In this candid essay, I share my unfiltered experience of womanhood, shedding light on the duality of the beauty and brutality of being a woman for International Women’s Day (March 8).
Table of Contents
Introduction
Recently, I was offered to share my experience of womanhood in a short essay. What I wrote was a raw account of a portion of my life as I waited for my train on a cold February day in Berlin. While I was praised for my honesty (in a very kind way I may add), I was asked to alter my writing for a professional setting—and notably remove the words “death,” “hitting,” and “choking.”
Unfortunately, like many women, I do not have the luxury of censoring my experience. While I understand that my life might be triggering to some (which is why I included a warning at the start), it has also been upsetting to someone else—myself.
I did not enter life expecting to be beaten and raped. I understand that reading those words makes people uncomfortable. But I consistently spend my effort to make others feel happy, comfortable, seen, and included. I focus on having a positive and uplifting energy and ensure that I do not spread my pain to my peers.
However, I also deserve the opportunity to exist. My reality is unsettling. But it is also my truth. And it is a truth that countless women have also experienced. So today, I’m going to share my experience of womanhood—first with some contemplation, then I will include my initial raw entry that I submitted.
What Womanhood Means to Me
Please be advised: This story contains content related to domestic and sexual violence, which may be distressing or triggering.
What do I envision when I think of womanhood? I think of flowers, perhaps a rather heteronormative and cliche concept. But flowers are diverse. They are beautiful, intoxicating, deceiving deadly, impossibly delicate, surprisingly stalwart. They bloom under seemingly impossible conditions, develop to thrive in arid climates, proudly resurface after frigid months to unfurl in the spring sun.
Being a woman is a bit like being a flower, at least from what I’ve experienced. When people think you’re beautiful, they seek to pluck you, sever your stem and sit you on their table. The violation (that’s legal in some parts of the world if you sign a marital contract first) is excused, because they would prefer to marvel at your colors for a pocket of time rather than allow you to thrive in your natural habitat. (Besides, they can always replace you with a fresh stem when you begin to brown.)
What’s it like to be plucked from the earth, hands so rudely forced? I was raped for the second time in January 2014. I awoke to find my body marked all over with dozens of almond-shaped bruises, the same marks that I would soon come to associate with love. (How much I must have been cherished to have fingers dig into my skin with such voracity!)
The first time I was raped, I lost all my friends except for two women. The rest of the group told my remaining confidants that while they cared about me, they didn’t know how to be friends with someone who was raped. Some of them even asked me to stay silent to protect my rapist, as it could affect his college admissions. Why should he be punished for life for a singular act of passion?
I have been asked to hold my tongue countless times, because my silence is their comfort. I have been asked to bite back my reality, water it down and wear the face the world expects of me.
Maybe you can imagine the defeat I felt when I realized I had yet again been violated. At first, I stretched my shaking hands to the women in my dorm. I reached out to them for solace. I went to a party and tried desperately to grasp on to normality. But the life I so sorely wanted to regain had already slipped.
I was in a car with five women in January 2014, days after the second rape. The ringleader berated me (someone she labeled strong) for turning to another woman (someone she labeled weak) for support. She told me I shouldn’t have spoken of my rape to my friend, that it was a weakness of me. That strong people couldn’t lean on the weak, that I was selfish to expect the others to help me.
I begged to exit the vehicle, but the driver was instructed to keep moving as I sat sandwiched in the middle sobbing. I was told I needed to really understand how I couldn’t lean on people. When I finally exited, one of the four women ran after me to see if I was alright. She was iced out by the other women for the evening as punishment.
I lost most of my friends twice due to rape, due to no one being able to look me in the face and allow me to exist within my new reality. The second time, I embraced the arms of a man who offered to care for me, protect me. The same man who went on to verbally and physically assault me for the following year and some (very costly) change.
In March 2015, after 14 months of being abused, I locked myself in a car and called the police to receive help for domestic violence. I have experienced many challenges in life that feel deeply intertwined with the experience of womanhood, yet I maintain that calling the police this night was the hardest thing I ever did because of the court case that followed.
My story with my ex was not unique for its rarity of occurrence, but rather the brutality it caused my life. It’s a heartbreakingly common tale: love-bombing turned to violent outbursts. Promises of salvation turned to being slammed against the wall and choked, having a knife held between your legs as you’re told you will soon be raped with it. (Luckily this part was just threats. But who knows what reality would have materialized if I hadn’t left.)
This man told me that he was glad I was raped and spoke of my rapist, using his name to taunt me. He said he would like to thank him for making me damaged enough to enter a relationship with him. Yet, another man came to me in the final weeks of my relationship and begged me to seek help. He told me he would support me in court. He gave me the strength to walk away—albeit limping.
I believe this man saved my life, though it surely took my courage as well.
It was men who supported me throughout the trial, because compassion is not limited to sex or gender. Nor is brutality. But here is the grim reality that many women face. We are not awarded the same privileges as men. We do not exist in the same reality. We often have our problems minimized, have our realities compacted into something digestible for others.
The trial I endured was excruciating. I sat silenced with a court-appointed attorney as my ex and his expensive lawyer (and his frat brothers committing perjury) did everything in their power to rewrite reality. When I sought help from peers, I was faced with every unasked for response: I did something to earn the violence, I was lying, I should have been loyal and not told the cops, I was probably only hit once. (Though some loyal friends stood by me.)
The ultimate outcome was as heartbreaking as the process; the judge looked me in the eyes and said that he believed my story and he knew my ex was lying. But he said in the state of Texas, you have to both prove you’ve been hurt and will continue to be hurt in order to receive help. So he told me, the next time I was hit, I could have a protective order.
The next time I was hit.
He said he was positive there would be a next time and it was up to me to decide if I would be the one on the receiving end.
The next time I was hit.
If your partner chokes you, you have an approximately 750% increased chance of them killing you one day.
The next time I was hit.
I have feared for my life, a life that my former partner described to me in detail, how he planned to take. I have been raped and had it excused by former “friends” as a crime of lust. I have been told that men couldn’t help but want to take from me because of the way I looked, that I am too provocative with language, that I shouldn’t call people out, that I command punishment of the worst kind because I cannot stay silent.
Punishment of the flesh.
The next time I was hit.
My name is Emma Fischer and, like many women, I have survived. I share my story today and I attach my name to it, because we have to remember what happened to women, because these things are still happening. I am grateful to share some of the many truths of womanhood, the duality of the beauty and brutality.
Because the following is also what I know of womanhood.
Womanhood is forgetting a hair tie and having another woman excitedly realize she has an extra on her wrist and present it to you with pride. It’s passing tampons up your sleeve when you’re 14 because you’re embarrassed to be on your period and loudly declaring you have cramps when you’re 24 because you’ve learned to embrace your body. It’s sleepovers with your heads pressed together, whispering gossip into the early morning hours.
It’s compliments in bathrooms and fitting rooms, looking out for each other on dark streets. It’s the desire to rise together in the workplace and not use each other as a stepping stool. The sex we are assigned at birth, wombs, or motherhood do not define it. Womanhood encompasses a vast range of experiences, as beautiful and fragile and precious and infinite as snowfall.
My experience of being a woman has been marked by life-altering brutality. But it has also been filled with so much tenderness and beauty. I have not had a single woman reduce my bisexuality to something conceived for the male gaze. I have tried to explain myself to women countless times only to look into their eyes and feel the embrace of understanding, a certainty you don’t need words to convey.
As I’ve made clear, womanhood isn’t all daisies and sunflowers. There are thorns. women can destroy you, and these cuts can burrow even deeper because they come from someone who you thought would understand you. But these aren’t the parts that I choose to have define my experience.
I am immeasurably proud to be a woman. Maybe flowers remind me of womanhood, but women are not flowers. We do not crush under your foot. Maybe we are weeds; something that continually rises despite attempts to smother, suffocate, silence.
Women are capable of astounding endurance and kindness. We have bled and birthed and endured for countless decades. We have been deemed second-class citizens, then told to split things 50-50—though our half so often carries 100% of the domestic load. We have been stripped of our voices, stoned in the streets by our own families, put to death for the crime of dishonor.
We have been burned as witches for being too clever, institutionalized for being too hysterical, mutilated to keep us pure, and beaten into silence for daring to speak. We have been thrust into rigid Madonna-Whore dichotomy, stripped to the most rudimentary parts. We have been bought and sold like commodities, trafficked, traded, and discarded when deemed no longer useful. Our pain has been dismissed as exaggeration, our bodies legislated by men who could never fathom our experiences.
And still, we endure. We rise from ashes, build from ruins, and carve space where none is given. We will do more than just build—we fill rooms with love. We stitch ourselves back together after every violation, carry the weight of generations on our backs, and reach our hands to uplift those who come after us. We seek to shelter our sisters, preserve them from the pain we know rather than force them to share the experience.
We are warriors, nurturers, revolutionaries. We are relentless. We have fought for our place at the table. We are indefinable, infinite, and above all, infrangible. We speak our truth uncensored even when it’s not the truth the world wants to hear.
Why? Because we are far from finished.
This is what it means to be a woman. It is not just about survival, not defined by how deep our scars run. It is about the beauty we can still create, the ferocity of spirit that allows us to emerge from the muddy trenches to reveal our petals to the world. And guess what? You can pluck us, but we will regrow, regenerate.
We will come back stronger.
We will endure.
Womanhood is reading ugly words without pity, because we are embraced in a chain, and these hands will hold us up rather than send us crashing to our knees.
My Unedited Submission
This is the unedited submission I originally submitted as my experience with womanhood. Please note, I have no hard feelings about being asked to edit it, though I respectfully refuse to soften my reality. Harsh words like death, hitting, and choking are parts of my experience, though not the defining ones.
The person who beat me refused to accept the reality of his actions and at most admitted to “tapping” me on occasion. I refuse to waiver from my truth and will tell it with raw language, because I do not intend to soften the impact of my occurrences.
In March 2014, after 14 months of being abused, I locked myself in a car and called the police to receive help for domestic violence. I have experienced many challenges in life that feel deeply intertwined to the experience of womanhood, yet I maintain that calling the police this night was the hardest thing I ever did because of the court case that followed.
As trauma is also often characterized, my story with my ex was not unique for its rarity of occurrence, but rather the brutality it caused my life. It’s a heartbreakingly common story: love-bombing turned to violent outbursts.
I cannot tell you the first time he hit me, but I can recall with as much trust as we can reward memory what it felt like the last time he choked me. This is a memory that often plays in my brain even over a decade later.
Here is the grim reality that many women face. When I sought help, I was faced with every unasked for response: I did something to earn the violence, I was lying, I should have been loyal and not told the cops, I was probably only hit once.
The trial I endured was excruciating. I sat silenced with a court-appointed attorney as my ex and his expensive lawyer (and his frat brothers committing perjury) did everything in their power to rewrite reality.
The ultimate outcome was as heartbreaking as the process; the judge looked me in the eye and said that he believed my story and he knew my ex was lying. But he said in the state of Texas, you have to both prove you’ve been hurt and will continue to be hurt in order to receive help. So he told me, the next time I was hit, I could have a protective order.
The next time I was hit.
He said he was positive there would be a next time and it was up to me to decide if I would be the one on the receiving end.
The next time I was hit.
If your partner chokes you, you have an approximately 750% increased chance of them killing you one day.
The next time I was hit.
I have feared for my life, a life that my former partner described to me in detail how he planned to take. I have been raped and had it excused by former “friends” as a crime of lust. I have been told that men couldn’t help but want to take from me because of the way I looked, that I am too provocative with language, that I shouldn’t call people out, that I command punishment of the worst kind because I cannot stay silent.
Punishment of the flesh.
The next time I was hit.
My name is Emma Fischer and, like many women, I have survived. I share my story today and I attach my name to it, because we have to remember what happened to women, because these things are still happening. I am grateful to share some of the many truths of womanhood, the duality of the beauty and brutality.
Because the following is also what I know of womanhood.
Womanhood is forgetting a hair tie and having another woman excitedly realize she has an extra on her wrist and pass it to you with pride. It’s passing tampons up your sleeve when you’re 14 because you’re embarrassed to be on your period and loudly declaring you have cramps when you’re 24 because you’ve learned to embrace your body. It’s sleepovers with your heads pressed together, whispering gossip into the early morning hours.
It’s compliments in bathrooms and fitting rooms, looking out for each other on dark streets. It’s the desire to rise together in the workplace and not use each other as a stool. It’s not defined by sex organs, wombs, or motherhood. It encompasses a vast range of experiences, as beautiful and fragile and precious and infinite as snowfall.
My experience of being a woman has been marked by life-altering brutality. But it has also been filled with so much tenderness and beauty. I have not had a single woman reduce my bisexuality to something conceived for the male gaze.
Womanhood is also not pure glitter; women can destroy you, and these cuts can burrow even deeper because they come from someone who you thought would understand you. But these aren’t the parts that I choose to have define my experience.
What I wrote today was not polished. It isn’t a work of art; it’s raw and it’s messy and it’s imperfect. Just like my experience of being a woman. And like this experience, I’m proud to say it’s mine.
I am immeasurably proud to be a woman. We are capable of astounding endurance and kindness. We are indefinable, infinite, and above all, infrangible.
This is what I know of womanhood.
(For more writing, I invite you to check out my website www.emmamaryfischer.com — thank you for hearing my experience.)
Domestic Violence Resources
- What should you do in a situation of domestic violence?
- Domestic Violence Awareness Project free materials
- Helping Survivors (organization)
- National Domestic Violence Hotline (USA)
- Frauenhaus Koordinierung (Germany)
- Government of Canada Resources
- Women’s Aid (UK)
Continued Reading: Examining The Gender Safety Gap & Women’s Safety