Breathe
By Mónica Hernández
No, this is not a misleading headline. For years it has been said and maintained that women want gender equality and it is not true. We want equal opportunities, equal pay, equal rights. We do not want to be the gender we are not and will not be. Women are born the way we are: diverse. There is variety in skin color, hair color, height and body shape. There is also diversity in thought, ideology, goals and dreams. Let's not even talk about sexual diversity because that is already (or should be if it is not already) an intimate issue and is not even up for debate and should not be mentioned. Because let's be honest, what the hell do we care about who sleeps with whom? And if anyone around here cares, I advise you to seek specialized help.
Gender was for many centuries the word used to denote a thing, an object: gender was a cloth, a spice, a crate of books, a commodity. Any physical product that could be bought and/or sold. After a certain time, genre became a kind of adjective, a classification to group similar things: genre of jokes, genre of literature, genre of species. As usually happens in times of science, biology took over the word gender and its meaning, dividing it into feminine or masculine. It is then that in the 19th century gender began to be generalized only as an identifier of females or males, of nuts and bolts. Thus the simplification. Thus simplicity.
Also in the 19th century a French philosopher (Charles Fourier) decided to describe feminism as the movement of a group of women seeking gender equality. False. False as hell. There is, as far as I know, no woman who wants to be equal to a man, unless we are talking about jobs, salaries, opportunities, schedules, objectives, goals, dreams. Some women prefer to dress in suits, shirts and even ties. Maybe flat shoes (which are very comfortable). That does not equalize them with men. It will equalize (if anything) the dress, but nothing more. And that is if we do not take into account that the female hip, recipient of a womb with a womb option, is higher and wider than their male counterparts. In short, the so-called "pull" in the pants must necessarily be higher, wearing more fabric. As an anecdote, the complaint of my colleagues in a soft drink bottling company, who had to wear pants cut for men, because it had never occurred to them that a different pattern was needed for the pants of the pre-saleswomen and saleswomen. So they had to wear one that fit underneath to look uniform (with the consequent unexplained genito-urinary infections that this attracted for years).
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