On this page, I’ve collected a few of the blog posts I’ve written over the past year on gender issues. Here you go:
An introductory post.
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.
(Photo: My mother at the Grand Canyon, some time in the 1950’s.)
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.
The Feminine Genius of the Cowgirl in Red
The Catholic world has met contemporary gender questions and turmoil with its own set of movements and gathering spaces, where feminine and masculine virtues are celebrated and reinforced. Fantastic. One of my own sons has benefited greatly from one of these groups, and I’m deeply grateful.
But to recognize the risks with all that. There’s no Catholic doctrine or dogmatic teaching anywhere that insists on a particular set of “feminine” or “masculine” virtues or even characteristics. Yes, dive into JPII’s Theology of the Body and extrapolate from that and find benefit in it, but – deep breath – the insights of the TOB on this score are not dogmatic. They are rooted in dogmatic truth – the creation of man and woman as male
and female by God’s will and the role of the family in the created order – but the notion that “femininity = innate receptivity,” for example, while helpful, is not anything that anyone is required center their thinking on – about women in general or themselves in particular.
So, if you are a woman who looks at the current feminine-genius-you’re-beautiful-every-woman-is-a-mother-in-some-way-love-Jesus-love-makeup-too landscape and thinks….not me.
You’re fine.
We’re fine.
And we’re still women.
Dig back into Dorothy Day, Teresa of Avila, Hildegard, Flannery, and all the other quirky Catholic women and feel right at home again.
We have to be so, so careful, in our determination to fight what’s wrong in the culture and celebrate the truth of the beauty of the human person, male and female, to not communicate a whole other set of expectations and assumptions that might, indeed, have some foundation in authentic Catholic thinking, but aren’t actually normative for every single person.
“The Real Catholic Woman” can be a mother of ten or none. She can be really interested in fashion or absolutely, totally indifferent to it. She can be hoping for a spouse or she can be fully content without one. “The Real Catholic Woman” can find “beauty” a helpful personal and spiritual concept – or not. “The Real Catholic Woman” can be ambitious and entrepreneurial or she can live more quietly, oriented to serving those around her in simple, ordinary ways. “The Real Catholic Woman” can find deep connection and nourishment from being with other women – or she can find that from hanging out with the guys, or professional colleagues or in her garden or heck, with her cats. I guess. “The Real Catholic Woman” can be deeply into Church-y things – or she can hit Mass once a week, say her prayers and do her best in life.
But Look How Much I Gained
Several years ago, when I first started observing these movements, the following popped into my head. If you read my first post on this, you know that the thought of Germaine Greer and 80’s era feminists who questioned the impact of reproductive technology on women has been very important to me. What all of these thinkers – as well as pro-life feminism – emphasized wast the cultural and social temptation to, as it were, castrate women to make them more productive cogs in male-defined social and economic structures – make them easier to sexually exploit, with little fear of pregnancy – and render them more efficient workers. Hence the title of Greer’s book The Female Eunuch.
So when I started seeing this moment evolve, here is what I thought, and I can’t shake it:
When historians look back on this, they’re going to see the ultimate triumph of misogyny, enabled by technology: The ideal woman – is a man.
Peaked?
One of the areas in which this issue has played out in the United States has been in relation to public restrooms and now, increasingly, locker rooms. You all recall the great passion mysteriously spent over North Carolina’s “Bathroom Bill” – and all the attendant feverish and pained announcements of boycotts over the Great Injustice.
This bill is built on hate and bigotry. Expressing fears that women will be hurt by allowing the transgendered in their restrooms? BIGOT!
There are, of course, a few issues to raise along with this, but I just want to focus on one.
And that is the truth that people who want to hurt others will go to places where they can do so.
Reality-based structures and institutions must take human weakness, sin and determination to do harm to others into account in their policies and procedures.
That is simply to say, that if you have a system in which people can declare that they are female and then freely enter female-only spaces, no questions asked, and lawsuit at the ready if you do –
Men who want to hurt women and girls will take advantage of that.
You can say, “Oh, why would someone go to all that trouble?”
Hey, guess what. They do.
People with a desire, compulsion or the will to harm someone – a child, a woman – simply another person – will act on that. They will go to great lengths to place themselves in situations where they have easy access to the people they want to exploit.
For pete’s sake – we know this. Don’t we?
Creeps and criminals will go to a lot of trouble to become a teacher, a Scout leader, a priest, a youth leader – they will go through training, and put up with all the attendant nonsense, they will patiently participate in all the activities, and they will just wait – for the vulnerable person to come along, at which point, they have built trust and perhaps even gained a degree of popularity so that of course he wouldn’t do that! Of course we can trust our kids with him!
Which is why smart institutions structure themselves to protect against these people’s actions. They know – most of them having learned the hard way – and are realistic about the fact that if a person wants to hurt a child – they will go where children are.
So with Boy Scouts, you have a two-deep policy – no adult allowed to be alone with a child – at least one other adult must be present. When I was teaching in one school, we weren’t allowed to drive students home – even if we knew them from outside school. It was a pain in the neck, and sometimes these policies overreach in the name of caution (and liability) but honestly – responsible, reasonable adults know that the policies we endure in these organizations are for the good of the vulnerable. They’re for their protection.
These policies are NOT a condemnation of every potential Scout leader. They aren’t saying “All Scout leaders are child abusers.” They’re realistically admitting that a child abuser could take advantage of a situation in which adults work with children.
And so it is with bathroom bills. Especially with gender self-identification. It is not saying that a transgendered person must want to hurt a woman or girl in a restroom just because of who they are. It’s saying that someone who seeks to harm women or girls could easily take advantage of such a situation – with legal protection.
And it’s not just restrooms any more. It’s health club changing rooms, locker rooms. It’s shelters.
Peaked yet?
But what if you’re not feeling it? What if you’ve had horrendous experiences in life that have made, it seems, a sense of self – much less a contented, whole self – challenging? What if what’s inside doesn’t match what your family, your community or even the big world tells you is correct and normal?
Raised in a material, appearance, emotion and achievement-oriented culture – despair for the dis-oriented might seem to lie just on the other side of every door, around every corner.
But consider another way – formed to value this life and who you are, but also understanding that, because of weighty mystery, you – along with everyone else on earth – is broken, sees through a glass darkly – including yourself – and that as hard as it is, it is also okay, because this is not your home.
Oh, the suffering remains, and strangeness. But one just might be spared the perceived need to fix oneself right here and right now and make what’s outside “match” what’s inside.
And the older you get, the more true you see this is.
I turned – unbelievably – 59 this week. A few weeks ago, on our way back from Spain, I spent time with my friend Ann Englehart, who also turned 59 this summer. Over great Greek food in Astoria, I looked at her and asked the question that had been weighing on me:
“Do you feel fifty-freaking-nine years old?”
“NO!” she exclaimed, clearly relieved to hear someone else say it.
What does it even mean? we wondered, articulating the same thoughts aloud. What does it mean to be “almost sixty” – but to feel no older than, say forty, and to wonder – was I ever even 45 or 52? I just seem to have leapt from still almost youngish adulthood to AARP discounts without blinking. My appearance is changing, and I look at women two decades older than I and I know – God willing I make it that far – that there will be a day when I, too, will be unrecognizable to my younger self.
Peak….peaking…peaked?
It is mostly misogynistic, crowd-driven, profit-fueled gnosticism.
And those of you who call yourselves feminists, take note here. The greatest energy in the trans movement is of biological males demanding access to women’s spaces: restrooms, athletics, locker rooms, shelters, prisons and honors. You do not see female–to-male individuals making the same demands. As I’ve said before, I see this movement in part as Peak Misogyny, enabled by medical technology and profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies. (Because if you do physically transition, guess what? You’re on medication…for the rest of your life.) Peak Misogyny which is trying to create a world in which actual girls and women hopefully commit to their own erasure and the best women always turn out to be men.
Yes. Erasure of actual women, is what it all seems to be about, in the end.
