gender

Listening to the gut feeling

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It’s probably a weird hobby, but I tend to go to a lot of job interviews, even when I am not  actively searching for a job. Sure, I don’t apply for anything I wouldn’t want or for which I am not qualified (obviously I wouldn’t be invited to an interview without qualifications). I have probably written somewhere before that I think keeping the interview skills sharp is important, and even if I can’t claim to be brilliant at interviewing skills, despite my keeping my “hat in the ring”, I would be even worse if I weren’t actively practicing.

Because this is a common enough occurrence in my life, as a hobby, I give the process and the part of the process that involves gut feeling, a lot of thought. Possibly I am more interested in worklife/human resource linguistic anthropology than in getting jobs. I’ve written before about red flags and alarm bells experienced in interview situations. Sometimes, though, things are even more subtle. You get a sense for a company culture by the small things you see and observe. You might be wrong about the impression you get, but ultimately those impressions matter. You probably aren’t going to feel particularly comfortable in these places if you do get these inexplicable feelings or unusual observations.

I am thinking now about a few other examples. I had a great series of interviews with a company but to start with they rescheduled interviews multiple times throughout the process. I am flexible, so this was okay, especially when we were doing Skype calls and could be flexible. But then they invited me for some final interviews, which required moving around a lot of my schedule and traveling at the last minute. I flew to the city where the company was located. And late in the evening the night before the interview, they emailed to ask if I would mind postponing an entire day. Not just a few hours but an entire day. I already had my tickets to return home in the evening, after the originally scheduled interview. Looking back, maybe I should have said no. Instead I agreed to the change but told them that it was really inconvenient.

In the end, even though the interviews went well, I noticed as soon as I went to the offices that everyone I saw in the office except for a receptionist, everyone I talked to, everyone who was referred to as being a part of the global organization, was a man. And when they talked about their customers, they kept referring to the men who use these products and their wives. It may well be that the majority of their customers are men, but the framing was (unintentionally) gender imbalanced. And later, when they called to tell me it had been a hard decision, narrowed down to one other person and me, they ultimately hired the other person – a man. I don’t necessarily think that was conscious or had anything to do with it, but it was something that I clearly observed. The gender imbalance coupled with the multiple last-minute shifts in schedule led me to think that it was a good thing that things didn’t work out.

Photo by Rostyslav Savchyn on Unsplash

 

 

 

finger blame

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I just watched a series of MOOC lectures on bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies, and the instructor just said, “…now you have to worry about the fact that they’re supplying code that has its grubby fingers on your bitcoins…”. 

Ah, yes, fingers. I guess my fingers are deceptively large. Or my hands are larger than they look. I was recently reminded of this … optical illusion when someone commented on my awkward, off-kilter hand gestures, citing how non-authoritative it looks when I use my index finger to scold someone (jokingly or otherwise) because my hands are “so small”. But I put my palm flat against his, which left him shocked to discover that our hands are basically the same size. And then when the time came to demonstrate dexterity and strength, I was able to stretch my hand across the top of a large can of paint and lift it. He was not able to do the same. In some small way this was an emasculating act, and I have been doing this same kind of thing my entire life by being physically stronger than most of the men I’ve been around (even when we’re only talking about fingers and hands).

And being as conditioned as we are, I end up being the one ‘blamed’ and shamed for how ‘unfeminine’ this is.

And to this, I erect a deceptively small – or deceptively large – middle finger.

no one thinks it’s him/her – but it could be you

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Anger and frustration are the only two feelings I can put into words regarding the maelstrom surrounding … well, everything – the exhausting everything – around #metoo, sexual harassment/assault, consent, sexism and the whole bubbling stew of every related thing that can be stirred in. It’s too complex and all-encompassing, touching on so many issues, to be able to parse effectively. Even if I could separate all the component parts, I am too indescribably angry and frustrated to do so.

But the thought that keeps coming back to me again and again is this line that people draw (I use the word “people” here because sometimes women are the ‘predators’ and sometimes men are the ‘victims’ – and even these labels are not going to be detailed and inclusive enough – but that isn’t my point): the line where one person stands, on the side of which (s)he (“he” from here on out because it’s usually a “he”) really, truly believes he has never done anything wrong. The “No Man Thinks It’s Him” line. It could be you standing on one side of this line, firm in the belief that you have never assaulted someone, never harassed someone, never pushed someone beyond their comfort zone, never took advantage of a power dynamic that essentially left the other person feeling they had no choice. But you could be on the other side of that line as much as any of these things could have happened to you.

I was more fired up about this particular point many months ago, but never had the time to articulate this. This is always the danger: when you don’t act immediately, the passion behind your motivation dissipates, or fear, or antipathy – any number of things – creep in. You just want to forget. You just want to move on. How many of us have just wanted to move on? We can see how speaking out may get your voice a megaphone (see #metoo), but the results can end up being terrifying (see the Kavanaugh confirmations and Christine Blasey Ford; oh yes, we’ve come so far since the divisive Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill case. No… history repeats and just a lot of noise around something that… goes on being exactly the same).

There are no consequences for those, particularly powerful white men with powerful white male friends, who abuse. Make as much noise as you want – it has not changed the real way in which such cases and complaints are handled, nor how victims are seen and treated. Certainly not in the court of public opinion.

And, as several articles highlighted as the Kavanaugh story got underway: both of them could well be telling the truth. Because in a man like Kavanaugh’s mind he never did anything wrong. This is how the “No Man Thinks It’s Him” line is drawn. All these people (again, primarily men, but I do know women who are wildly inappropriate to near-criminal levels) truly believe they never did anything wrong. Anything that happened was the norm, was expected, was agreed to.

One of the first times I really thought about this was when I stumbled across a video discussion among a group of relatively well-known actors and some lesser-known but still influential entertainment-industry type men called “Man Enough:. Essentially they sit and discuss together in frank terms their own transgressions, acknowledging that they never really saw the extent of the problem but eventually realized that it is also all of their responsibility, i.e., lamenting all the times they never said anything to stop others from behaving badly (which could mean a vast range of things) toward women. They acknowledge that their silence is complicity. But at the same time, while they may have alluded to their own actions (not necessarily treating women with as much respect as they should have), they still perceived themselves as being on “the right side” of this “No Man Thinks It’s Him” line.

But, if I take their discussion to its logical conclusion, it’s every man. No man thinks it’s him, but it is every man. In one way or another. No man in the video acknowledged that he has no way of knowing whether some action he took in the past might have been perceived as taking it too far. Almost no man (particularly those loud, prominent pro-women types) walks away from what he thinks of as a consensual encounter believing he did something wrong (assault, rape) and “got away with it”. It’s the fundamental thinking about these things that’s wrong. It is fundamentally a problem of not just thinking and acting on that sense of entitlement and “societal norm” on which he relies, but firmly and completely believing that whatever he has done has been consensual.

In cases where power dynamics are at work, or women have been cornered and go along with something they don’t want, it is not because they really consented. It is because they took the lesser of what they feared – giving an aggressive, out of control, overpowering man what he wants right now might save her life. Never mind that it will haunt her for life – at least she will still be alive.

But accountability – no. A man who goes through the world in which, if they are not overtly, openly “grabbing women by the pussy” – but are “just grabbing them and kissing them”, is a predator but will never, ever see himself that way.

This also came to light recently in Seattle, where a well-known businessman, David Meinert, was accused repeatedly of a persistent pattern of sexual assault and intimidation – all of which he tried to deny. Early on in the media, he tried to deflect the accusations by asserting his place on the right side of the “No Man Thinks It’s Him” line; he went into damage-control mode, and issued halfhearted apologies that amount to trying to demean and diminish what his victims endured, claiming that he had believed the people in question had wanted everything that they had done (consensually). And he may well have believed this. But the pattern of intimidation, coercion, threats, the power differential, and the sheer shock some victims felt as these events occurred (i.e. “is this really happening?”) is well-established.

The power dynamics and fear dynamics at play are things most men are not going to understand. They will swear up and down that they would never disrespect, much less force or hurt a woman, but do not understand that their insistence and manipulation is already disrespect, force and/or hurt. When forced into a situation where you’re afraid to say no, you are not fully consenting. Your ability to freely consent has already been taken from you.

No one is immune

There are, though, some very blurred lines.

Take for example the very blurry territory of consensual sex that turns into crossing boundaries that turns into assault. I read an article during the height of the #metoo publicity about the challenge of delineating when assault has occurred in a consensual relationship that contains mutually agreed-upon rough sex. The rough sex story hit a nerve because it’s right on that boundary – you have readily consented to have a sexual relationship in which you each agree to a certain kind of sex, which then can be twisted and manipulated and turned into an easy excuse to abuse you and then used against you when you realize you have been abused. I didn’t realize until recently that the discomfort, and unsettled feeling, I had about a former relationship, was largely down to this. And I am 100% certain that the man in question would never, ever imagine that he had abused his power, the very clear power differential (I was very young, he wasn’t) or me. I had consented and agreed – in his mind, I had liked it. Even when it reached the stage that I did not like it, did not agree and did not consent. He held all the cards, and I spent a long time convincing myself that I was agreeing to “exploration” – anything not to confront the reality of what had actually happened.

This line I refer to, the “I’m not that kind of guy”/”No Man Thinks It’s Him” line, isn’t just a line that men cross, as I mentioned earlier. Less blurry, but certainly an area for discussion, of course, is when women assault or abuse men, which can be and often is, coercive and manipulative. (This does not begin to cover the violence, abuse and assault in every demographic, e.g. gay and transgender populations, which is disproportionately high and very important, but not within the scope of this rant.) As a man in my life stated about his own experiences with a woman perpetrator: “If a man were perpetrating these acts on a woman, it would be assault. It would be harassment. It would be rape.” Society isn’t prepared to see woman-on-man acts as something unwelcome or that a man would not be willing to have happen. And yet it happens all the time. With the #metoo movement came a few media stories about similar tales, such as the Asia Argento ‘backlash’ and a story about an NYU female professor accused of sexual harassment by one of her male students. If we want to get to a place (however unlikely that seems at the moment) where women can come forward with what has happened to them, and today we defend women who are not listened to or believed, we have to do the same for men in similar situations.

As I told someone around the time these revelations came out, we have all done things we are not proud of. We should all be reflecting on how our actions will affect other people. It does not need to rise to the level of assault or rape to be questionable and worth self-reflection and/or remorse. A big part of the problem is that so many of the (mostly) men, those on the “right side” of this line I’ve cited, who have been accused still don’t really believe that they perpetrated assault/rape. They genuinely think they used their power to gain consent, and even that coerced consent still equals consent. They will never reflect on their actions and the meaning of those actions to realize, “Wow, I did something wrong. I hurt someone.” If they pretend to reflect at all and apologize it’s never “I am sorry for what I did and that I hurt you” but rather “I am sorry if you think I hurt you”, placing the blame/perception of harm back on the victim.

civilized responses

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In conversation recently I talked to a guy who shared his frustration about being “ghosted” by a woman with whom he felt he had a perfectly fine date. Theoretically I would have agreed with him that she could have just said at the end of it, when he asked to keep in touch, that she had a nice time but didn’t see it going anywhere. But I know that I have never been able to do this – and I have equally been almost totally unable to disappear from someone’s life completely without any kind of explanation whatsoever. Truth be told, I have mostly been scared of men my entire life – too afraid to disappear completely (what if they then find me and react badly?) but equally too afraid to wound a fragile ego. The point isn’t me, though.

No, it’s the idea that these people (usually men) who insist that they “just” want someone to be honest with them, that it would have been fine to say “thanks, but no thanks” are out of touch with reality. They often, as news stories everywhere all week long have pointed out, take a polite rejection as an invitation to keep trying, keep pestering, push harder, and sometimes, it escalates into outright threats and violence. This is nothing new to most women.

Sure, it might be civilized and polite to be able to say to someone, “Thanks for the drink, but I think we should go our separate ways”, but reality has taught us that we are rarely met with civilized responses.

 

Photo by Val Vesa on Unsplash

into the friendly fray: uses, excuses and replacements

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Randomness on friendship…

What day passes without my reflecting on friendship and its concomitant challenges? Friendship is not so challenging any more, now that I am a seasoned old lady, but I think back to when every slight felt like a lashing, and I was too insecure or scared to call people out on their bullshit. (And when I did, it was often a disaster.) It is now whatever I decide it is. It’s a little bit like when people tell you that you can’t control other people’s reactions or behavior, but you can control yours.

Not that I put all the bitter bits away when I reached legal adulthood. The game goes on as long as one lets it. But perhaps now that I am this wizened, though not unwise, hag I can more easily accept the frailties and failures of all people. We are, after all, just people, mostly trying to do our best. I can’t count how many times I’d heard and hated this expression in the past, which seemed ready-made and packed with excuses: I did my best. But now, having blinked my way through enough days, enough experiences where I didn’t reach my potential or didn’t fulfill expectations I’d set and thus disappointed others (and how many times have I disappointed others without knowing it?), I feel a certain measure of compassion for those who employ this phrase, even when it is used with nonchalant insincerity.

I do still wonder if people know how to be friends; it seems like the most natural thing in the world, to meet, discover and bond with people, forging strong connections with some and transient or momentary connections with others. Because we don’t formally learn how to be friends, or learn how to treat other people with care, and instead do so by inference, can we ever really say we did the best we could? Or… is that all we can truly say?

Occasionally, vivid memories bubble to the surface; nostalgia burns and makes one long for the ability to cut through the overgrown fields of the past to return to specific moments, which always include the blinding, shining specter of some friend or other. For me, it is almost always one single person, T, a friend about whom I have written at length (which does not even begin to convey the amount of time I’ve spent thinking and dreaming about her). I don’t have any control of how much my subconscious mind dredges her up, even after 19 years passing without a single word or contact. Most days, most moments, she is completely absent from my mind, and the more time passes, and the longer my life, so far removed from that adolescent whirlwind in which we spun together, goes on in some entirely different context, the more remote she becomes.

But those memories we form in youth, so packed and powerful, bursting bright and flavorful, exist so indelibly that very little that has happened since competes in intensity. And the triggers, especially through the increasing sentimentality of age, mine every step, exploding in emotional outbursts. I can’t explain why the heart rate ratchets itself up ever so slightly every time I hear, see or experience something that I wish I could share with her (or could have shared with her). Here I mean everything from the recent TV show Derry Girls, which is something we would have died to watch as girls, to seeing and meeting all these bands and musicians that we adored, to planning St. Patrick’s Day baking and thinking about how insane we became about St. Patrick’s Day (who knows why?). The selectivity of my nostalgia makes me imagine that she’d feel as thrilled at being touched by these memories as I am. But this selectivity censors out the whole ‘drifting apart’ segment of the relationship, and all the empty and silent years that have happened since our last conversation.

A series of events kicked this latest reverie into motion. First, I’d seen the aforementioned Derry Girls. Next, out of nowhere, I got an email from a Polish exchange student (JK) we’d had at our high school. She and I had been friends and had been partnered up on various projects during her stay in the country. I had somehow forgotten that her presence, and my teachers’ enthusiasm about pushing the Polish girl and me together, had irritated T. I suddenly recalled T commenting, “Of course they let you be with JK because you study Russian, but no one else will get a chance to be friends with her” as if it were somehow my fault. (And I know – as if studying Russian has anything to do with the girl being Polish, but I imagine that in my teachers’ minds, it did.) By this point in our friendship, in our lives, in that end-stage of public education, I think T had felt academically blocked by me in so many ways (at least that is the only conclusion I can come up with? Now I am making assumptions), but I still don’t get it. So much of what happened and who we became was formed by what others (i.e. people, friends, teachers) assumed about us, sometimes pushing us together when we did not want to be, and other times creating situations that should not have been remotely adversarial but became that way. T is not the last friend who has tried to subtly undermine me, either out of envy or insecurity or whatever, but she is the only one who has stuck with me emotionally.

That’s not to say that it was surprising. Very early in life, I learned that friends are fickle, and people are often jealous, have a short attention span, or easily grow apart. Does that mean that I accepted those things? No, that came much, much later. All the many times I cried inconsolably as a kid, my mother kept telling me, “This won’t help you now at all, and you won’t believe me, but kids don’t know how to be real friends.” She was mostly right. It didn’t stop me from crying, but it certainly made me feel tougher later on when friendship didn’t withstand time or change.

“She had done it on her own, while I hadn’t even thought about it, and during the summer, the vacation? Would she always do the things I was supposed to do, before and better than me? She eluded me when I followed her and meanwhile stayed close on my heels in order to pass me by?” –My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

I recently read Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which I had long been resisting (always have to buck the popular trend, of course). It was no great literary work, but its ability to slice right to the heart of conflict in female friendships affected me immediately. Ferrante’s ability to convey the teeter-totter nature of our fragile friendships made me surrender my resistance to the book, at least. Most of all, the push-pull feeling of envy we get about our friends’ accomplishments and achievements, their loves and attention they get. That is, we envy them at the same time as being happy for them. We love and seethe at the same time.

We constantly change places – one friend leading the way and the other worrying furiously that she will fall behind. How many times did this happen between T and me? So many times I went off on all kinds of strange and new musical paths, and each time, T felt left behind and left out until she finally “caught up”. How many times did she acquire things and travel places that I could never have afforded to have or to go? I remember when she spent an entire summer abroad, and I was happy for her, but I was filled with envy, knowing that I was not going to be able to go anywhere – in truly, overly dramatic teen fashion, I was sure I was NEVER going to be able to go anywhere. When she sent me a letter telling me she was homesick, unhappy and wished she were home with friends for the summer, I felt a tiny pang of glee that it was not all magical as she had hoped. But the bigger, more gracious part of me, felt my heart ache for her, wanting to do anything in my power to ease her feeling of being out of place. I jumped into action and wrote what I thought was the most brilliant, funny and reassuring letter ever and posted it immediately. And it helped her. It cemented our friendship. But is there that intense a friendship without these stakes?… The taking turns, unwittingly, at being the leader, with all the normal acceptance and suffering that that entails… always with the distractions (other friends, unknowing competition, growing apart). With the fickle way of one minute wanting to spend every waking and sleeping moment together, and the next repelled, finding yourself feeling completely left behind, but not knowing how to voice it without making yourself look weak, unequal and vulnerable.

A tribute to her: she was always a lot better at making her feelings known and clear; when she felt left behind, she said so. And I felt warmer toward her for her honesty and willingness to be vulnerable. I think, at least when it came to her and her alone, I felt a need to maintain some ‘coolness’ – ha! as if I could even pretend to have a shred of that – never admitting until so much later – that I’d felt just as remote at times, that we had both slipped in and out of these roles, always returning (at least back in those early days) to a world of mostly just the two of us – in which we were the most important parts – “I no longer felt that she inhabited a marvelous land without me” (Ferrante). But then, just as Ferrante shrewdly points out, there’s none of that warm togetherness without a pinch of the sense that you’re gaining ground … “Or maybe it was only that I was beginning to feel superior.” That is the delicate balance.

These things have been mummified for so long in me that it was strange to have the tomb reopened without warning by this book and other smaller triggers. I am reminded that things change – I have changed – when I am confronted by a (former-ish) friend I made in adulthood but with whom I’ve had a relationship fraught with ambivalence. It would be fair to say that we are not really friends now. We were once very close, and then everything came to an abrupt end. This end happened to coincide with the end of some rather big needs for her, leading me to believe that I had been convenient and then a casualty once I was no longer needed. For once, maybe because I was by this time an adult, I decided to confront, and she confirmed that she had backed off and regretted that it appeared as though she had used me (but she didn’t deny it, even though I am sure it was unconscious, even if she did). Having the confirmation or closure or whatever you can call it, I felt content – it’s the not knowing that makes things difficult. We have had extremely limited, sporadic contact – very cursory, surface level – over the last decade. Nothing I could call ‘friendship’. And then she turned up recently, asking for a favor. Not a big favor, and nothing really taxing. But all I could do was laugh, comparing how things had been left and how they were, very momentarily and casually, resumed. With need. And now it was up to me to determine how to feel about or interpret that need – do I feel used? Or do I decide that I can be the casual acquaintance I am and happily help?

The funny thing is… it can hurt, but when you figure it out (“it” here being friendship), you can walk away, or you can just accept the form the friendship takes and the role you play (or not).

Against silence: Ellen Pao versus high-fiving white guys

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Yesterday’s talk of silences and sharing was obliquely personal, but it did then make me think about an earlier moment this year when I read Ellen Pao’s book Reset, detailing the harassment and toxic culture in which she (and many other women) worked during her time as a VC at Kleiner Perkins. The timing of the book’s publication coincides with the contemporary tidal wave of public sharing/silence-breaking taking place en masse, but it seems Pao’s gender discrimination legal case came a little bit too soon (at least to deliver her a legal victory). Nevertheless her actions, as difficult and costly they were for her personally, certainly paved the way (however invisibly) for those who have finally found a voice with which to speak up.

I didn’t find the book riveting, nor Pao’s experiences shocking or surprising. In fact it took me a long time by my standards to get through the book. It’s not boring or badly written – it’s just that this is all so familiar. We (women) have seen this same story and had these experiences, all the silently slammed doors, slights, harassment, our part (as women) being cast only as ornaments or quotas to fill but who will be, as Pao asserts many times, compliant, hopeful and helpful enough to do all the grunt work, and to keep delivering ideas, progress and revenue under the radar. All the while, standing just on the edge of the action, we watch the high-fiving other people (usually men) do as they take undeserved credit or undercut or interrupt us. It sometimes feels like they do this because they are threatened; at other times it feels like they do this because we are invisible because this is the way the world is set up – mostly white men steering the ship while the women of the world are just bobbing along in the vast ocean hoping these men will benevolently deploy a liferaft.

And it’s a quiet, almost silent, kind of suffering – you don’t even realize you are in the shit until you are well and truly in it. Pao does a good job describing that first moment of realization – that it’s not just you on the outside. No, it’s the existence of an entire culture of discrimination that dawns on you. You might at first blame yourself, think you are overly sensitive and just not used to the way things are done. But even when you realize this is an offensive and hostile environment, and that you are not the only one to think so, what recourse do you have? You are invisible. OR you are the squeaky wheel, the bitch, the “difficult to work with” one. And it is only when you have exhausted all your options that you move to the extreme (in Pao’s case, litigation). And it’s then that all the energy and resources these men have channeled into insignificant frippery, such as paint colors on their private jets and discussions on porn stars and their ‘attributes’, are turned with full force toward discrediting any source of discord in their world.

And it’s crafty. I am first to admit that when the Kleiner Perkins PR machine churned into gear and started writing unflattering and defamatory stories about Pao (about whom I knew nothing at the time), I was inclined to believe the stories because I simply was not thinking about it critically. But when you think about it – why would well-respected, mainstream publications go on the attack against this individual woman in the vicious way they did unless there were something really big at stake underneath it all? Unless someone with deep pockets felt she had to be silenced? On the surface, it would be (and was) easy to look at her allegations in almost the same way the general public scoffs at the story of the woman who famously sued McDonald’s for being burned by hot coffee: it seemed frivolous. And why? In part because the general public has no understanding of the legal tenets of the case, the actual and physical damages (third degree burns) or the fact that McDonald’s knew their coffee could cause this level of harm – and showed during discovery that they knew and had had more than 700 similar complaints over the years – and did nothing to rectify the situation. But the other, bigger part of why the public vilified the woman for her litigious greed and to this day laugh at the case as an example of America’s sue-happy culture gone-too-far is because the PR machine was at work doing its ugly smear job.

Again. Still. As always.

Perhaps the book didn’t enlighten me in any way, but I certainly noted while reading Pao’s account that sometimes pushing the worst nightmares of your life into the light is your only recourse. Even if you get burned.

Photo by Isaac Benhesed on Unsplash

Shot in the face

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Who remembers the story of the Long Island Lolita, Amy Fisher? A Long Island high school girl who had an affair with a car mechanic, Joey Buttafuoco, and then when he dumped her, she went to the Buttafuoco house and shot Joey’s wife, Mary Jo, in the face. What in the hell did Mary Jo have to do with this conflict? Sure, the teenage girl is unhinged and somehow sees the wife as the hindrance keeping her away from her lover. But it wasn’t the wife. It was the man: blaming his inability to know what he wants, playing all sides, having cake and eating it. But the women pay the price.

It was a long time ago, and you would be forgiven to have forgotten this sordid, ripped-from-the-headlines, made-for-tv tale. It was mined once more in a recent season of Mozart in the Jungle, but even that is not a must-watch for most, so the Buttafuoco/Fisher story isn’t immediately at the ready in most people’s memories. No matter – it is just an extreme example of the cautionary tale that we’re fed: women are jealous; women are crazy; women will try to kill each other over a man and imagine the worst intentions in the other woman. In fact, the other woman may be completely in the dark.

So often, it’s not the women. It’s almost always the men. The men are the ones making poor choices, misleading women… and then these blind women, who never have all the facts, end up doing stupid shit like shooting each other in the face.

Most are not shooting anyone in the face. Nothing quite so dramatic… or criminal. But I wonder about the majority of the women I know. There’s a lot of lip service about being supportive of women, being feminists, believing and listening to other women. But in practice, even the most reasonable of women are always suspicious of and placing blame on another (or ‘the other’) woman. But I don’t think the majority of women would, for example, actively pursue someone (male or female) whom they knew to be already involved/unavailable.

I wonder today, along these lines, how could woman A (a nameless/faceless woman) read book after book, all feminist manifestos and dialectics of women supporting women, and yet be so territorial about the man she lived with and supposedly didn’t even love or want? Woman B is simply told that man Z has split up with woman A. But woman A apparently has a different understanding of the situation. Why does she then blame woman B, who does not have accurate or truthful information about where things stand? Woman B has stumbled into a situation about which she does not have, well… any information. (Although that does not become totally clear until the end, when it no longer matters.) The problem always comes back to man Z. And why would either woman, given how they are being played and given false or incomplete information, even want man Z?

How could woman A, apparently intelligent, thoughtful and brilliant, after reading so much about women, act as though and treat other women – strangers, in most cases – as though they were enemies to her cause? As standing in her way? As trying to steal from her? Women so often, especially when someone else is in the middle, do not have all the information they need.

And the world goes on being a horrible place for women not only because of men’s oppression, which of course is in the news now – dominating headlines – but also because of women’s suspicion about each other and what they do to and how they treat and view each other.

Photo by Mr Cup / Fabien Barral on Unsplash

The operating system of women

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Several months ago, Mr Firewall asked me if I had ever seen the ads for Bodyform feminine hygiene products that he remembers from his youth. I guess they were only in the UK (possibly Europe) because, as far as I know, Bodyform products don’t even exist in the US. As he always does, he charitably decided to belt out the ‘theme song’ of these ads. I thought surely his rendition was exaggerated and over-the-top… but for once, as I sought out the actual ads from the 80s, his version was almost toned down. I was a bit… stunned. What the hell kind of song was this?

 

Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

Firewall remembered the first ad, but my first exposure was this second one… I can’t really tell what the people are doing. First it looks like a water tank, then an oil rig-like thing and then like they are welding or something. (Okay, I admit I am not really watching closely.)

In the months since my introduction to Bodyform advertising, Firewall has continued to regale me with his renditions of this song, sometimes spontaneously and sometimes in response to my statements, such as “I must have PMS” or “I must be ovulating”.

We recently had a discussion, though, about how so many men have no clue about menstruation. (Firewall has a bunch of older sisters, so he well knows.) But I read a handful of things online recently that echoed the same kinds of things I have heard boys, and even men, say… in all their ignorance. For example, they imagine that women can control their periods in the same way people control their bladders. Just WILL THE BLEEDING TO STOP – hold it in! Beyond that, the lifetime cost of having periods will apparently add up to almost USD 20,000.

I don’t really know why I am writing about this except that it makes me mad. We must deal with – as women – for almost our entire lives – something out of our control, uncomfortable and often painful. And then deal with the total misunderstanding and ignorance surrounding this within society. And then get to pay for the privilege… to the tune of the cost of a car. But even that isn’t as infuriating as it could be. At least I have access to choices and resources. And as ignorant as people can be about something like periods, I don’t live in a deeply shame-based culture that demonizes menstruation.

I was talking to someone else last night, mentioning these menstrual misconceptions and issues, and he said that he, too, had spent the evening talking about menstruation… although slightly more targeted than my kvetching aimlessly. No, he was discussing how he and a group with whom he will travel will get feminine hygiene products in bulk to girls in Sierra Leone. He himself will travel with 60kgs of tampons. (I am wondering about the efficacy, probability and feasibility of supplying menstrual cups, which seem easier to manage, transport, distribute sustainably… but not sure how well that would work.)

And this issue makes me infuriated at my own helplessness – not just the fact that young women in Sierra Leone, West Africa, many parts of Africa and all over the world don’t have these kinds of basic tools at their disposal – but the fact that resources in general are so scarce that it is always like anything one does ‘to help’ is a futile ‘drop in the bucket’, yet at the same makes a tremendous difference (in the way it never does in a well-resourced part of the world). I recognize that I am unfocused and grazing the surface in this venting.

Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash

Not pretty any more

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“The faint lines on her face seemed to have deepened. She looked severe and competent and suddenly much older, not even very pretty anymore—a woman used to dealing with emergencies, ready to take charge.” Eleven Kinds of Loneliness – Richard Yates

Wading my way through the writing of Richard Yates a few months ago, I found the repeated statements about characters “not being very pretty any more” (or a variation on this) distracting. Perhaps it was a hallmark of the time – to write about a woman’s beauty (fading as it might be) as though it were the only real currency she had. Even if in the quoted case, Yates gave the ‘severe’-looking woman a new competence and ability to take charge, she virtually becomes invisible because she looks both older and less beautiful.

It occurred to me, though (and this is no lightning-bolt of revelation – it’s pretty much something that smacks us in the face daily), that while it might have been more common to write about a woman’s appearance in literature in earlier decades, it’s still the same.

I grant that when dealing in literature, the writer is creating a person: a description, physical as well, is warranted. It is also fiction, so the writer is creating a space, a scene, in which the character must exist and those around him/her react and perceive. Yet, the writer frames the physical appearance as the highest-value sum of the female character’s total worth. And that’s a choice.

My reaction to Yates was more a trigger to thinking about contemporary writing in media. While not every media outlet is the Daily Mail, with its headlines on so-and-so’s weight loss or weight gain, there are still more subtle value judgments associated with age, with beauty, with “health” – it’s all just couched in different language.

Photo by Elisha Terada on Unsplash

Rousing sessions, furious responses

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“Part of what interests me is the impulse to dismiss and how often it slides into the very incoherence or hysteria of which women are routinely accused.” –Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit

When not enunciated clearly, “betrayal” and “portrayal” sound very much the same. And in reality, they are.

Applicable in many situations, it seems most apt when thinking about the portrayal women must give so often in the world, consciously or not, in the workplace, in their private lives, even in their friendships. And in giving this portrayal (or portrayals), she performs or reflects a kind of betrayal – of herself, other women and even the truth of what women are or can be. I wrote a bit about this – or about false feminism – or carrying the flag of feminism only when it is convenient or aligns with one’s own individual conception of feminism. But I can think of very little that betrays oneself and womankind – and does the least amount of good for all of humanity – than the idea of portraying a role, fitting into a mold, being or showing some unreality to the world and perpetuating it. At the same time, though, it is so ingrained as the expectation that it’s hard to do otherwise. After all, no one appears ready to take a woman at her word.

“I told you, but what does the proverb say? A woman’s prophecy is always taken lightly until it comes to pass.” –The Dance of the Jakaranda, Peter Kimani

At face value

I think of this often: we don’t take what women say at face value. Even if we believe them, and even if what they tell us bears out, e.g. Bill Cosby’s many accusers, Cosby’s own admissions of what he had done (without accepting any culpability, i.e. “I did it but it wasn’t wrong; it was consensual”), we still don’t apply the logic or truths of what women say, we still don’t hold anyone accountable for what women endure, reinforcing the idea that we might as well just shut up or contentedly portray our role.

“If we could recognize or even name this pattern of discrediting, we could bypass recommencing the credibility conversation every time a woman speaks. One more thing about Cassandra: in the most famous version of the myth, the disbelief with which her prophecies were met was the result of a curse placed on her by Apollo when she refused to have sex with the god. The idea that loss of credibility is tied to asserting rights over your own body was there all along. But with the real-life Cassandras among us, we can lift the curse by making up our own minds about who to believe and why.” –Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit

Crazy label: Unspoken message

“As you know, men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.” –Cane, Jean Toomer

I read this week about Sylvia Plath, and how she is widely regarded in academia and in general as a gifted but troubled woman. Clearly if you’d commit suicide, you must have been crazy. She was just a jealous woman who had been cheated on, like so many before her, and could not handle it. Unhinged. Hysterical. But is any story or person that simple? It’s so easy to dismiss her this way because this is what evidence we have; this is the narrative that her ex-husband sought to craft in her death. Not to preserve her reputation as a literary voice but to protect his.

The article I read asks: “Why are we so unwilling to take Sylvia Plath at her word?” The “crazy label” assigned to her (which, granted, is not hard to assign when a person kills herself and is therefore left defenseless; any written evidence she left behind was destroyed by the aforementioned ex-husband) automatically makes her an unreliable witness to her own existence, all the more so because she was a woman. The hushed-up, unspoken message is clear: You don’t need to listen to a woman if she’s crazy, and much of the language used to describe women and their behavior (as if it can be so easily classified and compartmentalized) makes all women seem crazy in some way. All women then are unreliable or biased witnesses. When an individual woman’s own situation becomes unbearable and visible to others, it is demanded: “But why didn’t you say anything?” Answer: “I did and no one listened/believed me” or eventually, “Who would have believed me?” When their prescience comes to prove itself, later people ask, “But why didn’t anyone say anything?” Well, we did. It went unheard until it came to pass.

Uncontrollable circumstances, self-blame

As Dorthe Nors writes in So Much for that Winter, “and it is woman’s weakness to believe it’s because she isn’t good enough that things don’t go according to plan (and it is woman’s weakness that things should go according to plan).” Perhaps it is this near-built-in inferiority coupled with the idea that somehow you (as a woman) should be perfect that makes one seem crazy. Even though this is exactly the portrayal women are asked to give every single day.

Meanwhile, as Alice Munro writes on men in Hateship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage:

“Men were not like this, in my experience. Men looked away from frightful happenings as soon as they could and behaved as if there was no use, once things were over with, in mentioning them or thinking about them ever again. They didn’t want to stir themselves up, or stir other people up.”

(Wo)man with a plan

It’s overly simplified and not universally true (in other words: here are some sweeping generalizations for you), but in very broad strokes, women plan and then feel guilty and inadequate when that plan does not work precisely, dwelling on the consequences (even if they often have also performed risk assessment and made contingency plans even for the simplest of maneuvers). Men do not plan, and walk away without a second thought when the things around them fall apart, feeling no connection at all to the consequences.

Or, men’s and women’s idea of what constitutes a “plan” are fundamentally different: A man makes a plan, points A through Z. He rarely seems to follow the threads of what happens if any of those alphabetical points does not go to plan, which is where many women excel. She is thinking about point A1, and the contingency plans A2, A3 and how those interact and meet with the next possible steps in the plan, points B-Z and their subplans. If she thinks this way, how can she not foresee and foretell pitfalls and disasters? It’s a bit like a Choose Your Own Adventure book but without any real surprises. A bit like a woman’s life at times: chaos and silence, ignoring and being ignored and many rousing sessions and furious responses that lead nowhere.

Photo by Jamison McAndie on Unsplash