Nifty — I’m at the library
Oct 8, 2003 Feminism/Politics
Since I’m on a PC, I can see all these keen little formatting buttons in the Moveable Type input menu that don’t exist on my Mac. Makes me want to underline stuff just because I can.
I was working out today and thinking back to being eleven and how I used to wear this ugly little cap that looked like Radar’s on M*A*S*H only it was cream colored. I used to wear it with my beloved beige Member’s Only jacket, much like the one that Rosario wears on Will & Grace. Seeing as how the library has outlawed Google images search, you’ll have to look pics up yourself if you want to see the accessories for my snazzy ensemble.
Anyhow, it used to drive my parents crazy that I’d wear this all of the time. At one point they confronted me and said, “It’s because you’re ashamed of your chubbiness, isn’t it?” I think they’re still convinced of that. (As an aside, that’s how I found out I was chubby because previously I had no idea. So it was a rude awakening, “No, I like my jacket and what do you mean I’m chubby and why do you look so concerned?”)
Actually I wore the jacket all of the time because I loved having pockets. I wore the hat because I liked hats. So here I was this (evidentally) chubby girl in an ugly jacket with lots of useful little pockets and a ridiculous winter hat riding around on my black boy’s bike (because I didn’t like the pink Huffy that was my only other choice) and people used to mistake me for a boy. I had two feelings about this: 1) Ha! People think I’m a boy! What a bunch of dimwits! and 2) Of course this is a girlish outfit because I am a girl and that makes anything I wear girlish.
From the time I was three, I had a feminist sensibility that allowed me to define myself on my own terms. I never questioned my essential girlhood: I had girlparts therefore anything I do is by definition girlish. Makes sense, right? Well it did until I hit what is now called the “tweens.” Suddenly I was chubby whereas before I was simply me. Suddenly my supposed “boyishness” was cause for concern.
It was as I got older and social expectations descended decisively that I really started to lament my loss. By the time I was 13 and beginning to develop (and here I give you a meaningful look) I was pretty unhappy about the whole thing. I had a huge crush on James Dean at this time and part of it was because I wanted to be James Dean. He didn’t have to wear make-up and he had that snazzy red jacket, which probably had an inside pocket just like my beloved and long-gone Member’s Only windbreaker. He could dress for practicality and look good. I could see that there was more leeway for boys to be who they were and still be acceptable while it was pretty obvious to me that girls had to spend a lot of time hiding their supposed imperfections.
Boys seemed powerful to me. I didn’t want to be passive and pretty. I didn’t want to wait around for life to happen to me. I was very sad as I contemplated my limited future and unlike a Judy Blume heroine, was horrified that my body was dragging me into an adulthood I didn’t really want.
For a long time I was attracted to boys (then men) who had qualities that I wanted, too. They were brash and out-spoken. Confident, driven, creative, and brave. When I offered them the parts of myself that shared these characteristics, I was inevitably disappointed. They liked these traits in theory but in reality they asked me to please tone it down a bit and by the way, could I quit talking so loud for chrissakes? And if I couldn’t do that, could I please give them the number of my friend who wore flowers and flounces and was evidentally extremely proud of her breasts?
I thought about this while I watched The Lord of the Rings. I knew that if I had seen it at twelve or thirteen that it would have reminded me of my suffocating future. I was never pretty enough to be an Elfin Queen so where did that leave me? I wanted to be Legolas or Gandalf. I wanted in on the grand adventure.
At some point in my late teens, I decided that I was going to be the person that I always wanted to date. I was going to quit looking for men with the traits I wished I could cultivate and cultivate them in myself, to hell with the disapproving onlookers. It was hard-going at first. My feelings still got hurt when men who respected me wouldn’t date me. Or who did date me and then tried to change me. I still felt awkward when I tried to mesh cultural expectations with my own values. Although being an artistic punk rocker gave me some room to explore my strengths, there was still an awful lot of sexism only the (boy) punk rockers wouldn’t admit it in themselves because they thought they were such forward-thinkers. Frustrating indeed.
(Quick digression: At some point in my teens my mom asked me, with great compassion, if I was a lesbian. I rush to say in Seinfeldian tones, not that there’s anything wrong with that but I wasn’t — I’m not. And I felt further pushed into a little box that wouldn’t fit and hurt to climb into.)
When I met Brett, I would be over-the-top sometimes as a test. Did he like me even when I was obnoxiously pushy? Did he like me even when I was extremely loud? Yes, he did. What a relief! But Brett bought into the same premise that I did: that by definition I was feminine and so I never needed to prove my femininity to him.
There are people in the world — not in my friendship circle but in my relative circle — who believe that Brett is pushed around by me. What’s worse, there are people who think that he’s a wimp because he hasn’t muzzled me as any self-respecting husband would. Obviously, this isn’t true. Brett and I are equal partners it’s just that he’s quiet and I’m loud. I always think that Brett’s ability to love me not despite but because of my particular personality is a sign that he’s more comfortable in his male skin than other men. Like me, he knows that he is by definition a boy and he’s not in the least threatened by being in a relationship with a woman like me.
Our freedom to be the man and woman that we want to be is, I hope, an empowering model for Noah. I think that we get hung up on external boy/girl modeling — does the boy have a doll? does the girl have a truck? — when that’s just the tip of the sexism iceberg. We need to recognize our internalized sexism towards men and women. It’s pretty easy to chuckle as we watch our daughters climb trees or see our sons at their Fisher-Price cook stoves. The real test is how comfortable we are with the adults in our lives who stretch gender boundaries. I think it’s important to work this out before our children hit their “tweens” and start pushing buttons that we perhaps didn’t even know we had.
October 8th, 2003 at 5:51 pm
… I love it when you make me think.
October 9th, 2003 at 9:41 am
Dawn!! There’s so much here. I just want to sit down over coffee and talk about it with you. Until I was 13 or 14, I was adamant about wanting to play football. And I spent all of high school battling the expectations put upon me–why could guys get away with being comedic, but girls really should just be the ones laughing. To top it all off, the whole thing with dating guys who embodied what you wanted to be–unfortunately I didn’t figure that out until I was 25.
I’m just thrilled to read something that resonates so completely with my experience as a female–we even have similar husbands.
Wow.
October 9th, 2003 at 11:42 am
i could have said that (only not so eloquently). great post.
October 9th, 2003 at 2:16 pm
Yeah! Yeah! What you said. Exactly.