Epiphany

I just had an epiphany.

This is one of those rare-ish moments, like the very first time it dawns on you that all those Sublime lyrics you sang along to in high school are actually really messed up, and you can't believe you didn't notice it at the time, and you start to wonder what else exists in your life that talks about women that way, and you wonder why no one else seems bothered by it; in other words, the moment you first become "not a feminist, but..."

This is like that, in that it's life-altering and that I can't believe, having seen it, that I never saw it before.

So here it is: I have sometimes been accused in relationships (with men) of being controlling, demanding, critical, or nagging.  This isn't true of all my relationships, or even most of them, but it's happened nonetheless.  And when you hear something a few times, especially when it's coming from someone in whom you're emotionally invested to some degree, you tend to mull it over and take it to heart.

I should qualify here: women are trained by our culture to take criticism to heart.  We are trained to believe that women who assert themselves, who make waves, who have and voice strong opinions, especially if those opinions are counter to the kyriarchal status quo, are bitches.  They are hormonal and crazy and unstable, and because of these qualities, they may be ridiculed, hated, maligned, but need never be taken seriously.

Nobody wants to be any of those things, and I care about the people who are close to me and value their opinions and want to make them happy, and so, I've spent a lot of years believing that, yes, I perhaps do have some terrible personality flaws that cause me to behave in ways that seem (or are) controlling, demanding, critical, or nagging, and which need to be addressed.  I've pondered the problem at length.  I've made enormous efforts to "choose my battles," to begin requests or complaints with some kind of compliment or expression of gratitude, to tone down my choice of words, my way of speaking, even my own needs and feelings.  And yet, in the relationships in which these criticisms were being leveled at me, these efforts never seemed to help a whole lot, and the attempts to reduce my expectations and stifle the need to assert myself left me feeling resentful, helpless, and a little depressed.

"It's me," I assumed to varying degrees, depending on the day.  "Why do I have to expect so much?  Why can't I ever settle for good enough?  Why do I always feel the need to speak up?"

But somehow, in all my ruminating over the situations and arguments at various points in my life that led to these criticisms, I never, ever saw the common thread.  Until tonight.  I was thinking about one situation in particular, and it struck me that the criticism (of me) occurred directly in tandem with my attempting to express an idea that bumped--SMACK!--right up against the guy in question's male privilege.  And the memories began to fall in my head like dominoes:  what exactly had occurred each time a guy called me a nag or said I was too critical or controlling?

It happened when I complained about the obvious and gross inequality in who was doing the housework.  It happened once when I was upset that a live-in boyfriend who'd earlier told me he'd be home right after work showed up three hours late without calling.  It happened when I told a stonewalling boyfriend that I needed more and better communication.  It happened when I expressed I was tired of being interrupted constantly, and when choices were made that affected me without my consent, and when I simply held a strong differing opinion about something.

In other words, it happened when I asserted myself, made waves, gave voice to feelings that challenged what was expected of me in my feminine role.  Realizing this was sort of a "no, duh" moment, except that I tend to date liberal, progressive dudes, and aside from the ones who displayed obviously abusive tactics (physical or otherwise), it really hadn't occurred to me that they could possibly have been defending their male privilege.  And honestly?  I seriously doubt it ever occurred to them.

I'm not perfect--far from it--but it's astonishing to look back and realize that it really wasn't me in those moments; I was not the problem.  I was looking for respect, equality, consideration; in other words, to be treated like a human being deserving of the same rights and with the same needs as any other human being.

But in this culture, when women attempt to assert their equality, it's taken as an affront to masculinity and all things right and natural.  Case in point?  How about the tradition that calls for a married woman to take her husband's last name?  It would be exactly equal and fair for each partner to keep hir own name, and yet, there are plenty of men (and women) who would consider such an act to be selfish on the part of the woman and emasculating for the man.

Or how about the case of family courts and domestic violence?  Strides have been made in the last couple of decades with VAWA and a greater number of resources available to abused women.  And yet, the situation is far from equal.  Although women wind up with custody of the children more often than men, this is because that statistic takes into account all custody cases, the majority of which go through by agreement between the parties.  In contested custody cases, men are more likely to win.  It's also true that the vast majority of judges, guardian ad litems, and other important court personnel are men.  Regardless of these realities, MRA's vocally persist in paranoid delusions which paint the family court system as a twisted "feminist" enclave in which women secretly pull all the strings, and the men are their hapless victims.

This is also why the stereotypes of feminist-as-man-hating-bra-burner continue to pervade our culture.  Because true equality would mean that men would have to examine their male privilege and subsequently give it up, and rather than face that terrifying proposition, they turn reality on its head, declaring that women who assert themselves and demand equality are victimizing them.

None of this is news to me; the epiphany part lies is taking these principles and applying them retrospectively to some of my own personal situations.  And now that I've seen that wanting to be treated as an equal and with respect, insisting upon it, does not, in fact, make me controlling, demanding, critical, or nagging, the key lies in remembering and reminding myself as often as I need to, because truthfully?  The guilt and fear and self-blame does not go away overnight, no matter how many other places in your life you've already discovered those feelings and begun to rip them up by their roots.  When you're a woman, in can take a lifetime just to learn how to feel human.

Men's women

It began with the color pink.  Or, at least, that's the earliest memory I can point to for the opening scene of this narrative.  I was five years old, and I decided that I hated the color pink.  It's what girls were supposed to like.  I don't know what exactly I'd absorbed by age five that had already established subconsciously for me that a girl was something I did not want to be, but there it was.  Being unable to escape my physical gender, I made up my mind that at least I would not be like those other girls, you know, the ones who were scared of bugs, who didn't want to get grass stains on their knees, who were afraid to climb trees.  They were the ones who giggled when the boys chased them around on the playground, knocking them to their feet and running away, and I was not going to be one of them.

Instead, I played with G.I. Joes and matchbox cars.  I went outside in the mud and got as dirty as possible.  I collected cicada shells in a glass jar and scoffed at the girls who shrieked and backed away from them.  I built things with scrap wood and nails, and whatever the boys were doing, I'd go out of my way to do it better, faster, and more daringly, and I'd roll my eyes at the wimpy girls who didn't even try.

This is not to say that I never did traditionally "feminine" things.  I had dolls and a tea set.  But I was definitely a tomboy, and I intended to keep it that way.  Already, I was learning: in a man's world, it's easier to ally yourself with those in power than it is to fight the system.  Of course, I wouldn't have put it in those terms back then, but it's astonishing in retrospect just how early these cultural messages infiltrated my thinking and affected my choices and behavior.

In adulthood, this method of coping takes many forms.  Women align themselves against each other and ingratiate themselves with men, often without realizing that this is what they're doing.  It's an attempt at sharing in some of the power and privilege that men enjoy, and it's also an attempt to avoid terrifying feelings of powerlessness.  This is what's going on when:

• Women say that female victims of domestic abuse are victims because they have low self-esteem, they like being abused, they're stupid, they're weak, and that abuse could never happen to the woman making these claims.
• Women say that rape victims have at least some culpability in the crime committed against them because of the way they were dressed, their level of intoxication, their failure to "fight back" hard enough, their sexual history, or the fact that they supposedly lead the rapist on.
• Women blame the woman that her husband/partner cheated with, rather than the man who did the cheating.  They call the other woman a whore, a slut, a homewrecker.  I'm not going to defend the premise of getting involved with someone whom you know is in a serious relationship; that's not a very moral or kind thing to do.  But many women seem to ignore the fact that the real problem in this situation is with the man who made a commitment to them, not the woman he cheated with.  They can't do anything about her, but blaming her is easier than facing the fact that their trust has been broken and they're going to have to make some difficult decisions about their relationship.
• Women call other women "bitches," "sluts," "whores," and other derogatory names.
• Women are cruel to other women out of jealousy or fear that these other women might be prettier, more popular, more successful, etc. than they are.
• Women are cruel to other women in ways that make them feel better about themselves, e.g., making fun of another woman's weight, her failures, her clothes, her looks, her mistakes.
• Women willingly engage in the use of terms like "pussy" or "gay" to denigrate men (the insult here is that the man in question is supposedly feminine in some way, and that's bad because women are not human beings like men are, but something different and lowlier).
• Women agree with men that it's nasty or gross for a woman not to shave her legs or adhere to other social expectations of femininity that are mainly geared toward keeping women attractive to men.
• Women claim that they have no problem with their partners or other men using pornography which is denigrating to women, even though somewhere deep inside, it makes them feel bad to know that the person they love is getting off to unrealistic fantasy women being objectified and used.
  

I could list more examples, but you get the point.  Basically, this is what's going on almost any time a woman attempts to place herself in a position of power over another woman or to distance herself from damaging female stereotypes without attempting in any way to discredit them.

This is how we wind up with women like Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, Margaret Thatcher, and Phyllis Schlafly, to name a few.

A recent poll in the UK showed that more women than men believe a woman is at least partially responsible for her own rape if she was dressed in revealing clothing.  If you can believe that a woman somehow caused the act of violence that was committed against her, it makes you feel safer, because whatever she did to cause it, you won't do, and therefore it can't happen to you.  As emotionally compelling as this line of reasoning is, it's illogical and untrue.  Victim-blaming not only fails to make you any safer; it actually makes women as a whole less safe, because it perpetuates misogynistic ideals and is a large part of the reason why so many men who commit violence against women are able to walk away with no consequences.

But victim-blaming is only one form of behaving like a man's woman.  As Harriet Jacobs has pointed out, even something as simple as saying "I'd never put up with that" when referring to unwanted attention from men puts the speaker at odds with other women and actually aligns her against them, even if that's not at all what she intended.

It took me a long time to really understand why it is that being a man's woman is to fail utterly at being your own woman.  I think all of us have probably behaved like men's women at some point(s) in our lives.  A man's woman may reject certain gendered cultural ideals, and quite often, she may see herself as a feminist, but by mentally distinguishing herself from and aligning herself against those other women, she is actually doing all women (herself included) a great deal more harm than good.  She is perpetuating the status quo by playing directly into it, even despite herself.

Acting like a man's woman is an understandable survival tactic in a misogynistic society, but it's ultimately a step backward, all the more treacherous because it can sometimes be so well disguised as progress.  Let's instead be women's women; in other words, let's choose to identify as human beings, and not limit ourselves to the roles that men have historically carved out for us, not even the ones that at first seem empowering but which, on closer inspection, turn out to be little more than supporting roles in the great misogynistic drama.