Refusal

Uniqlo blouse
Sezane jeans
Mango heels
Mango handbag
RayBan sunglasses
Vintage necklace (similar)
Linjer rings (c/o) (similar)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Goody hairclip
Location: The Ambassador Apartments – Winnipeg, Manitoba

I’ve been thinking, lately, of just how much the world asks – no, not asks, expects – women to give up as a condition of our continued existence. And about how few of us realise that refusal is an available option.

It started when a male friend told me that he’s planning to propose. I was on the point of congratulating him when he added, I suspect expecting that it would somehow endear him to me, or at least illicit a response along the lines of, Oh, isn’t that nice, you’re such a good guy!, that he planned to ask his girlfriend’s father for his blessing first. “I’m old school like that,” he claimed.

“I’m not old school and she doesn’t belong to him,” I countered, my instinctive reaction putting itself into words before I could stop it. I don’t know his girlfriend. Maybe she finds this kind of paternalism as charming as I find it repulsive. After all, women are still raised on fairytales and romantic comedies, still nurtured in an environment that results in many of them choosing to take their partner’s name in marriage even though it’s more work than keeping their own. “You know her best,” I moderated my outrage slightly, “but I will say this; if you’d gone to my dad asking for his blessing to propose, he would have said, Shouldn’t you ask her first?”

“The female experience is profoundly radicalising for those who survive its brutalization.”
– Margaret Harrison and Lucy Lippard

I must have survived the brutalization, because I am entirely radicalised. I believe in my own humanity. My refusal to make myself small or invisible for anyone is a testament to that fact. But, to be frank, it’s exhausting. Refusal is an act of rebellion against established social norms. Anyone who says its easy is lying or, more likely, selling something. I understand women who choose to change their names. And women who allow their male partners to think that marriage will be a transfer of ownership from father to new husband. It’s so much easier to give up than to fight everyone around you all the time. Not every woman has the emotional werewithal for constant conflict.

Sometimes, I question if I do – but I keep fighting. I keep refusing, no matter how emotionally taxing it is – and it is – because capitulation isn’t an option I can accept. I will never be satisfied with a world that perceives women as the second sex. And for me, silence would be tantamount to tacit complicity.

Women belong to ourselves. We do not prove our love but sacrificing our identities in favour of taking on our husband’s identity as our own. No one should ask us to without considering the implications of that request. And we should not, under any circumstances, we expected to congratulate men for upholding paternalistic practises and ideals in the name of wholesome traditions. Those traditions only serve to help them to retain their primacy in the social heirarchy. And traditions, like rules, are meant to be broken. I refuse to give up or given in until they’re shattered.

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