Collection: The Underground Woman

Format: Philosophy Discussion
Length: 800 Words | 3 Min
Author: Melissa Nadia Viviana
Date: April 15, 2025

Tags: Fascism, Resistance, History, The Future

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The Beat Philosopher is a reader-supported publication by Melissa Nadia Viviana; Author, Activist, Existentialist, & Philosopher.

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It was over ten years ago that I began to write about gender and humanism.

I wrote about humanism before I wrote feminism, because at the principle of human nature, I believed we were all ruled by genderless desires.

When I try to explain the principles of humanism, I think of that simple explanation of universal human emotions on human faces. For example, a smile is a core expression of happiness.

There’s nothing gender specific about happiness: but it’s an emotion that every human being craves.

There’s also nothing racially specific about happiness. And although different cultures have appropriate moments in which it’s polite or not polite to express happiness in public––in general, cross-culturally, we all instinctually smile to show joy.

Humanism is just the measure of a universal element across the entire human species.

And it posits that a great deal of human emotions are, at the root, human-based, rather than culture-based, gender-based, or even racially-based.

Both by principle and by scientific evidence, race is a human construct. And while we do have different skin color, it would be weird to think of our emotions as being derived by our skin.

Just like we don’t attribute certain emotions to blue-eyed people vs brown-eyed people. Eye color gives us no capacity to create unique responses to the world.

An interesting thought experiment: especially when it concerns types of oppression or trauma is to say: what would I do in that situation.

For example, Africans became slaves and were segregated and othered for a hundred more years after slavery was outlawed. The question isn’t whether they have a set of emotions from those experiences. It’s - if the shoe was on the other foot and Africans had purchased Europeans, kept them as slaves for a hundred years, then othered and oppressed them - what would the white man’s set of emotions be?

If both groups have similar reactions to being kept as a slave, then the emotion isn’t derived from the skin. It’s a human response to being owned and othered.

The same can be done for rape. An experience that creates emotions in women. But of course, would boys or men molested, sexually assaulted, or raped, not feel the same feeling of violation?

In which case, it’s once again, not a reaction created by gender. Only a human reaction to trauma.

Just because the people who were enslaved are Africans doesn’t mean they have a monopoly on the emotions it caused. All humans have the same trauma responses.

Just because women are the ones who are primarily raped doesn’t mean they invented the set of emotions one feels from being violated.

So looking at human responses as skin-neutral and gender-neutral helps us understand humans as a psychological phemonenon that can be conditioned into a set of behaviors via their experiences.

But don’t have unique responses to trauma. They represent how we all would act or feel if we were put in the same situation.

Do you see?

A black person who feels persecuted didn’t invent the feeling of persecution. You just don’t realize if you were being treated the same way, you’d have quite a similar reaction to the trauma.

Human responses are similar. But the conditions of society create different people who have never felt the traumas allotted to some demographics within the society.

Beyond that, however, there is a layer of conditioned responses. For example, women cry when they feel vulnerable. Men are conditioned to get angry and use violence to mask their vulnerabilities.

Both of these are available human responses that little boys and little girls likely both experiment with. But over time, the culture trains them to stick with one or the other. Boys are stigmatized for crying after a certain age. Girls are consoled and supported when they cry for decades to come.

Therefore, a human being can be conditioned out of a very human response to trauma by their culture stigmatizing and provoking them to have a set of emotions.

And this is what bothered me in my early twenties. I was very sensitive to being conditioned into anything. I rejected commentary on my emotions or behaviors and did not take any sort of manipulation or feedback well.

For example, when I wanted to become a bartender, one of the male bartenders made fun and said I probably wouldn’t be able to do it. Not only did I become a bartender, but I became a mixologist and hand-crafted the entire drinks menu for two restaurants. At which point that same bartender said (now a few years later) that he was jealous of me.

Uh huh.

That was a satisfactory moment.

I abstained from following gender culture. I didn’t do things because women did them. I didn’t stop doing them because someone said women couldn’t do something. I didn’t follow trends or seek acceptance.

This was probably a decade before non-binary was a thing. But my goal was to be human first, a gender second. So I approached each situation from a human perspective, from acknowleding my human set of emotions. And I didn’t look for gender cues to let me know how I should behave.

taught to be patient and soft spoken.

The same can be said for hormone production. Hormones are great at producing physiological effects.

For example, shutting down our digestive system during fight or flight, retaining water during menstruation, getting us to feel sleepy at the same time every night.

And there are examples of certain hormones being released in sexual activity and pregnancy (which we have interpreted as emotional content). For example, sexual libido is physiologically derived, but feels emotional.

The presence of progesterone after a woman gives birth, might make her feel calm.

And the presence of cortisol can make a person feel anxious & excessively stimulated.

But there’s not much evidence beyond a few examples, that hormones have anything at all to do with our personality, life choices, behaviors, or emotions.

Back in my twenties, I assessed this from personal experience. I had spent my entire teens searching for the origins of my own emotions and with the exception of feeling grumpy if I was sleep-deprived, I could not attribute anything that I feltto physiological changes.

Yep. Even as a teen, I didn’t attribute my personality or feelings to “raging teen hormones.”

Further, as an adult, anxiety from cortisol was just about the only physiologically-derived emotion I could find––but cortisol is released as a stress response. And thus, by taking time to change your perspective about a stressful event, you can reduce your cortisol levels and have a positive impact on your anxiety.

In fact, two things that I found reduced my anxiety greatly were exercise (which expends excess energy), and ceasing to drink caffeine (which causes me a lot of jitteriness).

So there simply wasn’t much emotional content that I could say: my hormones are making me feel this. And I have no choice about it.

Throughout my life, I was able to find alternate reasons for the emotions and feelings that I had. And because I could find the origins of those emotions, I could alter and change them.

Emotional regulation was my aim––and that’s why I was on the hunt for my emotional source in the first place.

But in my years of learning to do this––I never once found a situation in which I could not regulate my emotions because of my physical body.

Of course, we live in a culture that is often trying to convince us otherwise.

For example, I had a coworker who complained that there was too much estrogen at work. And perhaps the most annoying thing about this, was that he was only 25. He didn’t need to be that ignorant. Open a wikipedia page once in a while, bro.

Since both sexes have the presence of estrogen and testosterone––it’s silly to attribute a whole personality to the presence of one of those hormones.

I might have said:

Dude, you, yourself, have estrogen. If someone said: ‘You’re a pompous ass, I think estrogen is the reason for this. Let’s get rid of all of the estrogen-producing people, so that we can get rid of all pompous asses at the office.’

Then 100% of the people at the office would be gone!

But are you really saying that you’ve measured someone’s hormone level and have deduced that higher levels of estrogen are responsible for a particular behavior you don’t like at work? And that if we just lowered the estrogen, we’d reduce a particular behavior?

Estrogen in men is responsible for regulating sex drive, supporting erectile function, aiding in sperm production, maintaining bone density, & maintaining muscle mass.

If we lower the estrogen at work, all we’re going to get is sexually dysfunctional people!

Our sex hormones are going to be out of balance, but our larger personality will still remain because it’s not derived from purely physiological processes.

Though the debate on the origins of consciousness remain - it sure as fuck isn’t the pituitary gland.

It’s okay to not like a human being at work.

But lashing out at random hormones that aren’t even responsible for these behaviors isn’t sensical, mature, rational, or intelligent.

That’s kind of like saying: “I don’t like her because she has a certain amount of liver enzymes. Or she’s a bad boss because her blood type is O+.

I think there’s this tendency for people who are perturbed by another living, human being to find a simple explanation for what they don’t like. It’s a coping mechanism.

But it’s okay to just not like another human being. You don’t need to take down a biological function with them.

“Gee, did we check the oxygen level of their blood cells? Maybe there’s too much oxygenated blood at work today!”

Back, when I was 22-23 years old, I wrote a series of essays on humanism & gender.

The purpose was to explain how and why my own self-identification was as a human being first & a gender last.

I was 100% sure that my identity was derived from a gender-neutral origin inside of me. And that essentially I was a human being walking around in a woman suit.

This was unusual in Washington D.C., (and likely many other cities) where gender was used as a shortcut for bonding. Essentially, by identifying someone as a gender, you could fall back on a script that allowed you to “make friends” via familiar and comforting parameters.

This irritated me endlessly. I sought to bond with people on human elements, alone and I avoided people who approached me with any kind of “gender objectification.”

Meaning, they were disinterested in me as a person and saw me only as a representation of a woman.

And yes, women did this just as much as men. I used to joke that I needed to bring a translator to all-female events because it felt like they were speaking in cultural code.

Though I will admit that I later realized this was a culturally trained phenomenon.

It wasn’t just gender objectification, of course. It was also age––and some kind of arbitrary projection that our age was supposed to define our personality.

I, infamously, bond with people who are 30 years older than me. My partner, who I’ve lived with for nearly a decade is 20+ years older than I am.

And. our friends have children who are my age but I’m not friends with the children. I’m friends with their parents.

But one of the reasons for that was that, in early adulthood, it didn’t take me long to realize that 30 years old was just about the peak of a person’s developmental maturity.

What that meant is that it didn’t actually matter if a person was 50 years old or 80 years old, they were essentially the same developmental personality that they had at 30.

They just carried with them more memories & life experiences.

I know there are many women today who feel it’s creepy for people who are 50 to be dating 20 years olds. Actually, I’ll be honest. I made a lot of 50 year old friends in my twenties. Not because it was creepy. But because 50 year olds are really just 30 year olds in an older body.

By acknowledging the experiences and memories of a person over 40, you do justice to their age and their wisdom. But by treating them as if they’re 50 years old, you’re actually projecting an arbitrary persona onto them.

Essentially, we’re all just 30-year-old personalities in ever-aging bodies.

A neighbor of mine is reached 80. One day she and a 60+ woman were sitting at a happy hour talking about aging. She was like “Aging is a trip. You’re just the same person in an ever aging body.”

At some point, your personality plateaus and stabilizes. But your body keeps changing without you.

There is a measurable difference in the first 26 years of a person’s life because of brain development and puberty. It is wrong to prey on developing children. But there comes a point (different for each personality) when the maturation is at its maximum.

A person who’s immature at 30 is actually also going to be immature at 50. A person mature at 20, will be quite serious at 50.

Body in both people, the body will keep decaying.

If you start to see old people as a 30 year old, you’re going to start to meet a lot of childish 60 year olds.

Our life experiences are going to be different, because the eras we grow up in change our paradigms.

And of course, the longer you’re alive, the more wisdom (and trauma) you might gain: via life experiences like the death of your parents, the death of your spouse, or even sometimes the death of your children.

Trauma can change us. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. For example, the war in Ukraine has likely changed a lot of people.

But certainly: age does not automatically mature you.

What I realized was that if a person was mature at 30, they would be mature at 60.

And if a person was childish at 30, they would be childish at 60.

Essentially, wisdom isn’t a guaranteed gain because of your age, it’s actually a capacity because of your character and your personality.

Those who have it, have it at 30. Those who are lacking it at 30, won’t ever get it no matter how many years they’re on this earth.

So because I was a mature person, I was very old for my age. But I also found that a lot of people who were decades older than me were basically 30 year olds with just a few more experiences.

Elizabeth Gilbert once said that she believed that our personality was a sort of fixed age and that you’d feel a little too old or a little too young for your body until you finally landed on that moment in which your personality and your body were the same age at the same time.

Then you’d think: finally I can be myself and it fits.

I get that. I was never young, even when I was young. When I was in my early twenties, I actually hung out and waited for my body to age.

I knew nobody would talk to my personality when I had a body of a certain age. So I just kept myself busy until the age I had matched the maturity I had.

It probably started to kick in around 28 - that people finally began to treat me as I had wanted to be treated at 18. But it took a whole decade for people to start talking to me the way I wanted to be talked to.

I actually didn’t mature at all in my twenties. With the exception that I learned how to be a functional adult (pay bills, etc). And that I learned how to set boundaries.

But I could post essays I wrote at 22 today and nobody would know they were written by a 22 year old.

My personality sort of just hang around, waiting for my body to mature so that people would start talking to me the way my personality demanded.

So I was a genderless, ageless 20-year old woman, who resented anybody who tried to fit me into arbitrary boxes that didn’t contain the actual character & maturity I had.

If people treated me like “a woman” - I said, wtf?

And if people treated me like “a twenty-year-old” I was even more offended.

It should be noted that I actually don’t look that different than I looked at 16. I had chipmunk cheeks at age 10. Like Selena Gomez - who has a kind of “cute” face that always looks young, I also had an innocent looking face.

But at the same time, back in those days, I was very frustrated with both genders for distinctive reasons. And I had to reconcile this anger.

If I believed that we were motivated by human elements, then how could I specifically be upset at the behavior of one or the other genders?

And one day, I finally made sense of the distinction.

You see, at the root of it, I believed that all human beings were motivated by gender-neutral desires. But I also realized that not all human beings are identified as human beings.

Identity is self-chosen. And there are plenty of people who identify as a religion first, and a human last. Or a gender first, and a human second. Perhaps, even, they identify as a nationality first. Or an occupation (such as doctor or actress) first.

And whichever identity we choose, will end up changing our choices in behavior.

It will change the behavior we think is appropriate.

So a person who is subconsciously motivated by a human desire, but consciously identified with a gender-specific culture, might condition themselves to behave a certain way to get approval from other genders.

And this can even conflict, contradict, or distort a neutral human desire.

If a person believes that their feelings and sense of fulfillment is derived from a gender-specific origin and that they have to learn how to belong and receive self-worth from a gender-specific behavior… then they will suppress and deny the true origins of their feelings.

They’ll shut down their human content and they’ll identify with a conditioned piece of gender content.

One of my favorite quotes back then was “We are dominated by everything with which our self becomes identified. We can dominate, direct, and utilize everything from which we dis-identify ourselves.” - Robert Assagioli

Both men and women have the choice to behave the same -- they've just made radically opposite choices for so long because they've been following the culture of their society. Women can just as easily have commitment issues, not want children, want to have sex with every thing that walks, want the power to run a company or country, and be capable of driving a stick shift.

While men can just as easily (though not as easily) need to cry, want to take care of their children, cuddle, and have a need to fall in love.

I think that a lot of men arbitrarily hide their feminine characteristics, to appear a pure man, a real man. 100% man.

Which is 100% an illusion. You can't be 100% man, you can only be 100% human. There isn't a single thought, desire, or feeling that ONLY a man can have. Not one. Not a single one.

Every single desire that a man can hold within him is also available to women. Whether or not we classically choose one or the other emotion means, only, that we want to fit in.

Again, a “human quality:” to try to fit in with our peers by acting the way they act, and doing the things that are expected of us––even that is merely a human quality, available to both genders and all ages.

This is the conformity to gender culture. And it’s arbitrary.

There is no argument in existence against sexist beliefs. What I mean is, sexism was never legitimate -- there was never a very good argument putting it in place in the first place. It's simply a double standard applied to only one half of the population. That we’ve divided our behaviors down the middle and said, “You take these human behaviors, but avoid those”

The only way to remove sexism is not to argue with it, but to eradicate the double standard. We're human. And the only way equality can exist is if there are human standards. Most societies simply don't abide by that.

We distort our emotions and desires to fit in with our gender peers -- wanting only what we're allowed to want, feeling only what we're allowed to feel. We forget that we're both human and gender and that we're making a choice to identify more fully with our gender when we could simply be human.

Normally, my self and sense of perception resides in a very gender-neutral space and I don't like to leave that space to view the world as a woman, or as other classic women view it.

At the core, I believe that the sense of self, the consciousness, the mind, the personality is a very gender-neutral, age-neutral being. Really, I think that age, masculinity, and femininity are mentalities. They're the filter in which we view the world for a short period of time, but this filter is created by our environment, social pressures, and by the current fads -- or, in other words, what we think will gain us more social success. All of these factors change constantly and our filter, thus, changes constantly.

Perhaps, then, it's easier for women to bond with other human beings by talking about stereotypically female topics, because they can then get along and make friends without exposing their real selves. The same for men who bond by doing classically testosterone-oriented activities, like sports, objectification of women, video games and... beer pong -- because this enables them also to bond in activities and attributes cultivated by gender culture -- all of which are slightly removed from the real self, so that they don't have to immediately expose the rawest parts.

Womanhood is a distortion of humanness, but so is manhood. Because all of the human qualities that are admired by society, at large, have been assigned to men, even though they're NOT masculine qualities -- they're human qualities.

The way gender has been shaped by society has created a sort of dominant/submissive yin and yang diagram of gender. All qualities that are dominant are assigned and assumed to come from men and all qualities that are submissive are assigned to women. But who are we kidding?

Humans are humans. Little boys cry. Women get horny. Women are powerful. Men are juvenile. And also, men are powerful and women are juvenile. That's because both genders are human. And we've taken the humanness out from ourselves and assigned, instead, a category that we should belong to, act exclusively from, and be restrained with.

We're not only distorting ourselves through gender, but we're incapable of seeing each other clearly when we project an extreme foreignness on the opposite sex that shouldn't really exist. Trying to figure out "how women work" is somewhat of an illusion, when women are actually just human beings.

The reason you can't figure her out is because you can't figure yourself out (let's face it, every guy who says he doesn't get women has no fucking clue what makes men tick either).

The more you understand your own human nature, the more her human nature will be revealed to you.

To identify with gender trains you to behave and think in a certain way. The nature vs nurture debate has such an influence on the meaning of gender because there's nothing more learned than womanhood or manhood.

The most important thing is that all humans were human. That meant that all men were actually human. And all women were actually human.

But in a society that did not agree with me on this, this meant that my ideal humanism was never particularly practiced or acknowledged…

*****And that meant that there were many HUMANS who were behaving like less than themselves, because they were identified with a gender.

Were they actually a gender? To my mind, no.

Were they behaving poorly in gender specific ways? Yes.

So was I mad at a gender? No. I believed all humans were human.

But did I feel that specific habits could be taken up by people who identified that they were a gender? Yes.

Gender-Identified Humans. GIH

I don’t believe that human equality leads to feminism. I believe that Inequality leads to feminism. That a society that constantly gives out gender messages, needs a militant gender counterattack.

But ultimately what I wanted feminism to do was help discard the need for gender ideology in the first place. §§§§§§******

I might attack a person for behaving wrongly, in a classic gender way. But I didn’t believe that people behaved the way they did BECAUSE of their gender. I believed that humans made choices irrespective of their gender, and that you could attack the behavior separate and apart from “gender causes” but not separate and apart from “gender effects.”

Meaning, it IS our human choice to behave poorly in classic gender patterns. So gender is the effect.

When you accuse “men” of doing something wrong… you understand that in fact “humans” (and most often the ones who identified closely with gender ideology) were responsible for this.

This meant that all other males had the choice, to either dispose of the gender ideology and choose their actions for themselves. Or to understand that this culture is wrong and stand up to their OWN gender ideology.

But no gender deserves punishment, because no human is caused by a gender. Gender is caused by them.

Suffice to say that if I use the word “men” or “women” - I conclusively mean ONLY “those who closely identify with their gender ideology, and thus create a set of behaviors linked to their gender’s perceptions and patterns.”

You’re not your gender. You’re fucking human. That’s all the more reason why you should be able to stand apart from it and look at it objectively and rationally as a constructed cultural mentality we participate in, rather than simply are.

I’m not a woman. But I lead a woman’s life. People treat me like a woman. I look like a woman. I’m judged as a woman is judged.

“I’m” not a woman, because “I’M” a human. The body I reside in is female. But the self is constructed through the same Existential Humanism all of us inherently possess. We play by the same laws.

I have human feelings. Human thoughts. Human desires.

One day I hope to meet someone who has come to realize it. -2020

Don’t Remind Me I’m A Woman - Opening Quote

I’m not going to lie to you guys - I’ve given this a lot of thought: being a woman in 2014 sucked. It legitimately sucked.

Being a woman in 2019 is so, so much better. Even though I’m the same woman.

Whether Trump realizes it or not - he was one of the best things that happened to women’s liberation.

And I’m legitimately grateful for this little evolutionary growth in our society. Or rather, for society becoming a more hospitable place for women to be themselves in.

FANTASTIC INTRO

There are only two sides of gender discussion for me: the angry feminist, and the humanist.

When I’m upset and insulted, I turn into the angry feminist. When I’m happy and contented, I turn into the humanist.

If I must consider myself a woman - if it’s in the discussion or in the picture, I”m angry, because I’ve always considered myself a human, and it feels insulting to have that taken away from me. To play by different rules than human beings and be given special rules as a woman being, I become angry.

All of my feminism: or literally defined: the belief that women should be equal in society to any other gender - is paradoxically a philosophy about humanism - particularly on the good days. As I said, when I’m happy.

When I’m unhappy, I’m still a humanist, I’m just an angry one. This is when I discuss women’s issues, not because I want to, but because someone has made being a woman “an issue.”

This does not make me happy.

But what if this is where the extinction burst comes from?

You see, after Donald Trump was elected a 2nd time, I started to notice that men were speaking out from a very humanistic perspective. They were pulling away and challenging the gender norms and gender constructs that were given to them.

I don’t think this has ever happened in human history. And I don’t mean to be dramatic about the potential of this moment. I don’t think this moment is all that special for gender.

I just want people to realize that women have been climbing towards a sense of humanity while men have been regressing towards a sense of manhood. (Regressive manhood).

There are so many people who talk about the “end of days of capitalism” but if you want to know if a patriarchy is in the “end of days” look to who its idols are.

Tim Walz and Gus Walz terrified a portion of American men.

Why? Because Tim Walz was empathetic, had a moral compass? He shot a gun, but he also cared if children were fed in schools. His son was proud of him, so he feels he has a loving role as a father.

Are fathers only supposed to be distant, toxic, abusive fathers?

A few days after the election it occured ot me that maybe that’s where we went wrong in 2017. We had a Women’s March - and thus, we had a women’s growth spurt. I wrote in 2019 that it was infinitely better to be a woman in 2019 than 2014 and I was grateful that Donald Trump actually was the accelerator of that growth spurt.

Many, many issues that I was uncomfortable talking about in 2014, I can openly discuss today. I have much less shame. Much more centeredness. And it’s not just because I’ve become older. It’s a part of the American culture. The shifts that occurred socially.

But you know who didn’t accelerate in 2017? Men! (Well, you can speak for yourself).

But I think a large break in the collective consciousness was this gender acceleration while propelled women into the future. But regressively asked men to defend the past.

Donald Trump’s anthem: “make america great again” is a silly hope for a return of the past. And yet, nobody can sufficiently say why the past was so great in the first place?

I mean other than the cost of living ratio to the minimum wage… I’m having trouble trying to identify why the future isn’t seductive and important to men.

Remember, Donald Trump is a serial abuser of women. A rapist whose initial controversy days before his election was that he felt it was appopriate to walk up to stranger women and grab them in the pussy.

Which men, at the time, defended as lockerroom talk.

The reason Toxic masculinity popped up as a terminology is not because there’s antyhign wrong with men. It’s because men are clinging to a sense of manhood that isn’t based on being human. It’s based on these bizarre standards of arbitrary self-worth in outdated masculinity. In a culture that doesn’t belong in this world.

It’s regressive. It’s a return to immaturity. It’s beneath the era we live in.

And quite frankly, it’s the definition of an exctinction burst.