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On the reinforcement of gender roles.
Went to worldcon! It was awesome! Hopefully I shall post more details presently!
At the moment, though, inspired by a recent post by a friend (friends-locked, or I'd link), I'd like to post the results of an experiment. See, my mother raised me feminist, and did a damn fine job of it-- I think I'm more comfortable with being female, and yet confident to do what I want with my life, than most other women I know. A large part of this was my unconscious construction of blinders that keep me from noticing and reacting to the tremendous number of signals I receive, all the time, telling me that:
1) because I'm female, I should act in certain ways
2) because I'm female, I should not act in certain ways, and in fact would not be physically/mentally/emotionally able to do so
3) because I'm female, I have certain qualities (usually negative, but also positive)
4) because I'm female, my purpose is to serve, care for, and please others, especially males
5) all other females and males should also act accordingly.
So I decided to try taking the blinders off. For exactly one twenty-four hour period last week, I would make a note of every single thing I noticed which reminded me of these messages.
4:15pm — On the street, a passing couple arrives at the corner just as the light turns; he says he’s sad they missed it. She pokes him in the arm — “Oh, be a man!” — and walks across the street against the light.
4:20pm — I start reading In the House of Brede, which I suspect of being feminist eventually, and starts off with a description of a woman who’s unusually powerful and accomplished:
“She has women and men working for her.”
“That must be hard on the men.”
5:20pm — I arrive at a party with my colleagues from my fellowship program. Can’t help but notice that, for the first fifteen minutes, the person holding the floor conversationally is a (admittedly awesome, friendly, sensitive, supportive, etc.) white guy.
6:15pm — One of my colleagues, showing off her two-month-old baby, talks about how she thinks there’s something about being a mother that makes her more willing/delighted to spend hours just staring at the baby, which “men just don’t seem to have.” The rest of the room start telling the father how he must be looking forward to starting to teach the baby sports in a few years.
7:48pm — My colleague with the baby talks about sending the baby to day care when she’s ready to go back to work. There is no discussion of her husband taking time off to split taking care of the baby.
8:55pm — Dinner over, my male colleague offers to help clean up, as a prelude to leaving. Our host(ess) tells him not to bother. Immediately, the four women (and my other male colleague’s boyfriend) in the room start cleaning up, while my two male colleagues sit on the couch and chat. They are joined by me (when I notice this), my male colleague’s boyfriend, and the other lesbian in the group, while all the straight women continue to clean.
9:05pm — Coming home, I go online to read Not Always Right, a blog of ever-so-wrong things customers do/say. Find an entry about a man who bought a flat-screen tv and then infuriated his wife by always having friends over for sports and irresponsibility… so the salesclerk recommended she call her “girlfriends” over for chick flicks, and concludes “Her husbands’ beer buddies never stood a chance.”
9:12pm — I start writing this list. Lila says, “Just include ‘6:15pm — Lila watches a compilation of the best of MGM musicals,’ and you’ve got it right there.”
9:25pm — I read a story about a female clerk who had a male client stare at her chest, lean over the counter, and tear off her name badge.
9:28pm — I can’t tell any more which of these stories have gender in them… I decide, for the sake of my wrists, only to include things I’m sure about, not things that just have shades of “this woman is portrayed as being dumb,” “this woman is portrayed as being entitled,” “this story is about a woman’s breasts, or a man’s penis,” ”this is a story about a woman prioritizing her appearance over her kids’ health” (two of those so far) “this woman seems to be sexually active,” or “this story about a man threatening to shoot a woman is portrayed as funny.”
9:33pm — Can I count a male customer being an idiot, then criticizing the clerk, rolling his eyes, and saying, “I can’t believe they hired you. I bet it’s only because you’re pretty!”? here. I rather think I can.
9:35pm — How about a customer thinking that Moby Dick sounds “ew!” and asking for a copy with a “manlier title”? I will admit this one sounds like a joke-- but the point is not that these be serious assertions of gender roles-- just reminders that they exist, and how constant these reminders can be.
9:58pm — What about one entitled “Be Prepared… for Some Womanly Advice,” where the point is that the clerk gave the (male) customer advice about his love-life, which proved successful?
10:01pm — Oh, fuck everything: Blargh.
10:13pm — Customer screams in anger that the whipped cream on his mocha is “too girly.” I go to bed.
8:36am — Get up, go into the bathroom, read The Funny Times on the toilet, mostly a column by Bruce Cameron about getting a flat tire. I’m not sure whether to include the lines “When my daughters were learning to drive, I painstakingly walked them through the steps for changing a tire, which they dutifully recorded in their notes as, “Step 1: Call Dad.”” Since he goes on to talk about how his father is very far away in a nursing home, maybe that has nothing to do with gender, and is just about kids.
But then we get to the line, “Luckily, I’m a man, so I don’t need to read no stinkin’ instructions.” He attempts something which has no effect whatsoever: “I’m a man, so I kept at it for about five minutes.”
In the end, he calls road service: “The driver very efficiently changed the tire while I stood around and talked hunting and sports to prove I was as manly as she was.”
Again, that's funny and kinda feminist-- but the purpose of this experiment is not to argue that the whole world is sexist so much as to point out the fucking omnipresence of gender roles and expectations. Of which, dude, lots.
10:05am - Go onto lj. Read![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kmd’s thoughtful IBARW entry about the intersection of feminism and racism.
10:45am — Talking on the phone with a friend, we both mention in passing a mutual friend’s household in which they eat out a lot—because the female member of the household has health problems which make it very difficult, and the two (healthy) male members “don’t cook.”
11:05am — Walking by a copy of the Metro on the street, I notice that one of their stories seems to be about the fact that you really can have a relationship in which the woman is taller than the man. No, really! Sure, it’s funny, but these people have done it!
11:40am — Readrosalarian’s entry about how in the professional American release of CLAMP’s series Wish, one of the characters who had been translated as male in other translations is now translated as female. (People who know more CLAMP than I, what’s the deal with this?)
11:50am — Miss Manners points out 1920s hat etiquette for gentlemen.
12:03pm — Reading The Comics Curmudgeon, run across a strip of “Blondie.” And a strip of “Hagar the Horrible,” where Helga berates Hagar for going to France, home of “scantily clad dancing girls.” And one of “Curtis,” in which the mother is portrayed as primarily there to tend to her son and husband, ending with the line, “A mother should love her child more than her husband!” And why are the ants in “Family Circus” called “he” when most ants you see are female? Oh, and a “Beetle Bailey” where one of the soldiers offers the Sexy Secretary tm a small box which she thinks will contain an engagement ring, but turns out to have a tiny, tiny thong! Ha, ha! And a “Crock” where a male character asks a librarian for the book “Pickup Lines to Get Women,” leading to the librarian saying, “Great choice! That’s what I used to catch this beauty,” pulling out (from behind his desk) a young woman who seems somewhat cross-eyed and possibly buck-toothed, though it’s hard to tell with the art in Crock. The guy leaves without the book, anyway. And a “Mary Worth” whole series about how horrified the female character is that the guy she’s been flirting with seems interested in sex. And...and...and...
...and I don't last 24 hours. Because now I'm avoiding the internet, or books, or anything else, because I know I'll see something else I need to write down. And I don't want to think about it anymore. So I give up, and go to co-lead my therapy group: "Coping Skills for Women Trauma Survivors."
...
Note that this is just things that jumped out at me. I didn't analyze clothing and hairstyle, or the fact that I was doing the laundry, or anything else under the surface. That's 1200 words of nothing but in-your-face gender-role reinscriptions.
And I try to ignore these, most of the time. Try to say that I am simply myself, try to be guided by my own beliefs, opinions and desires on this subject, not those which are all around me, constantly, insisting that I am something else. And I'm amazed at how often I succeed.
But doing this experiment makes me wonder. If I didn't have to spend all this effort insisting against all odds on being myself-- if I could just live in a world where people like me were the norm, or at very least widely accepted-- what could I do with all that energy? What could I be?
--R
Reading: C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength. Elizabeth Enright, Thimble Summer. Rumer Godden, In this House of Brede.
At the moment, though, inspired by a recent post by a friend (friends-locked, or I'd link), I'd like to post the results of an experiment. See, my mother raised me feminist, and did a damn fine job of it-- I think I'm more comfortable with being female, and yet confident to do what I want with my life, than most other women I know. A large part of this was my unconscious construction of blinders that keep me from noticing and reacting to the tremendous number of signals I receive, all the time, telling me that:
1) because I'm female, I should act in certain ways
2) because I'm female, I should not act in certain ways, and in fact would not be physically/mentally/emotionally able to do so
3) because I'm female, I have certain qualities (usually negative, but also positive)
4) because I'm female, my purpose is to serve, care for, and please others, especially males
5) all other females and males should also act accordingly.
So I decided to try taking the blinders off. For exactly one twenty-four hour period last week, I would make a note of every single thing I noticed which reminded me of these messages.
4:15pm — On the street, a passing couple arrives at the corner just as the light turns; he says he’s sad they missed it. She pokes him in the arm — “Oh, be a man!” — and walks across the street against the light.
4:20pm — I start reading In the House of Brede, which I suspect of being feminist eventually, and starts off with a description of a woman who’s unusually powerful and accomplished:
“She has women and men working for her.”
“That must be hard on the men.”
5:20pm — I arrive at a party with my colleagues from my fellowship program. Can’t help but notice that, for the first fifteen minutes, the person holding the floor conversationally is a (admittedly awesome, friendly, sensitive, supportive, etc.) white guy.
6:15pm — One of my colleagues, showing off her two-month-old baby, talks about how she thinks there’s something about being a mother that makes her more willing/delighted to spend hours just staring at the baby, which “men just don’t seem to have.” The rest of the room start telling the father how he must be looking forward to starting to teach the baby sports in a few years.
7:48pm — My colleague with the baby talks about sending the baby to day care when she’s ready to go back to work. There is no discussion of her husband taking time off to split taking care of the baby.
8:55pm — Dinner over, my male colleague offers to help clean up, as a prelude to leaving. Our host(ess) tells him not to bother. Immediately, the four women (and my other male colleague’s boyfriend) in the room start cleaning up, while my two male colleagues sit on the couch and chat. They are joined by me (when I notice this), my male colleague’s boyfriend, and the other lesbian in the group, while all the straight women continue to clean.
9:05pm — Coming home, I go online to read Not Always Right, a blog of ever-so-wrong things customers do/say. Find an entry about a man who bought a flat-screen tv and then infuriated his wife by always having friends over for sports and irresponsibility… so the salesclerk recommended she call her “girlfriends” over for chick flicks, and concludes “Her husbands’ beer buddies never stood a chance.”
9:12pm — I start writing this list. Lila says, “Just include ‘6:15pm — Lila watches a compilation of the best of MGM musicals,’ and you’ve got it right there.”
9:25pm — I read a story about a female clerk who had a male client stare at her chest, lean over the counter, and tear off her name badge.
9:28pm — I can’t tell any more which of these stories have gender in them… I decide, for the sake of my wrists, only to include things I’m sure about, not things that just have shades of “this woman is portrayed as being dumb,” “this woman is portrayed as being entitled,” “this story is about a woman’s breasts, or a man’s penis,” ”this is a story about a woman prioritizing her appearance over her kids’ health” (two of those so far) “this woman seems to be sexually active,” or “this story about a man threatening to shoot a woman is portrayed as funny.”
9:33pm — Can I count a male customer being an idiot, then criticizing the clerk, rolling his eyes, and saying, “I can’t believe they hired you. I bet it’s only because you’re pretty!”? here. I rather think I can.
9:35pm — How about a customer thinking that Moby Dick sounds “ew!” and asking for a copy with a “manlier title”? I will admit this one sounds like a joke-- but the point is not that these be serious assertions of gender roles-- just reminders that they exist, and how constant these reminders can be.
9:58pm — What about one entitled “Be Prepared… for Some Womanly Advice,” where the point is that the clerk gave the (male) customer advice about his love-life, which proved successful?
10:01pm — Oh, fuck everything: Blargh.
10:13pm — Customer screams in anger that the whipped cream on his mocha is “too girly.” I go to bed.
8:36am — Get up, go into the bathroom, read The Funny Times on the toilet, mostly a column by Bruce Cameron about getting a flat tire. I’m not sure whether to include the lines “When my daughters were learning to drive, I painstakingly walked them through the steps for changing a tire, which they dutifully recorded in their notes as, “Step 1: Call Dad.”” Since he goes on to talk about how his father is very far away in a nursing home, maybe that has nothing to do with gender, and is just about kids.
But then we get to the line, “Luckily, I’m a man, so I don’t need to read no stinkin’ instructions.” He attempts something which has no effect whatsoever: “I’m a man, so I kept at it for about five minutes.”
In the end, he calls road service: “The driver very efficiently changed the tire while I stood around and talked hunting and sports to prove I was as manly as she was.”
Again, that's funny and kinda feminist-- but the purpose of this experiment is not to argue that the whole world is sexist so much as to point out the fucking omnipresence of gender roles and expectations. Of which, dude, lots.
10:05am - Go onto lj. Read
kmd’s thoughtful IBARW entry about the intersection of feminism and racism.10:45am — Talking on the phone with a friend, we both mention in passing a mutual friend’s household in which they eat out a lot—because the female member of the household has health problems which make it very difficult, and the two (healthy) male members “don’t cook.”
11:05am — Walking by a copy of the Metro on the street, I notice that one of their stories seems to be about the fact that you really can have a relationship in which the woman is taller than the man. No, really! Sure, it’s funny, but these people have done it!
11:40am — Read
rosalarian’s entry about how in the professional American release of CLAMP’s series Wish, one of the characters who had been translated as male in other translations is now translated as female. (People who know more CLAMP than I, what’s the deal with this?)11:50am — Miss Manners points out 1920s hat etiquette for gentlemen.
12:03pm — Reading The Comics Curmudgeon, run across a strip of “Blondie.” And a strip of “Hagar the Horrible,” where Helga berates Hagar for going to France, home of “scantily clad dancing girls.” And one of “Curtis,” in which the mother is portrayed as primarily there to tend to her son and husband, ending with the line, “A mother should love her child more than her husband!” And why are the ants in “Family Circus” called “he” when most ants you see are female? Oh, and a “Beetle Bailey” where one of the soldiers offers the Sexy Secretary tm a small box which she thinks will contain an engagement ring, but turns out to have a tiny, tiny thong! Ha, ha! And a “Crock” where a male character asks a librarian for the book “Pickup Lines to Get Women,” leading to the librarian saying, “Great choice! That’s what I used to catch this beauty,” pulling out (from behind his desk) a young woman who seems somewhat cross-eyed and possibly buck-toothed, though it’s hard to tell with the art in Crock. The guy leaves without the book, anyway. And a “Mary Worth” whole series about how horrified the female character is that the guy she’s been flirting with seems interested in sex. And...and...and...
...and I don't last 24 hours. Because now I'm avoiding the internet, or books, or anything else, because I know I'll see something else I need to write down. And I don't want to think about it anymore. So I give up, and go to co-lead my therapy group: "Coping Skills for Women Trauma Survivors."
...
Note that this is just things that jumped out at me. I didn't analyze clothing and hairstyle, or the fact that I was doing the laundry, or anything else under the surface. That's 1200 words of nothing but in-your-face gender-role reinscriptions.
And I try to ignore these, most of the time. Try to say that I am simply myself, try to be guided by my own beliefs, opinions and desires on this subject, not those which are all around me, constantly, insisting that I am something else. And I'm amazed at how often I succeed.
But doing this experiment makes me wonder. If I didn't have to spend all this effort insisting against all odds on being myself-- if I could just live in a world where people like me were the norm, or at very least widely accepted-- what could I do with all that energy? What could I be?
--R
Reading: C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength. Elizabeth Enright, Thimble Summer. Rumer Godden, In this House of Brede.
Re: Your Mileage May Vary(tm)
In terms of my spending energy "railing ineffectively" or "being upset" by the state of the world around me-- well, I agree that it's important to pick your battles when it comes to action. I think that a certain amount of time "railing" against social conditions is a necessary part of becoming conscious and aware of them so that change can happen-- if you got to the point where you were fully aware of them and they were old hat, I imagine the amount of fire and anger would bank down to a low burn.
But the point I was trying to make in talking about the blinders, and in the experiment overall, was that I believe I spend very little conscious energy on either of those things. While I have been noticing and thinking about feminism more actively lately, and I do get pretty pissed off about some things (like the fact that all of my female clients have been raped at some point, where none of the male ones have*), I try to focus that anger into productive work (writing fiction and counseling my clients with an eye towards helping them question and break through ways gender is limiting them).
So (and I realize my phrasing may not have made this clear), when I speak about spending energy on insisting on being myself, it's a relatively unconscious and automatic insistence. It's a matter of the near-unnoticed mental caveat-- "This author just said 'woman is made for man,' and that doesn't fit my truth, and that feels like a rejection of me and a denial of my reality, but I will just put that fact aside for the moment in order to enjoy the book." "This person just refused to walk through the door I was holding open for him, and I feel rebuffed, but I will ignore that feeling because I know it's not worth my time and he might have meant it well." It takes work to "let things slip off," because it means repressing my first reaction. And if that first reaction weren't there, it would mean I wasn't connected with other people or the world at all, and that doesn't seem worthwhile.
The other way that things don't slip off is that the mental images formed by the world around me create my mental schema for how things "should be." Take kissing. I have a thousand images from books, movies, TV, comics, news, and watching other people of how to kiss, how it should look. When I go to kiss someone, all of those images are present in my mind, and (unless I very consciously try not to) they influence how I hold my body, whether I close my eyes or open them, where I feel comfortable kissing someone, etc, etc, etc. And almost all of those images are very, very, very gendered. I can consciously question them-- but unless I do (and even if I do), they're going to be in my unconscious, telling me "UR DOIN IT WRONG." That's what I mean by it taking energy.
*Note to the Universe: I do not want my male clients to be raped, thank you very much, they have enough to deal with as it is. I just wish that some of my female clients could share the not-being-raped experience.
Re: Your Mileage May Vary(tm)
That makes sense to me (thank you!), and furthermore at least partially explains why you find such things more tiring than I do. You have that first reaction of feeling rejected and denied, which requires effort to repress; I don't have that reaction in the first place so repressing it doesn't take effort. (When other people react differently than I do, I like understanding why. I'm also very glad that the answer doesn't in any way boil down to "because you're female and I'm not.")
I wonder whether I used to have that reaction? I mean, there are certainly lots of ways in which I don't live up to popular stereotypes of what men are supposed to be like, and there was a time when that bothered me more than it does now.
And if that first reaction weren't there, it would mean I wasn't connected with other people or the world at all...
I wonder whether that is necessary. I'll grant that I am frequently less connected with other people than you might wish to be, but I think I do okay, despite not having that first reaction much.
When I go to kiss someone, all of those images are present in my mind... telling me "UR DOIN IT WRONG."
Yeah, I do that too.
Try kissing someone on stage, for an audience. It's... well, it's an experience.
Also, I think my experience of dating (and kissing) women taller than me did a fair bit to burn this reaction out of me. Because, really, there is no possible way I can look like those images, when I'm kissing a woman who'd be 3-4 inches taller than me even if she weren't wearing heels that make her even taller. And I find it a lot easier to not be bothered by what I can't possibly help, than by what I maybe theoretically somehow could even though really I can't and have no good reason to even try anyway.
Re: Your Mileage May Vary(tm)
I wonder whether that is necessary. I'll grant that I am frequently less connected with other people than you might wish to be, but I think I do okay, despite not having that first reaction much.
I'm not sure, either. I've trained myself over the last several years to be very aware of my emotional reactions to things, because they often give me useful clues to what's going on with me or others. So it's possible I'm just picking up on subtler things?
But I'd love to hear more about how you've had less reaction than you used to, because that sounds like it might be really useful and cool.
Re: Your Mileage May Vary(tm)
It seems plausible that, under those circumstances, being presented with models of more typical masculinity (or humanity, or Americanism), would have felt more prescriptive. I don't remember it feeling that way, but it seems like it might have, and I was sufficiently out of touch with my feelings that I might not have been aware of feeling that way. I know I don't feel that way now.
Over the years I have gradually become much more comfortable with who I am overall. And so no particular aspect of myself really bothers me much in that way. I am myself, and for the most part the degree to which that correlates to any particular standard is somewhere between "interesting data" and "irrelevant." There are still things about myself that I'd like to change, but for my own reasons, not to better meet anyone else's standards.
Re: Your Mileage May Vary(tm)
Stupid brains with rewriteable memory.