village idiot on what being a woman means

A question that has often visited me in my cognitive sojourns, and though it has never been an easy question throughout human history, the kind of challenge it faces today seems to be more of a product of mass delusion than a real problem. For me, as of 18:51, June 19th, 2023, this question has a rather simple answer: the cumulative, lived experience—indeed, for many of us, a lifetime—of reacting to what is believed to be womanly.

Rid of its normative connotations, from which the word draws its substantive meaning, woman is a reactive term. Far from signifying only how we react to the garden variety of persecutions and discriminations, it also signifies, for instance, the excitement of the first time when you are rewarded for obeying the rules, the pleasure and pain of being gazed, that unfazed equanimity when, despite all you know, you still put on that performance. The term itself refers to but a shell without its mussel, and, indeed more often than not, a not so pleasant shell. But it is this shell that we’ve often been musing at, flirting with it, denying it, refusing it, embracing it, abusing it, cussing it, almost like a vexing pet. And it’s here where the distance one puts between herself and the normative woman matters. None of us has ever been the normative woman, none of our existence depends on the demarcation. We’ve only been reacting to it. To this end, the inclusivity of the term "woman" lies precisely in its ability to include all those who have spent a significant amount of time fumbling the same shell, birthing bodies or not. Canceling the term has suspiciously little effect on the whole progressive (or)deal in an era when norms are rank taboos. If anything, cancel gender. And if indeed we cis-gender hags need to invent a new name for ourselves, I think I quite like to be called gorge.