#35 Let Women Be Many

This morning I caught myself circling a hard, simple truth: a lot of the talk around women is a smokescreen. Under it sits fear—many men fear women.

That fear rarely says its own name. It shows up as folklore: we “belong” in kitchens, we’re “built” for babies, marriage will “protect” us, our highest calling is to decorate and caretake. If women stay small, no one has to ask men who they are without being the center.

Here’s the unromantic reality. Women are fully human. We want what people want: the dignity of our own choices, the freedom to be ourselves without apology. Some of us invent, travel alone, run crews, argue for sport, take hard shots under pressure, and sleep just fine the night before a risk. Some of us want kitchens and children and the slow beauty of domestic life. Freedom means both doors stay open without shame.

What grinds the gears isn’t women choosing the home; it’s the rule that the home must choose all women. That rule comes dressed as concern. It tells a girl, long before she can answer back, where to put her eyes, how to hold her head, which colors “flatter,” what fabrics soften her, what to eat to stay “pretty,” how to speak so she pleases without threatening. It trains her to be looked at before it ever teaches her to look back. The message lands early and it sticks: your body is a public project; your choices are community property.

Men have their own tightrope, and it cuts. No tears, no tenderness, no hand on a shoulder too long. In plenty of places, a man risks a label for ordinary affection. But the rules on girls start sooner and swallow more of the day: the outfit is evidence; the smile is required; the no is negotiable. When “being pleasant” becomes a safety plan, that isn’t manners—it’s management.

Here’s the crux: women don’t want to be men. Men are simply allowed to be themselves. We want that same license. Not a costume, not a cosign—just the room to be as complicated, gifted, ordinary, moody, ambitious, nurturing, or disinterested as we truly are. Small ask. Big implications.

Take the panic about women in hard places—ER nights, welding shops, high office, freight yards, combat units. The panic pretends to be protective: What if she gets hurt? What if we feel things?Protection without permission is control with flowers on it. If a woman weighs the stakes and says yes, your discomfort isn’t the governor of her life. Respect her consent the way you’d respect a man’s.

And if your joy is home: bless it. Raise children with the seriousness of an art. Build a kitchen that holds your talent and your peace. Just don’t turn your calling into our cage. The most provincial habit on earth is mistaking a personal preference for a public rule.

I’ll name myself here. I’ve been both the woman in boots on a deadline and the woman in lipstick at brunch—and I’m the same person in both outfits. I’ve also watched women police one another: the eye-roll for the “too ambitious” colleague, the purity test for mothers, the suspicion of women whose beauty is a door they won’t open for you. Internalized rules feel like conscience; they’re only custom. When we police each other, we volunteer for a system that was never designed to serve us. We make the border guards redundant by working the night shift for free.

What would a saner order ask of us?

• Retire the job of being decoration. A woman’s face isn’t public infrastructure. Some days hair is just hair and clothes are just clothes.

• Treat female ambition as ordinary, not provocative. No one calls a man “intimidating” for wanting scope.

• Call care work what it is—skill, not fate. If she chooses it, honor the mastery; if she doesn’t, spare her the sermon.

I’m not naïve about how fear defends itself. It will dress as concern, hire statistics like lawyers, point to tradition as if time could baptize a habit into justice. But fear is a bad architect. It builds rooms without oxygen and asks women to smile through the dizziness.

The sharper truth—the one I trust—is simple enough to cut glass: women are not a problem to manage; we are a plurality to meet. Let some of us break trail and some of us keep the hearth. Let some of us be beloved for softness and some for steel. Let us choose. That’s the whole project. Everything else is choreography to distract from the door.

If this sounds like a threat, ask what’s at risk. If your center can’t stand when women stand beside you, it isn’t a center; it’s a pedestal. Pedestals are for statues, not partners.

The call is not complicated. Stop confusing protection with control. Stop outsourcing your anxieties to our wardrobes. Stop treating our choices like referendums on yours. Start honoring consent as the only weather that matters. Start unlearning the reflex to rank women’s lives by how well they decorate yours. Start—finally—by letting women be many.

That’s it. That’s the essay. That’s the life.

—Catherine Fraser

___________________

Citations

• Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” Feminism and Foucault (1988).

• Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex (1949).

• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble (1990).

• Connell, R. W. Masculinities (1995).

• Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989).

• Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Second Shift (1989).

• hooks, bell. Feminism Is for Everybody (2000).

• Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing Like a Girl.” Human Studies 3, no. 2 (1980).