Rantypants
Wow, that's kind of long. Didn't realize before. This is what me not posting in three months looks like:
I have never considered myself a "feminist," or even someone who was concerned with gender issues at all, but wow, my last few weeks have been shoving these things in my face. I guess this really all began with the stuff Ellen's been saying for a while about words like "slut" and "whore" being things that need to be taken seriously and seen for the anti-feminist statements that they really are. I maintain that using the word slut to describe a girl who sleeps indiscriminately with any guy who she can get is not derogatory, but merely accurate, although I see that most people use this word accompanied with an attitude toward female sexuality that is in fact derogatory. I also don't think that Ellen would chose the phrase "anti-feminist," so I went back to my Scarlet Letter essay to explain my understanding of the definition of that phrase. The main point of this excerpt is in the very beginning and the very end, but I left the middle because it might help clarify my thoughts as well. Note that this has been slightly edited since the original essay:
"All analysis of gender roles must necessarily come back to sex. It is inescapable that, whoever we are and whatever attitudes we assume on the issue, we were all created by sex, and it is an issue that all people past puberty have to contend with in one way or another. Gender roles come from the way people define who they are, and who others are, in relation to sex. Feminism, in the same respect, comes from a particular view of feminine sexuality. The way the female role is defined in any situation is by the way both men and women handle the subject of the woman’s role in sex.
Feminism cannot argue for equality, in the sense that women should be considered to be exactly the same in all ways as men, if it wants to be taken seriously. In fact it ought to do quite the opposite, saying that women and men are very different, and that because it is absolutely necessary for the creation of human life itself that the two genders exist discretely in a symbiotic relationship with each other (here I am speaking purely biologically and not psychologically) then there is no valid argument for valuing one gender more than another.
This is where feminism comes back to sex. If one looks at the issues feminism addresses, they all are based on how people approach women in relation to sexuality. Despite the ways that we bury this fact in cultural ritual, sex is the fundamental biological function of life, and if an individual or group is considered to be weaker or less important sexually, they will be considered with less over-all esteem by the general populace. Consequentially, situations where women are considered to be not as good as or weaker then men are created when female sexuality is not fully comprehended or accepted. In these situations, women, and their place as equal participants in sex are labeled as wrong or weak by people trying to make the whole scope of feminine sexuality into something they can dismiss or devalue.
It is also important to note that feminism should not rank female sexuality above that of males- “while a critique of masculinity may be a crucial element of feminist analysis, it is not necessarily identical with it.” This “critique of masculinity” in "feminist analysis" is only the critique of the so-called masculinity exhibited in situations where women are oppressed or devalued by men. Therefore, a feminist is just someone who says that female sexuality is not at all less or weaker than male sexuality."
So, ok. Whatever, right? I've always believed that of course women should be seen as rational human beings, and of course they deserve equal pay and voting rights and sundry, but I also always sort of believed that those issues had already been addressed and resolved long before I was born, and that they weren't really relevant to me anymore. Now I'm starting to question that. The way I see it, women are certainly better off now than they were before. I know this from my own life- I pick my own clothes, my own school, my own career. I get to make all my own relationship choices. I just voted in my first election. I even think that being female gives me an advantage in a lot of academic situations; this is a generalization, but in my experience there's a sort of underlying assumption made by teachers and others that teenage boys are always lying and up to something, while teenage girls are more trustworthy and honest. I know that this attitude has been reversed in the past, just look at the story of Adam and Eve and the ideologies that have resulted from it, i.e.: the Anberlin lyric "boys speak in rhythm and girls just lie." I'm not ungrateful for my circumstances.
But, looking past all of that, I am starting to feel that women are still seen as sexually inferior, and not just by a few assholes, but by and large by a great deal of both men and women. The first seed of this feeling for me, other than my sister's arguments about word choice, was a conversation I had with Simpson... at some point in the past two years; I can't remember when. Possibly it was during class, possibly not. He pointed out that, if people hear that a boy has slept with 5 different girls in one weekend, they're likely to react with a "boy's will be boys; that's just what they do" sort of attitude. But if people hear that a girl has slept with 5 different boys in one weekend, they immediately start using those words to which my sister objects, and view the girl in question as having weak morals. It's fine for men to have meaningless, unemotional one night stands, but women are expected to only have sex with men they love and are committed to. This seems a little ridiculous, for what I hope should be obvious reasons. Note also that, for the purposes of this particular journal entry, what I am considering is really only relevant to heterosexual relations.
At first glance, this opinion seems very typical of a sort of naive mentality, and I know that at one time I believed that it wasn't so much a wide-spread belief, but more of a attitude of the specific small community in which I was living. Certainly, I know many people who don't sponsor this world-view, but the longer I look, the more prevalent it seems. Over and over again I have heard girls say things like "I want my first time to mean something," "I just want to find the perfect guy," and so on and so on ad nauseum. A facebook friend of mine recently put in her status that she had "decided that some cliches are right. Sex is never just sex." For crying out loud!
Girls are still being raised to believe this stuff! Not just by their parents, but by the general way in which we are all raised by the societies we grow up in. All these attitudes seem to come from a core assumption that women are incapable of understanding sex except through a lens of false/ascribed meaning, and that because of this, they are sexually inferior since they can't view the act of sex as objectively as men can. This is disturbing to me for two reasons; one is that, as I asserted earlier, the fact that women value themselves and are valued by men as inferior sexually leads to them being devalued in other cultural arenas, and two is that this sort of mindset can only lead to emotional pain and confusion in the personal lives of girls who hold these views.
I think we have tried, and admirably at that, to address the first problem, but we have been clipping at the leaves (once again, these are very important leaves to clip! Thank goodness they were clipped/are being clipped! But still.) of the problem by addressing concerns like equal pay and voting rights instead of going to the root of the issues, which is how children/young adults are taught to regard sexuality. The second problem is much more immediate and less abstract- I think that girls are taught to base their self value on the strange, two-faced image we as a culture have come to have about female sexuality which requires girls to both have and maintain "steady" relationships while still preserving some form of chastity. I've seen a lot of my female friends and peers who only consider themselves in a positive light when they are involved with a boy, and who simultaneously sabotage that self image by viewing sex as a sort of emotional ideal or weapon instead of seeing it for its more simple, basic reality.
A perfect example of what I'm trying to say is that dreadful Twilight series. A lot of girls say that they like the first few books, but that the last one reads like "poorly written fanfiction." This baffles me. Here is what the plot of that series looks like to me: Bella meets Edward, and within a Romeo and Juliet-esque period of time, they are In Love. Their love is eternal and all-consuming and neither of them could live without it. He loves her because (aside from some supernatural attraction based on "scent," ahem) he finds her physical weakness and impaired mental facilities "charming." She loves him because he is more mentally and physically powerful than she is as well as being a hottie. He won't turn her into a vampire (and it seems to me to be symbolic that he also won't have sex with her) because he doesn't want her to "loose her soul". They are going to get married right after her highschool graduation and live together for the rest of eternity because they have True Love. The whole first 3/4 of the series (I forget how many books there actually are, so I'm going by the story as a whole) is basically just a description of how Edward is her soul mate because he is strong enough to protect her, smart enough to know what's best for her (with one notable exception, when he leaves her for her own good, which makes her COMPLETELY MENTALLY UNSTABLE because she is unable to live without him. And then he fixes it with his superior intellect, despite mistakes made by other females), and caring enough to preserve her maidenly virtue/chastity/humanity.
It's practically like re-reading Percival. I mean, how much more of a Arthurian view of women could you have? I practically celebrated when she got bit, not because I thought the happy ending was believable or realistic, but because she was finally Edward's equal. In fact she was his better in some ways while he remained her better in others, which made them into an actual team (or, you know, two discrete and different beings who existed with equal value in a symbiotic relationship...) instead of having him be faster/smarter/stronger/wiser than her in every single way. Sure the plot was way more believable when she was human and bad things still happened; I do agree that the ending was pure sugar. But at least she ended up being able to take real, meaningful action instead of remaining as some dependent child. And yet, all of my female friends despise this last section and love the first part. Why? Because they have been raised to believe that relationships are supposed to work in the way put forward by that first section. These books became wildly popular among teenaged females because, right up to the very end, they represented the sort of sexless, idealistic, and emotionally tangled relationship that these girls have been taught to aspire to. It's sick and it's really hurtful when applied to the real world.
I recently read a fabulous post on this sort of portrayal of women in literature here , which I really, strongly recommend. For seriously.
I also want to make sure that it doesn't seem like I'm implying that women have to have a lot of unemotional one night stands to be feminists, because this is also obviously just not true. I'm only trying to say that females should take their self worth from realistic standards of self judgment, not from the previously described ideas. If girls set themselves up to believe that sex is going to always be meaningful and perfect (not that it can't be ever, it just obviously isn't always) then they have set themselves up for inevitable disappointment and hurt.
I'm not done yet! Disturbing in a slightly different way from the things I've already mentioned is this quote I read by a male poster on another website recently: "There's also the whole "chivalry is dead" speculation, which I believe. You women fought for your rights, now you're probably making more money than him. Most guys don't take girls on dates anymore for that reason." This is the flip side of women devaluing themselves as sexual partners- it allows men to devalue them as well.
This guy seems to be saying that, if women have rights, then there's no reason to treat them with respect. What? I suppose that if you stick to the strict, Arthurian definition of chivalry where a woman's worth is based directly on her virginity until marriage and the king's allowed to rape your wife whenever he wants because you swore an oath of loyalty to him, then it's pretty great that chivalry is dead. But if you look at the more modern definition, as this poster seems to, one that equates chivalry with romance and "taking girls on dates," then that quote has some pretty nasty implications. First, it implies that if a women makes more money that a man, it is solely based on some sort of privilege that she's been awarded, and not because she has done any legitimate work to earn it. Secondly, it implies that, if women are treated better in the public arena, then men have no reason to be civil to them in the private one. Most guys don't take girls on dates because they fought for their rights? Seriously? This seems to imply that men are just anxious to humble women in any way possible. That the only reason that they would treat women well romantically would be as a sort of charitable compensation for their inferiority. What?
So, whatever, I have no solution for all of this. I guess that's just a summary of what I'm thinking about. I know it's not... constructive or even very thorough, but it is what it is.
I have never considered myself a "feminist," or even someone who was concerned with gender issues at all, but wow, my last few weeks have been shoving these things in my face. I guess this really all began with the stuff Ellen's been saying for a while about words like "slut" and "whore" being things that need to be taken seriously and seen for the anti-feminist statements that they really are. I maintain that using the word slut to describe a girl who sleeps indiscriminately with any guy who she can get is not derogatory, but merely accurate, although I see that most people use this word accompanied with an attitude toward female sexuality that is in fact derogatory. I also don't think that Ellen would chose the phrase "anti-feminist," so I went back to my Scarlet Letter essay to explain my understanding of the definition of that phrase. The main point of this excerpt is in the very beginning and the very end, but I left the middle because it might help clarify my thoughts as well. Note that this has been slightly edited since the original essay:
"All analysis of gender roles must necessarily come back to sex. It is inescapable that, whoever we are and whatever attitudes we assume on the issue, we were all created by sex, and it is an issue that all people past puberty have to contend with in one way or another. Gender roles come from the way people define who they are, and who others are, in relation to sex. Feminism, in the same respect, comes from a particular view of feminine sexuality. The way the female role is defined in any situation is by the way both men and women handle the subject of the woman’s role in sex.
Feminism cannot argue for equality, in the sense that women should be considered to be exactly the same in all ways as men, if it wants to be taken seriously. In fact it ought to do quite the opposite, saying that women and men are very different, and that because it is absolutely necessary for the creation of human life itself that the two genders exist discretely in a symbiotic relationship with each other (here I am speaking purely biologically and not psychologically) then there is no valid argument for valuing one gender more than another.
This is where feminism comes back to sex. If one looks at the issues feminism addresses, they all are based on how people approach women in relation to sexuality. Despite the ways that we bury this fact in cultural ritual, sex is the fundamental biological function of life, and if an individual or group is considered to be weaker or less important sexually, they will be considered with less over-all esteem by the general populace. Consequentially, situations where women are considered to be not as good as or weaker then men are created when female sexuality is not fully comprehended or accepted. In these situations, women, and their place as equal participants in sex are labeled as wrong or weak by people trying to make the whole scope of feminine sexuality into something they can dismiss or devalue.
It is also important to note that feminism should not rank female sexuality above that of males- “while a critique of masculinity may be a crucial element of feminist analysis, it is not necessarily identical with it.” This “critique of masculinity” in "feminist analysis" is only the critique of the so-called masculinity exhibited in situations where women are oppressed or devalued by men. Therefore, a feminist is just someone who says that female sexuality is not at all less or weaker than male sexuality."
So, ok. Whatever, right? I've always believed that of course women should be seen as rational human beings, and of course they deserve equal pay and voting rights and sundry, but I also always sort of believed that those issues had already been addressed and resolved long before I was born, and that they weren't really relevant to me anymore. Now I'm starting to question that. The way I see it, women are certainly better off now than they were before. I know this from my own life- I pick my own clothes, my own school, my own career. I get to make all my own relationship choices. I just voted in my first election. I even think that being female gives me an advantage in a lot of academic situations; this is a generalization, but in my experience there's a sort of underlying assumption made by teachers and others that teenage boys are always lying and up to something, while teenage girls are more trustworthy and honest. I know that this attitude has been reversed in the past, just look at the story of Adam and Eve and the ideologies that have resulted from it, i.e.: the Anberlin lyric "boys speak in rhythm and girls just lie." I'm not ungrateful for my circumstances.
But, looking past all of that, I am starting to feel that women are still seen as sexually inferior, and not just by a few assholes, but by and large by a great deal of both men and women. The first seed of this feeling for me, other than my sister's arguments about word choice, was a conversation I had with Simpson... at some point in the past two years; I can't remember when. Possibly it was during class, possibly not. He pointed out that, if people hear that a boy has slept with 5 different girls in one weekend, they're likely to react with a "boy's will be boys; that's just what they do" sort of attitude. But if people hear that a girl has slept with 5 different boys in one weekend, they immediately start using those words to which my sister objects, and view the girl in question as having weak morals. It's fine for men to have meaningless, unemotional one night stands, but women are expected to only have sex with men they love and are committed to. This seems a little ridiculous, for what I hope should be obvious reasons. Note also that, for the purposes of this particular journal entry, what I am considering is really only relevant to heterosexual relations.
At first glance, this opinion seems very typical of a sort of naive mentality, and I know that at one time I believed that it wasn't so much a wide-spread belief, but more of a attitude of the specific small community in which I was living. Certainly, I know many people who don't sponsor this world-view, but the longer I look, the more prevalent it seems. Over and over again I have heard girls say things like "I want my first time to mean something," "I just want to find the perfect guy," and so on and so on ad nauseum. A facebook friend of mine recently put in her status that she had "decided that some cliches are right. Sex is never just sex." For crying out loud!
Girls are still being raised to believe this stuff! Not just by their parents, but by the general way in which we are all raised by the societies we grow up in. All these attitudes seem to come from a core assumption that women are incapable of understanding sex except through a lens of false/ascribed meaning, and that because of this, they are sexually inferior since they can't view the act of sex as objectively as men can. This is disturbing to me for two reasons; one is that, as I asserted earlier, the fact that women value themselves and are valued by men as inferior sexually leads to them being devalued in other cultural arenas, and two is that this sort of mindset can only lead to emotional pain and confusion in the personal lives of girls who hold these views.
I think we have tried, and admirably at that, to address the first problem, but we have been clipping at the leaves (once again, these are very important leaves to clip! Thank goodness they were clipped/are being clipped! But still.) of the problem by addressing concerns like equal pay and voting rights instead of going to the root of the issues, which is how children/young adults are taught to regard sexuality. The second problem is much more immediate and less abstract- I think that girls are taught to base their self value on the strange, two-faced image we as a culture have come to have about female sexuality which requires girls to both have and maintain "steady" relationships while still preserving some form of chastity. I've seen a lot of my female friends and peers who only consider themselves in a positive light when they are involved with a boy, and who simultaneously sabotage that self image by viewing sex as a sort of emotional ideal or weapon instead of seeing it for its more simple, basic reality.
A perfect example of what I'm trying to say is that dreadful Twilight series. A lot of girls say that they like the first few books, but that the last one reads like "poorly written fanfiction." This baffles me. Here is what the plot of that series looks like to me: Bella meets Edward, and within a Romeo and Juliet-esque period of time, they are In Love. Their love is eternal and all-consuming and neither of them could live without it. He loves her because (aside from some supernatural attraction based on "scent," ahem) he finds her physical weakness and impaired mental facilities "charming." She loves him because he is more mentally and physically powerful than she is as well as being a hottie. He won't turn her into a vampire (and it seems to me to be symbolic that he also won't have sex with her) because he doesn't want her to "loose her soul". They are going to get married right after her highschool graduation and live together for the rest of eternity because they have True Love. The whole first 3/4 of the series (I forget how many books there actually are, so I'm going by the story as a whole) is basically just a description of how Edward is her soul mate because he is strong enough to protect her, smart enough to know what's best for her (with one notable exception, when he leaves her for her own good, which makes her COMPLETELY MENTALLY UNSTABLE because she is unable to live without him. And then he fixes it with his superior intellect, despite mistakes made by other females), and caring enough to preserve her maidenly virtue/chastity/humanity.
It's practically like re-reading Percival. I mean, how much more of a Arthurian view of women could you have? I practically celebrated when she got bit, not because I thought the happy ending was believable or realistic, but because she was finally Edward's equal. In fact she was his better in some ways while he remained her better in others, which made them into an actual team (or, you know, two discrete and different beings who existed with equal value in a symbiotic relationship...) instead of having him be faster/smarter/stronger/wiser than her in every single way. Sure the plot was way more believable when she was human and bad things still happened; I do agree that the ending was pure sugar. But at least she ended up being able to take real, meaningful action instead of remaining as some dependent child. And yet, all of my female friends despise this last section and love the first part. Why? Because they have been raised to believe that relationships are supposed to work in the way put forward by that first section. These books became wildly popular among teenaged females because, right up to the very end, they represented the sort of sexless, idealistic, and emotionally tangled relationship that these girls have been taught to aspire to. It's sick and it's really hurtful when applied to the real world.
I recently read a fabulous post on this sort of portrayal of women in literature here , which I really, strongly recommend. For seriously.
I also want to make sure that it doesn't seem like I'm implying that women have to have a lot of unemotional one night stands to be feminists, because this is also obviously just not true. I'm only trying to say that females should take their self worth from realistic standards of self judgment, not from the previously described ideas. If girls set themselves up to believe that sex is going to always be meaningful and perfect (not that it can't be ever, it just obviously isn't always) then they have set themselves up for inevitable disappointment and hurt.
I'm not done yet! Disturbing in a slightly different way from the things I've already mentioned is this quote I read by a male poster on another website recently: "There's also the whole "chivalry is dead" speculation, which I believe. You women fought for your rights, now you're probably making more money than him. Most guys don't take girls on dates anymore for that reason." This is the flip side of women devaluing themselves as sexual partners- it allows men to devalue them as well.
This guy seems to be saying that, if women have rights, then there's no reason to treat them with respect. What? I suppose that if you stick to the strict, Arthurian definition of chivalry where a woman's worth is based directly on her virginity until marriage and the king's allowed to rape your wife whenever he wants because you swore an oath of loyalty to him, then it's pretty great that chivalry is dead. But if you look at the more modern definition, as this poster seems to, one that equates chivalry with romance and "taking girls on dates," then that quote has some pretty nasty implications. First, it implies that if a women makes more money that a man, it is solely based on some sort of privilege that she's been awarded, and not because she has done any legitimate work to earn it. Secondly, it implies that, if women are treated better in the public arena, then men have no reason to be civil to them in the private one. Most guys don't take girls on dates because they fought for their rights? Seriously? This seems to imply that men are just anxious to humble women in any way possible. That the only reason that they would treat women well romantically would be as a sort of charitable compensation for their inferiority. What?
So, whatever, I have no solution for all of this. I guess that's just a summary of what I'm thinking about. I know it's not... constructive or even very thorough, but it is what it is.