The Lost Years Part 1 : The Second Coming of Age

The Second Coming of Age

Greetings from this Copenhagen hippie café where the gender identities of everyone in this bright purple knick-knack lined room seem comfortably flexible. I sit between a small gnome and candle taped to red lion figurine, my spirit guides for the day.

Song Post Inspo : Radiohead Let Down 

As I sit on the precipice of 30, I find myself often looking back at a younger version self, idealizing the ornaments of American dream-like life. Mornings would be spent with a cup of tea in hand, ducking over white picket fences exchanging pleasantries with my suburban mom friends before jutting to work. Evenings spent combing out homemade slime from my child's hair while a Parks & Rec rerun plays in the back and my husband scoops dinosaur nuggets onto a plate. By 25, I thought I was halfway there, having cultivated habits well-suited for this domestic life : my crocheting, my insistence on residing no more than a 2 mile distance from a Michael's, and an increasingly strong inclination towards making things from scratch. But at 28, I look at myself and my friends, living drastically different versions of life from what I'd imagined.

Some of us are in foreign countries, contemplating the prospect of starting over. Some friends have left long term relationships now filling their time with a rotation of seasonal extracurricular activities and occasional forays into the digital dating hellscape. Some have taken up pole dancing and are fantasizing about living life as a financial dominatrix (Admittedly, this is me. Am I really meant to exist as an installation of capitalistic greed shackled to an Excel Spreedsheet?) Others are hosting small dinner parties in Brooklyn. And some of us are relearning how to be in the world again(also me). It feels like the last summer before everyone goes off to college or that feeling you get watching movies like Stand by Me or Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.  We're tightly circling around each other, while all slowly drifting towards something new. It's that feeling right before everything really changes. It's a second coming of age.

Adulthood for women seemed bound to images of domestication, marriage, and children. But now, reflecting on what women endure in pursuit of these ideals, I see a different reality. Conversations about dating with younger women were always teeming with this contagious buoyancy. Yet, amongst women in their late 20s and 30s, these talks took a different turn. Gone were the Sleepless in Seattle Meg Ryan-like hopeless romantics of the late 20s and early 30s women. The hopeful excitement of my older female counterparts had seemed to dull into an almost pessimistic pragmatism. While my youthful relationships were far from perfect, I weathered many breakups with enduring hope, unsure as to what had caused the jadedness of my peers.  But as I entered my late 20s, I began to understand why the tone of these conversations had so drastically shifted. What I once saw as jadedness had revealed itself to be just a symptom of fatigue. A fatigue born from harmful encounters with men and the unrelenting corrosiveness of the patriarchy.

As women, we learn patriarchy in two ways. We first learn patriarchy, as girls, through restriction : Don't speak too loud or be too aggressive.. This is (insert likely gender-neutral activity) is for boys. You can't play with that. Close your legs, as to not incite a man's lack of self-control. But as women, we learn patriarchy through destruction. As we come of age, we see patriarchy's continual objectification of our bodies and our selves, shrinking us into human-like objects, siphoning from us the fullness of life as autonomous women. With these encounters, we see our feelings, thoughts, dreams, desires only to be so often regarded as resources for the satiation of men's desires. Some of us are reduced to : soft places to land, comfortable nurturing stepping stones to men's growth and development. On the milder end of patriarchal harm, we encounter the carelessness of the self-centered fuck boys whose game-like pursuit and conquest of women, churn out broken hearts and self-worth issues with rapid speed. Further down the spectrum, we find ourselves serving as emotional labor horses for men often weaponizing incompetence, forcing us to labor endlessly for their growth while depriving us of relational equity and emotional sustenance. And at the worst end, we encounter assault and abuse as men use their societally granted powers to subjugate women for their own selfish gain.

Over the past few years, I've come to experience this fatigue through my own interactions with patriarchal men. I often think about the immense effort spent teaching men basic human decency, at one point sending a boyfriend an article on how to care about people and facilitating subsequent follow-up discussions. Unbeknownst to me, the dynamic between me and this male partner often required me to advocate for my own humanity, participating in a familiar struggle for equity with someone who benefited from treating me as less than and as other. This pursuit of equity, especially as a woman of color, felt doubly painful and unattainable. The more I examined my relationships with men, the more I questioned if true equity was possible with someone conditioned to view me as beneath them. And as I looked at other experiences women were having in relation with men, those like and unlike my own, I could see the destructive footprint of patriarchy everywhere marking the havoc in the lives of women, mine included.

Everywhere you look, you recognize it - patriarchy as the tangible third party in our relationships, dominating us both in the public and the private sphere and hurting women everywhere. No longer are we simply encouraging each other to continue this rouse of domestic bliss regarding partnership with men. Women across the world are sharing openly the ways that patriarchy has harmed them, most frequently and directly, in pursuit of love and partnership with men. In Bridget Harilaou's 'Patriarchy in Your Love Life', she talks about the many ways we see patriarchy appear in romantic life. She posits that "tolerating these kinds of inequalities in our personal relationships sets the standard for men so low, that people in relationships with them cannot shake structural and systemic manifestations of patriarchy". Graciously, she steers away from the typical societal inclination towards blaming women for men's "bad" behavior and excusing men of harm against women. She asks a more impactful question : What does our culture allow for men to do? How does it allow them to behave and how does that shape the way they interact with women? As Harilaou says, "Unless we all become alert to the unequal divisions of labour within our love lives and a families, sexism can often be perpetuated unwittingly , time and time and again."

Uncovering the patriarchy in my relationships had felt like finally unmasking the villain at the end of a Scooby Doo episode. But the delight of the "Aha!" moment was short-lived, soon giving way to a more poignant sense of betrayal. As I looked around at the many knowledgeable "woke" "nice" guys I'd encountered and came to soon see the way that their firm grip on the patriarchy had come at the expense of women. Imagine that moment when Barbie goes back to Barbieland and realizes the Kens have taken over and Ken has stolen her house. I imagine her thoughts being something like mine -  Didn't I care for you? Weren't we friends? How/Why are you using this poisonous patriarchy to harm me? It was jarring to identify how much harm men I knew had done with patriarchy, how frequent the men who we care for and nurture use the weapons of patriarchy - weaponized incompetence, dehumanization of women, lack of respect for women's autonomy, abuse, assault etc. - to subjugate and harm innocent women.

Now while there are some societal protections or recourse for these actions, I recognized that specifically within a context of a romantic relationship, patriarchy had enabled men to harm women significantly with little to no societal consequences.  It was if being in relationship with a woman was a playground for patriarchy's little boys to terrorize women as they saw fit, making harming women oddly permissible and excusable to a certain extent. Something about the relational bubble has allowed society to minimize men's harm of women as if it was permissible or just none of our business when men harmed women in dating or relationships. I saw this throughout much of this year in communion with women, particularly women who suffered from narcissistic and other forms of abuse. Whenever women trapped in cycles of harm tried to hold men accountable or dismantle the patriarchy within their romantic lives, they found their efforts ineffective. When they shared their experiences with wider communities, particularly those around the abuser, many often found themselves blamed for their harm and judged for their navigation of relational patriarchy. Many women left with copious amounts of shame and guilt or otherwise deepened insecurities. I myself left with Complex PTSD. While often times society offers sexual and physical assaults as rarely occurring threats to women's lives, in this area of dating and love, for me it became staggering clear that men are dangers to women in several incredibly mundane ways.

And thus with age and with this realization, many women found a misfortune-developed wisdom that would ultimately shift their attitudes towards partnerships with men. With the attitude shift came the development and adoption of many tools to cope with this. Women had created treasure troves of resources for other women navigating the dating world in pursuit of partnership and motherhood. There was the popular Female Dating Strategy subreddit which often edged on femcel ideology but existed in the hopes of helping women identify high-value men and avoid the harmful, nonchalant/lazy low value ones. There was emergence of the divine feminine rhetoric, urging women to exist in a feminine way, allowing for men to take on more significant amounts of labor and agency in relationships. Although, this ,many times, could come as repackaged patriarchy. For black women specifically there's been the soft life conversation, which sought to address the large expected labor contribution of black women to their partners' lives and development by encouraging black women to relinquish excess labor and seek fulfilling partnerships where they were also being cared for, instead of serving as caregivers. But in essence much of these functioned really as training guides on how to avoid the harm of patriarchy and the many ways it manifested in men.

But regardless of which ideology it was, it seemed that women across the board were facing the same kind of awakening and were trying to create lives where we could thrive amidst the constant threat of patriarchal violence in all its forms. Whether we were finding solace in exploring ourselves or engaging with community, this second coming of age would allow women to critically engage and tackle the truth about our experiences with men. For me, this wave also brought a new reckoning with how my experiences with men had critically intersected with another facet of my identity- my blackness. And from there, spurned another awakening about my relationships with white people, white men through much of my life. The rude awakening began July 28th , 2022 when my relationship with both white supremacy and patriarchy had left me a naked black  girl yelling and crying in the bed of an older white man. It is the most dehumanizing thing I've ever experienced and I had to understand how it happened.

From here, came the Lost Years, a exploration of this as one of many experiences within both white-centered and male-centered world. To quote Anne Marie Tendler regarding her upcoming memoir ( I told you it's everywhere). Men Have Called Her Crazy , "It is a story about mental health; about being a woman; about family. And finally, about the endless source of my heartbreak and rage — men.  My version is about being a black woman, about family, friendship, grief and the endless source of my rage and disappointment— patriarchy (men) and white supremacy (white people).