Gender

There's this meme floating around right now: List seven random facts about yourself that somehow relate to gender (perceptions of, your own gender issues, how you feel about other people's, etc.) Since no one ever tags me for these things (mostly because not many people actually know I blog and I primarily lurk and don't comment much on the blogs I read), I tagged myself for this one because I thought it was interesting.

1. I have never wished that I was a man. I do think that even now there are still certain advantages that men have over women. But I fundamentally like being a woman. I have an internal sense of power that is directly related to my sex. It would be too hard to articulate what I mean in just one blog entry, especially because the power is somewhat intangible, but I feel most powerful when I am at my most feminine (dress, high heels, makeup). I realize that for many people, this is contradictory.

2. With that said, I think that the feminine power I feel is directly related to sexuality. When I think about moments in my life that have made me feel absolutely confident, strong, and powerful, the majority of those moments took place in the bedroom or during flirtations and negotiations that eventually led to the bedroom. I acknowledge that in the past I have used sex to increase my feelings of power (occasionally deliberately, but usually it's only a side effect of more pure and sincere intentions). While I would never be comfortable "sleeping my way to the top", so to speak, I admit that I have flirted or even occasionally led a man on because it was going to allow me to get something that I wanted. I have always thought of it like this: I'm a woman, and if a man is stupid enough to let me take advantage of him just because he thinks I might eventually sleep with him, then when I take every single thing I want from him and never give him anything in return, that's his problem and not mine. I do realize that many people believe that using flirtation to get ahead is as bad as actually having sex. It's the exact same thing, just on a smaller scale, and it should be frowned upon, period. I disagree, but I respect that opinion. The thing is, as I get older, I question the act of using sex for power. There's no doubt that one of the things I find appealing about sex is that it does make me feel powerful, but what does that say about society? (And about me? P.S.-feeling powerful does not equal, like, dominatrix. The sense of power has nothing to do with who is actually the more dominant player in the bedroom on any given night.) Obviously I don't believe that a woman can get anywhere substantial on looks alone. You don't get to be the CEO just by being hot and sexy. While I think looks can help you in life to a point, there comes a time when the woman who is getting by solely on her body just can't go any further. But how far can we get on brains alone? Brain power being equal (and high), can the 350 pound woman with the acne gain as much success in life (careerwise, wealthwise, respectwise) as the leggy blonde with C-cup breasts? There used to be this idea that a woman who was too pretty would never be respected, but I don't think that's true. In fact, I think these days it's the opposite, at least in my life experience thus far. This is getting off-topic so I'll stop, but yeah. Lots to think about here in terms of what makes women feel powerful, how our looks affect our chances for success more than looks do for men, etc.

3. When I was little, I named all of my stuffed animals and created individual personalities for them. I decided that the majority of my animals were boys. I occasionally gave one a girl's name, usually when it was a bunny in a dress or something so clearly meant to be a female that I couldn't make it a boy, but I favored my boy stuffed animals. My sister's stuffed animals were predominantly "boys" as well, as were my brother's. To this day, I mostly anthropomorphize inanimate objects as male. It would be interesting to find out if children are more likely to make their childhood toys male or female, and if how they assign gender to stuffed animals has anything to do with their own sex and gender. Anecdotally, I know that my best friend Kiki's beloved childhood animal is a girl rabbit, and I remember another girlfriend in college had a favorite childhood toy that she decided was a boy, even though it is clearly a female clown. Obviously, my very small sample doesn't show any clear trends. Ha.

4. I went to Wal-mart last weekend with Nicole and Anna. We were doing some Christmas shopping for Anna's son so we spent a lot of time in the kids' toys and clothing sections and I wanted to smack every woman who was buying Bratz dolls or toy makeup for six-year-olds or Disney princess dress up outfits or play kitchens or basically anything marketed to girls. I've been trying to figure out why it bothered me so much ever since. I know I had some very gendered toys when I was a kid: My Little Ponies immediately come to mind, and we had one of those play kitchens, and I played a lot with paper dolls from American Girl magazines, etc., etc. We also played house a lot, although my brother played house with me as eagerly as my sister did and I actually think that it's good for kids to play house provided that boys are encouraged to feed the baby dolls and do the pretend laundry as well. But mostly I remember playing gender-neutral games: farm, school, restaurant, factory (my sister always wanted to play either "factory" or "orphanage". Don't ask, she grew up to be pretty normal regardless), lots of board games, lots of bike riding or setting up obstacle courses in the backyard. At Wal-mart, I was looking for gender-neutral toys and games, and I saw a grand total of about three things that were being marketed equally to both boys and girls. Even the toys that were gender-neutral when I was a kid now have some sort of character marketing them as either "for boys" or "for girls." This scares me, and seems like a big step backward. I'd love to say, "It doesn't matter, just let your kids play with what they want to play with. The boys can play with the girls' stuff and the girls can play with the boys' stuff, so who cares how they market it?" This is how I feel, personally, and I like to think that when I have kids my son will be able to wear the pink Dora the Explorer sandals if he feels like it and my daughter can collect Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But I also know that there are way too many parents in the world who are not comfortable letting their sons into the princess dresses aisle and their daughters into the toy car aisle so yeah, it IS a problem how these toys and clothes are being marketed since not all parents are willing or able to explain to their children that these boundaries between boys' stuff and girls' stuff are not natural or good.

5. The other day I had to fill out my course evaluations for the semester. There were a few negative comments I felt compelled to make about one of my courses, but since I like and respect the professor overall, it was really important to me that she not be able to tell that I was the one that had made the comments. The thing is, there are only 8 people in the class, and all of us have written approximately fifty to sixty pages for the professor over the course of the semester. She has had ample opportunity to get a sense of our writing style. If she cares enough (and who knows if she actually does), I think it would be relatively easy for her to go through her evaluations and match them up to the writer just based on writing style. So when I was writing my evaluation, I tried really hard to write it in a more "male" way than I normally do. I mentioned this to Straight Mate, who was also filling out his evaluation at the time, and he thinks I'm weird for believing that there are "male" and "female" ways of writing. But of course there are! For example: Normally in a course evaluation, I would hedge my response by saying something like, "I feel that at times the course was disorganized." So to masculinize it, I wrote, "The course was often disorganized." Academic writing on the whole is generally considered "male." There's this thing online (I would link but I'm too lazy to look for it) that lets you submit sections of papers and then it analyzes them and tells you whether it thinks the paper was written by a male or a female. Inevitably, no matter what paper topic I opt to submit, if I submit a school paper the response comes back as "male." If I submit a section from my private journal, however, the response comes back about fifty percent male, fifty percent female (which makes sense, as I'm not the most emotional of females and I think this thing largely judges the emotion-related words in your writing)

6. Speaking of feminine and masculine language, I am working very, very hard these days to state my opinions without prefacing them with, "Well, maybe..." or, "I could be wrong, but..." Because that's what women do, whether we mean to or not. And it's time we stopped doing it. Really, think about it: when was the last time you heard a guy say, "I could be wrong, but...?" or some version of that statement. And when was the last time you heard a girl say it? I can give you my answer. The last time I heard a girl say it was last night during class. The last time I heard a guy say it was...well, not any time in recent memory. And maybe this is just the type of men and women I'm generally around, but I'm betting the phenomenon can be generalized beyond my little academic microcosm.

7. As much as I'm glad that I'm a woman in 2007 and not 1947 (or 1647, eeee!), there's a deep down secret part of me that thinks it would have been easier to live in a time where there were more clearly defined gender roles. But I acknowledge that those old-fashioned roles don't work for most people, so it's a very good thing that we have made the progress we have.