The painting on the wall

A few years ago, I had an assignment in my Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies class, in which I was required to write down at least five things every day for several weeks that made me think about gender. For instance, I might notice that in one of my classes, most of the girls were wearing skirts, or that the signs labeling a bathroom for men or women are blue and pink, respectively. Or, I might notice subversive gender roles, like the fact that one of my male friends owns about six pink shirts, which is probably four more than I do. The following is a slightly-modified copy of the essay I wrote after that project.

 

We live in a world whose social structure is stratified first and foremost by our sex and the gender roles that are “supposed” to follow along with it. Gender, and the ideas of sex and sexuality that nearly always surround it, is a set of roles and ideologies that have become so ingrained in our society that we only rarely, if ever, stop to give it any thought. It is the painting on the bedroom wall that you only notice when it’s crooked, the song you stop hearing because it sounds every time your phone rings, the sock on your foot that you only notice when it starts to fall down.

We are surrounded by gender, but only aware of it when something challenges our understanding of the way it “should” work, and even then not always conscious of why we are upset by that discrepancy. This message is sent through everything from blatant marketing of pink things for girls and blue for boys to common expressions like “Man up!” or “You throw like a girl.” In this essay, I will examine some specific examples of these things, as well as include some general observations about my experience in the context of our class readings and discussions.

This project first and foremost led me to a new awareness of the ultimate intersectionality of sex, gender and sexuality, in more than just the seemingly obvious senses. For instance, when I was educated about the differences between sex and gender, I was taught that sex was physical, while gender was mental. However, during our class discussion of the movie Boys Don’t Cry, I came to the sudden realization that sex is not merely what’s on the outside, but also a consciousness of being part of that body and identifying with it (or not). There is a difference between a woman who exhibits so-called “masculine” behavior or styles, such as wearing her hair short or playing football, and an individual born in a female body who knows inherently that he should be in a male one. Following that logic, then, gender is not just whether you think of yourself as male or female, but quite separately, a series of ideologies and actions that are performed based on cultural ideas of what defines masculinity and femininity.

At the most basic level, we know that these ideas are socially constructed because when examined with an unbiased eye, we constantly find differences in gender roles between different times and places. For instance, because I work in a children’s clothing store and virtually all our baby clothing is either blue or pink, I am trained to ask customers, “Are you shopping for a boy or a girl?” If I lived a hundred years ago, I would be recommending the virginal blue (representing Mary) for a baby girl, while boys would get the more masculine “toned-down-red” color, pink. Today, though, these ideas have been switched such that the toning down of red emasculates it, while blue stands for the “strong” baby boy. Clearly, there is nothing fundamentally “male” or “female” about a color, but these ideas are still so crammed into our heads that a man told me at work the other day that he “wasn’t comfortable buying anything pink or blue because [he] didn’t know if the baby was a boy or a girl.”

But we can analyze even deeper than that. Note, for instance, my description of a baby boy as “strong,” above all else. As discussed in, “X: A Fabulous Child’s Story,” (a fantastic short article) when friends and relatives come to visit a new baby, “the first thing they asked was what kind of a baby X was…nobody knew what to say. They couldn’t say, ‘Look at her cute little dimples!’ And they couldn’t say, ‘Look at his husky little biceps!’” (Gould 109). Anyone who’s ever seen an unfamiliar adult interact with a child knows these things are true—but most never stop to wonder where they got these ideas, or even to realize that they are just ideas, rather than facts of life.

This, in fact, was one of the things that most interested me going into this project—the realization that as much as I think about gender and sexuality on a regular basis, whether due to classes or intense discussions at WoCo: A Feminist House, Drew’s feminist living community, I rarely think about my own gender. For instance, while I might think about the fact that I like girls, a clear source of contention for some people because I am one, I rarely make the leap towards actually thinking about my gender, even when contemplating this contention. This fact is particularly interesting in the context of the word “lesbian.” There is no analogous word for a gay man, a single noun that means, literally, “a man who is sexually interested in other men.”

Going by this logic, it would stand to reason that I would think of my gender by default when considering sexuality. Michael Kimmel’s article “Men and Women’s Studies: Premises, Perils, and Promise” may be of some use explaining this seeming contradiction. In it, he quotes one woman as saying, “‘To me, race is visible every day, because race is how I am not privileged in our culture. Race is invisible to you, because it’s how you are privileged’” (Kimmel 25). In other words, while it is certainly true that being a woman has made me less privileged as a whole, because it’s not an absence of privilege that I think about regularly or am often consciously aware of, being unprivileged in terms of sexuality often takes the higher priority in my mind.

The other possible reason for this barrier relates to the insistence upon dichotomies within American society. Individuals are considered gay or straight, male or female, masculine or feminine. Though this idea is occasionally accepted when it comes to sexuality, I can say from personal experience that even after receiving a lengthy explanation as to why neither of those descriptions quite describes my own sexuality, even close friends will often persist in referring to me as a lesbian. “Bisexual” has become an accepted term among some individuals, but is still scorned as flaky or even traitorous by many of those who do identify as definitively gay or straight—and the options are even slimmer when it comes to sex and gender.

As Fausto-Sterling says in her article “The Five Sexes,” “biologically speaking, there are many gradations running from female to male” (21). She asserts that while five sexes would be a more accurate description of sex range, it would still be insufficient to categorize the wide scale of sex possibilities. Gender is widely considered similarly inflexible, starting “with assignment to a sex category on the basis of what the genitalia look like at birth,” followed by the child being “dressed or adorned in a way that displays the category” (Lorber 142). There is no room for little boys in dresses or baby girls in tiny conductor’s outfits, but once the matter is truly recognized and considered, it’s nearly impossible to discern why these things are true.

Even men and women who have been educated to think outside these parameters—including those who do so, every day—easily fall into these patterns. For instance, a male friend that I know truly respects women on a deeply spiritual and personal level yelled, “Bros before hoes!” when his friend declined the opportunity to watch a TV show with him in favor of spending time with his girlfriend. Another male friend, one who is usually adamantly anti-gender- and sex-typing, said during a conversation, “Well, if it was a baby girl, she couldn’t wear that outfit,” pointing at one that had green stripes and was hanging in a section with many blue items.

The problem is that these stereotypes and ideas are all around us, all the time. Some of these observations I might have caught even without the gender log assignment, but others I realized happened every day, and I had never noticed them before. Some students in our class mentioned things like putting on a bra as reminding them of their gender, while for me it was simply something that I do and don’t think about. Though I certainly have my idiosyncrasies, the particular pet peeves that I notice and protest in every-day life, another girl might think nothing of the fact that during my Gender and Culture class, a girl said, “I don’t know anything about sports, so guys…” We are so bombarded by these messages that they have worked their way into our very language, body image and way of dress, yet they rarely enter the conscious mind. As a result, we continue to pass by, not noticing a thing unless the painting falls sideways.

References

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1993. “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are Not Enough.” The Sciences March/April 1993: 20-25.

Gould, Lois. 1972. “X: A Fabulous Child’s Story.” Pp. 108 to 113 in Learning Gender.

Kimmel, Michael. 1996. “Men and Women’s Studies: Premises, Perils, and Promise.”  Pp. 24-28 in Women: Images and Realities: A Multicultural Anthology, 4^th edition, edited by Amy Kesselman, Lily McNair, Nancy Schniedewind, with Susan Kelly. 2009. McGraw Hill: NY.

Lorber, Judith. 1994. “The Social Construction of Gender.” Pp. 142-145 in Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings, 4^th edition, edited by Susan Shaw and Janet Lee. McGraw Hill: NY

Just wash it

In my senior seminar a couple weeks ago, we read a book called Get to Work. Basically, it’s a self-described manifesto by Linda Hirshman about how choice feminism has completely killed the feminist movement. For those of you who don’t know, choice feminism is essentially the idea that if women have the power to make decisions, they must exercise that right, and that as fellow feminists we have no right to judge women for those choices. According to Hirshman, that’s all basically a bunch of bull designed to keep women from feeling guilty when they make what she categorically describes as the “wrong” choices—specifically, an educated woman’s choice to be a homemaker or stay-at-home mom.

To be totally honest, I’m not sure where exactly I come down on this issue. I completely understand the desire to stay at home with your child if that’s something you’re financially capable of, and I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to call it a betrayal to feminism if you make that choice. But I definitely agree with some of Hirshman’s other points, like the idea that even as adults, we can only know what we’ve been taught. If you’ve been raised your entire life thinking a certain way, that thought process isn’t going to be something you consciously notice. We don’t make choices in a vacuum, which means that if you’ve been raised in a heteronormative, patriarchal society—which, let’s face it, you have—that fact is going to color your decision-making.

For example. I was visiting my former/future roommate (we lived together last summer, and plan to live together again after I graduate in May)  last night, and I started thinking about some things that happened over the summer—specifically, housework-related things.

I just want to be clear before I go any further into this that David is one of my favorite people on earth, and we are still going to live together next year, so don’t think that this entire thing was an exercise in failure. Actually, I’m more interested in the strategies we developed to coexist than in complaining—though, to be honest, poking fun at him definitely played a role too. It’s also probably important to know that neither David nor I is even the slightest bit interested in dealing with drama, and are very straight-forward with each other when we don’t like the way something’s going. Also, we did have another roommate during the summer, which means that his actions came into play as well—he just wasn’t around as often and we’re nowhere near as close, so it’s not really relevant to the story.

Also also, David was raised in what I would call a VERY egalitarian household, and he’s been doing things like washing his own clothes and dishes since he was MUCH younger than I was when I started doing chores like that. He just doesn’t necessarily have the same ideas as I do about when or how much those things need to happen.

Anyway. Before I moved in with David, a lot of people were a little skeptical. I am very finicky about my room and my things being organized, and while I couldn’t care less if other people use my things, I need them to be back to their usual neat existence before I can be completely calm. David, on the other hand…doesn’t really have that problem. Still, I wasn’t worried at all. David and I were part of the same living community for two years before he graduated, meaning that we had our own rooms, but shared public spaces like the bathroom and kitchen. I figured it would be pretty much the same when we moved into an apartment together.

What I wasn’t taking into account is that in the dorm we lived in at Drew, facilities workers came in and cleaned the kitchen and bathroom pretty regularly. And while I couldn’t care less what David’s room looks like, or even what the living room looks like most of the time, as long as my stuff’s fine, what I never thought about is the fact that I am very accustomed to a certain level of actual cleanliness, like an absence of dirt. Pans that have been washed do not have a crust on them. The bathroom sink is shiny and clean, not covered in beard shavings and soap scum. And the toilet never, ever, has urine on the outside, with the possible exception of the MAYBE thirty seconds it takes between when you finish peeing and when you wipe it off.

Well, we were subletting the apartment from a professor at our school. I’d like to think that this was just because he knows David, but when we arrived, the apartment had all of the above and much, much more. When we first moved in, I couldn’t touch anything in the kitchen without scrubbing it first—everything felt sticky. Of course, before I could do that, we had to buy a sponge. Luckily, we found an unused one in a pile of the professor’s socks in his bedroom.

I wish that any of this was an exaggeration.

Anyway, my point here is that we started out at a very low level of cleanliness, and it took a lot of work to even get it up to what I would call acceptable. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if the apartment ever reached a level that I would call “good.” But in time, we figured out most of the professor’s mess and got into making our own. That was when the negotiations began. I literally heard David and myself have conversations I’ve heard my parents have. Me/my mom: Can you clean the toilet? David/my dad: Why? It looks fine. Me/my mom: Because it’s dirty, and I asked you to. David/my dad: But I’m not the one it bothers. I think it’s fine. Why do I have to clean it?

You get the idea.

The other thing that blew my mind is that there were household chores that David literally had no idea existed. A couple weeks after we moved in, I noticed that the bottom of the tub was getting slimy, and there was a growing ring of dirt around its edge. I mentioned to David that I thought we should have a chore schedule, with someone on kitchen duty, someone on bathroom duty, etc. But when I started listing examples of bathroom chores, he was baffled. The idea of scrubbing a tub weekly was not only something he found preposterous (“But you use soap and water in it!”), but something he insisted had never been done in his family.

After assuring David that someone in his family had washed the tub fairly regularly (I’ve been to his house, after all, and it was decidedly neat), as well as getting over a few other bumps (like the time he discovered a colony of maggots—or, as he put it, “a developing litter of squirming hell spawn”—in the bottom of Darth Vader, our trash can), things obviously turned out fine. Like I said, David was raised in a very feminist-friendly house, and he certainly didn’t expect me to take care of things because I’m a girl and he’s not.

The problem here is more interesting to me than that. Everyone says it’s about men versus women, and I get that because men are usually taught certain things (like taking out the trash) and women are usually taught different things (like washing the tub), it often is. But sometimes, like with David and his roommate my sophomore year, you get a situation where two men are living together, and one is super neat, while the other isn’t. Or a situation where a man and a woman are living together, but they’re not dating—and they still have to negotiate that relationship.

My point is, it’s only about men and women in so much as it’s about what men and women learn from their culture. Granted, that’s a lot. But I think it’s much, much more about respect—for yourself, and for the other person. David didn’t know that you’re supposed to wash the tub, but I told him that it was really important to me that it happened. I told him that even if he didn’t care whether the tub was slimy, I did. It didn’t matter that we’re not, and will never be, dating. Because you know what? He washed the damn tub.

That’s really what it comes down to. If you care about someone, you wash the tub when they ask you to. Ultimately, if you’re in a long-term living situation—ya know…like marriage—you won’t have to be asked. Maybe it’s idealistic, but I really don’t think it’s that hard. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man and a women, two women or two men. If you know it upsets your partner to have a dirty tub, and you respect and love that person, you’ll wash it.