“Cautious conundrum:”
noun: 1. the existential predicament of womanness; lit.: to be a woman.
Written 15 June 2018, in honour of Eurydice Dixon, Qi Yu, and all women who are problems.
—
The problem with being a woman is that:
When you speak up about what it is like
To be a woman,
You become more of a problem
By making the problem louder,
And loudness is a problem that must be quietened,
Lest we hear about the problem.
The problem with being a woman is that:
When you come forward about an experience
Of being a woman,
You are laughed at, yelled at, dismissed, or disbelieved,
Sometimes all at once, and you being a woman
Becomes an inconvenience,
A real managerial problem.
The problem with being a woman is that:
When you exercise caution,
You don’t just exercise it as one would practise the piano for forty-five minutes;
You intimately embody caution, you literally become caution—
More precisely: a cautious conundrum,
Because this caution is never cautious enough
To tackle the problem.
The problem with being a woman is that:
The problem of being a woman
Gets in the way of fixing the problem,
Because your very existence gets in the way of existence,
Because the problem is that you are a woman
And women are fundamentally
The problem.