Who is the modern woman? You can get several higher educations, make a career, become more successful than many men, but at the same time, the requirements for marriage, family and, most importantly, femininity in our time have become even higher and more multifaceted. Unexpected freedom has deprived us of guidelines and ready-made recipes — how to be a woman? Let’s figure it out!
You must have come across the opinion that everything used to be “simple” for a woman: no rights, no opportunities for self-realization. Take care of your husband and children, do not think about any social success. I hasten to disappoint you: the position of a woman in society has never been precisely defined.
Viking women were a full-fledged fighting force. In feudal Japan, girls in samurai families were brought up under the same Bushido code as boys. Excavations of the Scythian burials showed that among the warriors there were equally divided men and women, and all of them had corresponding tattoos and battle scars. In ancient Rome, women participated in gladiator fights on an equal basis with men. Need more examples?
And to this day on the planet you can find any form of the «norm» of female self-realization: polyandry in Tibet, polygamy in the Middle East, women in the Israeli army … And so on and so forth. Therefore, I suggest not to focus on any norm — especially if you do not like it too much. But what then shall we understand by the concept of femininity?
Femininity in relationships
Femininity does not seem to me to be some permanent property of a person, such as mass or height, but rather a kind of relationship. How and why, for example, to show femininity when you sit in a comfortable armchair and read a book? Femininity is the type of relationship that we build with men of interest to us, and it is not at all the opposite of masculinity.
Femininity needs context
Femininity needs context. Just as there are interlocutors in a conversation with whom you feel like a complete idiot, there are also men in relations with whom you do not feel like a woman. And this does not mean that there is something wrong with any of you: it is just the situation.
In the professional sphere, we do not need the recognition of all colleagues and partners without exception. Similarly, in the sphere of relationships, we need attention and recognition only from men who are important to us. In this sense, your femininity is also an indicator of the right man. Your femininity depends on who you are and who are the men who are important to you, and over time it can change: both internal sensation and external manifestations.
The outer form is the inner lie
You can add femininity to your image: hundreds of glossy magazines will help you. But “making” yourself feminine according to a given template is a rather dubious way.
Let’s imagine that a woman has found and mastered the formula of how to dress, what topics to talk about, how to move in order to correspond to some ideal idea of femininity, and with this she attracted the man of her dreams. How many hours, days, months is enough for her to continue what she started? How much lightness and happiness will this time bring to her? And what will happen later, when one day she says: “It’s not me, I can’t do this anymore!” The man will feel betrayed, she — betrayed herself.
One of the important criteria for “your” or “not your” man is how he reacts to you when you behave easily and naturally, while remaining yourself.
The search for femininity
It seems to me that the problem of femininity is not at all that one of us does not have it. And how can it not exist if every cell of our body is a female cell? And just as genes are unique, their expression in appearance, movements, manners is also unique.
The only question is how to hear the voice of our peculiarity, because it is not the loudest and the flow of external information drowns it out so often. The exercise “How feminine am I right now?” will help with this. The hourly signal exercises are one of my favorites: they quickly develop any undertaking that we intend to develop. The principle of the exercise is simple: what we pay attention to will grow and improve.
Turn your attention inward and ask yourself the question: How feminine do I feel right now?
So, get yourself a clock with an hourly signal or set a timer on your phone. At the moment of the signal, turn your attention inward and ask yourself the question: how feminine do I feel right now? This exercise takes no more than three seconds: we switch attention, wait for a response from the body and return to our business.
Do it for two, and preferably three weeks, and you will be amazed at how bright and understandable this feeling will become — your unique, inimitable feeling of femininity.