatever it is we want to. We can walk or even run towards these new experiences, the options are endless and no one is going to stop us. We can rush into an affair or two or more along the way if that’s what we want minus the drama and STDs because we know better! What I’m talking about is more than Eat Pray Love, my friends. 

Finally, we can do so with heart. A woman’s heart is infinite and victorious. It is the same heart that she relied on as a child and it’s the same heart that enabled her to be a wife and provided her the strength to be a mother. A woman’s heart is mankind’s matriarch and is never defeated.

Victim no more

No one is going to stop us unless we have been brainwashed — if we were led to believe that we are less of a woman if we do not become wives or mothers.

In case you haven’t received the memo, the natural power from above is a genderless birthright, we have had that power all along. It’s probably there lying dormant, waiting for others or for a tragic event to trigger it. In my opinion, it is a form of injustice. It’s an injustice that plagues women with a victim mentality.

It’s a kind of injustice that makes them prisoners of toxic and unhappy relationships that make them less  human — just because there is promise of a so-called happy married life, motherhood and family. The promise of being “normal.”

I have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to what’s normal and I’ve yet to know the repercussions of doing so. Probably I did not try hard enough, I didn’t flirt enough or sleep around much, but the thing is, I can’t dedicate my time preying on the opposite sex.

I can’t imagine myself going through the different schemes of dating or pretending that I have this kind of lifestyle just because the guy I like is into that or this, and hopefully he’ll ask me out. All that stressful hard work of staging, set-ups and mind games just to bag a boyfriend? Isn’t that sad? And they have the nerve to call it a love life?

Since I’m not proactive probably I really deserve to be an “old maid.” Fine. I’ve reached the saturation point of social pressure (imagined or otherwise) combined with the fact that I’m a precious “ticking biological clock.” At the end of the day, I refuse to be measured by the probability of me getting married or of me having kids.

I choose to be my own woman ruled by two powerful organs – a highly functioning brain and a naturally undefeated heart. – Rappler.com
 
 

Nikki Ann Pascual is a Manila-based designer who, in 2007, solidly immersed herself in the field of interior design.