Who do you think you are? What do you have to say that’s so interesting?
Silence speaks to me and doesn’t pull any punches. We’ve had this conversation often, whenever I’ve felt the urge to emerge from my protective cocoon, it’s standing there like a stern sentinel challenging my audacity to believe that I matter. It often wins.
You want to do what? Write a blog? Welcome to the ’90s.
Me: ...
Me: ...it’s not a blog.
What is it then?
(thinking hard of something impressive to say)
Me: I don’t know.
(shuts up)
So the conversation went, as it always does. Inspiration doesn’t stand a chance against Silence, but Silence bows before Fury.
As a child, I didn’t have role models, but even if I had, there were very few women to choose from while there was no lack of men. I never thought that it was a problem—I never thought about it at all. It never occurred to me that nearly all the books that I read had male protagonists; they had interesting adventures, they were complicated, they came of age and did great things. All the women portrayed were secondary characters, often in need of saving. I never gave it much thought when I was in college and was one of a handful of women in a room of more than a hundred men. I never thought about it as an adult when I was looking at startups to work for and their team pages featured all men, except for the occasional woman who was Marketing, Customer Support, or Reception. I minimally paid attention to the efforts to increase the number of women in tech.
It never bothered me, until it did.
I remember when Fury arrived—why it chose that moment, I’m not quite sure—I was watching the Food Channel at a restaurant. After a few minutes, I became puzzled that all the ads that I had seen, even the show that was on, featured men. I couldn't remember seeing any women on that screen while I was watching. It struck me that this was typical, the near-total absence of women. What disturbed me the most was the normalization of this omission, so much so that I had rarely given it a second thought, despite having seen it repeatedly.
That burned inside and kept burning.
Years of having felt overlooked, underestimated, and dismissed, I felt injured by the lack of women portrayed. In recent years, there have been more female characters, even protagonists, in movies and TV series; while laudable, their portrayals always felt problematic to me. The most obvious reason was simply the lack of options of what a woman could be; for every woman, there were multiple portrayals of men. As characters, the women tended to be flat, caricatures of womanhood—to add insult, they were written by men. I realized that I was allowing this to perpetuate and that troubled me, but what could I possibly do?
Silence had very sound arguments for keeping me frozen:
What if I say something stupid?
No one is interested in what I have to say.
What if I get attacked for my beliefs?
I might reveal myself to be ___ (pick some derogatory adjectives).
I might offend someone.
I don’t know how to write.
What I have to say is so boring.
Am I really a paragon of womanhood?
I don’t have time for this.
I’m not perfect.
Do I want to feel even more like an oddball?
To all of this, Fury responded, “Fuck that.”
All of this may be true, and none of it matters. If I don’t speak up, then I allow others to speak for me and that will always be distorted. I don’t need to be anything other than an example of a woman—perhaps flawed, hopefully, complicated, but real and of my own making. In doing so, I can contribute to the possibilities of womanhood, to give another the freedom to create her own, and that is what matters.
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