Femininity, as we know it

I have recently posed a question on my TikTok - not for advice, not for feel-good affirmations, but for something with teeth. A sharp, distilled, mindbit. Something proper. The question was the following:

Question for the culture: how do we assert feminine power without making it feel like we’re just flipping the script on men’s old tricks? Ordering the wine, taking the lead, bending the rules, all that jazz. Are these inherently masculine moves, or just the things we’d do instinctively if we weren’t raised to be pleasant instead of in charge?

Needless to say, it was inspired by the scene above.

If I said I wanted to dismantle the divine feminine myth and replace it with something much stronger, something unburdened by pop psychology, it would sound like some self-appointed manifesto. A grand theory of womanhood. That would be utterly grotesque. I wouldn’t do that myself, to you, or to the collective intellect we deserve.

At the core of it all, I believe, is my refusal to be passive. I can’t surrender to absence. I want to assert, dissect, provoke, tease, linger at the edge of things just a little longer than decorum allows. If you don’t press against the edges of things, you will never grasp its contours or map its inner terrain. I love the elegance of a rule bent just so. Not shattered, no, that would be crude. I want to be fully within myself, but just outside of expectation. That is the real play, isn’t it?

See, this is what I’m after. The language, the rhetoric, the cadence. The blueprint, the grand experiment, the index of desire. The phenomenon, the archetypes, the politics laced with silk and steel. The sensual mapping of power, the space, the arena, the playground. Of all this. Anything and everything that can embody this femininity. give it form, make it tangible, put it into narrative. Something to pin to my wall, to pull me forward, to mirror back a sense of direction. A pulse, a symbol, a North Star. I’m playing a high-stakes game, and now I need the currency of my play.

I want to know the name of that feeling when you’re poised to eclipse whatever stands in your way, not through brute force, but something deeper. Not force less, but force unplanned. Like a tide pulling back only to return stronger. To feel so assured, so effortlessly in motion, so anchored in your own presence that nothing truly penetrates. You are the one who sways. Gravity itself is second-guessing whether to cling to you or to let you go.

And so, when you order the wine, place the bets, call the shots, work relentlessly, drop the joke in the lowest, knowing register of your voice, when your vision sharpens into angles and precision - you will find yourself cast as a myth. The verdict that a woman who revels in her own authority must, at some level, be an undone thing. That if you dig too deep, push too far, and God forbid, enjoy it, what will emerge is not a woman at all, but a man in her place. As if certainty itself is a masculine trait. As if carving the raw, unformed parts of yourself into something diamond-cut, something undeniable, means you’ve forfeited your very own nature.

I don’t claim to know everything. But when I am at my most potent, sharp, unfiltered, and utterly assured - I still feel like Catherine. Never Charles.

That I do know.