I am a woman, but I am a person first. My gender, my sense of style and desire to look my best, deserving of compliment, and my search for connection do not make me a piece of meat.

I am a person first, but I am also a woman. I am strong because I must be, but I am also proud of that strength. By your male lack of commitment and responsibility you force me to be strong and I find I am thrilled with the well of strength I discover within myself. But upon my use of this strength, you call me “masculine”, “castrating”, and “bitch”.

I am a person and unless a man treats me as a person, there is no real future for us as a couple. Attraction and stubbornness might carry us through for a while, but eventually we will crave a life in which we are not discounted as cattle, chattel, or childish. I crave love, but I demand respect.

I am a person with dreams, desires, and preferences of my own. Do not feel you can decide for me with impunity. Do not give me presents that are what you wish me4 to have without taking my heart, my mind, my desires into account. You ask your women friends what women want when the women you chat up don’t fall at your feet when you throw empty come-ons their way. What do women want? Can you tell me what all men want? We are as diverse as men. We each want what we want and no two are the same.

If you love and respect your mother remember that she, too, is a woman, not a piece of meat of a convenience. Show all women the same respect you should show her until you, perhaps, find they don’t deserve it.

I, too, have sexual desires, but I will often choose to repress those to keep from ruining any possibility of a lasting relationship. Many women are turned off when your custom of desire causes you to treat them with no respect. You would be unreceptive to a woman who started off demanding this and that. We, too, dislike such treatment, especially when those demands are of a sexual nature. Ask – don’t demand or try to manipulate, and then respect our responses. No almost invariably means no. Depending on the situation, however, it might not mean never, so your treatment of me and the situation might determine when and if the no might turn into a yes, and force or manipulation are not the ways to my acceptance.

I am a person and my performance in the workplace is deserving of unbiased evaluation and payment equal to anyone else on my level of performance and responsibility. Whether I am a secretary or a CEO, I am deserving of my wages.

I am a person and I, along with many of my sisters, am in touch with my body. When we tell medical professionals what we are feeling, those explanations must not be discounted simply because we may not hold an M.D. If I say that I have pain here and I want to find the cause, do not assume that I am only whining. Do not overlay your expectations on the map of our suffering and disregard anything that just doesn’t fit. Listen to us with the same care you would use in listening to a man.

I am a person. I am young, old, black, brown, yellow, red, white, educated, uneducated, happy, sad, depressive, manic, impulsive, methodical, cunning, ingenuous, fat, thin, lovely, plain, but ever beautiful in life and spirit. Judge me only as you would wish to be judged. Love me for all of who I am – not the size of my breasts or the curve of my calves.

I am a person, but woven through my sense of self and the life I live is the wonderful, unavoidable fact of my female gender. I am a person who, inescapably, is a woman, but foremost, I am a person.

The author is a poet and playwright born in the foothills of the alps, but now living in the foothills of the North Carolina mountains with a crew of cats and opossums.

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