why women need creative outlets

I’ve often heard the phrase, “To be a woman is to perform” and resented it for the implication that women must exist for the satisfaction of someone else. As I grew I learned that despite its bleak understanding the phrase was rooted in something scarily truthful, which is that women have very little control in this world. 

In Zadie Smith’s essay Peonies, she writes of her frustration with the nature of the world interfering with things going her way; chatty baristas that extended her designated two minute coffee break and flowers in a clearing that were garish tulips instead of peonies. What stuck with me most about the essay was her take on menstrual cycles; a monthly reminder that she must submit to nature whether she liked it or not, a helpless position her brothers would never need to experience. 

Being a woman can often mean feeling powerless. Powerless against our bodies and against those who have determined their entitlement to them, powerless against institutions created against us and a society that perpetuates lies about our nature, powerless against our emotions that sometimes seem to come and go without reason or explanation, leaving us bewildered until days later when blood flow confirms that nature holds a power over us that we may never hold ourselves. It’s frustrating, and it makes us angry, and it should make us angry. 

But to look at things that way is to expect a miserable life. You can take anything and choose to make it ugly or choose to make it beautiful. There’s something innately artful about being a woman. We are complicated and emotional and made to feel powerless, but we are also natural creators. Think Gertrude Tendrich (who isn’t the credited creator of the tampon, only the company Tampax, but I find it very hard to believe that the tampon was a man’s conception). Think Katharine McCormick, the creator of the birth control pill. Or Mary Phelps Jacob, who invented the modern bra. 

We created ways to work and lead and feel pretty and manage childbirth and enjoy sex and make our voices heard. We created ways to manage the stipulations of womanhood because the choice was either to quietly endure the suffering or create a solution. Women have always been creators, because we’ve always been creating new ways to adapt to institutions not created for us. 

In Peonies, Zadie Smith writes of how she discovered that for her, writing was a means of control. In her story, the tulips were peonies because she wanted them to be peonies, and her writing was her own and couldn’t be taken from her. As women, many things will never truly feel like our own. Our bodies may be ogled and criticized until we feel forced to change or cover them. Our accolades may be snatched by someone deemed more acceptable (like the real creator of the tampon, undoubtedly a woman whose idea was usurped by someone who thought his voice was more worthy of being heard). There are things that nature or society or the Great Big Cosmos hold in their open hand, giving us the impression of control that we don’t actually possess. But the things we create will always be ours. 

Throughout history, the greatest singers, dancers, writers, painters, filmmakers, poets, and artists have been women. This is not a statistical fact but a shamelessly unobjective observation. Women create things not just for the purpose of doing it, but for the purpose of obtaining a sense of autonomy we can’t find anywhere else. We do so to satisfy an intrinsic desire to be seen, heard, and respected. We create because the things that masquerade as being created for us are more often than not agents of restriction, and by its very definition creativity is something that can not be restricted. 

So to all women I say: CREATE! CREATE! CREATE!!!! Find a creative outlet or outlets that speak to you and nurture it constantly, because the things that you create will always be fully yours, and no man or institution or officer of nature can ever take that from you.