A Reward for the Foreman
Lipstick and a dress are not womanhood. They are compensation for running a hot, messy factory underneath.
There is a tendency now to treat womanhood as something visible.
Something that can be expressed, adopted, performed, celebrated.
But the visible layer is not the source.
The source is internal.
It is a system that runs under load. It cycles. It demands attention. It requires regulation over time — not occasionally, but across decades. It shapes behaviour, tolerance, timing, fatigue, desire, fear, anger, care.
It leaves residue.
Women carry it whether it is recognised or not.
And this matters most, I think, for mothers and daughters.
Because mothers know this system. We have lived it. We have managed it, often without language and often without recognition. We have had to function anyway. We have had to be pleasant anyway. We have had to look acceptable anyway.
And then we watch our daughters enter it.
We watch them begin to carry the same load, the same regulation, the same constraints, the same dismissals.
And at the same time, we watch the surface of womanhood — lipstick, a dress, a look — be recognised and celebrated as though it were the thing itself.
That is where the sadness lands.
Not because men must be stopped from dressing as they choose.
But because the symbols being borrowed are not empty.
They come from a life that has carried load, risk, pain, regulation, consequence, history.
Lipstick and a dress are not womanhood.
They are compensation for the factory underneath.
A reward for the foreman.
Small, visible pleasures after a lifetime of managing something that does not switch off.
We have not even celebrated women properly yet.
So watching men be celebrated for borrowing the surface feels very sad.
I feel it for my daughters.
Because they are entering the factory.
They are still learning what it costs.
They are still being asked to function inside a world that does not fully recognise the system they are running.
And then they are expected to accept that the surface is enough.
It is not enough.
The surface can be adopted.
The system cannot.
The surface can be seen.
The work underneath is still ignored.
And when those two things are treated as equivalent, something real is diminished.
It is not equivalent.
And calling it equivalent undermines us.
