Category: gender stereotypes

That Asshole Is You

~ Clarissa ~ 19 Comments

People don’t seem to understand why I find the following post (and so many more like it) to be injurious and disgusting:

I don’t know what asshole invented the idea that teenage girls are the cause for all evil, but I really hope that person never has to raise one. I don’t want him to see her dissolve in his fingers as society tells her to eat less, be thinner, be the damsel in distress, be something for a man to fix, be different but not too different, be special but never ever a special snowflake – I don’t want him to watch as she realizes that no matter what she loves, she’ll be made fun of for it. She can simply like her coffee from Starbucks and suddenly she’s vapid and thinks herself poetic. She’ll want to play video games but be called a fake nerd, particularly if she poses in any remotely flirtatious way because for some reason despite the entire community playing games with poorly dressed women they still hate it when a real girl wears less clothing, she will be seen as trespassing in a specifically male space – but when she falls in love with a female-based television show for children, she’ll watch as men step on themselves to sexualize it.

(There is a lot more at the link, of course.)

In college, I used to know somebody who’d say the most insulting anti-Semitic things to me and my Jewish friend. These messages were always accompanied by, “I can’t believe how vicious those anti-Semites are. They say. . .” and a torrent of abuse would follow. My friend and I were young and we couldn’t really identify what was bothering us about this way of denouncing anti-Semitism.

Today I’m older and I see this fake concern for what it is. And I prefer an honest woman-hater, anti-Semite or any other kind of jerkwad who declares his or her hatred openly and directly to a fake progressive who hides behind imitating concern while pounding people over the head with vicious insults. The quoted text literally drips with enjoyment of female degradation. But it’s presented as an attempt to vindicate women, so nobody dares to criticize. Nobody even wonders why a supposed vindication of women is coming from a person who sees womanhood as so relentlessly horrific.

This is such a convenient role to assume. You can say any number of sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. things but as long as you preface your offensive rants with, “Nasty evildoers are, of course, completely wrong when they say. . .” you will be immune from all criticism.

Have you noticed how every initiative aimed at discriminating against women today disguises itself as coming from a place of concern for women? “No, it’s not victim-blaming. And no, we are not the ones trying to make women believe that leaving the house puts them in mortal danger. It’s just that there are all those nasty rapists around, it’s all their fault.”

So the answer to the linked post’s question as to “what asshole invented. . .” is obvious. Such covert woman-haters reinvent these pernicious messages every time they engage in their “defense of the downtrodden.”

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 Stereotypes and the Mystery Genre: From Christie to Rendell

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

>

In the mystery genre, no one can compare with the amazing British authors Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell. The first of these authors created the genre* while the second one took it to incredible heights in a number of extremely well-crafted novels. Compared with the psychological and literary sophistication of Rendell’s work, Christie’s novels seem primitive. The language is simple, the characters are one-dimensional, and the plots are quite similar.
One thing, however, is shared by the two queens of the detective genre. Both Christie and Rendell know extremely well how to manipulate the gender stereotypes of their times to create a mystery their readers will not be able to solve. Take, for example, Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger and Ruth Rendell’s A Fatal Inversion**. In The Moving Finger, Christie attempts to prevent the readers from guessing the identity of the criminal by relying on their misogynistic vision of what constitutes “male” and “female” kinds of crime. This particular gender stereotype has lost its currency completely in the decades that elapsed since the novel was published. As a result, The Moving Finger is one of the lesser known of Christie’s novels. A modern-day reader will have no trouble guessing what really happened since the gender stereotype is the only thing standing between the reader and the realization of the criminal’s identity.
Ruth Rendell’s A Fatal Inversion is one of this prolific author’s best mysteries***. Vulnerability is the topic she explores in this novel in a stunningly successful way. Her characters are vulnerable to all kinds of things: sexual obsession, insanity, the desire to fit in at all costs, fear of rejection, the desire to fit in, alcoholism. The question of which one of them will prove to be the only truly resilient one remains unanswered until the stunning ending of the book. However, if it were not for our deeply-ingrained gender stereotypes, that ending would not surprise us in the least.
Hopefully, the gender stereotypes that Rendell based her novel on will pass into oblivion one day, just like the ones that informed Christie’s outdated mystery I have discussed here****.
* Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle created the genre of the police procedural, not the mystery novel as such. Christie’s Hercule Poirot makes vicious fun of Sherlock Holmsian type of characters. Rendell has written quite a few police procedurals (her Inspector Wexford series), which I consider to be vastly inferior to her mystery novels.

** The novel was published under Rendell’s nom de plume Barbara Vine.

*** A Fatal Inversion, The Bridesmaid and Thirteen Steps Down are Rendell’s best novels, in my opinion. If I weren’t wary of making this list too long, I would add The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy and No Night Is Too Long to the list of her best work. If you like the mystery genre but still have not read anything by Rendell, what are you waiting for? She is absolutely the best. 

**** I have tried to discuss the plots of these novels as little as possible here to avoid spoiling the pleasure of their future readers.