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, 4th 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, 4th edition, edited by Susan Shaw and Janet Lee. McGraw Hill: NY
vendors gone, but there was a Gaga impersonator on the stage, and we saw a very proud dog. There was even a rainbow on the way home!
That Girl Has Got an Opinion 