Gender in Genre, Part 2: Femmes are Useless, and Other Problems

[chinders]

Here's another installment of Gender in Genre! The first post is hereIt's not that I wish to complain that femmes are, on the whole, a put upon or oppressed group. We get our fair share of sexism, certainly, but there's a lot of privilege that goes along with being femme

Comments

[mrissa]

I think there are several things that can be going on there, some of them jerkfaced and some not. Here are the ones where I give people some slack depending, partly because I used to be them:

1) Some people are from environments where the opposite sex is so very much not who you are "supposed" to be socializing with in anything but a romantic way that it is worthy of comment if you have any opposite sex friends at all. (These environments are not notably supportive of intersexed people, to the point of not recognizing their existence, so the binary is entirely accurate in this description.) Some people are strongly heterosocial or strongly homosocial their whole lives, regardless of context, and that's no problem with me as long as they aren't going on and on about it or making sweeping statements about other people and what it all means.

2) Some people are from such small environments that they literally are the Only Girl Who. See also some Only Boys Who in dance or theater. So if they want to be with people who share their interests, well.

3) Some people find that the dynamic of intra-sexual competition in their area is either extremely toxic or something that they just do not deal well with. You get this with girls who think that boys are much nicer but also with boys who think that girls are much nicer. A lot of people grow out of the toxic intra-sexual competition when they leave their teens and/or leave the involuntary hothouse that is secondary school.

All of these things can be completely reasonable in context. It's just when they spill over out of context that I start giving people the look and going, "Really? Really, that's your basis for judgment?"

I compare this behavior to the "I was always the smartest kid in the room when I was little": sometimes completely true at the time, but it's very useful to notice when that time has passed and you actually know quite a few smart people.

[mrissa]

"I get along better with women than with men" (or vice versa) is not the same thing as, "Men [or again, vice versa] are all lazy and stupid." But if I had an Indian friend who started going on about how all people from India are stupid and lazy, I would be more concerned for the level of self-hatred involved than dismissive.

But I do know women who live in very small, very insular communities. They're not where I live. But I have some sympathy for them, even as I want them to get themselves out.

[tiger_spot]

Yeah, I think that can be a relatively neutral statement when the speaker is still in high school, or maybe just out and her self-concept hasn't caught up. But I'm very leery of it in adults now.

The idea of adults trapped in such small social environments that they can just happen to not have any same-gender friends because of unevenly distributed interests or whatever frankly terrifies me. (Same for no opposite-gender friends, but there I can see the larger social forces at work, so it seems more explicable.)

[mrissa]

I have relatives and shirttail relatives who have essentially no friends in person because they live in very small communities and are not gender-normative (thereby ruling out same-sex friendships) and are not romantically interested (which is the only kind of opposite-sex friendship allowed in these communities).

It is indeed terrifying.