Street Cred; or, how to treat women well assuming you're already not a douche
Notes: I wrote this essay for to post to my RL circle of friends, despite reasons explained within as to why that's probably a bad idea, and I probably will when I find the guts to. In the meantime, I thought my journal friends might (a) find it interesting and (b) be willing to tell me if I said something utterly stupid. In other words, concrit welcome!
It's ironic (in what is the colloquial sense and not the literary sense) that I'm going to start this with the statement of "as a person of the female gender in the male-dominated field of physics", but I am and will suffer the hypocrisy.
As a person of the female gender in the male-dominated field of physics, I occasionally have conversations with my physics peers about women; generally about women in physics, sometimes more generally (like how I would love if I could sit in the lounge without having to hear guys saying "I'm gonna rape you" - to each other, playing video games, of course). And as one of the very few women in my program and department, and as a woman who generally likes thinking about sociological and psychological and feminist topics, I generally take it upon myself to at the very least bring up concepts like safe spaces and how they're not just about physical safety, because that line is so well-drawn in my particular segment of society that it's not something that needs discussing, but safe spaces as a psycological concept is still useful and relevant (see afformentioned usage of rape in the "gamer" way), and sometimes these conversations aren't fun and as much of my year of physics could testify, have very occasionally ended with me crying into my Fourier transforms.
But I don't actually want to make this post about why you're an asshole for using rape in the gamer way when I've asked you a dozen, a hundred times not to (short version of the story, as summed up by, if I recall correctly, Joseph: if you're my friend and I tell you something is hurting me and you gain nothing from doing it and yet still do it? You're an asshole, congratulations!), it's about the topic that always comes up. The one where my male acquaintances say "look, I get the essentials of how to not be an asshole - don't crack rape jokes, don't crack wife jokes, don't harass people - and that's pretty easy, except for maybe the wife jokes cause those are funny. But I'm not an asshole and yet it still feels like women (i.e. you) want something more and I don't know what that is."
I didn't either, for a while. Because pretty much all the men of my regular acquaintance - and I can't actually think of one who isn't - are good guys. They might crack the occasional wife joke, the might forget and holler the word "rape" in the lounge several times in a row as I wince in the corner (having given up on nagging, because if women complain they're nagging and that's pretty much the worst thing a woman in my circles gets called, these days, and this will be relevant when I get around to explaining my point), but they're good guys and I have no doubt of it and am proud to have them as friends.
The honest truth of it is my society - and to some extent the Canada where I have had opportunities to be physically present - treats women really well. Not even "well compared to Rawanda", but well compared to France or Italy or the Czech Republic, because when I was in France I experienced the most terrifying event of my life, which is saying something about the low-horror-movie-potential of my life, but still. Being followed at midnight through a gargantuan, maze-like, downtown Paris metro station by a dude who wanted my and my sister's number, and wouldn't believe us when we said we were traveling and as such didn't have a number - as if we would have given one to him as we did - and got increasingly angry as he chased us, me dragging my sister through the station, blind to where I was going until we ended up on some completely random subway platform and then he gave up, shouting curses at us while the other three hundred or so people in the station looked the other way. They wouldn't have looked the other way if he had kept following for even five more seconds, because I would have thrown down the biggest "I'm a crazy, crazy woman screaming and waving my arms around" fit of my life. So I had a back-up plan, but it was freaking scary, especially after that when my metro card stopped working and I thought I was trapped in the same atrium he'd found us in, and I don't think my heart stopped racing for a good half-hour. And there were the men who followed us down the boulevard in Geneva while heckling us, and the creepy hostel admin (night admin) who would not stop hitting on and "casually" touching my sister, and the German guy in the hostel in Prague who sat next to me at a computer and made me add him on facebook [1], and took photos of us over breakfast despite our protesting.
This was Europe, of course, and we could play the game of "ways in which women are treated even worse, now with physical assault and systemic violence and supression!" all the way to the bottom, but I don't want to talk about that either, because it's not my experience and all I want to say is, yeah, I have it pretty good. We have it pretty good: women that we can smile at a guy for holding a door and not expect to be followed through the streets for it, and men that there's no expectation that to be a man you have to denigrate and harass women. It's a good deal. But why do I still have these conversations that end with me feeling like something is missing and men confused that I can't tell them what it is?
It finally came to me when I was trying to articulate the subtle difference between the boys who are my very good friends in physics, the ones who are my best friends in a way that surpasses our respective genders, and the standard male of my acquaintance. Not every guy who is and isn't my good friend falls into the following explaination, because obviously there are many factors that make people good friends or not, but this was the discussion that clued me in. It's not that the men who are my good friends are less macho or more feminine or make fewer sexist jokes or are more appropriate in a 'work'-place (you know who you are, friend of mine with pictures of scantily clad women in your Subatomic presentation).
It's that those men in particular didn't make me show my street cred to be friends with them in the first place.
And that's really what I want, what I think most women, especially those who choose male-dominated disciplines want (because if you don't like spending time with men you're not going to go into physics). What I mean by street cred, to be explicit, really breaks down into two categories:
(1) The obvious one, which is in this case quite specific to me but certainly more broadly applicable, and a sensation I expeirience less: don't make me prove I'm as good at physics as a man. Just. Don't. Don't assume I don't know what I'm doing until I prove otherwise. This is more obvious and as such happens less, or at least, happens very little to me, possibly because we're all at the stage of not knowing shit and trying to prove that we do, but I could introduce you to many, many professional women in male-dominated fields who could regale you with stories of how often this happens. You don't have to assume we're geniuses, but do us the courtesy of assuming nothing at all, and at least of assuming we're as serious about this as anybody else.
(2) The subtle one, and the one I do experience with resigned regularity, is don't make me prove I'm one of those cool girls around whom you can be yourself. You know, the kind where you can talk about video games and make dirty jokes and talk about hot girls and hey! She's cool! She gets it! She joins in! Because I am and I do and I will, but with many if not most men I have to earn it, I have to prove it. It's a form of the old boys club, where I have to spend a lot of time and energy proving I'm not going to try and re-write the constitution and that I qualify for entry at all. I don't expect anyone to call me "friend" when I first meet them, or for that matter ever, but when I spend much of my life in a social circle with people, with men, especially when I have no choice but to spend my time with men, it'd be nice to be considered, automatically without the usual pre-screening, a potential friend.
Without fail, my closest male friends today didn't make me write that test. They looked at me and saw, not "potential girl" but "potential friend" and "potential physics study partner". The men who I see occasionally in various spaces, the ones who actually let me relax and enjoy chatting to them, are those guys. Our conversation is a conversation between equals, between people who are considering the ways in which they are alike and not this initial barrier to interaction. It's not about potential attraction or the awkardness of being interested in each other, it's not about screening our words - in either direction, like the conversation I had with maybe a dozen people at a party about what are female issues and topics of conversation by tradition, but really everybody's concern. Part of not making me prove I'm "one of the guys" is not revoking that license the minute I talk about "girl" things.
I guess as a sort of a half-hearted disclaimer I should say that this is only my (and the other dozen or so women I've explained this to and who have gone "fuck yeah, that") personal opinion. It's possible there are women out there who will say they want to be treated "like a woman", explicitly - actually, I know these women, but I'm not sure if they're limiting that to the mating game in particular and would extend that desire to general social circles at work or school or hobbies. But I really don't think asking to be treated like a colleague or coworker or peer or team-member or classmate first is something many women would say they don't want. Furthermore, I am biologically female and nominally identify as female in gender; I am cisgendered and have no active cognitive dissonance there, but I also don't explicitly identify as female. I am and I'm happy to be so, but gender is so far down on the list of self-identifiers that if I woke up tomorrow as male (obviously an easier situation to hypothesize about than experience) I'd likely just shrug and go about my life pretty much exactly as is, minus a few things that I would variably not miss at all (like shaving my legs) or miss but adapt to (sisterhood?). Well, I'd probably worry what Joseph would say, but I digress. [2]
But Hilary, you might say; you talk about gender and sex issues all the freaking time! Well, yes, for two reasons: one, I am as always perpetually interested in pretty much everything that makes humanity tick, and if you know me at all you know that gender politics is just one of the many topics I like to discuss and dissect. I am not an accountant or an expert in public policy or economics but I still like to rant about pension systems! Two, and a little more controversially, I lack the privilege to be able to not think about gender issues. One of the grand old markers of privilege of any sort is exactly that: I am white and in a straight relationship and am thus privileged enough in those areas that I never have to think about racial or sexual orientation issues. I can and do walk around oblivious to what people might be thinking of me because of my race or choice of partner. But as a woman, as a woman who's been taught by almost all men [3], studying things discovered by almost all men, working with almost all men, I don't have the luxury of not thinking about being a woman and what that means in this environment, even if that environment isn't particularly or at all toxic. I have to represent and consider that part of myself, because other people see it and assign ideas and characteristics and expectations to me because of it. I'm lucky that I do enjoy thinking about these things, because if I didn't it would be absolutely exhausting, and even then it still easily can be.
And here lies the contradiction, the hypocrisy of starting this essay with as "a woman in physics", because it's exactly that moniker that I don't want to be associated with, at least and especially not first and foremost. I'd love to not be able to think about my identity as female, to be able to walk into a room full of colleagues and not be wondering who will treat me as female and who will treat me as a physicist. The downside of being able to talk about these issues is that it makes me a nag, and that's another item in the privilege knapsack: I can't talk about this shit without being an angry feminist or defensive or whiny. But I do it anyway, at least when I have the emotional energy, but if I do it before I've earned my street cred with the men in the conversation, you can pretty much guarantee I'm never going to get initiated. It's a very fine balance and like I said, exhausting. I'd love to not worry about saying something too "female" and scaring men off, and I'd love not to have to lay the "I'm totally an awesome girl you can say 'that's what she said' around and I'll kick your ass while doing it" attitude really thick with most men I meet, because yeah, I am that girl but I shouldn't have to prove it to warrant your non-sexual attention, your sense of humour, your intellectual conversation.
There are a whole lot more issues tangled up in here, of course, especially if you dig into the part about why some personality characteristics are male-positive and female-negative and vice versa; basically the whole question as to why there are these male and female social divides in our society at all, and why should women who are cool enough be able to cross those lines anyway? What about the ones who aren't? Why do we think any aren't? I'd really like to be saying, instead of "treat me like a man" (which I've tried not to say and don't mean to say but can be read between the lines anyway) and "treat me as a person", but I also am explicitly asking men to not feel they can't socialize in a masculine way and thus in some sense extend an invitation to me to engage in that type of social interaction. And how does the whole insane mating game interact with this? (I'd like to say not at all because I'm talking about interactions in specified social circles that are for things, for jobs and school and sports and something that isn't general mingling, but obviously this is a component that can't be entirely dismissed.) Yeah, I don't think I have the understanding or time to go into that. Not today, at any rate.
Finally, I know a whole bunch of guys who do this already - like I said, my best guy friends were the men who didn't make me show my street cred, and it rocks. I can't really describe how happy, how relieving it is to be spending my time with men who are friends first and male second (or tenth or seventy-third), because I am a friend first and female second (or tenth or seventy-third). So if you're a guy and reading this, maybe you already do this. I've noticed that younger guys who grew up with female heads of the household often do this pretty naturally, for example. But in answer to that vague and trying question, "how do we actually make this male-dominated space open and inviting to women" is, for me, exactly this concept.
Teal dears and all: if you're a guy and not a douche and you're meeting me for the first time, don't make me earn your consideration. Don't judge me as a woman, don't worry about trying to be someone who you aren't to conform to somebody you're presuming me to be, just because I'm female. I've got more going on than two X chromosomes, and if we could just move past that at the start, if we could just not even put it on the table, our interactions are going to be that much more interesting and rewarding, because I'm pretty awesome and I bet you are too.
***
[1] He tried to make my sister do the same but that was the first and last time in my life I pulled the protective older sister card and flatly told him that no, sorry, she's too young and I won't let her, much to her initial confusion but eventual gratitude when he took to sending her increasingly angry and demanding facebook messages trying to get her to add him.
[2] This is not an argument against the validity of being transgender, at all. Individual attachment to sex and gender varies a lot, I'm merely pointing out where my particular biases fall.
[3] I counted how many female professors I've had in four years of physics and one of mostly philosophy, and the answer is three. One philosophy prof at McGill, who taught me three courses and so ups the "number of classes with a female prof" count significantly, one FSL and one math professor at uOttawa. I've gone seven semesters in a row without a female professor - my first semester at uOttawa was my last being taught by women. I have taken mostly science and math courses since then and know how bad the ratios are in physics, but it's still shocking to do the math and realize I've had 3/34 female professors (or 5/47 female-taught courses).
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It's ironic (in what is the colloquial sense and not the literary sense) that I'm going to start this with the statement of "as a person of the female gender in the male-dominated field of physics", but I am and will suffer the hypocrisy.
As a person of the female gender in the male-dominated field of physics, I occasionally have conversations with my physics peers about women; generally about women in physics, sometimes more generally (like how I would love if I could sit in the lounge without having to hear guys saying "I'm gonna rape you" - to each other, playing video games, of course). And as one of the very few women in my program and department, and as a woman who generally likes thinking about sociological and psychological and feminist topics, I generally take it upon myself to at the very least bring up concepts like safe spaces and how they're not just about physical safety, because that line is so well-drawn in my particular segment of society that it's not something that needs discussing, but safe spaces as a psycological concept is still useful and relevant (see afformentioned usage of rape in the "gamer" way), and sometimes these conversations aren't fun and as much of my year of physics could testify, have very occasionally ended with me crying into my Fourier transforms.
But I don't actually want to make this post about why you're an asshole for using rape in the gamer way when I've asked you a dozen, a hundred times not to (short version of the story, as summed up by, if I recall correctly, Joseph: if you're my friend and I tell you something is hurting me and you gain nothing from doing it and yet still do it? You're an asshole, congratulations!), it's about the topic that always comes up. The one where my male acquaintances say "look, I get the essentials of how to not be an asshole - don't crack rape jokes, don't crack wife jokes, don't harass people - and that's pretty easy, except for maybe the wife jokes cause those are funny. But I'm not an asshole and yet it still feels like women (i.e. you) want something more and I don't know what that is."
I didn't either, for a while. Because pretty much all the men of my regular acquaintance - and I can't actually think of one who isn't - are good guys. They might crack the occasional wife joke, the might forget and holler the word "rape" in the lounge several times in a row as I wince in the corner (having given up on nagging, because if women complain they're nagging and that's pretty much the worst thing a woman in my circles gets called, these days, and this will be relevant when I get around to explaining my point), but they're good guys and I have no doubt of it and am proud to have them as friends.
The honest truth of it is my society - and to some extent the Canada where I have had opportunities to be physically present - treats women really well. Not even "well compared to Rawanda", but well compared to France or Italy or the Czech Republic, because when I was in France I experienced the most terrifying event of my life, which is saying something about the low-horror-movie-potential of my life, but still. Being followed at midnight through a gargantuan, maze-like, downtown Paris metro station by a dude who wanted my and my sister's number, and wouldn't believe us when we said we were traveling and as such didn't have a number - as if we would have given one to him as we did - and got increasingly angry as he chased us, me dragging my sister through the station, blind to where I was going until we ended up on some completely random subway platform and then he gave up, shouting curses at us while the other three hundred or so people in the station looked the other way. They wouldn't have looked the other way if he had kept following for even five more seconds, because I would have thrown down the biggest "I'm a crazy, crazy woman screaming and waving my arms around" fit of my life. So I had a back-up plan, but it was freaking scary, especially after that when my metro card stopped working and I thought I was trapped in the same atrium he'd found us in, and I don't think my heart stopped racing for a good half-hour. And there were the men who followed us down the boulevard in Geneva while heckling us, and the creepy hostel admin (night admin) who would not stop hitting on and "casually" touching my sister, and the German guy in the hostel in Prague who sat next to me at a computer and made me add him on facebook [1], and took photos of us over breakfast despite our protesting.
This was Europe, of course, and we could play the game of "ways in which women are treated even worse, now with physical assault and systemic violence and supression!" all the way to the bottom, but I don't want to talk about that either, because it's not my experience and all I want to say is, yeah, I have it pretty good. We have it pretty good: women that we can smile at a guy for holding a door and not expect to be followed through the streets for it, and men that there's no expectation that to be a man you have to denigrate and harass women. It's a good deal. But why do I still have these conversations that end with me feeling like something is missing and men confused that I can't tell them what it is?
It finally came to me when I was trying to articulate the subtle difference between the boys who are my very good friends in physics, the ones who are my best friends in a way that surpasses our respective genders, and the standard male of my acquaintance. Not every guy who is and isn't my good friend falls into the following explaination, because obviously there are many factors that make people good friends or not, but this was the discussion that clued me in. It's not that the men who are my good friends are less macho or more feminine or make fewer sexist jokes or are more appropriate in a 'work'-place (you know who you are, friend of mine with pictures of scantily clad women in your Subatomic presentation).
It's that those men in particular didn't make me show my street cred to be friends with them in the first place.
And that's really what I want, what I think most women, especially those who choose male-dominated disciplines want (because if you don't like spending time with men you're not going to go into physics). What I mean by street cred, to be explicit, really breaks down into two categories:
(1) The obvious one, which is in this case quite specific to me but certainly more broadly applicable, and a sensation I expeirience less: don't make me prove I'm as good at physics as a man. Just. Don't. Don't assume I don't know what I'm doing until I prove otherwise. This is more obvious and as such happens less, or at least, happens very little to me, possibly because we're all at the stage of not knowing shit and trying to prove that we do, but I could introduce you to many, many professional women in male-dominated fields who could regale you with stories of how often this happens. You don't have to assume we're geniuses, but do us the courtesy of assuming nothing at all, and at least of assuming we're as serious about this as anybody else.
(2) The subtle one, and the one I do experience with resigned regularity, is don't make me prove I'm one of those cool girls around whom you can be yourself. You know, the kind where you can talk about video games and make dirty jokes and talk about hot girls and hey! She's cool! She gets it! She joins in! Because I am and I do and I will, but with many if not most men I have to earn it, I have to prove it. It's a form of the old boys club, where I have to spend a lot of time and energy proving I'm not going to try and re-write the constitution and that I qualify for entry at all. I don't expect anyone to call me "friend" when I first meet them, or for that matter ever, but when I spend much of my life in a social circle with people, with men, especially when I have no choice but to spend my time with men, it'd be nice to be considered, automatically without the usual pre-screening, a potential friend.
Without fail, my closest male friends today didn't make me write that test. They looked at me and saw, not "potential girl" but "potential friend" and "potential physics study partner". The men who I see occasionally in various spaces, the ones who actually let me relax and enjoy chatting to them, are those guys. Our conversation is a conversation between equals, between people who are considering the ways in which they are alike and not this initial barrier to interaction. It's not about potential attraction or the awkardness of being interested in each other, it's not about screening our words - in either direction, like the conversation I had with maybe a dozen people at a party about what are female issues and topics of conversation by tradition, but really everybody's concern. Part of not making me prove I'm "one of the guys" is not revoking that license the minute I talk about "girl" things.
I guess as a sort of a half-hearted disclaimer I should say that this is only my (and the other dozen or so women I've explained this to and who have gone "fuck yeah, that") personal opinion. It's possible there are women out there who will say they want to be treated "like a woman", explicitly - actually, I know these women, but I'm not sure if they're limiting that to the mating game in particular and would extend that desire to general social circles at work or school or hobbies. But I really don't think asking to be treated like a colleague or coworker or peer or team-member or classmate first is something many women would say they don't want. Furthermore, I am biologically female and nominally identify as female in gender; I am cisgendered and have no active cognitive dissonance there, but I also don't explicitly identify as female. I am and I'm happy to be so, but gender is so far down on the list of self-identifiers that if I woke up tomorrow as male (obviously an easier situation to hypothesize about than experience) I'd likely just shrug and go about my life pretty much exactly as is, minus a few things that I would variably not miss at all (like shaving my legs) or miss but adapt to (sisterhood?). Well, I'd probably worry what Joseph would say, but I digress. [2]
But Hilary, you might say; you talk about gender and sex issues all the freaking time! Well, yes, for two reasons: one, I am as always perpetually interested in pretty much everything that makes humanity tick, and if you know me at all you know that gender politics is just one of the many topics I like to discuss and dissect. I am not an accountant or an expert in public policy or economics but I still like to rant about pension systems! Two, and a little more controversially, I lack the privilege to be able to not think about gender issues. One of the grand old markers of privilege of any sort is exactly that: I am white and in a straight relationship and am thus privileged enough in those areas that I never have to think about racial or sexual orientation issues. I can and do walk around oblivious to what people might be thinking of me because of my race or choice of partner. But as a woman, as a woman who's been taught by almost all men [3], studying things discovered by almost all men, working with almost all men, I don't have the luxury of not thinking about being a woman and what that means in this environment, even if that environment isn't particularly or at all toxic. I have to represent and consider that part of myself, because other people see it and assign ideas and characteristics and expectations to me because of it. I'm lucky that I do enjoy thinking about these things, because if I didn't it would be absolutely exhausting, and even then it still easily can be.
And here lies the contradiction, the hypocrisy of starting this essay with as "a woman in physics", because it's exactly that moniker that I don't want to be associated with, at least and especially not first and foremost. I'd love to not be able to think about my identity as female, to be able to walk into a room full of colleagues and not be wondering who will treat me as female and who will treat me as a physicist. The downside of being able to talk about these issues is that it makes me a nag, and that's another item in the privilege knapsack: I can't talk about this shit without being an angry feminist or defensive or whiny. But I do it anyway, at least when I have the emotional energy, but if I do it before I've earned my street cred with the men in the conversation, you can pretty much guarantee I'm never going to get initiated. It's a very fine balance and like I said, exhausting. I'd love to not worry about saying something too "female" and scaring men off, and I'd love not to have to lay the "I'm totally an awesome girl you can say 'that's what she said' around and I'll kick your ass while doing it" attitude really thick with most men I meet, because yeah, I am that girl but I shouldn't have to prove it to warrant your non-sexual attention, your sense of humour, your intellectual conversation.
There are a whole lot more issues tangled up in here, of course, especially if you dig into the part about why some personality characteristics are male-positive and female-negative and vice versa; basically the whole question as to why there are these male and female social divides in our society at all, and why should women who are cool enough be able to cross those lines anyway? What about the ones who aren't? Why do we think any aren't? I'd really like to be saying, instead of "treat me like a man" (which I've tried not to say and don't mean to say but can be read between the lines anyway) and "treat me as a person", but I also am explicitly asking men to not feel they can't socialize in a masculine way and thus in some sense extend an invitation to me to engage in that type of social interaction. And how does the whole insane mating game interact with this? (I'd like to say not at all because I'm talking about interactions in specified social circles that are for things, for jobs and school and sports and something that isn't general mingling, but obviously this is a component that can't be entirely dismissed.) Yeah, I don't think I have the understanding or time to go into that. Not today, at any rate.
Finally, I know a whole bunch of guys who do this already - like I said, my best guy friends were the men who didn't make me show my street cred, and it rocks. I can't really describe how happy, how relieving it is to be spending my time with men who are friends first and male second (or tenth or seventy-third), because I am a friend first and female second (or tenth or seventy-third). So if you're a guy and reading this, maybe you already do this. I've noticed that younger guys who grew up with female heads of the household often do this pretty naturally, for example. But in answer to that vague and trying question, "how do we actually make this male-dominated space open and inviting to women" is, for me, exactly this concept.
Teal dears and all: if you're a guy and not a douche and you're meeting me for the first time, don't make me earn your consideration. Don't judge me as a woman, don't worry about trying to be someone who you aren't to conform to somebody you're presuming me to be, just because I'm female. I've got more going on than two X chromosomes, and if we could just move past that at the start, if we could just not even put it on the table, our interactions are going to be that much more interesting and rewarding, because I'm pretty awesome and I bet you are too.
***
[1] He tried to make my sister do the same but that was the first and last time in my life I pulled the protective older sister card and flatly told him that no, sorry, she's too young and I won't let her, much to her initial confusion but eventual gratitude when he took to sending her increasingly angry and demanding facebook messages trying to get her to add him.
[2] This is not an argument against the validity of being transgender, at all. Individual attachment to sex and gender varies a lot, I'm merely pointing out where my particular biases fall.
[3] I counted how many female professors I've had in four years of physics and one of mostly philosophy, and the answer is three. One philosophy prof at McGill, who taught me three courses and so ups the "number of classes with a female prof" count significantly, one FSL and one math professor at uOttawa. I've gone seven semesters in a row without a female professor - my first semester at uOttawa was my last being taught by women. I have taken mostly science and math courses since then and know how bad the ratios are in physics, but it's still shocking to do the math and realize I've had 3/34 female professors (or 5/47 female-taught courses).
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