What is “lady-like?”

My senior year of high school, I read a book by Margaret Atwood called, The Handmaid's Tale. I had never read such a thing before. It was unlike anything I'd ever encountered. It was vulgar and sexual and none of the women in the book were particularly kind or even pleasant most of the time.

I grew up in the south where women were expected to be "lady-like." In that book, none of the women were lady-like.

They were not polite. They thought horrible, violent things. They wore provacative clothing. They said crude, sexual words. They performed sexual acts because they wanted to, and never apologized for any of it.

And I had never even considered before then that women could be such a thing. That it wasn't natural for us to behave as what society tells us to be.

Women can be far more than what society, particularly southern society dictates. And that book made me see it.

I realized that the violent, mean, horrible, rude, sexual thoughts that I had were not abnormal. All women had them. I was not some monstrous thing that had broken the mold. Women just hid the parts of themselves that didn't fit what they were told to be.

It was an enlightening realization on my part. I was not a mutant. Just because everyone told us, as women, we were to behave a certain way, we did not actually have to do so.

That book brought me a level of clarity in my life I had never had before. I saw that the world's views of women were wrong. For the first time, I looked around and thought about how different women are, how much more we are than the ways we are often portrayed.

What is "lady-like" anyways? Just another word made up to tell women who they are meant to be.

Women are not only kind and soft and feminine. We are also fearsome and mean and masculine. We are terrifying and strong and sexual. We are violent and bold and intimidating.

Women can be anything we want to be, and Margaret Atwood taught me that.