SeekingSolace[dot]Net

Feminism: Part 2

I held off on responding to the comments on my previous post for a while, for a few reasons. 1) I wanted to see where the comment conversation led. 2) I wanted to gather my thoughts appropriately. 3) I was busy knitting.

I’m going to respond directly to the comments before I deal with my own thoughts on the matter, so we’ll start from the top, with Joel’s comment:

It comes off as complaining to me with no real attempts at solutions.

Well, this is, after all, only ONE post from each of those blogs…there are lots of solutions posed on those blogs, you just have to…*ahem*…read the rest of the posts. My linking of these posts was really as an introduction, not so much as the be-all end-all to the problem of a patriarchy.

And most of these are social realities, not institutional or legal ones.

Does this invalidate the fact that they are realities, though? Just because there’s no law that says women must be paid less than men doesn’t change the fact that women are paid less than men. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to fix the problem. I’d also like to point out that some of the offenses against women absolutely are legal ones…or at least, they’re enacted in the legal system until someone with a brain figures it out…

The fact we’ve never had a female president, for instance, in a representative democracy where everybody has one vote, should raise some flags. I don’t believe it is because of a lack of female authority on the matter — after all, women outnumber men, and therefore have more votes — but lack of good candidates.

This, in essence, implies that the lack of female candidates is not due to the fact that women don’t/can’t/shouldn’t vote (common patriarchal assumptions), but is instead due to the fact that women suck at being politicians (also a common patriarchal assumption). It assigns no responsibility to the fact that women in politics are often treated by the media as dysfunctional, incompetent, “raging bitches,” or as the token female.

Think, for instance, about how Hillary Clinton is portrayed. When she shows no emotion and “acts like a man,” she gets derided for being cold and unfeminine. When she shows a little emotion during a coffeeshop meeting with women in New Hampshire, it’s immediately assumed both that she was crying (which she was not), and that she calculated the whole thing as a sympathy ploy. Either way, she’s screwed. She’s too feminine, not feminine enough, or downright manipulative (which is a trait frequently used to portray women).

Personally, I don’t want Hillary to be president. But it’s not because she’s a BAD candidate. She’s just as qualified as everyone else, and in fact, I think she’s more than capable of being president. Just because I disagree with some of her policies does not make her unqualified to be a candidate.

I’ll only touch briefly on the “representative democracy” and “everybody has one vote,” comments here, because I feel that the corruptions in our government are a separate (though linked) issue. Woman suffrage in this country was hotly contested by many women who thought it wasn’t a woman’s place to vote…and it’s likely that at least some of this sentiment was passed down. Also, our voter turnout is nowhere near a level at which I feel this is a representative democracy. Now, if we had compulsory voting (like in Australia), or even measures to bring up voting nationwide (Mexico, for instance, has a national holiday on voting day…everyone in the country gets the day off), and our voter turnout was very high, I’d accept the fact that it was a representative democracy. Until that happens, we can’t even begin to discuss the impact of female votes/female candidates seriously.

There are a few reasons why girls tend to stick with girl things and guys with guy things. Mainly, it’s just more comfortable, perhaps. But you don’t tend to find a lot of female software engineers, economists, scientists, or politicians; all things which I’m very interested in, but unfortunately find I can’t communicate with basically any women about.

As a female IT worker, and someone who has communicated on many levels about coding languages before, I sort of take slight to that. As much as we all like to be special, I can’t be the only female on the planet with computer skills (take for instance, my mother, who works in IT, or the head of my department, who is a female web developer). “Girl things” are more comfortable for girls because society deems it to be so. “Boy things” are more comfortable for boys for the same reason.

It’s all a question of society/culture. And those who break out of that societal expectation are ridiculed and belittled. Women who achieve success by aggressively competing in the “man’s” business world are bitches. Women who remain single or childless (or both) are frigid or unwomanly. This is also bad for men who break out of their “roles,” who are accused of being effeminate (which, you might note, makes being womanly a bad thing - both sides are losing here). Think of all the offensive terms men call each other, and you’ll find the list riddled with female body parts, terms for females, and homophobic ideas (which is another post for another time). This is society’s definition of “comfortable” gender roles. The expectations are unfair, and constantly reinforced.

Sure, the guys are a big part of the problem. Many girls get chased away from internet communities that are very male-dominated. Either the bottom 5% of people troll them, or they fawn over them, and it’s enough pressure to make them give up.

My argument is that it’s not individual actions of 5% of internet communities. It’s a societal epidemic. 5% of men certainly couldn’t keep me away from science if that was what I wanted to do. It’s the fact that girls are raised in a society that constantly bombards them with messages of female submissiveness, female sexualization, and appropriate gender roles. It’s why girls get babydolls and boys get Legos.

It grows largely out of the fear of being judged. I’ve often thought about this (especially as a future teacher; we went through a unit on female bullying at the beginning of this semester). If I have children, which, at the moment, is not preferable to me, I want to help them break down gender roles. Ideally, I want my children to live life to the fullest by being exposed to all facets of it. But I won’t be the only factor in my children’s lives (this is part of why I really don’t want to have them…I don’t trust society, frankly). I would have to isolate my daughters from all the other girls in school and in the neighborhood who play with Barbies in order to keep them from being exposed to unfair gender stereotypes and ideals (not to mention television…). I would have to isolate my sons from all the other boys who want to play war and watch pro wrestling in order to keep them from being exposed to the male expectation of violence (again, this is not including the media). When I won’t buy my daughter Bratz dolls because I think they’re offensive, or I won’t let her go to school in skimpy clothes, she’ll hate me. When I won’t let my son have toy guns because I think they promote male violence, or I won’t let him join the wrestling team, he’ll hate me. Not to mention all the opportunities it will give them to go behind my back and do these things (or worse), and continue to be inculcated into a culture that forces women into roles as sex objects, submissives, and incompetents, and forces men into roles as morons, monsters, and misogynists.

Even if I could control every aspect of my childrens’ lives and choices (hahahaha, I know), I still couldn’t control the way they would be treated in society. I lived the life unpopular in school (Joel knows this). I didn’t dress well or wear makeup, I was into nerdy things like computers, and I got picked on a lot for being in the “smart class” (even by other “smart class” girls…I was too nerdy even for them). And I would never want to subject my kids to it. Do I think it’s the right way to grow up? Absolutely. But (again, assuming I could actually control my childrens’ behavior) could I watch my daughters suffer the disdain of their classmates because their mom won’t let them wear makeup because it suggests that women aren’t beautiful in their own right? I don’t know if I could stand it. Could I watch my sons get beat up for being effeminate because their mom taught them to knit (and be productive) rather than send them to football practice (which promotes male aggression)? Absolutely not. My kids would be social pariahs and their lives would be difficult and I wouldn’t want to watch them suffer in a society that promotes values I hate.

Here we have the vicious cycle (again, this is specifically in the raising of children, not in adult actions). Teach my kids to be anti-patriarchy and watch them get tormented their whole lives, or let them buy Bratz dolls and guns and consider myself a terrible mother for allowing them to be swayed by images of female submission and male dominance. Obviously, I can teach my kids to think critically, but I’d also like to think that the legions of college-aged men who get drunk and fight each other and the legions of college-aged women who concern themselves more with appearance than school smarts had parents who attempted to teach them critical thinking as well.

Obviously, these are my opinions and interpretations. I’d be interested to see a study on the behavior/attitudes of the children of feminist parents, and see how strong an impact societal messages have on the development of childhood behaviors.

The best thing women can do for equality in these fields is to be capable in them and keep a thick skin. Trust me, men suffer a lot of criticism in these arenas as well.

Frankly, this comment astounds me. “The best thing you can do is get better at being like men, and not get offended when we deem you unworthy.” The idea that society is just like this and will never change is an idea I refuse to which I refuse to ascribe. If I bought into that idea, I wouldn’t be in theatre, or in teaching. Listen, the status quo sucks. And it’s only the status quo because we let it happen. We are human beings, we are all capable of controlling our actions and behaviors, and society is made up of us. If we don’t fix it, who the hell will?

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My brain hurts right now. It’s taken me 3 hours to write this post. This discussion is to be continued, but I’m very interested to hear opinions and read comments in the meantime. Please don’t be afraid to share your ideas and thoughts.