Blogcast 

23.10.2023

Blog 4: Mommy Issues vs. Feminism

I’m aware that my fan base does not consist of a majority of women.
I’m not gon lie, if I didn’t know myself and my story and had read some of the things I have expressed in my art (read poetry), I might have thought of my persona as anti-woman too.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t be Victoria Mabelle if I didn’t address the stuff anybody wants to talk about out of fear of the backlash that comes with it. Meanwhile, I’m starting to like this shit, getting dragged only to find out I was speaking facts. So here we go again.

It’s said that a woman’s relationship with her mom shapes her relationship with other women in her life. The same goes for a woman’s father.  
I had three prominent mother figures in my life, my biological mother, my stepmother, and my foster mother. The first two weren’t very welcoming to me, as far as I can remember. My biological mother gave us up, and my stepmother, in my opinion, kept my father away from me.

My foster mother took me in as a teenager and reinstated my feminine instincts, even if I wasn’t consciously aware of that back then. 
She had the results to show for it. It might be biased because she was an elder, but oh well.
She was married and had four daughters and adopted children who loved and respected her. All her daughters were mothers too, and my foster mom was a real matriarch. She taught her daughters to respect and support each other.  

I was living with three foster sisters, and besides the normal catty girl stuff, there was never any form of animosity between us as far as I could remember.
Even though we were not related by blood, we formed a sisterhood as foster sisters.
We would do dance battles in our room to cultural Suriname music, do each other’s hair, go out to parties (that we had no business being at) with the older ones, and do all sorts of dumb shit together and then cover up for each other. #nostalgia 
I felt comforted and at home until my 15th birthday came around.

I came home from school, and my foster mom knocked on my door. She was devastated. She said to me,“ Mabelle it is your birthday, and I thought I’d call your mother just to get to know her better and to surprise you”. But the reply she got was not the nicest thing a mother would say. My foster mother, a mother bear herself, couldn’t understand it. I’m not sure if I cried about it, I just blocked that emotion, but it always stuck with me.

It was around 2 months later. My foster mom wasn’t so happy with me, out of frustration, she mentioned my mother and how my mother had warned her already. That’s when everything changed. I completely overreacted, as I didn’t come back home from school that day. I was triggered. Not only that, but I no longer felt like I had a fair chance to live my life,with my biological mom influencing my foster mom and my life from a distance. I was back at square one, and I stayed at a friend’s until my new “home”. (More about this in the next few blogs.)

This wasn’t the first time this had happened. While I was living with my foster family, my mother still had guardianship over me, and at every opportunity she had to make my life miserable, she would abuse the power she had left over me.
My classmates would go on school trips, and I couldn’t go, just because…

So coming back to “feeling like I have to pay for surviving my tragic childhood situation and having guilt for doing and wanting better for myself,” “it started there.

Since then, I have seen both sides of womanhood. I can tell the difference between strict but nurturing and manipulative and petty. I understand that not all women are the same.

Now let’s fast-forward to how all the above has shaped my views and how that translates to my private and modeling lives. 

I used to get into sisterhood-type communities and initiatives, but in my personal experience, it always ended up being a facade that was being used to look better in public by association. Maybe it’s just not for everybody, as I believe in individuality, or maybe it’s no longer appropriate at this time to expect women to not be competitive with one another. I mean, “How does supporting all women but not her because I don’t like her” work?

I used to tell my siblings how I sometimes compared the modeling industry to the hood/ghetto.
It’s like you’ve got a bunch of gangs, and they have a gang leader and gang rules. An enemy of anyone in the gang, especially the leader, is the enemy of everyone in the gang.

Meaning that one woman might not like me, and now all their female empowerment gang members decide they don’t like me either. 

And then you have the “neutral” flipfloppers, who are good with “everyone,” and they might kick it with you and call you sis but won’t defend you behind your back. 

It happens a lot to me when a woman contacts me to collaborate on something together.
Then I get ghosted or canceled last minute without a clear explanation, only to see weeks or months later a post or picture with a certain person I’ve had whatever issue with. And I’m like, “Oh, I see what happened…”

This all shows me that women do have a lot of power that could be used for good if channeled into the right causes and supervised by the right people.  

Surely the feminist ancestors did not agree with how “feminism” is used today, and I do neither.

All in all, I’m not against women’s rights. If you stay long enough in the entertainment industry, you’ll realize how important it is. But I can’t really get into the feminism thing because often the women that resonated with that word had the most anti-woman behavior behind closed doors in my experiences.

Having more than a platonic friendship with women became too difficult for me to bear. I ended up having male gay BFFs that I would rather hang out with.
And maybe being so much around men, also at work (photographers and producers), might have made my energy towards women more masculine.
I’m mostly the one who’s practical and non-emotional, and one thing I’m gonna do is avoid conflict as much as possible. I let a lot of stuff slide until I don’t which somehow always turns me into the bad guy, which is very ironic.

So again, am I anti-women? No, I just refuse to deal with certain characters. Whenever I criticize women’s behavior toward one another, it’s never out of hate; it’s just deep disappointment.

Because I know firsthand and feel deeply how hurtful and damaging this could be.
For the longest time, I felt bullied for stating my opinion and holding us accountable. 
But lately, I see more and more women calling things out for what they are. 
So I am taking the emotional distress and financial losses I went through as one for the team.

And I don’t think it’s fair to be perceived as anti-woman for not agreeing to certain antics. God knows my heart and my real intentions, so I believe that in the end, the good will outdo the bad.

Five years ago, when I was living in Belgium, I heard my foster mother had passed.
I never had the chance to rekindle that bond as an adult, but I’m forever grateful.
I dedicated this FB post to her: Rest in Heaven Mrs Griffith ˚ʚ♡ɞ˚
            
© C’estMabelleVictoire 

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