what is a woman? 77 suggestions
March: it’s our month!
WHAT is a WOMAN?????????????????????
(I’ve been one for many years and honey, fuck if I know.)
It’s a question that is asked in bad faith by anti-trans bigots who think being vague is the ultimate “gotcha!” We’ve loosened the boundaries of gender expression, inviting an existential and philosophical discussion; they’d rather throw a hissy fit. Womanhood is many things, but it is certainly not a cudgel with which to beat back the tides of progress.
This question reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of language. We create words in order to describe the world around us, and we codify definitions for those words in order to have conversations. To ask a person to undertake any sort of test to prove they are a woman is completely backward, missing the forest for the vaginas! The world is not supposed to bend itself to fit the dictionary. We write the dictionary to understand the world as it already is. And we re-write as many times as necessary. Like, duh.
Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? It’s a fucking tomato. That’s why we have the word tomato.
Still. Still! Whaaaaaat is a wooooooooman?????? For answers, there is some intelligent thinking/writing, which you can find online by looking for it, and also to some very bleak, revealing complaints from Roseanne Barr. Seriously, her thing is so sad.
To spare us all from rhetorical stupor and insipid cocktail party bickering, I offer 77 ready-made answers to the question. Feel free to add, delete, argue and dismiss. That's your woman right.
A woman is Peggy Olson in Mad Men seasons 2-7
A woman walks home alone at night but she never listens to music while doing so; she remains alert
A woman is right behind you, holding a knife! Look out!
Ariana Grande is a woman
A woman is the thing with feathers
Sorry, that’s hope
No, that’s grief?
I’m pretty sure the thing with feathers is a bird…am I missing something?
A woman is 82 cents on the dollar, give or take by race and class
If James Bond is having sex with it, it’s a woman
A woman is a woman, per Godard
The moon is definitely a woman, and good for her for putting up with all her male visitors
Trans women are women
A woman wishes she could give herself at-home manicures, but trying to paint her dominant hand with her non-dominant hand is impossible
Women know all the lyrics to “Time After Time.” Not just the chorus and opening verse, all the words. All women know all the words, and if you know all the words and you are not a woman, the part of your brain that holds the words is a woman.
Women be shopping
A woman invented science fiction
A woman is the reason Scorsese’s movies are so good
A woman is the reason Star Wars makes sense
Women can pay for their own drinks, but shouldn’t have to!
What’s a woman? For a long time, society didn’t really give a shit, which is why endometriosis is so under-studied and people don’t realize that jaw pain is a heart attack symptom in women. This world was built for men! Sucks
All aunts are women, but not all women are aunts
A woman has tried on heels. Maybe she taught herself to walk in them, maybe she decided they weren’t for her. For some women, the try-on has only ever been mental, as she pictures herself in heels, trying to imagine how she’d navigate stairs and subway grates. A woman decides throughout her life how she will interact with heels, what this says about her and the presentation of her womanhood. As Karen sings in the musical version of Mean Girls, “This is modern feminism talkin’/ I expect to run the world in shoes I cannot walk in.” Not the whole story, but there is truth to it
Women who think and look and act differently from how you conceive of women and the women you grew up around…are women
A woman is a Jewish female who has reached the age of thirteen and completed the studies and rituals of the Bat Mitzvah, becoming an adult in the eyes of her community
Celebrities worshipped by gay men are women
Lizzie McGuire is a woman, and should be allowed to fuck
A woman may see the glass as half empty or half full, either way, she’s leaving those half-drunk glasses of water all over her apartment, including like six just by her bed
A cat is a kitty is a girl; a lioness is a woman
If she identifies as a woman, she’s a woman
Every character on Ted Lasso is a woman
A woman has reminded you politely once, but she won’t be so nice next time
All big sisters are women
All Susans are women
The most woman women alive are the Williamses
Wanda Sykes is a woman, and I love Wanda Sykes
Women pay for their own Spotify accounts, but never their Netflix accounts
NOT salads
Soap operas were invented by a woman
If you Google “what is a woman,” the first thing that comes up is an anti-trans movie by that name, which I guarantee you 100% is why they made that movie, to get the top spot on Google
If you ask Bing, it’ll tell you, “Adult female human,” an answer supplied by the “woman” Wikipedia page
Plug the question into Yahoo!’s search engine and you get “an adult female human being,” and the “use it in a phrase” example for this definition is "a drawing of a young woman," which feels a little gross, no?
Search “what is a woman” on Ask.com, AKA Ask Jeeves, and you’re directed to a number of internal Ask.com articles with Woman in the headline. First is a review of The Woman King starring Viola Davis. The reviewer (named Patricia, and I would presume that she is a woman, though this is merely an educated guess) gave it 9/10. The second is about Maya Angelou. The third is about queer DC superheroes. I can say with great confidence that Viola Davis is and Maya Angelous was a woman
Should you want to get the Oxford English Dictionary’s take, you have to buy a subscription or make an account or something. That’s insane, right?
Merriam-Webster tells us that woman is a noun, an adult female person, and then offers synonymous/related words including womankind, womanliness, wife, mistress, Girlfriend Sense 2. I guess I just don’t get how the dictionary works!
On the Encyclopedia Britannica website, when you search Woman, the first page that comes up is for Shania Twain’s 1995 album The Woman In Me. Then Wonder Woman (fictional character), Eagle Woman (peace activist), The Woman Citizen (periodical), The Bionic Woman (television show)
If you ask Siri “what is a woman,” she reads from Wikipedia (adult female human).
If you ask Siri “are you a woman,” she says, “I don’t have a gender.”
If you ask Google why Siri and Alexa have female voices, the first result is an article from WeLocalize about how there are more recordings of female voices through history, and therefore more data from which to create AI voices. But I find this dubious, since we have plenty of recorded male voices from, like, the news
I thought Siri wasn’t AI; I thought the voice came from some person who recorded every single word. And I was right! Her name is Susan, and she is a woman.
Here’s a Mental Floss article that offers a few theories re: Siri, Alexa, Cortana. I think it’s just that people wanna boss women around.
Women are funny, but honestly when I see some event that’s like, The SheLaugh’s Tamponfest GirlComedy LadyHour, I have no interest! By a similar token, all-female improv or sketch groups can be great, but not if their name is something about how they are all-female. That’s a tell-tale sign the jokes will be mid. Men, please don’t tell me whether or not you think this observation is true
The Cut is for women, even though it doesn’t say that anywhere on the site
Same with Jezebel
A woman can have a fruity cocktail on vacation, or at the bar, and a man can too, and it doesn’t make him less of a man, and it also doesn’t make him brave or evolved or anything, it’s literally just a drink
Women were Talking at the Oscars
Women were not Directing at the Oscars
My cat Matilda turns ten next month, so you’d think she would be a woman, but she peed on a new chair last week so I’ve demoted her back to girlie
A woman will deliver the most eviscerating and correct observation that cuts you to your core and permanently alters your self-perception and then just sip her pinot grigio
March: it’s our month I guess?
The song “Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)” would have us believe that the sea is a woman. This is actually false. Only the Pacific Ocean is a woman. All the rest are, respectfully, and pun intended, gender fluid
Historically, a woman has not been leader of a dangerous cult, but we are making great strides toward equality in that arena
All candles are girls, all fires are women
Beyoncé once sang, “I’m a grown woman, I can do whatever I want” and I think about that lyric a lot
A woman hasn’t ever technically been president but Edith Wilson got close
Caitlyn Jenner is a woman
Her step-daughter Kim Kardashian has so thoroughly warped and commodified her own gender presentation that she is more abstraction than woman, a force more than a real person, and perhaps a toxic, negative one at that, and yet I wish her peace, for her sake and ours
You know who seems to have truly mastered the art and science of being a woman? Minnie Driver. She’s got it all figured out
Women (and children) got first dibs on seats on the Titanic’s lifeboats, but when you think about the fact that it was men who designed, paid for, built, captained and ultimately sank the ship, the story isn’t primarily an example of female privilege, is it?
American Girl Dolls are, obviously, girls, but if you’re old enough to remember the original line-up, congrats, you’re a woman!
Lisa Frank: a woman for girls
Women’s colleges are struggling to create admissions policies that recognize the gender diversity of current students while maintaining the characteristic exclusivity of the institutions. It’s an ongoing conversation that has no singular answer or solution, but I do have a funny story about my dad at Smith that’s sort of relevant, I’ll tell you if you want
Men are metals, women are gems
A woman is concerned with her eyebrows, because the rules for what we are and aren’t supposed to do with them keeps changing, which, when you think about it, encapsulates the issue
Hope this cleared things up
Lizzie (she/her)