The brilliant Danny of Danny’s Corner has created this great gender symmetry table:
This is just a small part of it. You can find the entire table here.
This is the kind of feminism I’m interested in.
Danny’s Gender Symmetry Table
Opinions, art, debate
Clarissa's Blog 
Thing is, Australian society doesn’t quite follow that pattern in many respects, just because Australia is a much less religious society than the US. The typical working class Australian woman is a beer drinking, tattooed woman, capable of exchanging swear words with the “blokes”. Women aren’t particularly identified with indoor activities in this culture, nor are they necessarily identified with “emotionalism”, as seems to be much more the case in the US. The expectation on working class women is that they will be emotionally very tough. Middle class women (those in white collar jobs) are not expected to be so tough, but to conform much more strictly to the table above. By contrast, once again, very wealthy women are free to either conform to gender stereotypes or not, as they wish.
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Oh yes, in terms of my culture this doesn’t work either. I grew up to the accompaniment of “Stop beating up boys, they are fragile.” Or “what do you expect from a man? He can’t cope and just goes to pieces whenever there is any hardship.”
It’s true, though, that the very poor and the very rich were always liberated from the constraints of gender stereotypes in all societies. As soon as people conceive of the idea to move to the middle class, they usually do it by adopting much more rigid gender roles.
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This is true. I should have mentioned that this table is going to be very US-centric due the fact that I have never been outside of the US in my entire life. Your mileage with this will vary by many factors including what country/culture you have experienced.
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Thank you for reminding me that for every Ensler or Schwyzer, the feminist movement has a rational activist like you or Danny.
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When I look at this table, it seems so logical, so self-evident, that I honestly fail to understand why anybody would fail to agree.
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Thing is Clarissa I think at heart a lot of people on all sides of the gender discourse would agree with those things. Its just that things get so heated that these simple facts are lost in the mix.
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This is the kind of feminism I’m interested in.(Clarissa)
I wasnt aware Danny was a feminist. 😉
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Well, if that ain’t feminism, then I don’t want any of what feminism is. 🙂 🙂
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Dude when I read that at the end I actually lol’d and almost dropped my phone.
I’m hoping that Clarissa means that in the sense of her literal words “this is the feminism I’m interested in” rather than trying to imply that I am a feminist.
Because while I’m sure I have some common ground with them my response to being thought of as a feminist is, “not no but hell no”.
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What I mean is that this is what feminism should be talking about and trying to address.
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Am I really the one to notice that every statement in that diagram is 100% passive language? Surprising, considering that it was you, Clarissa, from whom I learned to identify and interpret such usage.
And, can somebody please explain this one to me:
“Women are expected to be internal providers in order to verify their womanhood”
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Yeah it’s “culture” that’s behind it so it makes some sense to give a spectral subject doing the expecting, ‘specially since this is the damn internet. Doesn’t hold up in every case in every culture and not everyone has these expectations, so really no direct agent to assign the subject position, but as part of social frameworks such expectations as make up “gender” and other categories put powerful pressure on people to conform.
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This is a table, not a post, so it has to condense the message as much as possible or it will be unusable.
As for women as internal providers, there are a few examples:
a) a woman usually does all the social planning for the family. There are endless diaries called “Mom’s social calendar” or “Mom’s family planner.” Maybe they exists for dads too, but I’ve never seen them.
b) women usually are responsible for maintaining connections with both extended families, friends, etc. Who usually writes all the family greeting cards for Christmas? Women, of course.
c) in relationships as they are portrayed on pretty much every TV show in existence, women school emotionally stunted and inept men on how to be in a relationship, what are the appropriate emotional responses are, etc.
And as every other point on this table, this state of things hurts everybody (and, of course, benefits everybody) equally.
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Since we’re on the topic of stupid ideas about gender, has anybody heard about this “Work It” show coming out? This is literally a comedy television program in which two real-life dudes are getting paid to pretend to be two dudes who dress up like (horrible caricatures of) women to get jobs because the man-cession is giving all the work to ladies, in a real-life cultural climate that seriously marginalizes female comedians and actors. This is happening instead of a major network program with two strong female leads, of which there are (let me check my unscientific ad hoc mental calculator) zero as far as I know that aren’t all about shopping and fucking and/or being a mom.
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And, can somebody please explain this one to me:
“Women are expected to be internal providers in order to verify their womanhood”
This comes out in the form of the reaction women who don’t want to have children and/or don’t want to be stay at home moms get. Ranging from the blank face (because they can’t fathom the idea that a woman doesn’t want kids or doesn’t want to be a stay at home mom) to the way women are discriminated against in some job places (because such employers don’t women should be there anyway)
This also comes out in the form of the reaction men who want children and/or want to be stay at home dads get. Ranging from the blank face (because they can’t fathom the idea that a man wants to have children) to the way men are discriminated against when it comes to home care (they’re men, they should be out working anyway).
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Well, that’s the thing — it isn’t really such a mystery that we are all capable of encountering cultural and social expectations. If you go as a guest to a wedding, you are generally “expected” not to wear jeans or the pajamas you were sleeping in. We process cultural expectations as if they were common sense itself, so that only when we travel or cross cultural boundaries our own cultural expectations become obvious to us.
From experience: generally, if somebody is reading something I’ve said as “emotional”, (as in, in need of probing, reassurance, putting in a dubious light, that sort of thing), it’s generally because that person is American or has come in heavy contact with US evangelical culture. These expectations are quite obvious to me now, after many years of experience and reflection — the more so because they differ from my own expectations as to how what I’ve said ought to be received.
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Nobody blames me for being too emotional because that would contradict the received wisdom about the supposed emotional coldness of autistics. So this is a painful contradiction for many people: I’m either not fully female or not fully autistic and they struggle to pick one of these accusations. 🙂
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The fact that they struggle to pick one of those accusations is the problem. Its like, “Dammit she has to fit in one of these boxes!”
Now if said person doesn’t know about your autism (versus the almost immediate recognition you’re a woman) the perceived lack of emotion could lead to you being labeled a cold hearted _itch. Why? Because supposedly women are “emotional creatures” and those who aren’t are someone seen as wrong.
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Hell I’d trade a show that sounds that stupid in for a show about two guys trying to find work. Maybe a show where each episode they are in a different city helping guys that are down on their luck and need help finding work.
You know, something that would actually be useful.
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Since my comment concerns gender, I decided to leave it here. Two things I wanted to share:
1) AM’s reaction to “this sparky interview Tracy Clark-Flory did with David Ley, who has an upcoming book called The Myth of Sex Addiction,”. Loved both the interview linked on Pandagon and AM’s take on it. Thought you could be interested.
http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/sex_addiction_and_avoiding_gender_essentialism
2) Yesterday in “Let them talk” on ORT Philip Kirkorov talked about 26.11.11 revelation he made that at age 44 his daughter was born in America. He talked of feeling huge loneliness and that while meeting last New Year alone in his flat, he understood such life simply couldn’t continue. (Last summer he was mentally treated in Israel, btw). And that if he meets a suitable woman, she’ll be a mother to the girl. I would very love your take on this situation. The biological mother gave her egg, was pregnant with her own child and then gave her away. Iirc, in Israel the pregnant surrogate mother can’t be pregnant with her own egg/biological child. In Russia only married couples may apply AND if a surrogate mother decides to keep 100% *their* biological child, the law is on her side. One of reasons Kirkorov decided to give the interview was to try influence law-makers to change Russia’s laws. I have quite a few problems: 1. Why selling your own child is A-OK, but prostitution isn’t fine? The depth of hypocrisy can’t be expressed, imo. At least, in prostitution it’s your own body, not somebody else’s life. 2. I fully understand his point on loneliness and know that life with a single parent and other relatives can be extremely happy, but I guess it’s my patriarchial upbringing and what is most often seen in society (fathers leaving, even fighting in court against paying child support, mainly only very problematic women leaving their kids, etc.) My discomfort deepened upon knowing that she was a biological mother, who saw her kid and gave her away. I know that whether you donate an egg or like this woman did, the result is the same – giving your child away, but imho people do have partly monkey-brains, we are not pure logical thinking computers, so it’s perceived differently. And f.e. those surrogate mothers who want to raise 100% not their child despite the contract, isn’t it pure emotion? 3. Despite 1st point I don’t think outlawing it completely is the answer, but it’s all so tangled and hard. What laws would you put? F.e. a surrogate mother vs biological parents, what next?
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Forgot to add that I would very much love your take on those issues.
Btw, I am also against letting only married couples go this route. If it’s OK for them, imho, it’s OK for a loving and economically stable single parent. *Or* it’s not OK for anybody.
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OMG, last time: I meant a separate post on those diff. issues.
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For our non-Russian-speaking readers, Kirkorov is a Russian pop star who compensates for a grievous lack of talent with being scandalous. Last summer, he assaulted a female stage hand and beat her in front of a crowd of people for not addressing him with the veneration he thinks he deserves.
A total creep, in short.
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The Pandagon article is great, thank you, el. This whole “sex addiction” thing is the joke of the century. When N and I first heard about it, we laughed for an hour.
As for the surrogacy, I think the Russian law that allows the woman who carried the kid to keep her or him if she so wishes is absolutely fair. She carried the kid to term, she gave birth, of course, she should be able to keep the kid. Also, this law will prevent rich people from treating indigent women as incubators to produce toys for themselves.
Kirkorov is a very nasty character who beats women. I think the child will be well served to be kept away from him. I wouldn’t trust anything he says about anything.
And as for his looking for a suitable woman, isn’t he gay? What’s with the charade?
In any case, there is a million orphans in Russia, so a person who really wanted a kid could simply adopt and save a child’s life instead of playing these selfish games and buying surrogates in the US.
As for men leaving children more often than women do, given how unlikely it is that even the most amazing father is granted custody, how can anybody expect a man to develop an emotional attachment to the kid from whose life he can be ejected at any moment? This is why any true fight for feminism will entail a complete change to custody laws.
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//She carried the kid to term, she gave birth, of course, she should be able to keep the kid.//
But it’s not her biological kid. S/he has loving parents, his/her own roots, not those of a surrogate mother. For most people it’s important, otherwise why have your biological children at all in our very populated world and not adopt from the beginning? I hope humanity will invent an artificial womb making many of the issues irrelevant. Interesting whether somebody is working on it, or would be working on it if the law didn’t permit surrogacy.
I think Kirkorov has some talent. Not 1st class singer talent, but that of an artist/performer on a stage, charisma, there had to be *something* for him to become a name.
Btw, ironically, I loved his new clip with calmer, better lyrics imo that many of his songs, and just found out that the song was originally of Irina Билык.
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“But it’s not her biological kid. S/he has loving parents, his/her own roots, not those of a surrogate mother.”
-The woman carried the kid to term and gave birth. That’s really huge. She is the mother. Of course, the kid should know the biological parents and they should pay child support. But the person who actually damaged her health and put her life at risk for the kid is the mother. The process of gestation and childbirth has a huge impact on a child’s development, so a surrogate mother is not a simple incubator. She is the mother, so she should decide. Otherwise, we will see lawsuits trying to prevent a surrogate mother from aborting, and how will that be an acceptable thing?
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AM has written another good article on sexism in technology, specifically in ” Siri, Apple’s new voice-activated command software for the iPhone”.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/12/01/siri-is-sexist/
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