No Real Ladies

I got the tip of this book, a feminist anthology, from fellow blogger the Teacup. It´s not the kind of thing I usually read, but sometimes one must break out of one´s rut and look at something else, like "Av oss blev det aldrig några riktiga damer" (= we never turned in to any real ladies). It is edited by Charlotte Signell, who also contributes. At 190 pages, with a large-ish typeface and several blank pages between every contributor, it was a very quick read. 

It is a motley mix of contributors, some I can really relate to, others not so much. Most interesting is the transsexual experience of womanhood, as told by journalist Andy Candy, perhaps because I know less about that. Most of the contributors I have never heard of, and they seem very young. Sometimes during the reading I got provoked and wanted to bitch back when I thought they got too bantering, too generalizing, and too stuck up their own arses, as young people tend to be (and I was, for sure - probably still am). But that´s the point of this book, to be a collection of opinionated and passionate voices. 

One thought that I had during most of the reading was that many of the contributors seemed to be extroverts and that their feelings of being rejected or not confirmed by "society" was not something I could relate to because I am introverted and care less for what other people think of me. In my experience, people are not particularly bothered about what I do or how I live. On the other hand, I am not a gay person who tried to have children, I am not a transsexual who had to live up to some universal idea of gender behaviour to get my operation, my "county council vagina" (landstingsvagina) as Andy Candy so poignantly put it. So who am I to talk about being an outsider?

This was a good read for me. At first I felt that it had broadened my horizons. In the days after, forgotten memories of what it was like for me to be a young woman popped up in my head, I remembered choices I made that wasn´t so very popular with the patriarchal world view of the men in my life at that time, men who are not in my life any more. And I realize now that I could have contributed to this anthology as well. I certainly never turned into a proper lady either.