My mother took an obvious delight in us as young children, introducing us to nursery rhymes and songs. But if my presence was a source of delight in her life, it was also a source of dismay and frustration, such as when I'd come home from kindergarten without my umbrella or my coat yet again, for the third time this week. I think there were times she despaired of me ever becoming mature enough to function independently and responsibly.
And that was an important part of mothering for her. She wanted her children equipped to be self-reliant and competent individuals, to send us out into the world with confidence. In my case, I soon had teachers and other adults fawning over my brilliance and my verbal fluency. Mama credited that too but remained concerned about pragmatic things: having a clever tongue wasn't going to make up for being absent-minded and irresponsible; I was still in danger of needing a keeper!
The pragmatic approach was typical of my Mom. She was never much inclined to make a fancy statement or to outline her viewpoints as derived from general principles. She just did what she considered important, right, or necessary.
Wnen I was about 8, she became concerned about young poor children not receiving a good early education and therefore not getting a fair chance in life. She worked with Head Start for awhile and then became a public school teacher, teaching 1st grade. No one visiting our home or speaking with her in church ever found themselves on the receiving end of passionate lectures about racism and poverty, and she didn't hang posters on our walls or anything. She just recognized a social problem that needed cleaning up and went to work on it the same way she'd address a pile of laundry or a stack of dirty dishes in the sink.
Her own parents valued fitting in, not sticking out, and at a superficial level a person would probably have gotten that same impression about Mama. In her case, it was misleading. In the 1960s in Valdosta Georgia she had her own reasons -- practical and pragmatic ones, of course -- to have on a pantsuit on an early Sunday afternoon, and she chose to wear it to church instead of making it necessary to come home and change. Not long after that, a pair of church women were overheard to say "Well if Joyce Hunter can wear a pantsuit to services, I guess I can too".
Years later she was the first woman to work in the previously all-male ceramics and metallurgy sciences group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This integration didn't take place without some resistance. There were men there who didn't think she belonged. This was the late 1970s, a time when women's equality and their right to work in the professions of their choosing was a current hot topic of discussion. My mom's reason for being there was that her employer wanted to place here there, she had the skillset and talents needed for the job, and it sounded interesting. She showed up, did her job, won awards for the quality of her work, and outlasted her critics, and so in her own quiet way, with no trumpets blaring, she was a pioneer.
She taught me and my sister how to swim and drilled us on our strokes and technique until we qualified to be certified by the Red Cross first as Beginning swimmers, then Intermediate, and finally Advanced. When I was in Boy Scouts I decided to obtain the Mile Swim badge, and went to the most experienced long-distance swimmer I knew: my mother. A Boy Scout leader questioned this later: I wasn't in Cub Scouts, why the heck was I going to my MOMMY to get certified for my mile swim? I looked at this silly man and shook my head. Mama wasn't one of those flamboyant speed racer swimmers like Michael Phelps. When you saw her in the water swimming in her lane you didn't notice anything spectacular happening. But she was one of those people who could swim across the English Channel if she had enough time, she could go forever. She probably swam farther each month than he had in his entire life.
During my 30s I took pride in telling my friends that my middle-aged Mom had taken up scuba diving and was off exploring coral reefs in the Caribbean. She and my Dad went forth in a series of excursions and saw the world, and I enjoyed visualizing them as adventurers, peeking over new horizons and seeing new sights. Neither of them opted to spend their retirement quietly rocking back and forth in rocking chairs.
I was loved unconditionally and with joy, and launched with optimism and confidence to go out and live life to the fullest, to be a good person and to always do what I thought was right.
I don't think my gender identification stemmed from affirmatively wanting to be like her while actively trying to avoid being like my Dad or anything like that. For me, it mostly had to do with the larger world, the world that defines and describes what it is to be a girl or a boy. I'm not a Freudian; I don't think children get their sense of what the sexes mean exclusively or primarily from their parents. Parents are Other in a fundamental way: they're grownups! What is normal for them isn't normal for us and vice versa. I got the sense of what the genders meant from the neighborhood and from school. From people my own age. I made generalizations, the other kids made generalizations. And then we began treating each other differently on the basis of sex. The teachers did too. It's not the kind of thing you necessarily notice that strongly coming from your own parents, at least not unless you see them around enough children to see a pattern forming. You do see it in classrooms because you've got a box of children, about half girls and half boys, and if there's different treatment you see it. And if there's a persistent pattern you see it because over time you see several adults doing it, and you see the kids themselves doing it as well.
Home was a safe place and my mom certainly was a big part of why that was true. If she was exasperated with me it was because I didn't do my homework or forgot my umbrella at the library. Never because I wasn't out in the neighbor's yard playing football with the other boys on our street.
She didn't realize what my daily life was like, at least not while it was happening. "Just laugh and show them you're a good sport. When they see that teasing you doesn't get you riled up, the bullies will lose interest and the others will see that you're a pleasant person. Just don't let them get to you".
Later, she had a better sense of what I was up against, but she couldn't fix things for me. She couldn't defend me against them because she wouldn't always be there. She would have if she could. She told me so as we talked at length in her final days, knowing it was our last chance to have discussions. She was sorry my childhood had been so awful and that I'd been alone in dealing with the more complicated stuff as a young adult, sorting things out. I told her about how I'd been taught that I was worthy of love and given the courage to believe that no, I didn't deserve the treatment that was meted out to me. I told her that I've had a good life. It's been a life based on choices she would not have made, would have found absolutely off-limits, incomprehensible. Often did, since she knew of some of them. But that I've had good connections with people, a sense of purpose and engagement with projects, and that I've had adventures. That I have lived life to the fullest on my own terms.
"What do you think about a person who wants to end their life?", she asked. "Do you think it is immoral?" At 82 she had been an athlete still, doing her daily laps in the pool that she and my Dad built as part of their dreamhouse, when her body misbehaved and flung clots. Some lodged in the brain and messed up motor and sensory, a little bit of cognitive, all of which she'll probably bounce back from. One lodged in her right calf muscle and they had to make two parallel slices and weren't at all sure she could keep the limb, although eventually they detected enough pulse in the foot that they stopped threatening to remove it. Unfortunately the remaining clot blocked the femoral artery in the other leg and a good chunk of that leg turned into the equiv of raw pot roast, and they had to take it off at the knee.
She had never been very inclined to ruminate about philosophical questions. This was pragmatic. A practical consideration. I acknowledged that anyone in her situation would think about that. At the time, like the rest of my family, I hoped she would decide that insofar as she was still here, she might as well make the best of it or at least explore what she could do within her new limitations.
"What's that drug that people die from that's in the news so much? Heroin? And the legal version that they give you in hospitals, that's...morphine?" Yeah, pragmatic and practical.
She negotiated a discharge from the hospital and then from the rehab center they sent her to. It wasn't easy and there were setbacks but she succeeded in situating herself back in her own home, in a hospital bed set up for that purpose.
She ate well and seemed to be in good spirits and interacted with people. I spoke with her on the phone briefly.
Next day, apparently, she began to withdraw. Didn't want to eat, and ... the way my Dad put it was that talking to her was like calling an office and getting the answering machine. She'd answer questions put to her but wasn't really tuning in. Then when they were turning her to change the sheets she just...quit. No breath, no heartbeat.
Mama
1935-2018
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Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Sunday, October 21, 2018
About the Whining Thing...
As a sissy femme male, I'm quite qualified to talk about the whining thing. When males complain about masculinity being imposed on us, it's always seen as whining. Compare to female people speaking about how femininity is foisted upon them: anger is among those things femininity denies to women, and to step outside of feminity as they do is to be seen as erupting in furious anger. But anger isn't outside of masculinity. Whimpering and asking for sympathy solace and understanding is. And so it is inevitable that we're perceived as whiners.
But to an extent everyone who raises their voices to complain about a social issue is viewed as whining. Around us are always people enduring the same thing but not making noise about it, and around us is an entire society in which the social issues we speak of are not new. If others can endure it and it's been endured for decades or centuries, who are we to expect it to change on our behalf?
I've had various friends who grew up in Jewish or Black households telling me about how it was for them growing up. A common occurrence was being put in their place by their parents, being told that they had a lot of nerve complaining about whatever they were complaining about at the time, when their life was so easy compared to the life of great-aunt Rachel or your grandpa's uncle Raphael. He was born a slave and made to work in the hot sun and shipped in chains to the market when he was 12. She was marked for extermination and hid from soldiers and eventually caught and sent to the concentration camp and starved and then gassed to death in the showers. Admittedly, my friends' complaints to their parents were often about being required to clean their rooms and being denied permission to attend a weekend party with their friends, but if you extend the logic of their parents, people are just whining if they complain about racism or antisemitism today because they aren't property in chains or the target of an explicit genocidal pogrom. That's ludicrous.
Social justice discussions shouldn't be about whose oppression-scars are ugliest and most traumatic and dismissing the insufficiently injured people's complaints as unjustified whining.
We do admire the tough survivors. The woman who shouldered her way into a men-only world and always had to prove herself better to be perceived half as good, and outlasted them and thrived there. The middle-class suburbanite confronted by a would-be mugger who upsides him with her purse and whacks him with her cane resulting in him yelling for help. The fifh grader who knees her would-be abductor in the balls and calls 911 while he writhes on the ground. The lesbian in graduate school who describes crossing campus at 1 AM and approaching a cluster of young men gathered close to her car, only to see them scatter as she strides close, exuding "don't fuck with me" confidence. The gay femme on the subway who responds to threats and harassment with a loud and entertaining ridicule that has the whole car applauding and the belligerent harassers slinking away.
But the fact that some people do indeed go up against pervasive unequal treatment and don't let it stop them doesn't mean we as a culture don't need to stop the unfair unequal treatment. Presumably no one responds to the story about the brave fifth grader by saying "Oh, we don't need to protect children from sexual predators and abductors and abusers, they should be able to handle themselves like that girl did".
When I'm accusing of being a whiner, I'm often reminded by my accusers of my various social privileges. I'm not perceived as female and I can safely walk with no real fear of assault, threat, or harassment. I'm not exiting gay bars in sight of bigots weilding crowbars. I'm not put in a position where I can't pee in any available public bathroom without someone calling the police. What has a sissy male like me to complain about?
Well, let's see, I do get let in on the homophobic violence. It's mostly better the older I get but as recently as last month I had a pair of young male belligerents asking me if I were a boy or a girl and then calling me faggot. Then there's the social isolation, that's always a big one. My existence is tolerated but I never quite fit in. Like so many other Different people this is at the core of my experience. In particular it has been a problem throughout my life to negotiate sexual interaction, courting and dating and finding someone to be in a relationship with and all that. Oh, and I do face discrimination in hiring and promotion and similar differential treatment. Not because I am directly perceived as a gender invert and discriminated against for being in that category, that's true, but because I am perceived as pathological, as impaired or otherwise not normal.
Some people would reply to that list by saying that the gay bashing is something I should be protected from, but that the world does not owe me dates or sex, and that I'm not socially entitled to a sexual relationship. Yet for me, it's the latter that was the dealbreaker as far as just silently and stoically coping with what the world deals out to me. I was able to come to terms with the intermittent violence and random hate. It was like bad weather; I tried to be prepared and if I got caught, well I'd dealt with it before and survived. But being left out in the cold and never have the connection that I craved? Devastating. Go figure. Each person has their own scale of tolerable versus intolerable offenses. We should listen to each other and put down those litmus tests for deciding who has a legitimate social issue and who is just whining.
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But to an extent everyone who raises their voices to complain about a social issue is viewed as whining. Around us are always people enduring the same thing but not making noise about it, and around us is an entire society in which the social issues we speak of are not new. If others can endure it and it's been endured for decades or centuries, who are we to expect it to change on our behalf?
I've had various friends who grew up in Jewish or Black households telling me about how it was for them growing up. A common occurrence was being put in their place by their parents, being told that they had a lot of nerve complaining about whatever they were complaining about at the time, when their life was so easy compared to the life of great-aunt Rachel or your grandpa's uncle Raphael. He was born a slave and made to work in the hot sun and shipped in chains to the market when he was 12. She was marked for extermination and hid from soldiers and eventually caught and sent to the concentration camp and starved and then gassed to death in the showers. Admittedly, my friends' complaints to their parents were often about being required to clean their rooms and being denied permission to attend a weekend party with their friends, but if you extend the logic of their parents, people are just whining if they complain about racism or antisemitism today because they aren't property in chains or the target of an explicit genocidal pogrom. That's ludicrous.
Social justice discussions shouldn't be about whose oppression-scars are ugliest and most traumatic and dismissing the insufficiently injured people's complaints as unjustified whining.
We do admire the tough survivors. The woman who shouldered her way into a men-only world and always had to prove herself better to be perceived half as good, and outlasted them and thrived there. The middle-class suburbanite confronted by a would-be mugger who upsides him with her purse and whacks him with her cane resulting in him yelling for help. The fifh grader who knees her would-be abductor in the balls and calls 911 while he writhes on the ground. The lesbian in graduate school who describes crossing campus at 1 AM and approaching a cluster of young men gathered close to her car, only to see them scatter as she strides close, exuding "don't fuck with me" confidence. The gay femme on the subway who responds to threats and harassment with a loud and entertaining ridicule that has the whole car applauding and the belligerent harassers slinking away.
But the fact that some people do indeed go up against pervasive unequal treatment and don't let it stop them doesn't mean we as a culture don't need to stop the unfair unequal treatment. Presumably no one responds to the story about the brave fifth grader by saying "Oh, we don't need to protect children from sexual predators and abductors and abusers, they should be able to handle themselves like that girl did".
When I'm accusing of being a whiner, I'm often reminded by my accusers of my various social privileges. I'm not perceived as female and I can safely walk with no real fear of assault, threat, or harassment. I'm not exiting gay bars in sight of bigots weilding crowbars. I'm not put in a position where I can't pee in any available public bathroom without someone calling the police. What has a sissy male like me to complain about?
Well, let's see, I do get let in on the homophobic violence. It's mostly better the older I get but as recently as last month I had a pair of young male belligerents asking me if I were a boy or a girl and then calling me faggot. Then there's the social isolation, that's always a big one. My existence is tolerated but I never quite fit in. Like so many other Different people this is at the core of my experience. In particular it has been a problem throughout my life to negotiate sexual interaction, courting and dating and finding someone to be in a relationship with and all that. Oh, and I do face discrimination in hiring and promotion and similar differential treatment. Not because I am directly perceived as a gender invert and discriminated against for being in that category, that's true, but because I am perceived as pathological, as impaired or otherwise not normal.
Some people would reply to that list by saying that the gay bashing is something I should be protected from, but that the world does not owe me dates or sex, and that I'm not socially entitled to a sexual relationship. Yet for me, it's the latter that was the dealbreaker as far as just silently and stoically coping with what the world deals out to me. I was able to come to terms with the intermittent violence and random hate. It was like bad weather; I tried to be prepared and if I got caught, well I'd dealt with it before and survived. But being left out in the cold and never have the connection that I craved? Devastating. Go figure. Each person has their own scale of tolerable versus intolerable offenses. We should listen to each other and put down those litmus tests for deciding who has a legitimate social issue and who is just whining.
———————
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Sunday, October 14, 2018
Arguing Against Someone's Identity-Label is a Form of NOT LISTENING
= A =
I'm amazed at how often someone introduces themselves as having a specific identity and goes on to explain in more detail how life has been for them and what their experience has been, only to have people immediately contradicting their identity: "Well I think that makes you this other thing, not what you are calling yourself", or "You shouldn't use that term, it doesn't belong to you, only people who fit such-and-suchg other description should call themselves that", or even "You're just a mainstream person with no relevant differentiated identity to speak of, and you should quit calling yourself by any identity-label".
It happens within generic LGBTQIA community groups, it happens within highly specific support groups organized around one or more solitary letters from that acronym, and it happens within the larger surrounding society as well. "I reject all of what you're saying about yourself -- because you're calling yourself something that you're not".
It's a special form of not listening. I mean, any time a person uses a label for themself, it's a form of shorthand, like a book title or the title of a term paper or something. It's never going to express the entire thought process, but it's their chosen starting point. Then they go on to elaborate and explain about themselves and how they fit in (or fail to fit in) against this backdrop and that backdrop and how they have come to understand themselves as a person.
Now, it's one thing for someone to give a long thoughtful reply to the other person's entire narrative and offer comments and show understandings of that person's experiences, and to then mention along with all that other stuff that they think maybe this or that other term might be more appropriate or more useful. But to give a reply where the entire focus of the response is "you're not what you just called yourself"? That ignores the person's story and puts all the focus on the label as if the correctness of the label were the only important thing being said here.
It's the equivalent of writing a movie review of Sixth Sense that contained nothing except "This isn't about the sixth sense. The sixth sense is extra-sensory perception, like when you know what is going to happen before it happens. This Bruce Willis flick is just a ghost story, give it a pass". Or reviewing Boy Meets Girl by writing "Robby already knew Ricky at the beginning of this movie so it has nothing to do with 'Boy Meets Girl', don't bother".
People in narrowly defined groups sometimes do this as a gatekeeping function: "You tell a nice story but you aren't one of us and you shouldn't really be here in our space". People in broader LGBTQIA groups often do it as a form of shoehorning: "I divide the queer world up into these categories and excuse me but you belong in this category". People in the broad mainsteam culture do it fairly regularly as a way of denying the legitimacy of a marginalized identity: "You say you're that specific kind of person but really you're just a normal person who is trying to explain away your behavior or the outcome of it".
In all cases, it erases the full detailed story that the individual is trying to tell, by refusing to acknowledge that it has meaning aside from functioning as an example of a piece of terminology.
= B =
This is not just a case of people being dense or of getting caught up in little things that don't matter. It's political. They're rejecting what is being said because they don't like it, they feel threatened by it, they don't want a wider awareness of this kind of experience or understanding to catch on and they want to shut it down.
A person's choice of their own labels is also political, of course. To label our experience in the first place, in this manner, is to assert that it is part of a larger pattern, and that what we've been through has been the way it has been because of stuff that we have in common with other people who share the same identity-factor, that it is categorical, that it's an aggregate identity and not just our own personal narrative or our own unique personal quirks and traits.
There's always a backdrop, too. One chooses one identity as a way to push away some other identity, a default identity of some sort, that is otherwise constantly being foisted upon one. For example, if there were not a heteronormative expectation no one would need to come out as gay or lesbian. In the absense of being able to identify as gay and be recognized and understood as such, an individual's behavior, if still seen through heteronormative assumptions, looks strange: "Eww, you are so sex-obsessed and so unpicky that you would do perverted things like have erotic experiences with people of the same sex, which is clearly less desirable, so you are therefore a sex maniac and a threat to public decency!" Asserting the different identity (gay) shifts perception by establishing a different norm, a different set of expectations and values for understanding those same behaviors: "Oh, so for you, erotic experiences with the same sex are the desirable ones, so when you're sexually interested at all, that's where it will occur and it doesn't mean you're more sex-obsessed or less picky, you're different".
= C =
Our backdrop includes a world of existing labels, too. But they may not be useful to us, especially because labels that describe people so often bundle together a whole batch of meanings and implications that the person trying to explain their identity needs to untie and separate from each other.
Imagine a female person, perhaps from a previous century, who wants to designate herself as an expert in her field. The male people in her world call themselves "masters" of their subject areas. But "master" is a term that in her time is reserved exclusively for male people. The corresponding term for female use was "mistress". But the two terms have very different connotations, and she finds that saying she is a "Mistress of Science" doesn't convey at all what she wants to express. Perhaps she chooses to refer to herself as a "Master of Science" only to be contradicted by people who tell her that it is inappropriate for her to use the word "master" because it means she is male, and she isn't. The problem is that mastery, in the relevant sense, has been regarded as male, and yet she is. A person possessing mastery. Her choice of the term "Master of Science" is political. It is controversial (or was, once upon a time) because it is political. The people rejecting her entire claim on the basis of not liking her term for herself, that is also political, and their rejection of the entirety of what she's trying to say by focusing exclusively on her choice of term, that's also political: the politics of Not Listening.
———————
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I'm amazed at how often someone introduces themselves as having a specific identity and goes on to explain in more detail how life has been for them and what their experience has been, only to have people immediately contradicting their identity: "Well I think that makes you this other thing, not what you are calling yourself", or "You shouldn't use that term, it doesn't belong to you, only people who fit such-and-suchg other description should call themselves that", or even "You're just a mainstream person with no relevant differentiated identity to speak of, and you should quit calling yourself by any identity-label".
It happens within generic LGBTQIA community groups, it happens within highly specific support groups organized around one or more solitary letters from that acronym, and it happens within the larger surrounding society as well. "I reject all of what you're saying about yourself -- because you're calling yourself something that you're not".
It's a special form of not listening. I mean, any time a person uses a label for themself, it's a form of shorthand, like a book title or the title of a term paper or something. It's never going to express the entire thought process, but it's their chosen starting point. Then they go on to elaborate and explain about themselves and how they fit in (or fail to fit in) against this backdrop and that backdrop and how they have come to understand themselves as a person.
Now, it's one thing for someone to give a long thoughtful reply to the other person's entire narrative and offer comments and show understandings of that person's experiences, and to then mention along with all that other stuff that they think maybe this or that other term might be more appropriate or more useful. But to give a reply where the entire focus of the response is "you're not what you just called yourself"? That ignores the person's story and puts all the focus on the label as if the correctness of the label were the only important thing being said here.
It's the equivalent of writing a movie review of Sixth Sense that contained nothing except "This isn't about the sixth sense. The sixth sense is extra-sensory perception, like when you know what is going to happen before it happens. This Bruce Willis flick is just a ghost story, give it a pass". Or reviewing Boy Meets Girl by writing "Robby already knew Ricky at the beginning of this movie so it has nothing to do with 'Boy Meets Girl', don't bother".
People in narrowly defined groups sometimes do this as a gatekeeping function: "You tell a nice story but you aren't one of us and you shouldn't really be here in our space". People in broader LGBTQIA groups often do it as a form of shoehorning: "I divide the queer world up into these categories and excuse me but you belong in this category". People in the broad mainsteam culture do it fairly regularly as a way of denying the legitimacy of a marginalized identity: "You say you're that specific kind of person but really you're just a normal person who is trying to explain away your behavior or the outcome of it".
In all cases, it erases the full detailed story that the individual is trying to tell, by refusing to acknowledge that it has meaning aside from functioning as an example of a piece of terminology.
= B =
This is not just a case of people being dense or of getting caught up in little things that don't matter. It's political. They're rejecting what is being said because they don't like it, they feel threatened by it, they don't want a wider awareness of this kind of experience or understanding to catch on and they want to shut it down.
A person's choice of their own labels is also political, of course. To label our experience in the first place, in this manner, is to assert that it is part of a larger pattern, and that what we've been through has been the way it has been because of stuff that we have in common with other people who share the same identity-factor, that it is categorical, that it's an aggregate identity and not just our own personal narrative or our own unique personal quirks and traits.
There's always a backdrop, too. One chooses one identity as a way to push away some other identity, a default identity of some sort, that is otherwise constantly being foisted upon one. For example, if there were not a heteronormative expectation no one would need to come out as gay or lesbian. In the absense of being able to identify as gay and be recognized and understood as such, an individual's behavior, if still seen through heteronormative assumptions, looks strange: "Eww, you are so sex-obsessed and so unpicky that you would do perverted things like have erotic experiences with people of the same sex, which is clearly less desirable, so you are therefore a sex maniac and a threat to public decency!" Asserting the different identity (gay) shifts perception by establishing a different norm, a different set of expectations and values for understanding those same behaviors: "Oh, so for you, erotic experiences with the same sex are the desirable ones, so when you're sexually interested at all, that's where it will occur and it doesn't mean you're more sex-obsessed or less picky, you're different".
= C =
Our backdrop includes a world of existing labels, too. But they may not be useful to us, especially because labels that describe people so often bundle together a whole batch of meanings and implications that the person trying to explain their identity needs to untie and separate from each other.
Imagine a female person, perhaps from a previous century, who wants to designate herself as an expert in her field. The male people in her world call themselves "masters" of their subject areas. But "master" is a term that in her time is reserved exclusively for male people. The corresponding term for female use was "mistress". But the two terms have very different connotations, and she finds that saying she is a "Mistress of Science" doesn't convey at all what she wants to express. Perhaps she chooses to refer to herself as a "Master of Science" only to be contradicted by people who tell her that it is inappropriate for her to use the word "master" because it means she is male, and she isn't. The problem is that mastery, in the relevant sense, has been regarded as male, and yet she is. A person possessing mastery. Her choice of the term "Master of Science" is political. It is controversial (or was, once upon a time) because it is political. The people rejecting her entire claim on the basis of not liking her term for herself, that is also political, and their rejection of the entirety of what she's trying to say by focusing exclusively on her choice of term, that's also political: the politics of Not Listening.
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Sunday, October 7, 2018
Gender and Sex and Cognitive Dissonance
Do you notice this inconsistency?
People in our society so often insist that each sex has a rigid set of characteristics, and any and all efforts to make either sex more like the other is bound to fail, like trying to repeal the law of gravity. That there are two sexes and that they are different, and different in specific ways, making them opposites.
Then people expend so much effort making sure that this gets emphasized, lest anyone miss it. Encoding additional cues and clues that we're all supposed to use to make sure everyone knows what sex any given person is at all times. Pink for girls and blue for boys. Girls pushing little strollers, boys toting miniature sports equipment. Scotch-taping a little bow onto an infant girl's forehead.
I mean, after awhile it's kind of like someone insisting that something is so obvious and self-explanatory that you can't miss it, and then they keep explaining it and pointing it out and creating billboards and posters to draw your attention to it and eventually even passing laws to make it mandatory that you say that you see it, too.
After awhile it begins to dawn on you: these people don't believe what they're saying! They may wish it were so, they may want it to be so, but their actions show that they are afraid that it isn't. I mean, if you believe that night and day are so compellingly different from each other that you go around comparing other things to it ("as different as night and day"), you don't generally find it necessary to go around complaining about evil streetlights or telling children it isn't appropriate to draw a moon in the daytime sky lest people think it's night.
No, their defensive actions betray that as much as they insist that these differences are as they describe them, and inevitable, they secretly fear that if effort isn't taken to maintain things this way, it will all crumble away and there'll be no getting it back.
Once folks see that defensiveness, I think it is easier for them to understand it as an ideology. Now let's look again at some of the stuff that the ideology insists upon:
• TWO sexes — why so insistent on denying that variations exist? Because they've created a polarized situation, defining the sexes as opposite, like up versus down. It has to remain an either/or binary choice at all times to be consistent with that polarization. Intersex people are a threat.
• KNOWING — why do all the lilies have to be gilded, overemphasized and underlined? Because the systematic way of treating people different based on their sex is dependent on knowing at all times which sex a person is. Indeterminacy is a threat.
• GENDER — first time this word has appeared in this blog post, have you noticed? Gender is the assortment of traits and assumptions and meanings that get attached to the sex identification of the person. People are treated different, and their behaviors interpreted differently, according to which sex they are perceived to be. All that different-treatment stuff, that's the assignment of gender.
• INEVITABILITY — The insistence that these traits invariably attach to the corresponding sex, the insistence that they follow inevitably, hides the fact that gender isn't sex itself, it's a socially maintained set of beliefs and assumptions that we attach to sex. Screw around with any of the previous bricks that this structure is built from (that there are exactly TWO sexes, that you always KNOW which sex you're dealing with, and that the sexual differences in traits that we've all had drilled into us will be duly present) and you start to see that gendering is occurring as a verb. But when all of those illusions are successfully maintained, the inevitability of gender is maintained too. The ongoing act of gendering becomes invisible.
• SEXUAL ORIENTATION — The fear of getting sex and gender wrong gets turned into a sexual threat. Sexual appetite has been mapped onto conformity to gender. You won't be heterosexually eligible if you deviate. But that in turn makes non-heterosexual people a threat to the system. Since the system is mobilizing fear here, a threat can be useful though: something that people are given a fear of being or becoming if they don't conform.
• ENEMIES — Opposite sex, polarized sex differences, diametrically divided traits and characteristics... what is this all aimed at? Keeping in place an adversarial hostility. Sexuality tends to forge intimacies, have you noticed? But the system (let's give it a name: patriarchy) is based on inequality. Real intimacy is a threat to maintaining inequality. But if the overwhelming majority of people deal with the folks they're sexually attracted to by treating them as utterly foreign creatures that you have to treat according to rules instead of treating them the way you yourself want to be treated, and if they interact with them like enemies trying to negotiate a truce and don't really trust each other easily, intimacy is kept to a minimum despite the barrier-breaking potential of human sexuality.
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People in our society so often insist that each sex has a rigid set of characteristics, and any and all efforts to make either sex more like the other is bound to fail, like trying to repeal the law of gravity. That there are two sexes and that they are different, and different in specific ways, making them opposites.
Then people expend so much effort making sure that this gets emphasized, lest anyone miss it. Encoding additional cues and clues that we're all supposed to use to make sure everyone knows what sex any given person is at all times. Pink for girls and blue for boys. Girls pushing little strollers, boys toting miniature sports equipment. Scotch-taping a little bow onto an infant girl's forehead.
I mean, after awhile it's kind of like someone insisting that something is so obvious and self-explanatory that you can't miss it, and then they keep explaining it and pointing it out and creating billboards and posters to draw your attention to it and eventually even passing laws to make it mandatory that you say that you see it, too.
After awhile it begins to dawn on you: these people don't believe what they're saying! They may wish it were so, they may want it to be so, but their actions show that they are afraid that it isn't. I mean, if you believe that night and day are so compellingly different from each other that you go around comparing other things to it ("as different as night and day"), you don't generally find it necessary to go around complaining about evil streetlights or telling children it isn't appropriate to draw a moon in the daytime sky lest people think it's night.
No, their defensive actions betray that as much as they insist that these differences are as they describe them, and inevitable, they secretly fear that if effort isn't taken to maintain things this way, it will all crumble away and there'll be no getting it back.
Once folks see that defensiveness, I think it is easier for them to understand it as an ideology. Now let's look again at some of the stuff that the ideology insists upon:
• TWO sexes — why so insistent on denying that variations exist? Because they've created a polarized situation, defining the sexes as opposite, like up versus down. It has to remain an either/or binary choice at all times to be consistent with that polarization. Intersex people are a threat.
• KNOWING — why do all the lilies have to be gilded, overemphasized and underlined? Because the systematic way of treating people different based on their sex is dependent on knowing at all times which sex a person is. Indeterminacy is a threat.
• GENDER — first time this word has appeared in this blog post, have you noticed? Gender is the assortment of traits and assumptions and meanings that get attached to the sex identification of the person. People are treated different, and their behaviors interpreted differently, according to which sex they are perceived to be. All that different-treatment stuff, that's the assignment of gender.
• INEVITABILITY — The insistence that these traits invariably attach to the corresponding sex, the insistence that they follow inevitably, hides the fact that gender isn't sex itself, it's a socially maintained set of beliefs and assumptions that we attach to sex. Screw around with any of the previous bricks that this structure is built from (that there are exactly TWO sexes, that you always KNOW which sex you're dealing with, and that the sexual differences in traits that we've all had drilled into us will be duly present) and you start to see that gendering is occurring as a verb. But when all of those illusions are successfully maintained, the inevitability of gender is maintained too. The ongoing act of gendering becomes invisible.
• SEXUAL ORIENTATION — The fear of getting sex and gender wrong gets turned into a sexual threat. Sexual appetite has been mapped onto conformity to gender. You won't be heterosexually eligible if you deviate. But that in turn makes non-heterosexual people a threat to the system. Since the system is mobilizing fear here, a threat can be useful though: something that people are given a fear of being or becoming if they don't conform.
• ENEMIES — Opposite sex, polarized sex differences, diametrically divided traits and characteristics... what is this all aimed at? Keeping in place an adversarial hostility. Sexuality tends to forge intimacies, have you noticed? But the system (let's give it a name: patriarchy) is based on inequality. Real intimacy is a threat to maintaining inequality. But if the overwhelming majority of people deal with the folks they're sexually attracted to by treating them as utterly foreign creatures that you have to treat according to rules instead of treating them the way you yourself want to be treated, and if they interact with them like enemies trying to negotiate a truce and don't really trust each other easily, intimacy is kept to a minimum despite the barrier-breaking potential of human sexuality.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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