Some guidelines to help this space be a positive experience for everyone:

☮ As always with the Avocado, don’t feel compelled to share beyond your comfort level. 

☮ Anyone who identifies as female, or who was socialized female/AFAB/otherwise has firsthand experience with the issues being discussed, is welcome to post. If you identify as cis-male, we ask that you please set your participation to “lurk” mode, unless otherwise explicitly invited to participate further (i.e. if we did an AMA kind of thread). I’m sure there’s plenty to be gleaned just by reading!

☮ Please do your best to be mindful of others’ experiences when commenting or posing questions for the group. The female identity is Legion and contains multitudes, and not everyone who has experience with being treated as female by society identifies as female. Furthermore, racial and ethnic identities, sexual orientation, and many other factors can color how one experiences their gender identity on a day-to-day basis.

 

Hello it is I, Annanomally, your guest host for this week’s edition of the women+ thread. While I fully support this turning into a full drag session of Just Kidding Rowling, I also wanted to present a topic I found myself struggling with at 2:30 this morning: holiday-ing as a woman.

Now, #notallmen, but it was 2 am and I was helping my boyfriend pick out presents for his mother, niece, my daughter, his brothers, twelve other people I don’t as well as him, etc. And I LIKE present shopping. It’s one of my favorites, a skill I am so good at I should probably put it on my resume. But the…stereotypicalness of it stood out to me. Surely I am not the only one helping the males in their lives pick out gifts. And my picture of making christmas cookies? It’s not of a dad and his son in the kitchen while the girls go hang out. Something about holidays brings out gender roles–look at the vast majority of advertising about kitchen cleanup during thanksgiving or christmas meal prep. Like honestly, what the fuck.

 

So, here is a space to vent about the extra stress of the holidays, and the things you find yourself responsible for you suspect have to do with your gender, but also whatever else is making us exhausted and angry this week.