If you are female or queer and seek to attain professional excellence, the levels of scrutiny you have to face feel extreme. This is to say nothing of internalised misogyny, which impacts one’s self-image
Simone Biles competes in the floor exercise event in Paris on July 30. Pic/AFP
I passively follow the ongoing Olympics. I don’t tune in to anything and all the information I gather comes to me via my social media feeds. The only athletes I follow are Simone Biles and Tom Daley. I like glimpsing their lives and particularly enjoy seeing images of Daley knitting while watching the games as a spectator. Biles has a quiet energy about her and ever since she publicly took a break from competing for the sake of her mental health, I felt great admiration for her. A day ago, I read about the complexity of the moves she recently manoeuvred. I also read that her talent and ability are so unique, a new level of difficulty had to be created in order for her to be adequately judged. It’s as if she is competing with herself. I’ve also read about the spirit of camaraderie that she maintains with her competitors, how she encourages them to push themselves and is inspired by their talents. I mean, there are moves named after her!
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And yet, recently, after she did some incredibly difficult and challenging move that perhaps no other living person could manage, what so many people fixated on was her hair being out of place. Don’t come for my hair, she allegedly wrote on her own social media account. It vexed me to think of the obvious misogyny behind the vitriol she was receiving for her hair seeming slightly unruly. There’s undoubtedly also a racist element to the backlash. Biles is Black and she has admitted to having a difficult relationship with her hair. To think that a woman could be at the height of her career, not just at the pinnacle of her success but at a point where she is breaking new ground and pushing the limits of the field itself and that instead of celebrating her accomplishments with unfiltered joy, she should, instead, receive backlash for not looking perfect, that some superficial flaw should instead become the focus of global attention.
It enraged me to be reminded that with every feminist step forward, patriarchal forces threaten to drag the world ten steps behind. A patriarchal mindset is so enduring in its stubborn narrow-mindedness, it cannot contemplate the possibility of anything existing that doesn’t fit into its closeted worldview. It also compels us to waste our time and energy rehashing the same debates that we, frankly, need to move beyond—like whether a woman can ‘have it all’, whether menstrual leave should be permitted, whether women are entitled to abortion rights or whether or not gender is a social construct. Instead of building environments that can support, sustain and nurture the creative and physical labour of womxn, patriarchal mindsets are hell-bent on reversing the clock and undoing whatever progress feminist activism has managed to achieve.
If you are female or queer and seek to attain any form of professional excellence, the levels of scrutiny you have to face feel extreme. The standards against which you are measured are not ordinary, they are much higher than the standards held for cis men. Besides the external sources of pressure, there is this internalised misogyny that all of us are struggling to undo which infects something as basic as how we see ourselves. Sometimes, we even imagine the forces expecting us to excel when they are suddenly absent. How often have we felt the compulsion to make others proud of us without considering whether we are working in service of our own pleasure and happiness as against others?
The last two weeks of my life have felt exceptionally calmer. For the first time in months, it feels like I have some kind of respite from feeling inundated with work deadlines. My regular work feels less hectic because the person to whom I report had the wisdom to hire two more freelancers to ease our collective workload. The practice I put into place a year ago of not accepting low-paying work has yielded fruit. Because I had spent all of May and June preparing for the bilingual exam, which I passed, I suddenly find myself with this extra time on my hands that has the quality of phantom time. I am struggling, still, to let go of that feeling that I ‘need’ to be ‘doing’ something with that time, that I need to fill it with activity. I found myself buying books for the B2 level because I feel motivated to continue learning both these languages—Italian and German, and not in order to pass a test. I’m waiting to hear back on whether I might be selected for the PhD position for which I applied, but I am now almost hoping I didn’t make the cut. As I begin to ease into my 39th year, I wonder if I should learn to rest on my laurels instead of feeling I need to achieve more. Maybe what I want, right now, is to live an ordinary life where the compulsion towards intellectual thought is purely voluntary.
Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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