My students need an urgent course in feminist theory. I didn’t have the slightest idea of how incapable they are of making an even remotely feminist analysis of a work of art. I’m a feminist and so is everybody I know. As a result, I’m completely out of touch with how infected many people are with a deeply patriarchal way of thinking. The absolute majority of my students (irrespective of gender, by the way) hold the following beliefs:
– If a woman works, she does so only because there is no man who can provide for her. There is no other conceivable reason why a woman might be working.
– If a man does not keep a woman and “has to allow her to work”, he has no choice than to feel desperate and “unmanly.”
– Women almost never leave men. Men are the ones who are more likely to leave. (This is not surprising, since in this bizarre imaginary universe where women have no income of their own, they wouldn’t be able to leave.)
– Women cannot have male friends. If a woman has a male friend, it means she is sleeping with him.
– If a man lives in a pigsty, that means there is no woman who loves him.
– Men don’t care about their appearance. But that’s OK because women also don’t care about men’s appearance.
– If a woman leaves an alcoholic husband who beats her, she betrays family values.
– If a man hugs his male friend to comfort him, that explains why women don’t like him.
– A high percentage of women who work is a sign of a bad economy.
– Unless a man and a woman have very strictly defined and very different roles in the family, the family will fall apart.
– Masculinity is a quality men acquire by paying all the bills.
I believe that we need to add at least one course in Gender Studies to the basic requirements for all students to prepare them for life in the modern world. These kids can do a kick-ass analysis of class issues, they mostly lean towards very progressive political and economic views, but in terms of gender roles, they are living in such a remote past that my illiterate great-great-grandmother would have been horrified with their opinions.
People! Friends! Citizens! Are we still living in 2012 or have we traveled far back in time?
P.S. One wonderful, amazing, brilliant student made me feel better about things when she wrote, “Only old people care about gender roles.”
Clarissa's Blog 
Are you in the Bible Belt?
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And he keeps rubbing it in. . . 🙂
Yes, I am.
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Ouch! Ukranian, Russian speaking, Autistic Feminist. How the F… did you get that job. 🙂 🙂 🙂
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In all fairness, I didn’t get a job on a farm. 🙂 This is a university. Everybody is interesting and complicated.
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Yeh, but you drink vodka. 😉
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Brrr, I never touch that shit. I have a Russian in the house, remember? 🙂
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“Men don’t care about their appearance. But that’s OK because women also don’t care about men’s appearance.”
There is a highly prevalent myth (i.e. untrue) that states that men are visually-oriented and women’s orientation is tactile.
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There is a highly prevalent myth (i.e. untrue) that states that men are visually-oriented and women’s orientation is tactile.(Muster)
I agree. I so much more like touching the Breasts Im looking at. 😉
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Having done my thesis on Dambudzo Marechera, where he descends to Devil’s End and is anally raped and then excreted by his double, nothing shocks me anymore.
“The Black Sunlight (revolutionary) Organisation was shit,” one of his characters, a version of himself, later surmises.
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The version I heard is that men are visual and women are auditory. Never heard the tactile part.
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Oh, auditory…hmmm. I’m pretty sure I read the tactile thing in one of the fundamentalist Christian posts, probably linked to by this blog.
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Auditory is explained in the following way: women are easily convinced to do anything with pretty words and compliments.
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It makes sense, although perhaps we could be as easily bewildered and transfixed by textual messages. Do they have to be spoken?
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Yes, it’s all about the spoken word.
Don’t ask me to explain!
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Maybe it’s the fairy moans (pheromones).
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Figured out the difference between Spiritual and Empowered Feminists yet?
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I’ve been mistaken for most types of US feminist, I’m sure. I don’t know the difference between those two, but I would say the first believes that women are intrinsically goddesses, and the second says, no, we have to beat men at their own game.
My feminism is neither of these. I suffered from a lot of emotional repression growing up, but then learned that extreme, masculinist society used emotional repression as its own means of dominance. I was pilloried for being a feminist and mistaken for a man. Both events happened simultaneously, so I see there is a lot of room for error in the game of categorization.
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The question was for Clarissa, who has had a couple of months to work it out. It confused her so.
The former believes in and talks about the spirit of Feminism, the latter is the one that actually get Feminism done. The problem is these two disagree on what Feminism is. My long past and inscrutable point was that Spiritual Feminists, like Clarissa, don’t matter because that’s not the Feminism that exists or even will exist.
The Feminism that exists, for example, holds that if two women say that a man is stalking them then he is guilty whether he knows them or not ( VAWA and “the preponderance of the evidence” ). Clarissa has, does and will object that such isn’t “real” Feminism and make celestial pontifications of high theoretical rigor. So, what?
I had hoped that would spur ( goad ) her to action, but she couldn’t understand so she decided to penile-ize me instead. I keep wondering if she’s ever going to figure it out. It will get me banned to give it but would you like a link?
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“My long past and inscrutable point was that Spiritual Feminists, like Clarissa, don’t matter because that’s not the Feminism that exists or even will exist.”
– I have no idea who these spiritual feminists are. This is a group you seem to have invented for your own benefit. It is your inalienable right to do so, of course, but you can’t expect other people to guess what these classifications are supposed to mean to you. If you want to be understood, it makes sense to address people in a language they will find understandable.
“The Feminism that exists, for example, holds that if two women say that a man is stalking them then he is guilty whether he knows them or not ( VAWA and “the preponderance of the evidence” ). Clarissa has, does and will object that such isn’t “real” Feminism and make celestial pontifications of high theoretical rigor.”
– Are you trying to say that you are a psychic? Or a fortune-teller?
“I had hoped that would spur ( goad ) her to action, but she couldn’t understand so she decided to penile-ize me instead. I keep wondering if she’s ever going to figure it out. ”
– Ah, I see, you are a person who hears voices in your head.
” It will get me banned to give it but would you like a link?”
– A link to what?
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The feminism “that exists” may well be some nonsensical identity politics, then.
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This difference and these categories exist only in your head. I can’t find anything there because it isn’t a space I can or want to access.
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My mother says that if there is not a stay at home adult in the house, the children go bad – have trouble.
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Hmm. Well at least we old people are a convenient target, and dissing us can make young people feel better.
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? The post is about college students 18-22. My point is that this (largely Republican) propaganda on gender roles, including importance of a “homemaker” of whatever sex, has really permeated public discourse at the present juncture.
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If your class is about Spanish literature, and not about gender studies, does it much matter if students take a perspective that you do not share? Is that not what makes literature so fascinating. How well they argue their case, rather than the case that they argue,is surely the relevant criterion of success or failure.
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I agree with you but I don’t think this is what Clarissa was talking about.
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Of course, I don’t penalize them for their views, God forbid. I don’t grade the content. Only the grammar, vocabulary and the structure of the essay. This is why I need to vent on the blog because I don’t want to censor their writing.
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Living over here in France I was unaware that young American adults could hold such unreconstructed attitudes towards gender roles. Frankly I’m gobsmacked. Even my (Welsh) mother, born in 1933 to a deeply patriarchal (Victorian) father, educated me to believe I should earn my own money using my brains (not my body) and be independent, and her mother insisted she should have her own bank account.
That these young Americans believe that women should be, in my ex-husband’s words, ‘parasites’ living off and being totally dependent on their husbands, in 2012, is shocking. Have they learned nothing about the importance of independence, freedom, being an individual etc. as a woman rather than an entity linked by a sort of umbilical cord to the Master? No, I suppose, the religion they were taught has stamped its mark on their brains and deprived them of critical thought when it comes to gender roles.
You probably shock them terribly, Clarissa. I hope you sow the seeds of dissent in their minds.
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Living here in America, I was also unaware that young American adults could hold such views. Hopefully these students is a minority view.
I also wonder if these students will eventually find that it is difficult to afford all the things they want on only one income, especially when paying back student loan debts for the education the wife has received for no apparent purpose.
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“I also wonder if these students will eventually find that it is difficult to afford all the things they want on only one income, especially when paying back student loan debts for the education the wife has received for no apparent purpose.”
– I know for a fact that pretty much everybody’s mothers work and have always worked. There is just one student I met here whose mother didn’t work by choice. So they have got to know that reality is different.
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“Men don’t care about their appearance. But that’s OK because women also don’t care about men’s appearance.”
If my experience is representative (which I wouldn’t claim) then this is half right. Neither the men or the women that I come into contact with care that much about potential partners appearance. They do care, but the it’s closer to the level women are stereotyped with than the level men are.
However caring about your own appearance is common among men as well as women.
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“Neither the men or the women that I come into contact with care that much about potential partners appearance. ”
– I don’t know how this is possible. Is sexual attraction something they don’t believe in? But then how do the sex acts happen? Do people close their eyes and think about Britain? 🙂 🙂
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They care. Just not way more than other attributes.
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These views are pretty extreme. Although I have to say that the views prevalent in my village growing up, and still prevalent among my childhood friends, are not so much better:
– If a woman has a better job than the man, earns more, or is more successful, this undermines the masculinity of the man and will with 100% certainty end in him leaving her for a younger and less successful woman.
– Men in truth find secretaries, stewardesses and nurses very attractive. More educated jobs than that make women very unattractive.
– If a mother works, even after the children have left home, it has to be part-time and a job that she does simply for her enjoyment or out of the wish to help and care for others, like as a nurse or kindergarten teacher, and not to contribute to the family income.
– There is no point in having children if the woman continues to work while they are younger than 18 years. Even part-time work is problematic. The children need their mother.
– A woman has to continually provide the man with the illusion that he is in charge and more intelligent than her, otherwise she undermines his manliness and he is a poor, suppressed creature and it is to be expected that he will leave her.
– If a man does half of the household work because both are working 100%, that means that “she is a strict ruler”/”she’s in charge”/”she has taught him well”. He needs to be pitied and she needs frequently to be reminded “not to be so hard on him”.
etc.
It took me a long time to get over these beliefs. Some of them I still struggle with, I am for example stupidly worried that a situation could arise in which I have a better job than my boyfriend.
So your students should be very happy if you address these stupid ideas in class. We never discussed any of this in school.
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” I am for example stupidly worried that a situation could arise in which I have a better job than my boyfriend.”
– In my experience, most men are ecstatically happy to be able to share the financial burden with a partner.
These beliefs that you list set the stage for profoundly miserable relationships.
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I know. I have seen enough such relationships.
I also think men like to share the burden, but I am applying for a job where I would earn quite a lot more than my boyfriend, and have a more advanced position. That is totally not a problem for me, and he claims also not for him. But I have read many stories about how this ‘naturally’ has to destroy the relationship. On the other hand, we have survived worse things. 🙂
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I must say I’m almost fifty years old and that wasn’t how I was raised. However, I was raised in South Florida, not in any part of the Bible Belt — though these midwestern puppies make even the Deepest Southern people I’ve met seem enlightened. (Hell, where I live now is Mennonite Central and even the ladies of that community seem to have more agency than your students think is proper.)
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For these students, the rhetoric is in no way related to their actual lived experiences. And the strange thing is that they don;t see any disconnect between what they are saying and how they are actually living.
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That’s definitely the nature of ideology, that it prevents you from seeing connections. There are people who have benefited tremendously from Australia’s free or cheap public health system, and they will vote for the right wing party in the next election. This party wants to undermine the system and make healthcare private. These people don’t see the connection, or the fact that their votes will undermine their interests.
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I was raised with most of these ideas, and I am not that old. My grandparents did not believe in them and my father did not care one way or the other, but they were very important to my mother. She is from Easton, Maryland.
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My parents imparted a different set of beliefs:
1. (from my father) Once you start in any particular job, that is your vocation for life. You must never consider changing it, or you are evil and/or lack discipline and character.
2. (from my father) if you end up in any particular situation, for example you are renting a house where one of the main stakeholders is a bully, don’t consider changing that, or you are undisciplined and bad to the core.
3. Women don’t really know what they think and are short-sighted. They may express a view, but they are just being moody. Ignore it.
4. (from my mother) Nobody really means you any harm, even if you feel that. People are just amusing and say funny things. It’s only left-wingers who do harm by making us feel bad and shameful. Everybody else is just expressing normal, human nature.
5. (from my mother) Don’t really bother reflecting or planning, because anything that happens will be the best outcome anyway.
6. (from my mother) divert resources to boys, because they are the flagship of the family. Girls don’t matter, anyway, unless they give us something back, like children.
Old-fashioned gender roles…
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Oh, those, too. Yes. Especially #3; it is probably my root Issue, come to think of it.
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The weird thing is, my father was an intellectual zombie before his stroke — very rigid and unable to observe the complexities of the world around him. Now, he is an entirely different person. Apparently a right-hemisphere stroke can inhibit the side that deals with religion and creativity. It also dis-inhibits emotion. So, he is able to remark on his direct experiences and express his emotional reactions to these much better than before, and without the stereotyping or stiff formulations concerning correct behavior.
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#3 is what I was taught about men. I’m still trying to convince myself this isn’t so.
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I want to play, too! Here are the beliefs about gender roles I was taught: https://clarissasblog.com/2012/10/25/gender-stereotypes-i-learned/
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My parents have improved with age quite noticeably. I used to fear they would go to their deaths in anger and unhappiness, but it seems not.
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About what age did the improvement start?
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