S1 E2: The Super Wise Two Score and Single Episode

This episode tackles the seemingly insurmountable stigma associated with being an autonomous woman who unabashedly exists within an unforgiving society. 

Let's get into it.

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Welcome back to the superwise Speak Space. It's your favorite spiritual super cyan, the superwise intelligent, here to bring you some super good conversation. Let's get into it, y'all. Today we are going to talk about me and my single ass. We are going to talk about why I am two score and single. And two score, for those of you who just don't understand, means 40, 40 years. A score is 20 years. Two scores put together, 20 plus 20 is 40. And I am 20 plus 20 and single. So let's really start talking about this. I think I'm entitled the podcast today to Score and Single. That sounds pretty good and catchy. But what I want to talk about today is societal pressures for women to marry and reproduce on a timeline that we didn't even create that's one. And then really get into the respectability politics of family planning and who that really works for and why. And then also talk about the true definition of womanhood and why it's important to be clear on the definition of what womanhood actually is versus what womanhood feels like to people who are not women, if you get what I'm saying. So let's start by talking about me and my single journey. And I don't mind talking about it because it's something that needs to be addressed in the community of natural womanhood. And when I say natural womanhood, I'm talking about womb signatures. So human beings who came into this earth out of a womb, mind you, but who was born womb bearing, right, with the ability to birth a child, that's who I'm talking about. And that's what my definition of woman will be, plain and simple. Because if you have the womb and the tools that go with the womb, then you have everything else that comes with that. Okay? And I don't think we need to go too far into what that actually means. All right, go look it up if you must. Thank God in this generation for the YouTubes and the Googles, because you get pictures and video and everything else if you really must. See if you are a learner by sight. So there's plenty for you to go look up if you don't believe anything I'm saying, bless your heart. So for me as a woman, a womb bearing woman, and discussing societal pressures for women to marry and reproduce on a timeline, it has been a conscious decision for me at this stage in my life to be single up until this point. And I'm so happy that that is exactly how my life worked out, because sometimes there are plenty of women, and I know a few who had the same goal, but life kind of just happened, you know what I'm saying? And they have their beautiful children here to account for. But I know that in many instances, in many cases, there were just so many things that at the time of conception, they wanted to do. And they kind of wanted to be a different type of woman than the woman that they became. And I'm not saying that children changed them for the worse, it absolutely changed them for the better in many ways. But there were sacrifices at a time in their lives that they had to make when they really more than likely weren't ready to make those sacrifices, but such as life sometimes, you know what I'm saying? But for me, and especially coming from the south, because if you didn't listen to the first podcast, which is about me and how I became who I am right now, I talked about being from the South, I'm a Southern girl from Louisiana, and that comes with what it comes with. All right? So growing up in the south, womanhood and daintiness, I was a debutante twice. Proper ethics and respectability, politics are all in play in the south. That's all Southern living right there. Right? And one of the big hurdles that girls have to mount and cross successfully is that whole pressure for you to marry a man and start having kids, right, regardless of what that looks like. And for me, the marriage and the children were something that I wanted at a soul level. But when I looked around at my environment, I just didn't see nobody who I could realistically, in my mind of mind, say I wanted to have that with and then couple that with not necessarily having healthy examples of that. It was words to me. It was just words like, oh, you're going to get married and have kids. Okay. You know, I just heard it. I just didn't have an action to put behind that. I know where kids came from, but I saw so many girls, teenagers, some who weren't even teenagers yet, get pregnant and start to start the journey of motherhood before they even became women. And ask a man and he'll tell you that a girl enters into womanhood when she starts to menstruate. I will tell you that a girl enters into womanhood when she becomes wise. Menstruation happens for most girls, most young ladies at the age of twelve to 13, right? You're in, what, the 6th grade at that point in time, in the society that we live in right now, we're not talking about our great grandmothers and grandmothers when they have 15 kids and all of this other stuff. They also didn't have education, they also didn't have access to opportunities in the workplace. So the home was where they worked, the home was where they learned. But we're not talking about that right now. We're talking about the year 2023, and we're talking about my lifetime. So that's been 40 years. Okay, so we're talking about the last 40 years of Earth. Okay. Within those 40 years, though, and I said this before in the first podcast, I'm the eldest millennial. I was born in the early 80s, so I kind of got to see the last little trickle of traditional homemaking into full on women being bosses and for the sake of contemporary technology, contemporary verbiage, boss bitches. I don't like the term boss bitches because I don't like to refer to women as bitches. But we run some stuff right about now. And it's not just the home, it is the home, the office, the state, the country, the world. We run things, you know, as Beyonce. But for me, having the luxury of understanding the autonomy of my body early on was such a gift. And honestly, where it came from, ironically, was my grandmother in my family structure in the south. In my family, they were just like, don't bring no babies home, blah, blah, blah. And they drilled that shit into us and they never said why. They just said, don't do it. You know what I'm saying? And that's how most things were. It was never a why. You better not ask. You just don't do it. If they say don't do it, don't do it. But I got to see, I got to learn through mishaps, surprises and the like from other girls who were around me who did bring the babies home. And I got to learn from them just how much womanhood is autonomous to the bearer of the womb, because the bearer of the sperm got to go do whatever he wanted to do because he wasn't connected to the birth of a person. Men drop off the seed, some of them, and they just keep it moving. And imagine if a boy, literally, because especially if men mature later than women, you had boys getting girls pregnant and sometimes they were men getting girls pregnant. But let's just say boys getting girls pregnant at twelve through let's say twelve through 16 and then beyond. But let's just say twelve through 16. Can you imagine in the past 40 years of Earth in the way that society is built right now? A twelve year old and a twelve year old creating a life together and being successful? I, for one, cannot. But for the girl especially, she doesn't get the break that the guy gets. And that's why when it comes to societal pressures for women to marry and reproduce, I always go back to the definition of woman and who determines what that is. Because traditionally the definition of womanhood came from rich white men who had power, who also owned property that looked like women and who were also very much so religious in a Christian way. And that is so problematic on many, many levels, fundamentally, because the world is not a Christian white world on a fundamental level, but then practically because men are not women, period. So how can you have a non womb bearer who does not have the hormonal imbalances and changes that we do, who will never be able to walk up to me as a woman and say, girl, can't you got some et cetera, for migraine, because I'm cramping girl this uterus. Oh, my God. Oh, wait. I don't have one. Right. If you don't go through the change right? If you can never realistically ask me for a tampon that you have a vagina just again, then we can't have this conversation about what womanhood is because you don't know, but because men have had the luxury of defining for women what the signifier for womanhood is. Now, in the past 40 years of Earth that I've seen and, of course, since the beginning of time. But now, specifically, we have men who identify as being a woman and who literally want to be who want women womb bearers to acknowledge them as such. Now, this is the thing. I don't have no qualm with the LGBTQ plus community because there are many members of that community who agree with what I am about to say. There is a lack of respect for womanhood that is dangerous to the point of women being extinct. Because without a womb bearing woman, there would be no Earth. There would be no people. You can't have a man come up to me and say, respect me as you, because my answer is, Hell, no. That's one thing you won't get from me. But we're almost being forced to, just like the same men who create space for these types of things to happen. Overturn the 1973 landmark decision by the US. Supreme Court that we know as Roe versus Wade, in June of 2022, women were sent back how many years? And, yeah, you had women who played a pivotal role excuse me, in doing that to us, but they did so at the behest of the same rich, white, Christian men who make decisions for everybody, for the west, for the entire west, right? And then if you go back into it, even in the east, what they look like, even on the continent of Africa, you have African faces who have titles. But if you peel back those onion layers and you really do look at who's pulling the strings. They don't look African. They don't speak native African dialects. Why do you have African countries with English as its primary language? How does that work? How does that work? But anyway, going back to me being two score and single, it's by choice. It's by choice because my goal in this life is to maintain my autonomy as a woman, to maintain the agency that I have over my body not only as my natural born right, but also in protest for those of us who are women and stand on our womanhood. I have nothing against men who are feminine and effeminate. There's nothing wrong with that at all. But don't you dare tell me to respect you as a woman. And I cannot wait for a man to tell me that he is more of a woman than I am. I'll say oh, yeah. Well, when it's time for me to have a baby. I want you to have it for me. I'm going to give you my egg, as a matter of fact and in the uterus that you don't have. I want you to grow this child. I want to see you do that. Once you do that for me, then we can have a conversation. But since you can't but it's important that we make this distinction and it's important that we have these conversations because womanhood is under attack. Women are not respected in any space. And I'm not even about to dissect that down into the race, relationship and women, right? Because that's a different conversation for another day. But when it comes to me and my singlehood, I am so happy with the choice that I made to be single for so long because I've gotten to know myself in a way that nobody can approach me and tell me who I am or who I am not. I already know. And I'm so happy that the timeline that has been imposed on me hasn't driven me crazy because I would be a liar and say if it's not scary, it is scary sometimes to think about all of this propaganda. You have these medical journals. You have people who believe this shit saying, oh, my God, Aaron, you're 40. Have you frozen your eggs? Are you thinking about freezing your eggs? Oh, my God. You want to have a baby now? Go to people literally tell me to just go to a bar and pick a person. How retarded is that? As though life has no meaning. One of the things, one of my greatest accomplishments in this life will be to birth a human being that I have the wisdom, knowledge and understanding to impart upon so that they have the best functioning experience in this life that I can afford them. And I don't want to do that unparnered. I do want to be in a relationship with a man who understands me enough to accept and to respect me as I am, to not compete with me because it's not a competition. We balance each other and to understand that I am his balance. I am not his replacement. He is my balance. He is not my replacement. And when you have a natural flow of energy and understanding, nine times out of ten you'll have a pretty harmonious relationship. But it is so hard to partner with men who have come to this understanding themselves because society is so toxic when it comes to gender roles and who men should be and who women should be. And people get this shit screwed up and then they tend to place blame for the divorce rate in America. And I'm like the divorce rate in America doesn't have to do anything with the institution of marriage being a failure itself. It has a lot to do with the failure of society and the way it perceives relationship and partnership because I don't think we have a healthy understanding of what partnership entails because so much of it is rooted in religion. So much of it is rooted in how this country was built and who well, we can't say who built it. We know who built it. But the power behind that and the power behind the religion and the foundation of this country does not look like the makeup of this country today. And we have not revisited what that means. And I don't think as a country we will be able to. I think that the pressure for women and marriage and reproduction and the reeducation of that starts in the home. But it's hard when you have two people who are products of the toxic group Think and the group's A Lilloquy, pretty much that created the issue from the beginning. So it's this ongoing cycle of toxic thought, and we are creating children in this dysfunction and we're expecting something major and radical to happen, right? And that's another reason why I'm single right now. And I'm okay with being single right now because I don't want to contribute to what I have seen as dysfunctional parental politics. Right? I'm okay with waiting until it's my turn. I don't have to have all the kids. I could have my little one or my two. And then I can do the best I can with the kids that I've been given. Because the measure of my worth as a human being and the measure of my worth, especially as a woman, is not marriage and children. It's about being the best version of myself so that I can impart upon the world around me a piece of positive change. And yes, children are one of the biggest blessings I feel that any person can ever have in this whole wide, entire existence of the universe. Right? That is how we grow as a population of people. But what's scary in all of this to me is the rate at which we are populating the earth back into the same toxic cycles that we seek to fix or to get out of. And a part of positive change for me really does start with my mentality. And I choose to be autonomous. I choose to own the agency of my body as a woman. And I stand very firm on that. And because I do, it is very difficult for me to partner with men who can accept the fact that I am capable and that I don't buy into the traditional gender role, right? And it's so funny because I think about respectability politics and family planning and how that really doesn't work for women like me because fundamentally, I'm talking about the west now. I'm not even talking about the rest of the world. Well, I can actually I can talk about the rest of the world because I've been a few places and I've seen how one of the common denominators, besides men fucking things up around the world is that women are treated like second class citizens no matter where you go, even in the most royal families. Look at the United Arab Emirates, right? Those women are treated like servants. They're treated like animals. They don't have autonomy. They don't have rights. They're rich, though, but they don't have no rights. What's the point of having all of the riches in the world if you can't even think for yourself? What? Give me my freedom any day. But that is a part of power in womanhood, right? I was initiated into the eggbe. I practice an African spiritual tradition called IFA indigenous, the indigenous faiths of Africa. And of the many initiations that I've had, or the initiations that I've had, the initiation to my Igba, which is Eilo Day, was such a liberating experience for me. And it makes so much sense because my ILO Day, which is the heavenly Mate group that I come from in Orune which in my tradition is equivalent to what Christians understand as heaven, would be that we are the council that makes many decisions, and most of us are women. And I'm like as above, so below, because in my heart of hearts and I've been this way, I came out this way, it is very difficult for me to follow instruction that I know to be faulty or just flat out wrong. And if I have to take the reins in a situation, I will. I've done it before. And currently I work in an environment where I deal with men who have been granted rank. Lord have mercy. First of all, they are ready men. Most of them are white. And then you mess up and give a man a rank on top of him being a man monster, just out here creating monsters. But I've had to put plenty of monsters in their place. And I don't apologize for it. I've been ostracized for it. I've been punished for it. And guess what? I don't care, because I know who I am. And it's so funny because the respectability politics surrounding womanhood and women being complicit with their discrimination and abuse in order to be the good girl, in order to be the opposite of wild and free, if you will, the tameness that respectability politics promotes is abusive at its core. And because I am not a victim, I don't allow anyone to abuse me in that way. And it's not physical. It's emotional and mental. And it's so deeply ingrained in society that when I check a man, when he steps across the line that I have drawn in the sand for me, my boundaries, and it's so subtle, but it's so impactful that immediately they feel offended. They feel like the level of offense that men have when I stand up in all of my power and womanhood and the audacity that that becomes to them is just the most hilarious thing to me because I'm like you've never had that authority or power over me anyway. But the entitlement to their prowess, the entitlement that they have for it to just be understood that they run shit is just hilarious to me because they really don't. But if you take a historic look at the roles that women have played and how many women who were powerful figures in history were murdered or eliminated at the hands of men who couldn't stand to be subject to a woman, even though he didn't have anything to offer to a group of people to enhance their situation just because she was a woman. Right. Men would plot against them to the detriment of themselves, right. Spite their own lives, just to say, well, at least it's not a woman. Hillary Clinton. But yeah, I thought it was important to have this conversation about being 40 years old and single as a woman within the past 40 years of Earth because there's so many women out here who are afraid to be alone, not because of the loneliness itself, but because of the stigma of being single as a woman. As women, we have to lift each other up, and we have to work as women to shift the narrative on what womanhood actually is because it does not begin and end with marriage in reproduction. We are full and complete human beings capable of the most brilliant of accomplishments if we only step into the power of our womanhood. And this is not to bash men at all. I love men with everything I have, especially brothers, because I, as a black woman, can create them. And I came from one, so of course I love them. But across the spectrum of manhood, right, I don't care. Italian, German, Spanish, European, whatever. Men, men, whatever, because women experience the same thing across the board, this whole this toxic thing and this toxic masculinity, women have to start stepping into their power. But we can't just do that. It's easier said than done. It has to be a strategy associated with this. Because like the powerful women before us like the wise women before us who have been mislabeled as witches like those of us who dare to speak up, who dare to say when we've been wronged or slighted in any way. Like they tend to murder us. If we possess this energy, we can't be silenced by the fear of death. Because you're going to die either way. Either you're going to die underfoot or you're going to die fighting, or you might even just die being a victor. You might experience some victory, but you have to try first. And my try is an act of political defiance by maintaining autonomy and maintaining agency over my body as a woman, whether I'm single or partnered, it just so happens that I'm single right now. The act of standing in the agency of my womanhood is definitely an act of political warfare at this point. And I'm okay with that men and women, when they find out that I'm single and I've been single for a while and I'm 40, they're like, well, what's wrong with you? Something must be wrong with you. Why must something be wrong with me? If I'm 40 and single and a woman, I have a whole full life right about now. No, it's so crazy, because as soon as they find out that I'm single, everything, every accomplishment, any form of intelligence just goes out of the window. All I am is a body that is not married and hasn't reproduced yet. That is so crazy how women are reduced, and sometimes we do it to ourselves. But that's all social conditioning. But I have a call to action in this episode, this second episode of The Speak Space. My call to action is actually a challenge to change the way you think. For all of the listeners who are tuned in, I challenge you to change the way you think about womanhood. Women and men. Change the way you think about womanhood. Because what I can tell you is that womanhood is not the way a person dresses. Womanhood is not breasts. Womanhood is not thick thighs in a booty. Right? Womanhood is very emotional and mental and spiritual. Womanhood is also biological. Without women, there would be no us. Human beings would cease to exist without a woman. Understand that there is a definite reason why it's important to be clear on this definition. And I stand on my womanhood and the autonomy of that, and I will defend it to anyone who challenges me in that to include questioning why I'm 40 and single as a woman. Try. Because I want to be. That is a political, politically defiant act. Wanting to be single as a 40 year old woman who has been on this earth within the past 40 years, think about that. Think about the fact that it is a political act of defiance to say, as a woman, I am single because I want to be. Well, thank you for listening, and I hope you tune in next time. Until then, go be good.