Today’s accompanying tune: I Love You Always Forever (Nora's Version) by Donna Lewis and Nora En Pure
Jasmin Paris didn’t have a lot of time left.
The 40-year-old British ultramarathoner had set out on her fifth 20-mile lap hours before, moving clockwise around an unmarked and difficult course through a mountainous state park in Tennessee. She spent months running and walking nearly 130 miles a week, oftentimes with more than 11,000 meters of elevation gain, in preparation for the race. All of that, in between working full-time as a veterinarian and raising two small kids.
Paris had raced the Barkley Marathons before, and had set the previous women’s record — completing the four-lap “fun run” out of the 100 total miles of the race before dropping out. But here she was, the furthest any woman had ever come in a race whose founder had explicitly said that a woman wouldn’t be capable of finishing his course. All she had to do was finish under the 60-hour cut-off, touching a yellow gate that marked the end of the race before her time ran out.
“I was so close to passing out,” Paris told The Guardian. “I felt I was going to reach the finishing gate, or collapse right in front of it. There was a tunnel of roars on either side. But I couldn’t focus. It was all a bit blurry.”
She was sleep-deprived, having taken no longer than a few minute nap at any point in the last several days. She was hallucinating, stating that the trees of the park morphed into animals as she ran. And, with 99 seconds to spare, Jasmin Paris became the first woman to ever complete the Barkley Marathons.
I compulsively refreshed my browser while I waited for updates, glued to my phone as if I was myself participating. The Twitter/X meltdown felt particularly acute as I scoured a patchwork of other websites less-than-capable of providing real-time updates from the woods of Tennessee. The clock ticked past the hour, then past the 15-minute mark, the end of the race. No word yet on whether Jasmin had crossed the finish line.
The agonizing wait for confirmation, that a woman had, yet again, made history, seeped into my bones and spilled out of my pores. I was steeped in the kind of awe that arrives alongside disbelief and followed closely by inspiration. Could she do it, could she fly in the face of the race’s own founding beliefs that a woman was not capable of such a feat, though a man’s ability was never questioned? Could she endure, push past the boundary of human limits, carrying the responsibility of men’s expectations of women on her back? If she didn’t finish, would the male founder feel vindicated in his belief that women, any woman, couldn’t complete the race? Would she feel like she failed herself and other female-identifying athletes? Is that too much for one woman to carry?
The same was true of Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, before women were “allowed” to race. She entered as K.V. Switzer, and endured countless attempts to push her off course and disqualify her as she pounded out the 26.2 mile course. When interviewed later, Switzer commented that she felt that she had to finish, lest the race continue to bar women from participating entirely, all because of her performance. The weight of an entire gender’s future in racing, in sport, fell to one woman who just wanted to see what was possible.
Most of our society has decided that women can only be notable if they are extraordinary — if they are the first, or the best, or one of a small club standing under a glass ceiling on a glass cliff. Surely, Paris and Switzer are extraordinary athletes in their own rights. But every day, on stages smaller than Boston or Barkley, women prove time and time again how extraordinary they really are.
Take last summer, for example. Talking heads coined it “The Summer of the Girl,” with box office hit “Barbie” raking in an unprecedented amount at the box office while Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour broke record after record for a tour by any artist. Women were dressing in pink and making friendship bracelets to trade with strangers. The vibe last summer was akin to a women’s bar bathroom, awash in female camaraderie and support. We complimented each others’ outfits and traded hair ties, gave pep talks to the women who needed a push, held hair back and fixed each others’ makeup when things got messy. One of the most popular sounds on TikTok at the time captured it well — “oh, how I love being a woman.”
Luckily, I had years under my belt as a reformed “not like other girls” girl by then. I spent most of my childhood and adolescence mortified of my girlhood, so full of softness and weakness as to be barely considered worthy. I stopped wearing dresses and started playing outside, a boy’s domain. I swapped out my CD from The Chicks to Kenny Chesney (my musical upbringing was not ideal, and I’m still working to rectify that) after my mother mocked their songs while we rode in the car. Women couldn’t make music, she said, it was so whiny. Why couldn’t they sing about something other than being women? Don’t even get her started on that young girl Taylor Swift — all she does is sing about her boyfriends!
My mother despised other women so intensely it was impossible to not notice. Whether it was due to her perceived fear of competition or her own internalized misogyny, I’ll never know. But as her only daughter, I quickly learned that the only way in was to push every other woman out.
I wish I could say I recognized it earlier, that I stopped the cycle before it overtook me. I wish that I had done better, that I had given the women in my life a reason to be soft instead of another piece of evidence that they should be hard. That we could bond over something other than dislike of other women. But I can’t. It lasted well until college — I proudly told anyone who would listen that I joined a sorority and, upon seeing their incredulous looks that I of all people would do that, insisted that my sorority was not like the others, that we had a drinking song and wore whatever we wanted.
Even writing that now, I cringe. It hurts to think about how awful I was, to myself and to other women. I let my own self-hatred seep into a larger disdain for girlhood, for makeup and the color pink and pop music. I hung out with men that hated me as much as I hated myself and called them my friends. I refused to cover women’s issues for the college magazine I worked for because I didn’t want to be perceived as a woman reporter — I just wanted to report. I drank beer instead of sugary cocktails, an effort to get invited to drinking games women were otherwise excluded from. I wanted in without realizing how far out I had gone.
I don’t know when the shift started, though I know it wasn’t a smooth transition. I had a girlboss phase, where I decided working myself into the ground was sticking it to the man, to all the men, when really it just served their own interests even more. I attended “Women in STEM” events that insisted the attendees were not like other women, no, they were skilled. This wasn’t marketing, this was engineering. The specter of self-hatred among women never lifted long enough for us to see it followed us everywhere. But eventually, thankfully, mine lifted. And like the lights at a bar at closing, everything looked so much worse in the light.
Once you see how much people hate women, how much they hate femininity, it’s hard to unsee. As someone who lived it for far too long, I can recognize how deep it goes, how inflections point the way to deeper truths the speaker has never questioned. Last March, I got drinks with friends outside of Chicago. We were out too late and had drank too much when I grabbed the friend’s phone and fired up his TouchTunes account to queue every Taylor Swift song in the library. When the first song hit, the women of the bar grabbed each others’ hands and started dancing and singing. They were so full of joy — it filled every empty stool at the bar. It filled the quiet night air just beyond the windows. Their partners, meanwhile, rolled their eyes and sipped their beers, obviously embarrassed by the display in front of them. The bartender, a gruff biker-looking guy, stopped by our table to apologize for the disruption — he would see about disconnecting the music so we wouldn’t have to hear it anymore, completely oblivious to the fact that the perpetrator was right in front of him. He couldn’t bear the joy, the girlhood, occurring at his own bar. The disdain was palpable.
What I cannot understand, even in my reformed state, is why people feel compelled to squash others’ joy? If she likes pink, if they enjoy Taylor Swift, if he paints his nails — who cares? There is so little joy in this world as it is. Why do we have to make it harder to achieve, to share, to experience? Joy is not a zero-sum resource — if anything, an abundance of joy only leads to more joy. To more happiness. To inspiration and resilience during hard times. Every human, regardless of gender identity, absolutely deserves to experience unabated joy without judgment. That is merely an artifact of being human, and it does not change merely because some people want us to be miserable. Suffering for suffering’s sake, making those around them miserable simply because they are themselves miserable, is no way to live.
Women are extraordinary. Women are incredible. I’ve surrounded myself with women I love, women I’m constantly inspired by, women I trust with my life. My life is so full of joy because of them, even if they record the emotional moment Taylor Swift took the stage and I again burst into tears at the sheer enormity of what I was feeling. I watch that video nearly once a week, floored at my own transformation. That is the work of joy, the work of girlhood. Of camaraderie in the bar bathroom with other women. Of sticking it to the men who want us to feel small. The men that said we could never do it. To knowing we can, and choosing to bring everyone else with us.
Here’s to the incredible women, the emotional women, the girls’ girls. Oh, how I love being a woman.
- Megan
Hello??? We Seventies and Eighties Feminists fought hard and frightening battles so that coming generations of women wouldn't have to go through the sexism that we had. Are you aware of that work? If we don't learn our Feminist histories we are doomed to repeat our own oppression. I suggest you talk with older Feminists - I am available - to learn about our work. Time and again, I see younger women writing about their oppression as if it was a new phenomenon. Learn your history and use it to change sexism and misogyny now.