Hey guys! This is a short essay I wrote last year. It includes the stories I told you about in class (about how my parents treated me when I dressed up as a girl, vs. how they treated my brother)
When I was about five years old my family and I were on summer
vacation. We were staying at a “camp” (which to all of those outside of
Maine is a summer house on a lake) with a big porch off one side of it.
One morning, I decided the porch must be swept. But I didn’t
just
want to sweep, I wanted to really maximize the moment. So what did I
do? I dressed myself up in a long skirt and a bandana crafted out of a
kitchen towel. Only then was I truly ready to pursue my goal for the
morning. I remember being SO proud as I swept that porch clean, nearly
dancing through the movements in a happy rendition of some 1800s peasant
scene I had conjured in my mind. So proud was I that I even asked my
parents to capture the precious moment with a photo, a request to which
they happily obliged.
A few years and many dress-up episodes later, we were all back at
this same camp. This time I decided to beautify my brother and dress him
as a girl. I put him in a spaghetti-strap tank top, gelled up his hair,
and masked his face in cheap child’s make-up. I thought he looked
great! My parents, however, were not pleased with my
artwork. Essentially, I was shaming him; certainly this was not
appropriate play for a seven-year-old boy.
Now are we seeing a gender binary or what? Of course it’s okay for a
little girl to emulate an older woman cleaning. But god forbid a little
boy is put to express his potential feminine side.
My little anecdotes here are certainly not new experiences to most,
but I do think they’re quite illustrative of what our society so fears
today: misplaced femininity.
We fear so much to be called a sissy, a pussy, or god forbid, a girl.
We fear to show weakness through our feelings (because only females
have feelings, and therefore feelings are for the weak, obviously). We
fear to have children and lose the race against male dictated capitalist
success. And we absolutely fear to be “crazy”.
Society is so fearful of not just female-connoted weaknesses, but
especially of male enactments of femininity, that we actually teach
females to enact a super femininity. As long as females stay feminine
(emotional, weak, and beautified with particular clothes and make-up),
we will never truly challenge nor confuse masculinity for anything other
than strength, logic, and innate correctness (as it is indicated with
masculine bodies and behaviors).
Okay that’s a rather loaded paragraph. What I mean to say is this: in
order for men to be as manly as they are, they need women to remain
super feminine. As long as we women enact our gender with skirts and
craziness (ahem, emotions), it’s going to be near impossible to redefine
society’s concepts of strength and wisdom, because those are traits
connected to everything masculine.
For a while now I’ve been thinking, why is it that I wear make-up
every day? Why do I like to wear such feminine clothing? And why the
heck do I bother to shave my legs all the time? Sometimes I actually
tell myself its because I choose these styles because I feel powerful
when I look my best. But then I think, this power it absolutely connoted
with a male-dominated society where female enactments at least garner
me mainstream acceptance.
Yet, I’m not ready to chop off my hair and ditch the skirt I’m
currently wearing. I like being a female. I like the way I look (if for
no other reason than the fact that after 10 years of wearing mascara
every day my face looks much more familiar this way). Being a woman can
be and is normally great (which should and will be another post in
itself).
Perhaps rather than asking females to continue emulating males in
their pursuits for success in modern day life, we should
teach/encourage/push/ask males to be more “feminine”. Maybe we don’t
need to dress them up with spaghetti-strap tank tops, but we could open
up a space for men to be more emotional and more aware of other forms of
strength.
A couple of weeks ago I was in my gender and diversity class, and we
had a guest speaker for the day. This particular man spoke to us about a
group of males of which he was a part. This group encourages men to not
just combat gender violence, but to open up themselves to one another
in authentic conversations about emotions and life experiences (how
“girly”/awesome does that sound?!) He described to us a different type
of masculinity, one in which maleness was expressed and valued, but in
non-violent, non-dominating ways. Rather, the guys in his group support
each other with male-defined peace, caring, and equality.
Now, how difficult is it to digest that sentence… that males can
might want the same things as women are traditionally made to want? (If
you think I’m generalizing about gender-based values (which I admittedly
am), I am doing so with consideration to only what I have lived and
learned. Just consider that the most typical phrase associated with the
ultimate feminine embodiment, the beauty pageant contestant, which is of
course: “I want world peace”. Now I’ve never heard a male contestant of
any sort exclaim that his number one goal is “world peace”, unless of
course world peace includes a few more bombs along the way.
So rather than trying to call myself a feminist and try to be as
strong as a dude, maybe I should call myself a maleist and seek a world
where males work to embrace female-associated expressions strength and
wisdom, because yes, peace, care, and equality are all wise, powerful
choices we can all make.
