On "Softness"

"A girl should be soft."

This is something that my father told me on the drive back home from Waterloo, his first instinctive response to my detailed plans for future involvement in student politics, plans for change, and in the excitement for the continuation of my double major and to go onward in the field. He hesitates, gives me that sideways half-smile that he always gives when he doesn't take me seriously.

"Amy," he says, "Don't you think that's a little too intense? A girl should be soft."

This is far from the first time he's told me this, but it was absolutely jarring-- this was the first real instance that I really paid attention to what he was telling me. I know he tells me this because he cares for me, because he thinks that my ambition and intense goal-setting are a flaw to my character that should be changed-- he believes I should be "soft".

This is nothing new. I've been hearing this my entire life, but the fact that I only realized this recently, in my 19th year of life, frightens me. This means that I've been absorbing my parents' words, sometimes ignoring them as children are apt to do with their parents, but otherwise accepting them, and this frightens me.

And I know this is not something that happens under my own roof. I know this happens in hundreds of thousands of millions of households all around the world.

This offhanded comment, which I'm certain my dad forgot almost immediately, became a worm. It ate away at me for days and days and it took me a lot of time to understand and articulate why exactly it disturbed me.

It's because my parents have characterized something that is an adjective as a noun. It's their belief that I, and the legions of other beautiful beings of my gender, are first and foremost "girls" or "women"-- everything else is an afterthought, an addition or a detriment to this base identity. They've characterized "girl" as a noun, when, to me, it's really an adjective.

I am a girl, yes. I am a woman, and I am fiercely proud to be one, but I am more than just a woman. Whether or not I am hard or soft or ambitious or determined or empathetic or compassionate extends beyond my gender and is instead representative of the person that I am, not my sex. Therefore, my dad's belief that "girls should be soft"- that I should be soft because I am a girl- is, to me, horribly close-minded.

What he should have said is that people should be soft, that I shouldn't forget to be compassionate and empathetic to offset my sharp-toothed ambition and intense drive. What my mother should have done instead of comparing me to other girls and chiding me for my "masculinity" scaring people away was to celebrate the friends that I have, who didn't care for the outside appearance of my persona and person, and who instead care for me as a person.

And there's the context in which these comments are made: gentle chiding for me trying to change things for the better.

My father genuinely believed my drive, my ambition was too "hard" for a girl. It doesn't matter whether or not I'm a girl. I would do these things regardless of whether or not I was a girl.

Being a girl has nothing to do with how ambitious or how driven I am.

And it's this sentiment that frightens me so deeply, that colours a lot of how I live.

I live in continual fear that these comments, though meant so honestly and so well, will one day wear me down.

I am constantly aware of these sideways comments being tossed so gently to me, but only because I've made the conscious effort to open my own eyes. How many other girls have succumbed to them without realizing the full weight of their worth? What if, one day, I wake up in the morning and I find the sun duller, the future less bright, and myself utterly exhausted, left to succumb to their well-meaning, poisoned wishes?

I have such enormous dreams, and even bigger visions of change, but I am weak. I am so weak. I am so afraid that one day, I'll wake up, so plagued with self-doubt and questions incited by these words of so-called well-intention, and actually hear and agree with what my parents and the rest of the world whisper so faintly. I'm afraid that I'll make the decision to declaw myself, but in that careful, near-invisible way that files them down slowly each day until, suddenly at the end, I realize with a jump that I am completely powerless.

When the opposition is obvious, it's easy to combat. But when the opposition is subtle, hushed, whispered, coming from the mouths and hearts of those you love and admire, it become infinitely more difficult to find where their opinions end and your beliefs begin. It becomes infinitely more difficult to stand opposed to those you love, because they truly have your best intentions at heart.

I should mention that I absolutely love my parents and that they have gone to such enormous lengths to provide for me. I am eternally grateful for everything that they've done. I'm not calling them out specifically on this, rather on a specific instance that just really shocked me.

This extends beyond my own little familial circle, beyond this comment that my father threw lightly at me in the fading evening light, racing against an ice storm-- it goes to the guy on twitter who retweeted the interview with Linda McQuaig and Chrystia Freeland with nothing but a line about showering with Justin Trudeau, taken absolutely and completely out of context, minimizing the seriousness of both candidates. It goes to the girl in my English Class last semester who came to the conclusion herself that women were too intimidated to apply to scientific research opportunities, and failed to see anything wrong with that.

This extends so far beyond me, and we need to open all of our eyes to it-- we all need to be softer to each other.

- A