“Women laugh together only in freedom, in the recognition of independence and female bonding.”

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

My life is transforming again. I am once again trying to make space for myself while realizing my incredible and unconscious diligence as a meek, small, and submissive woman. The sickening realization that I have more layers to peel off in this human development of mine is made worse as I examine each layer of patriarchal messaging I have built myself with. I thought I was done with this. But here I am again. However, this time I will try something new. 

This time I will break free from patriarchy with laughter – the unruly joy that is so antithetical to the rigid, appeasing woman I thought I should be. Sue Monk Kidd laments that “religion is the last patriarchal stronghold” and I believed this when I read it years ago, but now I see it in myself. I see the stronghold patriarchy has on my female life as a wife and a mother. Past attempts to break free have been marked by serious conversations, sobbing, and lots and lots of reading – but this time, this time will be marked with laughter.

Not empty laughter, but the true, full-body, free laughter that Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves, describes as “unrestrained, not caring about showing your tonsils, letting your belly hang out, letting your breasts shake” kind of laughter. The type of laughter that defies the patriarchy and is inspired by inappropriate behavior – the laughter of what Estés calls “the dirty Goddesses” – the loud laughter that does not care what a body looks like, only what it feels like.

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At an Exponent II Retreat, my friends and I performed a skit we created from the 1960s book Fascinating Womanhood. The skit was a comedy based on the book’s appalling content (for example: “To be charming” is one of three reasons a wife shows “child-like sauciness” to her husband. It’s a real book. Ask your grandma.) Preparing the skit was a riot: four grown women rolled with laughter, adding commentary until we were lost in a breathtaking, toppling display of wild laughter. 

But I was horrified, too, realizing that I am a 1960s “fascinating” woman. Estés proclaims that laughter “is sacred because it is so healing.” I needed that sacred laughter with those women about that subject because facing my smallness is painful. Part of my healing, part of my liberation, happened in that cabin with other women as we whooped and hollered and peed a little with laughter.

In the book Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn G. Heilbrun declares, “In the end, the changed life for women will be marked, I feel certain, by laughter.” I want this type of change; the change that is marked, not by weeping or fasting or prayer, but by laughter. It feels rebellious and true and delightfully womanly.

My body is breaking free from the layers of submissive beauty and I want to laugh with abandon. I want to sacred laugh like I did with my friends at Retreat. This laugh is a marker of a woman’s changed life from conformity to freedom. Because, “when the laughter makes people glad they are alive, happy to be here, more conscious of love, heightened with eros, when it lifts their sadness and severs them from anger, that is sacred.”

Photo by Ainara Oto on Unsplash

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