Katie’s Musings: It’s Complicated

I’ve always had a really odd relationship with feminism… well, femininity in general.

That sounds weird.  Let me explain.

I just had a birthday, and it occurred to me that this year marks my 20th anniversary of being 6’2” tall.  I achieved my full height by the time I was 13 years old, a lanky 8th grader who always formed the midpoint in the back row of sports team pictures, always in pants ever-so-slightly too short.  For all of my high school years, I was the second tallest person in our Class D-2 school, and easily the tallest girl in our conference.  In fact, as far as I know, I’m still the record holder for blocked shots in basketball for game, season, and career, and I only played in high school for two years.  Couldn’t make a basket to save my life.  But I have very long arms, so…

Yeah, yeah, hold your applause please.

When you’re a woman growing up tall, you’re gifted with an interesting perspective on the world, and I don’t just mean physical vantage point.  There many ways I could illustrate this – the inevitable toll it takes on a girl’s self esteem to never be able to walk into a store at the mall and buy something off the rack, the way tall kids are always expected to behave better because they look older and like they should “know better,” the boys who never quite know what to do with you, the girls who frequently try to bring you down a peg, going through the universal awkward years without the benefit of being able to hide, etc.  Growing up a tall girl is not for the faint of heart, though I was very lucky to have parents who raised me to believe that being tall was cool.

But the thing you become extremely aware of when growing up a tall woman is the way that our culture associates femininity with the amount of space you dare to take up in this world.  The less space you occupy (and there are many spacial factors in this scenario), the more “feminine” you are considered.  And.. well, I personally take up a lot of space.   And it makes my relationship to standard definitions of femininity, and therefore feminism, really, really weird.

When I hear my fellow women complain about not being taken seriously at their jobs, being talked over by men and mansplained, being catcalled in the street, feeling threatened physically, I have very little to compare it to because it’s next to impossible to talk down to me.  Literally and figuratively.  My best friend is just shy of 5’, and I’ve seen her have to fight to be heard in a room full of men.   (Which she does very admirably, I might add!) I don’t have to do that.

I do have to buy pants online, encounter scowls from other women when I deign to try on high heels in shoe stores, have to sit at a weird side angle in most theaters and sports venues and airplanes, and I totally open my own doors more often than not and carry my own groceries and happily walk on the outside of sidewalks (closest to the road… I didn’t even know that was a thing until very recently…).  It’s totally fine, and I am quite proud of being capable, but I can tell you that when women occupy more space than is deemed femininely acceptable (in whatever way that manifests) it can make people varying shades of “uncomfortable.”

And it’s complicated.  A few weeks ago, while at a series of meetings, I was watching my friends and minor acquaintances marching in various cities all over the country for a myriad of women’s issues.  A few pictures popped up of people marching with signs that read, “Feminism is for ALL Women,” and the like, and I had to giggle because back in my theater days, those same people marching for “Feminism for ALL Women” had told me a number of times that the would have loved to cast me in one role or another, but couldn’t because I was too tall.  Because taking up so much space would mean I would not be believable as an *insert stereotypical women’s theatrical role here*.

It’s complicated.

A few years ago, a movie about the iconic tall woman, Julia Child, contains a line that I very much resonate with:  “From the beginning, you just don’t fit in.  Literally.  So then you don’t.”  We live in a world of very carefully crafted societal boxes, and we get told we have to fit entirely in them.  Feminine.  Masculine.  Dumb.  Intelligent.  Left.  Right.  Good.  Bad.  And not fitting into boxes can make other people uncomfortable, because those boxes help us make order out of a crazy, mixed-up world.  But the annoying thing, the truthful thing, about those boxes is that none of them are big enough to encapsulate a singular human existence.  Even if you aren’t exceedingly tall.