Category: gender roles

Those Horrible Boys

~ Clarissa ~ 38 Comments

Those mean, horrible boys! They are sexist straight from the childhood while the good, patient girls are not sexist at all. See, for example, the following story:

A popular exercise among High School creative writing teachers in America is to ask students to imagine they have been transformed, for a day, into someone of the opposite sex, and describe what that day might be like. The results, apparently, are uncannily uniform. The girls all write long and detailed essays that clearly show they have spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject. Half of the boys usually refuse to write the essay entirely. Those who do make it clear they have not the slightest conception what being a teenage girl might be like, and deeply resent having to think about it.

The only conclusion we can draw from the story is that boys are infected by sexism at a much earlier age than girls and that these boys will continue spreading sexism throughout their lives. Of course, the story acquires a completely different meaning if we consider the following:

1. “Male students are consistently less likely to graduate from high school with a diploma. Nationally, the gender gap in graduation stands at nearly 8 percentage points. Females also earn diplomas at higher rates within every racial and ethnic group examined, with the largest disparity (more than 13 percentage points) found among black students.”

2. Male students are much less likely to exhibit an interest in the Humanities subjects both at school and in college.

3. And as a professor of languages and literature, I can assure you that getting the very few male students we manage to attract to the Humanities to write anything on the subject where they need to imagine something quite impossible is a losing proposition every single time.

Conclusion: the suggestion that boys “resent” thinking specifically about what it means to be a girl is ridiculous. Boys generally do worse than girls in high school and they have less interest than girls in the Humanities disciplines in college. As an educator with over two decades of experience in teaching, I am convinced that the “deep resentment” these boys experience has nothing whatsoever to do with girls. Boys are socialized towards the “practical,” “useful” disciplines. As a result, an “imagine something outlandish” exercise is a task they see as a complete waste of time.

Let’s remember that the burden of being a provider for a bunch of other people and finding one’s gender identity through that is still almost exclusively male. Keeping that in mind, I’d also be quite resentful if, instead giving me an education that would allow me to be a good, reliable provider, my time would be wasted on the “imagine you are a big blue balloon” exercises.

Women in Business Class

~ Clarissa ~ 18 Comments

My sister was traveling from Paris this week on a long overnight flight. She decided to pay for a Business Class seat in order to enjoy the flight instead of suffering for hours in a cramped, miserable little space.

When she went into the Business Class section of the airplane, she was stunned to see that everybody else there was male. She was the only woman until a lady from China joined her. It felt like a striptease joint, she says.

I very much hope to be mistaken but this looks like evidence that, yet again, women economize at their own expense and don’t feel justified in treating themselves as well as men.

The need to sacrifice for the sake of parents, husbands, siblings, children, pets and potted plants is a guiding principle of many women’s lives. I see it everywhere.

Dear women, this has got to stop. You need to start doing things for yourself. Get yourself a massage, find a cool facial mask, slather it on your face and drop into a bathtub for an hour, buy a cake or two pounds of expensive fruit you like and eat them all without considering who might need this money or this cake more than you. Close the door to your office or your room and stick a note that says “Me time. Keep out!” on the door.

Of course, if you are a man who tends to sacrifice yourself, then you should stop doing that, too.

Remember, people who really love you, do not need your sacrifices. They need for you to be happy. If you can’t be happy for yourself, then make this last sacrifice and be happy for the sake of your loved ones.

>Gender and Housework

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

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So as we can see from this table, even when both partners are employed full-time, women still do a lot more housework than men. Why does that happen?

I’ve been thinking about it a lot and according to my observations, women themselves are often to blame for this state of affairs. In my experience, most if not all men are more than willing and capable of cooking their own meals, doing the laundry, cleaning their place of abode, etc. Granted, I haven’t spent much time with fundamentalist freaks, so I’m mostly talking about normal, educated men who do not believe actively that women are inferior by nature.

What I often observe is that women go to great lengths to do everything they can and more around the house and stifle any attempts that men make at doing their share of housework. Often, when I visit a couple I know I observe the following scene: when we finish eating, the male partner gets up to remove the dirty dishes and the woman immediately jumps up and almost screams: “Don’t! I’ll do it myself!” Usually, these are very progressively-minded, feminist women.

The myth that you have to be a good housewife to be loved and appreciated is too deeply ingrained in our minds. It’s often difficult to get rid of the feeling that a sink full of dirty dishes is somehow your problem just because of your gender. As much as we might advocate for gender equality, we often end up doing everything we can to infantilize men and prevent them from learning to fulfill their household obligations. In a way, it makes sense. If a man feels completely useless around the house, it makes a woman feel more indispensable.

What we have to do is learn to give up on this fake feeling of indispensability and remember that we are valuable not for the amount of household work we perform. We shouldn’t strive to be useful and convenient to the detriment of our equality. Contrary to what the title of the above-quoted table says, men do not need looking after. They are perfectly capable of doing that for themselves.