I Am Not a Kitten Stuck Up a Tree Somewhere

I am back to learning French, and today I tried out this sentence: Quand j'étais jeune, j'esperais que j'étais un garcon. When I was young, I used to wish I were a boy. I always felt that it was too problematic being a girl and that maybe my life could've just been so much easier if I were a boy. Now that I have grown, I often wish I were a man; it's even more problematic being a woman.

In Le Déuxieme Sexe, Simone de Beauvoir coined the controversial phrase that translates to "woman is womb". I was only introduced to that book and that phrase a few years ago and have been trying to resist it ever since. But the harder I try, the more I am convinced that even after the feminist movement and after the fight for equality, women are still always reduced to sexual beings. Even Eve Ensler's admirable attempt at empowering women through The Vagina Monologues reminded the world that women will forever be constrained by the fact that they have a vagina.

In this society and at this point in time, having a vagina unequivocally revokes any freedom thought to be your own. The simplest everyday example would be a woman's inability to walk down the street dressed in whatever she desires. It's a mundane, cyclical debate: if a woman dresses (even remotely) provocatively in the street, she risks the chance of getting harassed/assaulted/raped. Answering back or taking legal action both have proven to be of no avail. So the choices really are: a. be free; or b. get raped. There is no real blame to be put on the woman. Even the debase argument that a woman's attire is what leads to men's despicable behavior has been nullified by the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights' extensive report which showed that three-quarters of sexual harassment and assault victims are veiled. Even the act of advising a girl not to walk alone in the street is infuriating; why should I carry the burden of despicable men who carry out unlawful deeds? It reduces woman once again to nothing more than their sexuality. I have a vagina, therefore I am not free to walk.

Moments like this make me listen to Ani DiFranco's Not A Pretty Girl. As beautiful and empowering as the song may be, today I couldn't help but think that, contrary to Ani's powerful anthem, not every kitten figures out how to get down. And yet the easiest thing for a man to do is to dismiss women's issues as trivial, secondary problems that could be solved with answer as simple as not walking in the street. But a man has never transformed into a woman; has never felt the struggles, frustrations and hindrances that women feel every single day over issues small and large. And until they miraculously experience this extreme empathy, men all over the world should at least give us some of the peace of mind we deserve by not giving their irrelevant and unqualified opinion on the matter.