Welp, so much for the “week” thing. Also, apologies for those who either read the unfinished post earlier after I accidentally scheduled it, or came here looking for it. Here it is.
I’m going to talk about gender this week. Probably not every day. Because every time I do that I end up either getting caught up in something else and breaking my promise or…keeping my promise and letting it take over my life.
So why this week?
Well, these are notions and thoughts that have been peculating for a while. As is the case with almost everything these days, there’s just so much – it’s paralyzing for those who want to write or talk about such things. You think you get a grasp on one aspect of it, you settle on an angle – and thirty minutes later, some other news story or perspective pops up and blows it all to hell. Again.
But as I looked at the Mass readings for this week, I was struck by the fact that this week – this fifth week of Ordinary Time – we’re starting, with our first readings, with Genesis 1.
(And Mark 7 in the Gospels.)
So, it seemed to fit.
But don’t come here looking for restatements of takes you’ve read elsewhere. I have my idiosyncratic way into these issues. You won’t find hardcore social analysis here.
For sure you’re not going to read rhapsodic celebrations of complementary natures or the feminine genius. If that’s your thing, go for it. It’s just not my thing – it’s not the way I think or experience being a person.
I’m puzzling through some things and trying to say some things out loud that I’m not hearing many other people say.
So we’ll begin, as one does, with the personal angle.
Where I’m coming from.
I want to talk about gender (and sexuality) because it’s an issue that’s fracturing our culture and fracturing social and political movements – which is rather entertaining to watch. My reasons have nothing to do with any sort of personal, passionate interest in gender issues or investment or attachment to a cause.
Briefly:
I’m 58, going to be 59 this summer. That means I was born in 1960 and grew to adulthood in the 1960’s and 70’s. I’m an only child of academically-minded parents. My mother almost got a M.S. in Library Science and my dad was a Ph.D. in political science. I grew up in college towns from Bloomington to Lubbock to DeKalb to Lawrence to Knoxville. Small families on both sides, mostly educators and business people on both sides, male and female, father’s side southern minimally-practicing Methodists, mother’s side French-Canadian Catholics, mother specifically very sour on post-Conciliar Catholicism by the early 70’s, stopped going to Mass. Highly intelligent parents, politically and socially middle-of-the-road, constant conversations about issues in the home, exposure to the life of the mind, etc. , etc…..
Why is that relevant?
I think because, as I reflect on how I think of myself as “a woman” that background might go some distance in explaining why I have a hard time doing just that – thinking of myself in terms of “a woman” who’s part of this group called “women” that is supposed to have particular interests and characteristics. Or at least – defining myself primarily in terms of “womanhood.”
I just…can’t. I don’t even know what that means, really. I’ve never had any driving desire to attach myself to other “women” in women’s groups because we’re women and that’s what women do. I suppose in part it’s because I’m not a joiner, period, but I do sometimes wonder if it’s because I was raised in this household where a) I didn’t have a brother for comparison – either by my parents or myself, and so my existence wasn’t delineated against any male family member peer and b) the expectations my parents had for me and their sense of who I was had nothing to do with being female – it was all about learning and ideas and accomplishment (to some degree) and living a decent life as a person in a family and in society. No one ever talked much about being female or male or what that meant or what was right or appropriate. I was just a person.
I went to a small Catholic high school in the South in the 70’s, so consciousness-raising was really not on the menu. I mean – no one cared. When I got to college – in 1978 – at UT, I did venture to the Woman’s Center. I was a politically minded person, but I’m really not sure what I thought I was going to find or why I was going – I do know that one of the musicians in the folk group at the Catholic student center was a part of it. Perhaps she invited me? Well, for whatever reason, I went to some meeting, and heard, right away, a focus on abortion. It was the center of the conversation. So I stepped away and didn’t return.
Later on, I did get involved in the national organization Feminists for Life – at a pre-internet era when involvement in national groups was a lot more challenging than it is now. But I did, and knew all of the leadership at the time and their writings and the writings they promoted were very important to me.
Every few years, it seems, people rediscover the possibility of progressive/liberal prolife views – it’s good that it gets rediscovered, but also puzzling to me how short our attention spans are now. Every time someone raises a proverbial fist on Instagram and proclaims in wonderment, “Yo! I’m pro-life and – ” wait for it, you’ll be shocked and amazed – “a feminist!” – aren’t you amazed? I just feel old and grumpy. More so than usual.
Okay, let’s look at that word: feminist. It’s not a big deal to me. You want to call yourself a feminist? Sure. You want to avoid the term? Sure. I don’t care. You want to write for pages or talk for hours about why you do or don’t call yourself a feminist? Then I’ll probably find something else to do.
Once, probably in the early to mid-70’s, my mother, who was born in 1924, went on a rant about feminism. She said something like, “Sure, I’m a feminist. I’m an old-school Amelia Earhart, Rosalind Russel, Katharine Hepburn feminist. We all were.”
And if there were any late 20th century feminists who had any role in my intellectual formation it was first, Germaine Greer, and later, Camille Paglia – although Paglia is not as serious a thinker as Greer. Reading The Female Eunuch and Sex and Destiny blew my mind in my late 20’s and early 30’s. That as well as pro-life feminism, and various feminist critiques of developing reproductive technologies – critiques which were standard and pervasive – provided the framework for any most of my political and social framing of women’s issues.
So that’s the essence of my growing-up-as-a-female: Raised playing in neighborhoods with boys and girls, mostly outside, reading whatever I felt like reading, all of us wearing shorts and t-shirts and jeans and tennis shoes, my toys a jumble of Barbies, games, a dollhouse, contraptions like Spirographs and this Fun Flower Thingmaker, a firetruck, a dump truck and lots of Matchbox cars. Expectations? Mostly that I’d be a professional of some sort, probably an academic. And that I’d try to live a good life. I wasn’t raised in a household that articulated or even assumed any particular female-identified choices or behavior.
Was that strange or unusual? I honestly don’t think so. The girls and women I grew up with – we didn’t feel any particular need to assert any roles that we felt denied.
Nor – and this is my focus right now – did we feel any pressure to dress or comport ourselves in a “feminine” kind of way.
Perhaps others have different experiences. No doubt they have. But that’s just mine.
Discrimination, exploitation and worse exists and always has. The powerful use and repress the less-powerful, and this happens in a web of racial, sexual, socio-economic and cultural identities. Ask any woman or minority group member trying, say, to work in predominantly white male environments in the past or in the present. It’s real. The harsh, contemptuous, lurid male gaze cast upon women is real, something most young women can tell you about in distressing detail.
But what this rambling post is about is not that. It’s not about workplace discrimination or social exploitation. I’ll get to that in a couple of days.
No, what this is about is simply setting the stage for my …confusion and puzzlement about how we got from there to here, particularly in regard to gender “roles” as expressed culturally and socially.
Quite often those kinds of questions are posed by older folks looking back and wondering how a seemingly more restrained past became so loose. My observation takes me in the opposite direction.
And really – honestly – I’m angry.
I reflect back on the 60’s and 70’s and I see a casual, relaxed landscape in which kids and young people are exploring and figuring things out, and it seems, everyone is wearing earth-toned plaids.
And at some point – I don’t know when – the pink and blue shelves sprung up. Sprung up, exploded and closed us in.
You know what I mean, right? How you go into a toy store or even the toy section of a department store, and you can tell the “girl toys” from the “boy toys” simply by color? The girl section is all – all – pink and the boy section is, if not baby blue, dark blue and black?
For contrast, take a look at vintage Christmas catalogs – here’s a great collection that will definitely take you down some rabbit trails. I looked at a few from the 50’s and 60’s and the FAO Schwarz 1967 catalog.
Yes, toys are, to some extent “gendered.” But perhaps partly because they catalogs aren’t in full color cover to cover and employ fewer human models, you don’t have your oppressively pink-and-blue division. In fact most of the toys and games are just that – toys and games for kids. There’s an acknowledgment of realities – no matter their source in nature or nurture – that more girls than boys like dolls and household-related toys while more boys than girls lean to toys that echo life outside the home. But it doesn’t strike me – nor did it growing up in it – as oppressive or restrictive. As I said – I had a lot of cars and trucks and science kits and yeah, I think I had a cowboy gun and holster
Even the kids’s clothes are – yes, obviously made for female and male tastes – are for the most part, simple and straightforward. And, yeah, plaid. Not super gendered either in the direction of Girl Power or Tough Guy!
Oh look, – here we go. No more words necessary. I was probably four years old here and look what I got for Christmas: a fire truck. A baby doll carriage. And a freaking punching ball.
Chaser – 3rd birthday. Look at my big present.
And guys, this wasn’t a political statement. This was 1963, pre-second-wave feminism, which my family didn’t get into anyway, despite being academics. My parents were, at the time, good Kennedy Democrats, and this was the Durant, Oklahoma home of my conservative Southern Methodist grandparents. It was just not a big deal.
****
As I said, this is an intro.
My typical, discursive, wandering intro to get my brain to a more focused place.
And that place is, quite simply, wondering how we – to use a common phrase – transitioned – from:
…a landscape in which expressions of “gender” were downplayed or even discouraged as stereotypical and limiting
to..
..a landscape in which “feminine” and “masculine” stereotypical preferences and expressions have become pathologized.
Where little girls who like short hair and to play outside in the mud or tween girls who are uncomfortable with their changing bodies are being told that this is clearly a sign that they aren’t a “real girl” and then shot through with puberty blockers and given mastectomies and then boys who don’t like sports and present effeminately are being told they are obviously really girls– because, you know…
…you can always tell a girl by how much she likes girly things.
****
Come back for more.
I’m already thinking it’s the Reformation’s fault.
But you predicted that, didn’t you?
Charlotte was Both 