u/peacheeblush

I’ll never forgive society for making me feel as though I was inherently masculine simply because I was a Black woman. Meanwhile, white women were given the freedom to be feminine regardless of their height, weight, body type, facial features, or overall appearance. They were allowed to be soft, delicate, beautiful, and feminine without having to prove it.

I still remember being in high school when a white boy told me I was ugly and that I looked like a man. I also had Black men and other non-white men tell me I was “manly” and compare my facial structure to that of a man. Hearing those things repeatedly affected the way I saw myself and my femininity.

It took me years to finally embrace my feminine side and realize that there was never anything inherently masculine about me. Society had simply taught me to view certain features as masculine when they existed naturally on a woman.

I genuinely wish society would stop masculinizing Black women. Black women can be just as feminine, delicate, dainty, soft, and beautiful as Asian women, white women, Latina women, or women of any other race. Femininity does not belong to one race, one body type, or one set of facial features.

Black women deserve the freedom to define our own femininity instead of constantly having it questioned or taken away from us.

On an important note…
Lately, I’ve been confronting some feelings of inadequacy when it comes to white women and the way beauty is perceived.
Sometimes, it feels like white women can do the bare minimum and still be celebrated as beautiful, desirable, and worthy of admiration, while women who look like me often feel like we have to work three times as hard just to receive the same recognition.
I’ll be honest—I sometimes feel a little jealous when I see white women being praised for doing things that women of color have been doing, embodying, and contributing for decades. And if I’m being completely honest with myself, seeing that can make me question whether I’m enough or whether what I bring to the table is enough.
I know these feelings are mine to unpack. So rather than judging myself for having them, I’m choosing to sit with them, understand where they come from, and do the inner work necessary to heal them.

Anywho… back to the inner work. 🤍

I don’t know if it’s a trauma response or I could just be bugging. For whatever reason, when I see white people just staring at me, I get this uneasy feeling that they’re judging me or deeming me to be “ugly.” Makes me wanna get defensive even though they’ve done nothing wrong. I really think this thought process is a trauma response due to bullying in my adolescent years by my white peers.

Whenever I caught white kids staring at me on the playground, they’d sneer at me, give me a dirty look or quickly whisper something in their friend’s ear which, in turn, would make their friend giggle. I know I shouldn’t be uncomfortable with it but somewhere, in the back of my brain, my fight or flight mode bell is ringing loudly.

Yeah I could just be bugging. Idk