Womanhood - Tumblr Posts
“Maybe it was actually an unspoken instant agreement between the four women on the balcony: No woman should pay for the accidental death of that particular man. Maybe it was an involuntary, atavistic response to thousands of years of violence against women. Maybe it was for every rape, every brutal backhanded slap, every other Perry that had come before this one.”
— Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies
I want to feel powerful again.
I used to be a powerful girl. A hot girl. A confident girl.
Someone people looked up to and envied my confidence.
Now I’m just like the quintessential girl– anxious, meek, visibly insecure.
And now I’m even more like any other girl– I finally have an eating disorder. I wonder if every girl is just waiting for the time they’ll be sexually assaulted or get a legitimate eating disorder (not a weak half-eating disorder where you just kind of don’t eat enough or kind of eat too much).
It seems like a rite of passage into womanhood. Are you even a woman if you’re not insecure, have an eating disorder, are currently or previously in an abusive relationship, or have been sexually assaulted?
Or are you a mystical non-woman who actually, seriously, truly (not lying) is comfortable with herself and food is easy for her?
You’ll be admired but also kind of despised, because you’re so foreign and difficult to relate to and understand.
So far I’m still half-unicorn: I haven’t had any full-on sexual assaults. Semi-close calls, obviously. I mean come on. I’m a girl.
A Pennsylvania museum has solved the mystery of a Renaissance portrait in an investigation that spans hundreds of years, layers of paint and the murdered daughter of an Italian duke.
Among the works featured in the Carnegie Museum’s exhibit Faked, Forgotten, Found is a portrait of Isabella de'Medici, the spirited favorite daughter of Cosimo de'Medici, the first Grand Duke of Florence, whose face hadn’t seen the light of day in almost 200 years.
Isabella Medici’s strong nose, steely stare and high forehead plucked of hair, as was the fashion in 1570, was hidden beneath layers of paint applied by a Victorian artist to render the work more saleable to a 19th century buyer.
The result was a pretty, bland face with rosy cheeks and gently smiling lips that Louise Lippincott, curator of fine arts at the museum, thought was a possible fake.
Before deciding to deaccession the work, Lippincott brought the painting, which was purportedly of Eleanor of Toledo, a famed beauty and the mother of Isabella de'Medici, to the Pittsburgh museum’s conservator Ellen Baxter to confirm her suspicions.
Baxter was immediately intrigued. The woman’s clothing was spot-on, with its high lace collar and richly patterned bodice, but her face was all wrong, ‘like a Victorian cookie tin box lid,’ Baxter told Carnegie Magazine.
After finding the stamp of Francis Needham on the back of the work, Baxter did some research and found that Needham worked in National Portrait Gallery in London in the mid-1800s transferring paintings from wood panels to canvas mounts.
Paintings on canvas usually have large cracks, but the ones on the Eleanor of Toledo portrait were much smaller than would be expected.
Baxter devised a theory that the work had been transferred from a wood panel onto canvas and then repainted so that the woman’s face was more pleasing to the Victorian art-buyer, some 300 years after it had been painted.
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“I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free. (…) I want, I think, to be omniscient… I think I would like to call myself “The girl who wanted to be God.” Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be—perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I—I am powerful—but to what extent? I am I.”
— Sylvia Plath, Letters Home
Pour vous, c’est quoi une femme? Au XIX siècle dans le grand dictionnaire universel Larousse la femme était définie comme: « Ayant une constitution proche d’un enfant et étant naturellement faite pour le mariage ».
De nos jours le Larousse nous dit plus simplement « être humain du sexe féminin ».
Mais pour le dictionnaire de l’Académie Française une femme c’est: « un être humain défini par ses caractères sexuelles qui lui permettent de concevoir et de mettre au monde des enfants ».
Ce n’est pas forcément votre définition du mot « femme ».
On a souvent l’habitude de considérer le dictionnaire comme une source neutre, unique, fiable: Le Dictionnaire. Mais rien qu’avec cet exemple du mot « femme » on voit que la définition peut varier d’époque à l’autre, d’un dictionnaire à l’autre.
« Regarde dans le dictionnaire! ». Quand on vous dit ça, de quel dictionnaire parle-t-on? D’un dictionnaire papier? D’un dictionnaire en ligne? D’un dictionnaire collaboratif ou d’un dictionnaire fait par des professionnels ? Du dictionnaire de l’Académie? Du Robert? Du Larousse? Il n’y a pas un dictionnaire, mais des dictionnaires faits par des gens différents, qui font des choix différents, des choix éditoriaux, mais aussi idéologiques et même politiques.
—Laélia Véron, Votre dictionnaire est-il de droite?
“Medusa lost her beauty—or rather, it was taken from her. Beauty is always something you can lose. Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: We are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live. Oh, but ugliness—ugliness is always yours. Almost everyone has some innate kernel of grotesquerie; even fashion models (I’ve heard) tend to look a bit strange and froggish in person, having been gifted with naturally level faces that pool light luminously instead of breaking it into shards. And everyone has the ability to mine their ugliness, to emphasize and magnify it, to distort even those parts of themselves that fall within acceptable bounds. Where beauty is narrow and constrained, ugliness is an entire galaxy, a myriad of sparkling paths that lurch crazily away from the ideal. There are so few ways to look perfect, but there are thousands of ways to look monstrous, surprising, upsetting, outlandish, or odd. Thousands of stories to tell in dozens of languages: the languages of strong features or weak chins, the languages of garish makeup and weird haircuts and startling clothes, fat and bony and hairy languages, the languages of any kind of beauty that’s not white. Nose languages, eyebrow languages, piercing and tattoo languages, languages of blemish and birthmark and scar. When you give up trying to declare yourself acceptable, there are so many new things to say.”
— What If We Cultivated Our Ugliness? Jess Zimmerman. (via kuanios)
i do not know what it means to be a woman every time i put on a dress it seems to be a masquerade a little girl playing pretend. i am no man that is all i seem to know.
Shout out to Sylvia Plath
I'm re-watching the Barbie movie as my mom makes friendship bracelets. Mom's really are just teenagers or little girls in disguise
made a little collage about young womanhood and s*x and dr*gs and the not so hidden downsides to these things 🩷
Mia Goth
Our living legend
I’m scared to have a daughter, because I hope she doesn’t have the same guilt I do of taking her mother’s identity from ‘dreamer’ to ‘Mom’.
🕯️༻𝒱𝒾𝓃𝓉𝒶𝑔ℯ 𝒷ℯ𝒹𝓇ℴℴ𝓂༺ 🕯️
If you were in lotf you would set the whole island on fire by day one
If I were in lord of the flies at my big age I'd use a leaf as a pad, and whoever doesn't agree is stinky
Sometimes womanhood is walking for hours around town because your friend is scared she’s gonna get murdered by her tinder date
