Today it finally happened. As I was waking up in Mexico City, my best friend woke up to her children’s first day of school. Lara, my god daughter, threw a fit because she wanted to wear shorts to school, matching her best friend. Her mom would not budge. At 9 years old, Lara is ready to differentiate, as the age for children’s differentiation seems to be getting younger and younger. As a girl, Lara is starting to explore what femininity will mean for her. I think this is something all young girls go through, unknown to them.

I remember the day Lara was born like yesterday. I held her in my arms for the first time that day in September she was born. I half jokingly had encouraged her mom not to give her such a beautiful name lest she live up to it, but she paid me no mind. Lara Iman lives up to her name. She is objectively beautiful in a way that few people can deny. There has been a fuss about her since she was a toddler. A friend of a friend once jokingly advised her dad to carry a shotgun when she was six or seven.

The truth is, whether beautiful or not, it is hard to learn to be a woman.

The reason for this is regardless of who you may think you want to be in this world, for a woman, there is a pretty strict paradigm as to how to be in this world, and it is not so positive for a woman who wants to see herself as a full human being, beyond her body.

Lara’s tantrum to wear shorts and the fact that she has been rounding up her age—I confused her mom when I told her Lara is only nine as she has apparently been telling people she is 10 while—in my opinion indicates what a hurry she is in to grow up. What’s funny is that many of us wish we could turn back the hands of time, even for a moment, to experience the beautiful carefree liberties to be yourself, like we did when we were children. And yet, just as adults we may relish childhood, they are children who are in a hurry to grow up. What a paradox.

Living in Mexico City at 39 and having stumbled and fallen many times in this lifetime, I long to hold my Lara in my arms and tell her what it has been like to be a woman and be in touch with my own version of femininity. I want to tell her what it is like to be a woman who marched to the beat of her own drum in a world that did not appreciate or want this of women.

In my desire to talk to my sweet baby, I saw a desire to talk to any young woman.

My own mother tried to prepare me for the world in the best way she knew at the time. She advised me to get a college education so when I got married my husband would respect me. Many of the Arab girls from my generation and community followed this advice and married educated men who have been able to take care of them and gave them children who now can look up to two college educated parents. I think it came as a shocker to some that I was looking forward to college as an opportunity to learn both the knowledge that comes in books but also that of being in the world. 

I became my own person very much against the will not just of my family and their culture but also against the will of American culture.

While arrogant western people may not even attempt to see it, Islamic cultures have so far preserved the idea that sex is something that comes after a relationship—marriage—has materialized. This means society is not set up such that every person is trying to see if they can have sex with a stranger tonight. I find it much more liberating and safe. Perhaps it is my Arab upbringing and belief in Islam, but I just do not see my existence beginning and ending with my body. Not at all.

Even though I have been alive almost 40 years now, it still seems to be unusual to many people that I am not that enthralled with my body. I mean this to say that I am not enthralled to have been born to be a beautiful woman, but I also am not enthralled to be seen first and foremost as my body. I am glad I have a body. I view it as something one must have to experience being a human. In one of my favorite essays in the book “101 Essays that Will Change the Way You Think” called “Why does a soul want a body?” author Brianna West posits that “A body is responsible for the most amazing part of anything—physically finding or creating.” This is why I value and am glad I have a body.

To me, it makes complete sense that the first and most important thing one should notice about me is that I am a human. I have human feelings and human insecurities. I had a very human longing for love before I met Jean Carlos and I have human failings. I sleep like humans and eat like them. I get sick and make whimpering noises when I inevitably cry, like a human.

And yet, in most interactions with other humans, the first thing you experience is a size-up. The size-up of your class and status are part of the first time someone sees or meets you, but the most immediate is likely a sizing up of your attractiveness, for better or for worse. People think it is easy being an attractive woman. They think femininity is simply in being pretty. It might be easier than not being attractive, but the truth is likely somewhere in the middle, in that it is also hard, but just in a different way.

As a woman, and I think especially as an attractive woman, one of my first interactions with most men is one in which they see me as someone to get something from. I may be kind and open minded, ask intelligent questions and be respectful of them, and they may reciprocate what that looks like back, only for me to find out that many times this has happened, they are just trying to see how they have to play their cards to take something from me. 

Some months ago a friend and I bonded over the fact that neither of us would like to be perceived anymore. Please do not perceive me. After 39 years, I would like to announce that I am done being perceived. I am sick of being gawked at and the attempts to take from me thereafter. Enough already.

Sex is one thing men try to take from women. But there are other strange things that I have witnessed men trying to get—sometimes it is just attention, the status of being married to you, a nice looking indentured servant, the status of having got your phone number, the status of being near you via friendship, or even just a nice good look at you on the street. I am certainly not saying all men are like this, but men who want to take from women are indeed the rule in many societies. Once, a male friend outright lied to another friend about dating me—it is this absurd that our culture of taking from women has become.

The result is that in almost all situations outside of my apartment, I have to have my guard up. My apartment is literally the only place I am truly safe to be myself. There is a man who cleans my apartment building. Over time, he has taught me what actual loathing is. There have been days when I literally step outside of my apartment to get to the trash chute and there he is, cleaning the hall and taking a good, indiscreet look at me as if it were a perk with the job.

I hate him. I hate him. I have come to hate him even though I hate hating anything.

In my head, there is a list of places I have to keep my guard up, and it is nearly everywhere. He added the very hallways of the building I live in to the list. I have tried to pay attention to what days he works so I can know which days I don’t have to be so guarded. I am hesitant to use the building gym on days he is working because if by chance he is with the doorwoman, I do not want him to enjoy me through the security camera. It is to this extent that I feel limited and restricted in my life and movement in the building I have lived in for nearly three years. I pay rent early and bother no one. And even here I do not feel safe. And this, this is a very real part of what being a woman in the world is. Protecting yourself is an unfortunate facet of femininity, it seems.

There is no place a woman can truly find peace from people treating her as a commodity to be engaged with—stripped down to the most utilitarian parts—and consumed.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were wandering through the streets of quaint Coyoacan, a charming, historic neighborhood here in Mexico City, and we made our way into a feminist bookstore. This did not bother me a bit as I am a feminist and am intrigued by my own femininity. There is an obvious lack of equality between men and women, from salaries for the same jobs to the expectations placed on us by society. I see no way in which men and women are not equal, other than the way society perceives and treats them. How could I not be a feminist?

In my opinion, one of the definitions of capitalism is that it seeks to boil things down to the parts it can use, bottle, and sell. That’s how teas which were originally meant to heal us have become ground up powders in bleached white baggies. That’s how yoga is now a symbol of white women wearing expensive spandex, as opposed to its original intent as a spiritual practice. 

In both cases, capitalism took a look at both things, found the parts most easy to sell, isolated those parts, and then mass produced these things back to us. When this is what we do to things like plants and spiritual practices, what else can we expect of society other than to view us, as women, as the sum of our most commoditized parts?

In the bookstore supposedly about femininity, my friend pointed out all the vagina stickers with glee. “Look how cute it is!” she told me. She bought one to put on her water bottle, I guess to prove she is a feminist.

I am indeed autistic, so sometimes things that make sense to other people don’t immediately make sense to me. But personally, I don’t understand how a sticker of a vagina gets me or any other woman closer to equality. I do not want to be seen as my body. That’s actually what I am fighting for. I want to be seen as a person before I am seen as a woman. Isn’t that the point? For us to all be seen as people, as human beings, rather than walking vagina holes? I personally have fought tooth and nail to be taken seriously, as an entire, whole human being despite or alongside how I am perceived—and I see now that that is unusual. 

A sticker of a vagina, how cool and counterculture. A sticker of a vagina, I am sure, will give us complete control over our bodies. I am sure if we all put vagina stickers, things we can buy, on our water bottles we will achieve freedom. As if freedom itself could be bought—this is what the system has convinced us with with their vagina stickers. Let’s engage with freedom by buying something, let’s pick up our freedom on the way to work like we do our lattes, from the drive-in at Starbucks. This makes complete sense.

In my opinion, in many women’s desire to co-opt the way we are seen in the world, we have just started to see ourselves through the same lens—as commodities. 

I learned over time that even if I do not agree with this ideology, this is how I will be seen. People assume I engage with my body the same way they do. I have had situations in which men appeared to treat me kindly and with respect, only to later be clear that they were just look for new places to put their privates.

My 9-year-old sweetie wanting to wear shorts does not exist in a vacuum. She exists in a world and society that has already given her the message that no matter how smart, wonderful, jovial, sweet, or kind she is, her greatest and more desirable trait will be what she looks like. She exists in a society that has made legions of women who have commoditized themselves, and she can either buy into that idea, like many adult women, or run from it but never fully get away from it, like me and her mom. The commodification of women, supported by women, is so prevalent and pervasive, I am not sure if many people see it.

At the end of the day, whichever end of this a woman wants to engage with is her choice. But that’s exactly the issue with these small, smug societal expectations, isn’t it? The idea is, we think it is our idea, whereas in reality it is not. Our surroundings construct our reality. The context we exist in feels normal and right to us until we face what feels wrong, until we inspect why we think the things we think we think and why we feel the way we think we feel. We will always feel like it is our idea and our choice until we question where the idea came from. The same is true of what we perceive to be femininity.

“‘This stuff’? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you,” said iconic Miranda Priestly in “The Devil Wears Prada.” “You go to your closet and you select, I don’t know that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you are trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent–wasn’t it who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room, from a pile of stuff.”

The way an idea becomes an idea for us in capitalistic societies, will always seem to creep up on us, like a cold that you just woke up with one day. One such idea is that I need plastic bins for my kitchen cabinets even though they already come in jars and boxes. Another is that to be desired for my body is to be valuable. And another, was my baby’s desire to wear shorts today.

Lara is at a stage in which she feels ready to be an adult, even though she is far from. She wants to be a woman and unlike being a man, being a woman is a precarious existence, one in which you must always watch out for your physical, mental, and emotional safety. I don’t think she knows this yet and it makes me sad that she will one day have to learn this—likely through the crossroads of time and experience. 

There will be plenty of times ahead of her in which she can and will learn these things, but it really shouldn’t be a rush. “Don’t be rushed to experience this, sweetheart. Be a kid while you still can. I promise you, the other side isn’t better,” I want to tell her.

Lately, I have been pushing my best friend to bring Lara to Mexico City and visit me. I want this for a variety of reasons, but one is to be able to expose my sweet girl to another outlook on life, perhaps to show her what femininity means to me in my life.

I want Lara to come visit me because I want her to know that no matter what kind of woman you want to be, and what kind of roles people limit women to, you can indeed be any kind of woman you want, and somewhere out there, there is a space for you, with people who will love you, exactly as you are. You can still find a man out there who loves you for you. Believe it or not, they exist, searching for women who see themselves as themselves and not as commodities, the kind of men that also are searching for someone who will love them for who they are instead of the utility they bring. You can climb corporate ladders and reject them, separately or in that order, or backwards. You can break glass ceilings or perhaps explore what it means to live without them, under the open air, whatever that may mean. 

To be a woman is simply to be a female human being—which can mean being creative, intuitive, worldly, and all the other things aligned with divine femininity and the beautiful things that come along with being a woman—but it also means that whatever you decide to be, you will embody femininity, not by being beautiful or by desired for your beauty, but by being yourself. 

The essence of the human being, regardless of gender, is whole and perfect exactly the way it is, including that of my girl. Over the course of our lives we think we have to add to become more valuable. More clothes, more botox, more followers, more filler. We add because the world teaches us we are inherently less, inherently missing something, so we add to what feels like the emptiness within us in order to feel whole.

The divine reality is that it is when we strip away—when we subtract—we find the most perfect versions of ourselves, the versions that require no validation or physical spectacle to be worthwhile and wonderful, the versions in which femininity is not defined as being desirable. With the stripping of these things, we find the versions we are meant to be all along. There is no inherent emptiness. We find who were all along, whole and beautiful. The version my baby girl already is today.