International Women’s Day 2025 – Oh, How I Love Being A Woman – A Reflection On Modern Womanhood

International Women’s Day 2025

It’s International Women’s Day, and I’ve been bombarded with videos on my feeds. They all made me feel something, and I had to write it down. Sometimes it is raw emotion, sometimes it rhymes, sometimes it doesn’t, and I’m aware it’s way too long and as much of a mess as I am, but there’s only so many times I can hear that clip from Anne with an E exclaiming, “Oh, how I love being a woman!” without sharing how it makes me feel.

Being a woman this year, and even the past few years, has felt different. Tragic, powerful, depressing, and exhilarating all at the same time.

The journey of being a woman is so complicated.

You start out happy because you’re like Mommy and Mommy is amazing, so why wouldn’t you want to be female?

And then you live in the world just a little, and you start to notice the value placed upon womanhood. You are teased for being a girl. For crying like a girl, hitting like a girl, being nosy like a girl… and suddenly, you realize that almost everything in relation to girlhood is negative. It is synonymous with weak, needy, overemotional, and unworthy.

So you try to act more like a boy. You even proudly adopt the tomboy persona. You’re not like a stupid girl. You like dirt, and ninjas, and playing outside, playing rough, and basketball, and you hate Barbies, dresses, doing your hair, and anything pink. No matter that none of these things truly belongs to one sex or the other. Because in your mind, you’ve chosen to value what society values in males, without realizing yet that you’ll be ridiculed all the more for embracing these traits.

Time goes by, and you become a teen, and things start to change. You still hate pink, but you begin to soften yourself, you put on some lipstick, you paint your nails, but never pink, because pink is for girly girls, and no one wants to be thought of as more girly than normal, because those people are annoyingly girly. You’ve realized that being overly girly can make you a target, not only for boys now, but other girls as well.

So you do your best to find the perfect balance of feminine so that a boy will sweep you off your feet, only to find that boys are much more interested in the clinical things that make you a woman, things you often have no control over.

The roundness of breasts, the curve of your hips, the things that so many girls in your circle seem to have—but your mother says you’re a late bloomer, your body won’t be this thin, this boxy, or this boring forever, and at the time you can’t wait for this to be true and so you miss the sadness in her voice when she says boys will want you too.

And so you grow into a woman’s body and forget to appreciate it at such a young age. You pick and poke and prod, and your words and your feelings toward it are ugly and harsh; they’re as ugly as you now feel.

You hate your body because it isn’t perfect. Your hips are now too wide, your breasts aren’t perfectly round and symmetrical, in fact, you’re pretty sure one is smaller than the other, and you would be so much happier if you could just lose a few pounds so you can look like the girls in the fashion magazines you’re expected to read, maybe then you could love yourself. Maybe you could find a love like the ones in all the girly movies you watch with your mom.

And then a boy comes along who does love you and thinks you’re beautiful and who wants to be with you always because he can’t get enough of you, despite his friends heckling him with words like she’s not that hot, you’re whipped man, or what a p*ssy. And you don’t care that much. It’s only a thing boys say at this point, and you’ve heard worse.

Eventually, he finds another center of his universe, one willing to give him what he wants, and you can’t even think of him badly because at least he didn’t force it like another boy tried to do.

You’ve been taught that your own morality is tied up between your legs and that you’re only of worth if you keep them closed. Good women are not sluts they’re not easy, they don’t want sex until they are married. And you wonder what’s wrong with you. You must be a bad woman; there must be something deviant about you, or you wouldn’t have these feelings for boys, and you know the same feelings you have about girls are definitely going to send you to hell, so you try to drown those out completely.

You enter the workforce and face a whole new slew of obstacles from dangerous situations, pay gaps, and jobs that a woman just shouldn’t do and again you think, if I were just a man, maybe no one would care and maybe I wouldn’t be so underestimated, maybe someone would value my input, but you would miss the unique experience that comes from sisterhood, from women looking out for other women despite the cost.

And so you trudge on, getting married, giving up your name, and finally giving up your body for a new life. A perfect new being, and you can’t help but marvel at the experience, both painful and joyous, filled with equal parts fear and hope. How amazing it is to be a woman.

And then you hate your body again, not that you ever stopped, but now it feels like someone else’s skin. And then the demands begin from everyone but yourself; you lose the inside as well as the out. You drown in the expectations of what a perfect mother and wife should be. There doesn’t seem to be a right answer, only opinions from every angle. And your job won’t pay you, and your resume takes a hit, but everyone agrees, a mom should stay home with her kids, but don’t be poor and don’t ask for help, no one likes a needy woman, so she’ll have to fend for herself.

You lose women in your life and hear them described only by what they could give to others, all they did, not who they were, and that scares you. It also enrages you, and you’re not quite sure what to do with the feeling.

It takes years to heal, and you’re never quite the same, but eventually you are ready to admit it wasn’t the clothes you wore or the way that you dressed; you were a woman all along, fierce, powerful, and strong. And the color pink? Well, you might find you like it, and that it was never the real problem.

Being a woman is like being a Phoenix. You are born, and you die, and you’re reborn a thousand times over, each time coming back a little changed by the world, by your experiences, but you would never trade places with a man because there would be something missing from your very soul without the experiences you fought so hard to get through.

Oh, how I love being a woman…