The Trauma of the Gendered Child
The Trauma of the Gendered Child
by Julian Real
Copyrighted 2005. All rights reserved.
I am, for the most part, ungendered. This means something very politically important to me. From the time I was a child, I did not experience myself as a gendered being. For me, and in my experience of others around me, being gendered meant sacrificing parts of the vulnerable, complex self in order to be less-than-human: lower in status for girls and women, lower in humanity for boys and men. Both genders are dehumanised in traumatic ways, and then that trauma is repressed or acted out in atrocious ways. I paid attention, from the age of nine, approximately, to what the hell was going on. I saw people working to become boys and girls while being forced into these identities. (By identity I mean this: a self-identification with a set of feelings and behaviours as “mine” or “ours” that is socially compulsory and politically mandated.)
I also have some forms of male privilege, and not others. I am socially perceived, most of the time, as a male of the human species, which, in patriarchy means, first as a boy, then as a man. I never truly identified as such, which again means that I didn’t do many of the things that meant being those identities, especially not in order to be one of those identities. I rebelled, internally, or, rather, I held my ground. I resisted being gendered. But because I was perceived as male, most of the time, I was given certain privileges. And I was socially informed, informally, that I had certain political entitlements, and I did take some of those in as “acceptable ways of being”. Most notably the entitlement to violate others visually, by using pornography, and through private and public voyeurism, most of which was done furtively. Men are also taught, formally or not, that they have the right of access, visual or physical, to girls and women. This leads to atrocities such as rape.
A question that has been with me for some time, while the obviousness of the answer stares us in the face, is this: what is it about being raised to be a boy and then a man is traumatic-while-status giving, such that boys and men do what they do, call it “their right”, and disregard it as harm to others?
When I was a kid I saw boys slowly or rapidly dis-identify with girls, and girls do the same with boys. “Ew, I’m not one of THEM” was a commonly heard expression. At the same time, one group (boys) was afforded rights to behave in certain ways, and was given social status for doing so. Girls, it appeared to me, lost out in the deal. “Throwing like a girl” was never intended as a compliment on any playground I was ever on. The girls I knew thought boys were gross in certain ways, but also deeply envied their freedom of movement and, in some ways, their freedom of expression. Boys, after all, could get away with being boisterous. Many girls I knew wanted to be like boys, but not really BOYS. They wanted the freedom from the physical restrictions of being a girl, and in patriarchy, that means becoming a boy, and then a man. It’s a two-party system, and it’s no party.
The boys I knew had no easy ride. It was not ALL about freedom of movement and expression. No. What being a boy, what making that compulsory “choice” meant, was that boys had to give up important ways of being humane, in order to be proper boys. They had to dis-identify with girls, and whatever activities were associated with girls. To not do this brought ridicule and shame and punishment: the loss of respect from peers, and the loss of approval, in some cases, from family.
Each culture operates a bit differently, and in any culture there are customs and ways of being that play out this drama of gender trauma differently, but usually with the same basic message: boys gain status by not being girls. Girls cannot obtain that status. Girls obtain stigma. Boys can get that stigma by doing what girls are mandated to do. This is not to say that all boys don’t like being boys. Or that all girls hate being girls. No. It is to say that there is no real choice, no meaningful choice in this happening. I had no choice as to whether or not to go to a certain kind of school. Did I like that schooling? Sometimes. Did I have any real options? No. This is how it is with gender, in my experience.
Let’s get right into the trauma. The abuse of being gendered, as I shall refer to it, is that parts of one’s pre-gendered self must be put away, banished, devalued, and self-ridiculed. I think this is normal. I think in patriarchy this is required if one is to become a gendered being successfully. What is sacrificed is seen as necessary, in order to go on living as a socially acceptable (dehumanised) person, that is, with a gender.
When I was little, I saw this as the price paid by males in CRAP: one got lots of privileges, and also got to be sacrificed in off-shore military wars, but it meant one had to publicly disrespect women, or privately hate them, and also to sacrifice (try to destroy) the most vulnerable emotional parts of oneself. You must make yourselves as invulnerable to other men as you can, in order to be a socially acceptable man. You will get paid better, if paid at all, and will always have access (visually and/or physically) to a population of females for sex, should you want to avail yourself of this unjust access to real human beings seen as being “for you” and becoming for you to the degree that they are unjustly accessed sexually.
Feminism-bashing reveals a shocking level of denial about the real causes of men’s harm to themselves and to women. Patriarchy is the cause. Feminism is the cure. But men have so learned to demean women and praise men that the idea of critiquing patriarchy simply hasn’t occurred to most men, I find. They hardly know it exists. Most women, on the other hand, know well that patriarchy exists, because they must survive it, daily. Men, having privileges and entitlements relative to women, can enjoy patriarchy in a way that women cannot, in my experience. Women tell me their tales of date rape, being accosted, being stared at and stalked, being commented on in sexist ways, and being seen and treated primarily or only as a female thing, not an ungendered person. Most women I know have been sexually assaulted, at least once.
This denial, or repression of knowledge, of what children have to do to themselves, and of what has been done to them, in their families, by media, in peer groups, means that men can be deeply unaware of how patriarchy has shaped them. Since women occupy lower status levels than men, generally speaking, in many patriarchal cultures, men can get away with blaming women for their woes. To blame patriarchy (to hold patriarchy accountable) would, well, result in a loss of status, at least, and violence at worst.
The boys who did not act enough like boys, when I was growing up, were not treated well by boys who strove to be real good patriarchal boys. Those real good patriarchal boys had sacrificed parts of themselves to become that way, often unconsciously, or with great pain and effort, and in order to complete the process of transformation, had to beat the shit out of, or at least systematically shame, all the boys who didn’t follow suit. Boy culture was vicious, when I was a kid. Troubled, insecure, and cruel. At one point in dominant Western culture, boys were obsessed with toy Transformers. I believe this obsession derived from what they were doing, unconsciously, to themselves: from emotionally vulnerable human to hard invulnerable machine. See: http://www.hasbro.com/transformers/
Boys knew they could not be human in certain ways, without garnering the stigma branded into girls. But boys DID have vulnerable feelings. Pesky things, those. They just had to put them away. If this is done self-aggressively, then those boys are likely to be aggressive to boys and girls who show those feelings publicly. (Peer pressure to act inhumane is yet another dynamic.) So conflicted and hurting are those almost-boys, that they force onto others what patriarchy has made them do to themselves. A boy on the playground who is crying because physically hurt is attacked mercilessly. Patriarchal boys swoop in like vampiric vultures, picking at (on) the vulnerable boy who shows what they regard as weakness. Girls see this horror show. Girls learn, consciously or not, that the stigma they carry cannot be beaten out of them, but, rather, is beaten more deeply into them. Boys can dream of an adulthood of relative safety and sometimes find it. Whether or not girls dream about such a world, no such world awaits them. Boys become men, and they still rage inside about what they had to put away, banish, destroy in themselves to be good patriarchal men. And they HATE seeing it displayed in others, males and females. But they are drawn to it too, like a lost friend. Yearning and contempt is what most boys feel, in my experience, for those vulnerable parts of themselves. Publicly they say they want to “get a piece of ass” and privately they want to be held, touched, made whole through non-patriarchal intimacy. But because too many men have sacrificed their capacities for certain forms of intimacy, they leave behind that kind of eroticism, shredding it, and forge ahead into patriarchal sexuality.
Patriarchal sexuality is an eroticism of inhumanity. It is founded on the entitlement to violate others, visually or physically, and to act callously as one predatorially seeks to consume what one has been told one wants because of what one has become. Men mass-consume what is marketed, advertised and sold, as patriarchal sex. This kind of sex is CRAP.
The hurting, deep down vulnerable boy and man goes to pornography because it teaches him how to have sexual feeling in a way that produces exciting sensation, but no vulnerable emotions. Once through the adult door of the world of pornography, boys and men learn that misogyny is sex, that ethnic hate is sex, that sexx is sex (whether gay or heterosexual). The sex that one can have without being vulnerable–that awful thing that brings with it the degraded status of girls and women–is the sex that boys and men eagerly want.
Boys are prepared, through the trauma of being gendered, to desire a corporate, racist, patriarchal sexuality that provides excitement without nurturance, that produces desire to do things to things, not to be humane with humane beings. Sometimes heterosexual women in heterosexual men’s lives push them to be real, humane beings. Sometimes those women give up, and become pornography for those men. Atrocities result.
This enforced, mandated, trauma-induced sexual preference, in CRAP, is identified as hormonal, genetic, or a brain difference in order to keep us in denial about what patriarchy actually does to us. Patriarchal scientists do not tell us what they and we do not want to know: we and they had to become dehumanised in order to desire what we and they do, because we and they enjoy sensation-based sex, rather than vulnerability-based eroticism. Their studies cannot study something they do not want to uncover. So, in the patriarchally-unconscious world of biopsychology, there is not likely to be a lot of funding to discover the traumatic effects of living in CRAP.
Most boys and men desperately crave sensational sex because it is the only route to something that resembles the real comfort and intimacy they need, but are too terrified to ask for, or, more tragically, receive even when offered it. And, too often, men get mixed messages from those around them about the degree to which they are to be vulnerable AND a rock of support; do we want men to have a functional heart or a functional penis? Men shallowly choose the latter, often, to avoid deeply experiencing the former.
Once men kill off all that is considered “womanly” (read: humane) in them, they can be killers, batterers, and rapists. Once men do this to themselves, or have it done to them, they can HATE seeing it in others: in vulnerable boys and men, as well as girls and women, of course. So misogyny is socio-psychologically (not biologically) constructed in the male, and this leaves boys “ready” for pornography, and pornography then teaches them the details of (racist) misogyny-as-sexxx, which becomes sex for them, and, increasingly, for everyone.
Boys and girls need lots of safe space to have their more tender feelings, and instead are systematically shamed, and otherwise abused. Men, though, are also coercively privileged for becoming non-women/inhumane. For women there is the on-going degraded status, the stigma, the efforts to survive in patriarchy, against great odds. But women, too, are made inhumane. A patriarchally good woman may cry–especially when discussing rape on a chat show, but she is not often encouraged by male partner, psycho-therapist, or chat show host, to rage against patriarchal atrocity. She is, rather, medicated, or self-medicates. Sometimes, in economically privileged cultures, she starves herself to death.
When not-yet-boys are given safe space to have their more vulnerable feelings, and have them SEEN and RECOGNISED as meaningful, important, valuable, and precious, (and socially statused by family, peers, and media) then they can stay humane in a way most boys don’t stand a chance of being/becoming in most, if not all, contemporary patriarchies.
When the each of us turns to look at what we all do to ourselves, to be accepted into CRAP, and when all our stories are told, then we will know why our world is as it is.
Peace to us all.
Stan:
I’ll be honored to make the first comment, by pointing out that the aspiration of women to liberal “equality” is deeply counter-revolutionary. The so-called (by Erica Jong, years ago) “zipless fuck” grew directly out of the idea that individual women should be able to “enjoy” objectifying, instrumental sex in exactly the same way men do… which is a profound and fundamental FAILURE to grasp the essence of gendered power… which they have confused to mean simply puritanical restrictions on women’s sexuality. The power of men does not change in this purported “challenge,” except in its form… conservative exploitation becomes liberal exploitation. Privileged women get to be one of the objectifying boys. (Welcome to Abu Ghraib.) Sex as restricted and dominated intimacy (without intersubjectivity) becomes sex without intimacy (without intersubjectivity). In each case, male social power, as males, is left unchallenged, nay, reinforced. Sex — freighted in the real world with terrible and violent power — is abstractly reduced to an individual choice… it’s hard to get more liberal or bourgeois than that.
More masculine, either. After all, whose purposes have always been served by devaluing sexual activity to “a simple fuck.”
15 December 2005, 1:48 pmm.c.:
I tend to be hesitant to comment on topics of Feminism, but as a man I have been both a victim & user of masculinity and patriarchy. I wasn’t particularly close with my Mother, and didn’t have any other strong female role models(like sisters). To make things more complicated, my relationship with my Dad has been pretty screwed up too. Communication breakdown problems.
Generally, I wish there were more women and women of color in alternative political movement leadership. Women make ideal activists and easily rival men as visionaries.
However, I’m going to use professional chess here as an example. The top ranked woman player in the world is Judit Polgar of Hungary(#8) which is very good. She’s the only woman in the top 100. Her sister, Zsuzsa, is the #2 woman & #203 worldwide. Garry Kasparov, the current #1(and considered by many to be the world’s best ever) commented once that women don’t do as well as men because one important aspect to competitive chess is psychological warfare. He has lost to Polgar by the way. For anyone doubting whether chess & politics have anything in common, Kasparov recently has been involved in Russian politics critical of Putin, although I’m not qualified to speak if he is a real alternative for the Russian presidency though.
15 December 2005, 7:27 pmStan:
Competitive spectacles have long been dominated by men, and men are socialized for competition, while women are socialized to be “supportive” of men. I’m going to assume there is no attempt here to posit a biological basis for chess rankings, or politics.
My own experience with the question of women and oppressed nationalities in leadership (or the lack thereof) is that this is highly overdetermined — that is, from Wikipedia: “Having multiple causes, with the implication that one cause would suffice. In psychiatry, an overdetermined symptom would reflect a confluence of defenses, needs, and unconscious drives. In developmental disabilities, a disability is often overdetermined by a combination of genetic, environmental, familial, social, and learning etiologic (causal) factors.”
Lots of reasons, in other words, working in concert.
White privilege and male privilege are certainly part of that determination. Structural inequality accounts for much of this, too, and this is related to white-male privilege; people who suffer stuructural inequality not only have less access to development of leadership skill sets and lower self esteem from internalized racism-sexism, they have fewer resources that allow them to play leadership roles (whihc take time away from jobs, for example). Cultural bias is determinative, and related to all fo the above. Moreover, the priorities are different for different groups. Women who are active around rape as an issue may not have time to be antiwar leaders. Black folk who are trying to defend themselves against redistricting, gentrification, police brutality, environmental racism, and the criminal injustice system, have their hands full… and then white activists, many of whom have never been there on these issues (sometimes they are themselves the gentrifiers!), suddenly get charged up about the WTO or whatever, and want to know… why aren’t Black people with us. Finally, and I’ve seen this plenty, women and people of color are constantly appalled by the repetitious experience of liberal racism and sexism they are exposed to in these white and male led formations.
I don’t know if women make more ideal activists than men or not. I’m not prepared to reactively valorize women as the embodiment of the Sacred Feminine or anything like that. In fact, I know I won’t. But I do know that when formations emerge with white male leadership, there are always plenty of women who clean up after events while the men continue to discuss “weighty” issues, that the note-takers for meetings are often women, and that fundraising always seems to devolve to the females… and that people keep leaving the seat up on the john at meetings.
15 December 2005, 8:01 pmElaina:
Yeah.
This is a wonderful piece, BTW.
But getting back to what Stan talks about in his comment, to relate a personal experience:
A few years ago, a member of a group I was involved in proposed a “Car-Wash” as a means of fundraising.
I don’t know if Car-Washes are all alike across the country. Here, they’re a good way for church and youth groups to raise money. M.O.: get a bunch of teenaged or “barely-legals” to stand at a busy intersection, clad only in wet t-shirts and bathing suits, and hold up giant posters that say “Car Wash”.
Plenty of old dudes in nice cars will give money if they think that a “hot” teenager is gonna wash his car in her bikini. That’s why it’s such a “good” fundraiser.
I was adamantly opposed to the idea. Openly. Obnoxiously. I cussed and stomped, and in a group meeting, no less. I’m pretty sure I humiliated the woman who brought up the idea… everyone thought I was a stick in the mud. So what else is new?
But I did bring up enough good reasons not to have the “Car-Wash,” and it didn’t happen.
Then a whole new set of folks joined the group, during the next year, the “Car-Wash” idea was proposed again, and again I was the “stick in the mud,” and I got outvoted, in spite of my stomping and cussing. All the same points were argued. But I was told, point-blank, “it’ll make money. We NEED money.”
I think this story is illustrative of a few points: 1.Women have been enculturated to “opress” other women just as well as men. While I agree that YES YES YES, there needs to be more female/non-white leadership in progressive groups, I don’t think this based upon any sort of “inherent” ideal-ness on the part of women. I just think that as long as white males keep leading groups, they’ll skip and skirt and squirm, and ultimately the group will serve white-male motives, no matter how hard they try not to. Does that make any sense??
2. Folks think that if money’s the issue, any sort of “prostitution” is at least justified. It’s a common trump of the “principle” of many. “We were desperate for money. We HAD to do it.” Etc.
3. Women can visualize and face their own objectification and not bat an eye about it if they think they’re doing it for “the cause.”
I don’t know if this particular story lends perspective for most folks; but I thought I’d add it just in case.
Hope everybody here’s doing OK.
16 December 2005, 3:15 amJulian Real:
Thanks, Stan, for posting the piece (too rapidly written, I fear). And thanks, Elaina, for that great example of how less physically invasive, but no less misogynistic, forms of prostitution infiltrate our communities.
A couple of additional thoughts for now:
For those men who ARE feminist, or supportive of women having human lives, not patriarchally female ones, I offer much counsel as to how to become more fully human. I note to close male friends that males in CRAP learn early, in the home, from peers, and from porn, to name three socialising sources, to put away feelings (except misdirected rage) in favor of emotionally/spiritually void “sensation”. This means that genital sexual arousal becomes far more interesting than emotional sexual intimacy: more compelling because it doesn’t threaten their new mandentity (I know, I’m reaching… don’t get me started with bad puns!), more compulsive because it “works” to keep men feeling void of vulnerability, while keeping them aroused. More addictive because feeling titillated or turned on, by visually violating women on the street, in the strip club, or on the computer screen, or female members of one’s family, becomes a politically rooted psycho-chemical response, a high, that men seek, moment to moment–short bursts of cheap (or less cheap) thrills–by staring at a woman’s breasts (actually by fetishising any of women’s body parts). This short burst must be long enough for the thrill to register as violative act. The act is done to get that thrill, the violation is part of the thrill, a necessary component, and is increasingly sought, not accidentally stumbled upon. The act does not “just happen” or happen because men are “more visual”. It happens because men learn to feel entitled to violate women, and early on in life, if sexually oriented to do so, banish the political truth of their acts. Men get this “patriarchal high” by physically violating women in more aggressive ways, too, of course. Any of these chosen (willful), if instantaneously decided upon or habituated acts, gives them the feeling they want in order to avoid the emotions and inner life they have sequestered or killed off in themselves. The entitlement is registered in the unconscious mind as a variation of this: “I had to fucking kill off so goddamn much in myself to become a man, I’ll be damned if I’m not going to get my thrills where and when I can. And NO ONE can tell me I CAN’T!!” Any time a man is challenged on objectifying women, some variation of this feeling of entitlement, repeatedly enacted and reinforced as “socially fine” by media, peers, and family, will likely surface, in the form of biologically deterministic excuses. “I can’t help it” is a common one. “That’s just how men LOOK at women” is another. “Men are more visual” is perhaps the most common form. That men are visual, as women are, does not explain, in the least, why men feel entitled to visually violate women, and fetishise their body parts.
The objectification of women by men is not “biological”. It is political, bound up in a deeply personal trauma attached to overwhelmingly attractive social supported entitlements and privileges.
No one wants to speak about that trauma, because patriarchy can not exist on the same false premises if it is revealed for what it is (social, cultural, not universal, not inevitable).
Also, I know this wasn’t clear to at least one reader of the piece: CRAP stands for Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy, which is an acronym that just “says it”, for me, and better describes what some call “Empire” as it more accurately locates the globally destructive complex of phenomema as patriarchal (male supremacist) at its core, not economic. (Which is not to say that corporate capitalism doesn’t result directly in mass despair, mass exploitation, and mass murder: it does.) But the racism that is now so bound up in male supremacy as to be, for the most part, experientially disentanglable, means that fighting male AND white supremacy is, in my view, a single battle.
Credit to Audre Lorde for the modified use of her term “plasticized sensation” in reference to what pornography offers its consumers, by the way. It appears in her great essay: “The Uses Of The Erotic: The Erotic As Power”, in her book of essays, Sister Outsider.
Thanks also to all the amazing work of social psychoanalyst, Alice Miller, from whom I modified a book title, to arrive at the title of this piece. (Her first book, in some areas, was titled “The Drama of the Gifted Child”, and is also called Prisoners of Childhood.) For more on Miller’s work, see:
http://www.alice-miller.com/sujet/framen.htm
And thanks to Stan, for making this space exist! Yay Stan!!
16 December 2005, 12:22 pmElaina:
I just want to add one more thing and then I’ll step back–
I love the word you made up, “mandentity.” You ain’t reaching, I don’t think. I love to make up words, ones that I feel fit certain situations, states of being, persons, places or things, better than any that previously existed.
If we’re gonna create language outside of CRAP, we gotta start somewheres, yo.
So yay julian, and yay stan!
16 December 2005, 3:33 pmm.c.:
I don’t think there is a biological basis for chess talent. Maybe just less girls are encouraged and therefore interested in learning to play. Its also a time consuming endeavour. The Soviets/Russians had/still do? chess academies for young talent. From age 10(or younger) that was their job. In some eastern european countries, its as big a sport as baseball. Lenin is supposed to have said after his wife learned to play reasonably well that they were now ‘socially acceptable’.
16 December 2005, 5:24 pmA grad student instructor in poli-sci told me one reason lawyers who are partners in big law firms tend to go in elected politics is that they have both the time & socio-economic connections to be successful. They leave their underlings trying to make partner to slave away 60-70-80 hours a week while the partners can come in late and leave early for golf or racketball or cocktail parties. This happens to be true for rich people who don’t have to work for a living and have lots of spare time to travel, fundraise, give money away, etc…. I bets its hard for a Bill Gates or Warren Buffett not to rub elbows with pols and big money cats at the airport, hotel, foundation or think tank speeches, horse tracks, etc….
Yolanda Carrington:
This is more than an article, more than an essay inspired by personal experience. It is the whole gender program laid out for you, concise and clear. It spans from birth to death, for all the major countries of the globe (or at least those produced by European domination).
After reading this, you and I have a decision to make. Are we okay with this, or are we sick of it? If we are sick of it, what are we going to do about it?
That’s where it starts.
Yolanda
16 December 2005, 6:00 pmJulian Real:
Thank you so much for that support, and for your gracious and powerful words, Elaina and Yolanda.
Your understanding and encouragement means a lot to me. I have lived most of my life without that sort of recognition, and you each really seeing what I’m saying makes life more livable for me. I mean that. More than I can say here.
I do not live for validation from emotionally cut off and politically ignorant white men, not that I ever did much, since escaping their abuses of me in childhood, but, rather, for the recognition of real humane people, who can see real suffering for what it is. I hope more and more women (and Womanist/feminist men) of Colour find some sense of belonging and support here, at Stan’s blog.
And thanks, Elaina, for giving me support for creating new terms. “Mandentity” stays in my vocabulary, thanks to you! : )
Blessings to both of your hearts. And justice for our bodies and spirits.
There’s a party at a straight white male friend’s house tonight that I am going to, armed with two DVDs, borrowed from a gay white friend of mine, of Margaret Cho’s stand-up comedy. I highly recommend her videos: I’m The One That I Want, The Notorious C.H.O., Revolution, and Assassin. She’s known for being honest and real and telling it like it is. And she makese me laugh harder than anyone, while delivering a consistent message about the real-life harm of racism and sexism that everyone needs to hear. We gotta cut through this CRAP as best we can, and that surely must include lots of laughter, whenever possible. Gotta have something to balance out the despair and rage!
Julian
17 December 2005, 7:56 pmKatherine Emerald:
Well, gosh, my brain is quite full. I am not sure which segment of Julian’s article or the responses to Julian’s article I should respond to first.
Julian really nails it down, I feel, the tracking of gendering throughout childhood to adulthood. My only issue is that there are some “universals” being made about men that I really feel apply very specifically to middle to upper class white men. Of course, Stan comes back with his response pinpointing white hetero men, so it all comes together in the end.
I guess I kind of always associated the push and pull of “girl” and “boy” feelings within myself, specifically, with my sexuality, because that was the only lens through which I ever really looked at it. I do believe, however, very strongly that gender identity and sexual identity are two separate entities from one another. In fact, after reading this article, it is very clear to me that the Gay Community is RAMPANT with CRAP. In fact, I would argue that it is the core of many people’s stances on gay issues–the influence and grasp patriarchy has on it.
After all–does it not become “apparent” that a woman with baggy jeans, short cropped hair, a baseball cap, and a saunter = a lesbian? A dyke. And a man who is “swishy” in his walk, wearing clothes maybe a little “too tight,” always concerned with his appearance = a gay man. A faggot. And when people meet someone who does not adhere to those visual stereotypes, they are shocked (sometimes apalled) that this person could even possibly be gay. Up until I shaved my hair short, I confused a lot of people at MECA, at home in Florida, in Portland. It became a conversation that either had to be had with a male friend giving me the eye, or maybe something that came up in passing. Now, with my “unfeminine” haircut, it is no shocker: I even had a professor reference my sexuality the other day. It was a strange moment.
I remember being on the playground when I was in elementary school, and there was a great gender divide. The boys played on the jungle gym. The girls played jump rope, and hop scotch. Sometimes both genders met for four square.
I was the little girl who played on the jungle gym. It was a good set up: I wasn’t scared of getting hurt or dirty, and the boys I played with never wanted to be the “villain” of our super hero games. It was a win-win situation for me: I could run around like a crazy person, AND no one questioned my validity as a player. They needed a “bad guy.”
I remember NEVER owning any “girly” things. I was a Mario Bros., Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Legos sort of girl. My mother never questioned any of it.
In fact, my mom didn’t try gendering me until I was in high school. She began to question my lack of make-up, my lack of skirt-wearing, how I styled my hair. But I later learned all these concerns were tied heavily into her fear of my homosexuality.
Which brings me full circle: we know, I know, very well that how someone portrays him or herself can be extraordinarily contrary to their gender and their sexuality, as said above. Patriarchy mandates that men must not be like women, AND women must not be like men. For a man to be “feminine” is considered WRONG! And the Gay Community does not see this as ANTI-WOMEN or as PATRIARCHAL at all, but as a blind hatred for those who are different. Yes, it is that. But it is also a deep connection to gender roles and therefore genderism throughout society, and therefore keeping those boundaries clean and straight. (No pun intended.)
Because, in the end, I think it is the implication that men CAN be like women that makes those patriarchs twitch and toss and turn the most. And, that women can be like men. In our personal lives, in our public lives, in our sex lives, in our schools, work, and friendships. How do we achieve what are considered, supposedly, “gay rights”? We achieve *women’s rights.*
But this is all coming from a Lesbian Feminist.
18 December 2005, 5:38 pmRhonda Lee:
Chess? As long as the discussion involves how women compare to men in traditionally male endeavors, isn’t tacit approval being given to the notion that endeavors traditionally beloved of males are the true measure of humanity? Suppose it turns out that xx versus xy does indeed predispose a person to certain skills (oh, the horror!). Who decides that one set of skills is inherently more worthy than another? What is the basis for such decisions?
Suppose women do tend to have a lesser ability to plan 48 steps in the future, but a greater ability to see 60 steps laterally in the present? As human beings, our societies are made unhealthy by the glorification of one skill-set at the expense of the other.
22 December 2005, 5:04 pmAnton Dolinsky:
Thanks for the article, Julian. I’m reminded of a few lyrics from Roger Waters, “Wish You Were Here”:
And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” is a beautiful statement of how the destruction of intimacy leads directly into fascism.
I’ve noticed that when I am hanging out with one of my intimate friends, who I can hug and be vulnerable with, I escape that sense of compulsive sexual desire that otherwise dogs me whenever I am alone or with other compulsive leerers.
Really makes it seem like compulsive sexual desire is a shallow, destructive addiction, like smoking cigarettes. Sex as pain relief – as close as many of us have gotten to intimacy as joy.
23 December 2005, 4:14 pmJulian Real:
You’re sincerely welcome, Anton.
Thanks for that thoughtful post, and please keep up the painful and joyful struggle to find your humanity, and please work for women’s humanity to shine brightly as well.
Peace after patriarchy.
Julian
28 December 2005, 5:31 pmEric Hamell:
I think there’s a lot of truth in what you’ve written, Julian; it reminded me of a lot about my own childhood. However, I don’t think the compulsive viewing of porn is, in most cases, about symbolically exercising power over women – it’s simply a way of proving, to oneself and others, that one is heterosexual.
What to do about it? Well, obviously keep working against the material inequality between men and women. At the same time, work against the compulsory gendering of children. Don’t do it yourself, and question it when you see others do it. Ultimately we may hope to see gender disappear as a legal category, although I don’t expect that will be any time soon.
I certainly don’t think misogyny is biologically determined, but socially as you say. That doesn’t mean that no behavioral differences are biologically determined, in whole or in part. It’s certainly my impression that such differences are observed in other species, where presumably socially constructed gender is not at work.
27 October 2006, 10:18 pm