Editorial: Why I want a daughter, even in a world that hates women
(Re)discovering the joys of girlhood, womanhood, and femininity.
I’ve never considered myself especially feminine, and being a woman has always felt incidental, rather than integral, to my identity. Yet, I haven’t always succeeded at ignoring my gender. When I learned I’d be writing the op-ed for The Medium‘s Women’s Day issue, these memories floated through my mind.
I remembered standing in the grocery checkout lane with my mom as a small child, exactly eye-level with the tabloids that criticized famous women’s bodies. My mom covered my eyes, but I became fluent in the language with which to hate my appearance. I could write about how capitalism sells manufactured inadequacies to girls and women. Maybe I could talk about the Sephora kids and Drunk Elephant tweens.
I remembered when every comments section of every Instagram post was flooded with degrading, misogynistic hatred. I remembered being groped by a stranger at Scarborough Town Centre, being catcalled by men along Queen St. W. I could write about how women are expected to protect their safety by giving up their right to exist in the public sphere. I could talk about how women are punished for the sins that men commit against them.
For more than a month, vague inspiration floated in and out of my mind. As a woman, I feel…, my writer’s mind prompted me, and my memory filled in the blanks: Insecure. Angry. Ashamed. Afraid.
The world hates women. Women and girls worldwide, including Canada’s First Nations, Métis, and Indigenous women, face violent and abusive hatred that bars them from education and jobs and endangers their health and safety. Even for relatively privileged women in the global West, like myself, existing as a woman is exhausting and undignified, forcing you to navigate a labyrinthine culture that propagates sexual harassment and that reminds you at every turn—through endless advertisements, headlines, and sponsored social media content—that you are ugly, unhappy, and unlovable, and need to purchase those things back.
Femininity is not the same thing as womanhood: a woman who is “less” feminine is not less a woman than a woman who is “more” feminine, although I am not the right person, nor is this to place, to try and detangle the differences between those constructs. But women have little cultural capital—a sociological concept that refers to the resources groups use to retain or gain dominant status—and, as a result, everything associated with women is devalued. Women and men alike who are seen as feminine are belittled and criticized. I learned early that the best thing I could be was provisionally masculine, and I preened when I was singled out as a “tomboy,” “not like the other girls”.
I also learned from a young age that the worst thing anyone could be was girly, a sissy, or a pussy. I was ashamed of the few “feminine” traits and interests I did possess, feeling they contraindicated my intellect and ambitions. The same culture that sold its women $12.4 billion in cosmetic products in 2024 tells those women that they are superficial and slutty for buying those products; so, although I also longed to feel beautiful, I mocked the first girls in my middle school class to start wearing make-up.
One stereotypically feminine trait I’ve had for as long as I’ve been conscious, however, is a love for children and a desire to be a mother. I’ve always pictured a future with a child by my side, regardless of whether they were a son or a daughter. Recently, though, I’ve thought that I would like a daughter. I remember the little girls I used to babysit: how they’d section my hair into five lopsided ponytails and examine their work with a satisfied smile, exclaiming, “You’re beautiful!” I remember how we’d draw houses or flowers or dolls together and how, when we’d compare the drawings afterwards, they always liked their work better, regardless of how much more detailed or colourful or realistic mine was. I remember how I painted their nails with clear glitter polish and how they, entranced, held their hands up to the window and turned their hands again and again to let the sunlight catch the sparkles.
I remember how, as I was making my rounds through the class of three-year-olds I teach at church, I noticed that some girls had smeared their eyelids with purple marker, their cheeks with blue, their lips with orange. “Hey,” I protested as I carefully wiped it off, “let’s not do that, okay? You look very pretty, but it’s not good if you get marker in your eyes or your mouth.” The only word they heard was “pretty.” They threw their heads back and giggled. They feel no shame, no anger. Their love for pretty skirts and soft colours doesn’t preclude them from screaming ferociously as they chase each other around the classroom. They are simply girls.
The times I played dress-up as a fairy princess as a little girl; the seventh-grade sleepovers where we very seriously dissected the words and actions of boys who definitely did not know we existed; my eventual choice to study forensic science—one STEM field where women outnumber men—and my best friend Ayera’s and my never-ending pursuit of coffee, bubble tea, matcha, and sweet treats are all joys that were available to me because I was a girl and am a woman.
But the time a friend and I found deer feces and poked and prodded it with long sticks for almost an hour, taking stock of the several species of insects with naturalists’ curiosity; the rock ballads written by 30-year-old white men that soundtracked my middle school days; and the scars on my knees from toppling off my bike during one of the rides that have characterized every summer since I was five years old were all joys that came with being a girl as well.
That’s because I am a woman, and being a woman is integral to my identity and my life—the sum of it, not just the griefs and the fears but the joys and the hopes too. When I have a daughter, if I have a daughter, I would like to teach her to love being alive: and, as an extension, to love being a girl.I don’t want to buy into misogyny’s lies that fear, anger, sadness, or violence are all that I can aspire to as a woman. I don’t want to believe that the only way I can achieve more is by shoving my identity as a woman aside. There is a time and place to riot, cry, and scream, but letting violence define my life and identity deals no harm to the system that perpetuates it. It would only destroy me. I am learning that it is “by grace that I am who I am”, and so I am learning to love the life I have been given. I am learning to love being a woman. And so, when my mind prompts me, As a woman, I feel…, I will choose to respond: Joyful. Content. Grateful.
