Gender issues....

[zana16]

Sometimes being a woman means you have to shut up and lie. You learn that early. You're in high school, you've been split up into groups in a class, you're with a girl and a boy you don't know. Somewhere along the way the girl starts talking about baby names and you know what's coming. She mentions that she's pregnant. You and the boy exchange a glance, but you're the woman, so you have to say something, cause you know the guy'll fuck it up. So you have to ask things like, ohh, when's it due? Boy or girl? That's so exciting!, and you have to pretend and act like this is a great thing cause really, you have to make the best of all this for the baby's sake. And the entire time you're lying through your teeth, you're thinking, How old are you? How the fuck are you gonna support this kid? What the fuck were you thinking? What the hell; you're fucking married?!? But you can't say that, cause you're a woman. You have to pretend that it's wonderful news, because all babies should be wonderful and maybe if you say it enough she'll believe it and the kid will have a better life cause her mother doesn't see her as this awful thing. You have to be supportive cause she already knows she's screwed, she already knows she has no support, and you can't let her lose hope cause if she does the baby's screwed. And because you're a woman, you can't just look at the reality of the situation. You have to look to the future. You're responsible for all of humanity, cause all of humanity is out to screw the future, and you can't accept that because it's hardwired into women to think of the future of the race while men are killing each other.

But I was raised by a man, and I look at the world from his point of view more often than not. My uncle came to visit, we talked about how the Spickard men tend be all like: "I'll do anything, I'll sacrifice anything, just keep loving me", how my cousin Daniel is like that too. How it fucked up my granddad's relationship with his sons, how it screwed my dad's relationship with my brother and me. And in the end, I'm a Spickard male. I do the same. Which leaves Naomi as the only Spickard female. Fortunately she's pretty stable.

One of the few things you come away from Smith sure about is that gender does not always correspond to biological sex. That it's mostly a social construct with some biological underpinnings. But since you've learned that the traditional societal definition of gender doesn't work, you try to compartamentalize reality and figure out a new definition. But you can't. It's too confusing. So here I am. I don't know whether I have a male or female mentality and I don't have definitions for either of them. It fucks with my sexuality and it fucks with my perception of the world. My mother's generation of feminists embraced being Woman without the social stereotypes. I don't know what Woman means, because even Woman seems to be social stereotypes.

Hee! TheSpark.com's gender test tells me I am a cross-dressing male.

Another thing you learn at Smith is that women are socially trained to lie so as not to hurt anybody's feelings. You tread carefully, make sure that everyone is satisfied with the results. Getting a vanful of firstyear girls to decide where to go out to eat coming back from a math conference is a minefield of diplomacy; nobody wants to disagree with anyone else. The first year at Smith is the most frustrating. Eventually you get to a stage where you're going nuts trying to figure out what's really behind that "No, really, it's okay" and you start screaming, "Dammit, I want to talk to a boy. Just give me a guy, I don't care if I like him, I just want somebody who will fucking say what he thinks for once." So uncomplicated, boys. At Smith you have to unlearn all that social training, have to learn to say what you think cause you're out to equal men in a men's world. And then you have to go back out into that world and deal with women who haven't unlearned that stuff again, and it's so frustrating.

The United States is from Mars, Europe is from Venus. This is foreign policy.

Dammit, why couldn't I just be a gay male? Life would be so much easier.

And we're not even going to start with transgender politics here.

Comments

[sylvanstargazer.livejournal.com]

Maybe you just have a you mentality. It doesn't help with the whole relationship issues, but maybe you'll find someone with a them mentality, who loves your you mentality and that way you will always have a second place in the world (you do know your first place is where ever I am, right?:-) I think that's what I've decided. It's a lot easier than trying to figure out the other labels. And that way I get to wear *all* the pretty clothes.

[zana16.livejournal.com]

Thanks, luv. I miss you.