Translator: Mia Pan Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
What if femininity has nothing to do with being a woman?
I ask because I've been a woman my whole life,
and I only recently discovered femininity,
and I want to talk tonight about what femininity has come to mean to me,
why I think it eluded me for so long,
and why I think it's not just important but actually one of the things
that can create a more sustainable and equal society.
For me, femininity is experience orientation,
and it's different from masculinity, which is results orientation.
All these words that we associate with femininity,
like sensitivity and compassion and beauty and creativity,
they only matter if we're invested in the experience of a situation.
All the words that we associate with masculinity,
like focus and competition and aggression and logic,
they only matter if our priority is on the results of a situation.
In other words,
if I drink my coffee for the flavor and the taste and the ritual of it,
that's for the experience of the coffee,
that's a feminine way of drinking coffee.
If I drink my coffee for the caffeine, as I did many times today,
that's for the results of the coffee,
that's a masculine way of drinking coffee.
If I wear a dress because I like the swish of the fabric on my skin,
that's experiential, that's feminine.
If I wear the very same dress for the effect that it produces on someone else,
that's for the result, and I think that's masculine.
I don't think that either of these things have to do with gender
though traditionally women are expected to behave in a feminine manner
and men in masculine manner.
I will allow that maybe there is
a biological predisposition to one over the other,
but I think that they are more like languages than they are presets,
and that we can all learn to drink or dress in either manner
and might even come to prefer
the one with which we are not traditionally associated.
I think that Women's Lib picked up on this,
and it liberated women to be more masculine.
It liberated us all to be more results oriented.
I grew up in the wake of Women's Lib,
and it was great.
All of my masculine muscles were very much encouraged,
so I was allowed to be ambitious and competitive,
and it yielded great results.
I grew up in a small town,
but that competition led me to Stanford for university.
It got me a really good job in New York, working across Europe.
It led me back to Stanford
for one of the top MBA programs in the world.
By the time I was 26,
everything in my life had a result in mind.
I made career decisions based on prestige,
and power and money.
I made dating decisions based on a suitable husband.
I made eating decisions based on a slimmer waist line.
Literally everything was about having a goal,
and if I wasn't happy, I just found new goals.
And if I couldn't think of a goal,
there were plenty of women in self-help magazines to give me ideas.
The problem is that results are a drug,
and eventually you need more and more in order to maintain the fix.
And at some point, they stop working altogether.
I hit that point, and it was really ugly.
And for the first time in my life,
I couldn't figure out why I was doing what I was doing,
and I was ambivalent to the result.
I was forced to confront my emotions that I had frankly been suppressing,
and in it, I found that I was anxious,
that I was a fraud.
I found that I was afraid that I was going to mess up everything.
I found that I was angry that this path wasn't really fulfilling.
But most of all, I found that I was guilty
because I knew how hard so many women had fought
to give me the opportunities that I had,
and what right did I have to feel dissatisfied?
Instincts are a funny thing, and for once, I listened to mine,
and they told me to go do something that didn't have a goal tethered to it.
I signed up for a creative writing class.
I was really bad at it.
I was 10 years older than everyone in it.
But I loved it.
And I didn't just love it for the writing,
I loved it because I loved experiencing something for the experience.
I loved the feeling of being so consumed by something
that didn't need to go anywhere in order to have joy in it.
So I took this creative writing class
and in that, I think I was finding my femininity.
It felt like I had been running for 20 years,
and I had these muscles that were tight and strong,
and I was finally starting to stretch.
It was uncomfortable and I was inflexible,
but over time, I settled into it, and it was juicy and it was rich,
and it released so much that I have been holding in,
and it helped me to feel like a more full version of myself.
I give you this story
because I think that it is parallel to what is happening in society right now.
You see, when Women's Lib liberated masculinity in women,
I don't think it remembered to liberate femininity in men.
What happened is that all of society got tilted into a masculine direction,
and we developed this notion
that results orientation was better than experience orientation,
because why else would women have fought so hard to have it?
What became was a society that is focused so much on results
that we have detached from experience.
Femininity is treated as a second-class citizen,
and feminine people are treated as indulgent and lazy and irresponsible.
Because we cannot measure its value, we treat it as though it is valueless.
Which I might be willing to believe were society working a little bit better
than it is right now.
I think in our obsession with results,
we have detached so much from experience
that we started to lose our morals and our meaning.
And in its place,
we have filled it with anxiety and anger and fear.
And instead of trying to correct by embracing femininity,
we're trying to correct by being more efficient and more results oriented,
by asking for more and more measurement of everybody in society,
and I think that that's a mistake.
I'm not saying we abandon masculinity,
but I'm saying that we restore femininity,
and we find a way to marry the two,
and associate both with gender.
For myself,
I finally let my masculinity in on this writing thing
because I'm ambitious and I can't help it.
And I realized that I really wanted to be a writer.
All data suggested that this was a terrible idea,
and I was reminded of it constantly
when I quit my job in finance to pursue it full time.
But I wasn't focused on the results.
I was focused on the experience,
and in the experience, I could see this path that was really cool
and that I just had to pursue.
I raised money and built a serial fiction platform
and wrote a 12-part book that became The Underwriting,
which is my debut novel.
It's now out in 20 languages, and I'm making it a TV show,
and it's super fun.
And I did not do it perfectly, and it was not easy,
but I think that I discovered in the experience a new way of being
that was stronger and more powerful than anything I had ever done before.
It yielded great results, but it was really a great experience too.
So I think what we are left as women is with two causes.
The first is for women,
and that is about making sure that we are not discriminated against
because of our body and our sex and our voices.
It's about fighting for equal pay, and it's an all-out fight,
and we need our masculine muscles for it.
But the second cause is for femininity,
and I think that one is a little bit different.
You will have to forgive the analogy -
I've tried to think of something that's less crass, but I'll go for it.
Trying to explain femininity to really masculine people
is like trying to explain love-making to people who've only masterbated.
You're like,
"Well, it takes a lot longer, and it's more complicated,
and you have to open to other people,
but trust me, it's really cool."
And I think that's what we need to do;
we need to welcome and invite ourselves
to accept our experiential nature within our own personalities,
within other women,
and even within men.
And in so doing,
I think that we will achieve not just equality between men and women,
but equality between masculine people and feminine people.
And when we have that marriage happen,
we will find that the world is not just more equal,
society's more sustainable,
our results are better, but our experiences are too.
Thank you so much for having me tonight.