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Thoughts on Gendered Language Use in the Classroom

October 22, 2024 in Education, Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

Two gendered restroom signs, slightly askew in space

I try to create an inclusive space when I teach, and that means everything from learning my students’ names (even when there are a lot of them!) to not having policies that would make people feel unwelcome (like, I don’t require students to ask me to leave the classroom for any reason; I figure they’re adults, I should treat them as such, plus such a policy might single out students with a disability or medical condition requiring them to stand and stretch their legs or visit the bathroom regularly).

This sense of trying to be an inclusive teacher also extends to how I use language, and how I encourage my students to use language in their writing and speaking. And here, too, my goal of teaching critical thinking skills creeps in, as it often does, because it turns out that being attuned to social justice concerns (those foregrounded in inclusivity practices) also correspond with acknowledging the complexity and diversity of the world around us, and responding with curiosity and empathy rather than trying to wedge everyone and everything into narrow boxes.*

All of this is why I don’t use “male” and “female” as nouns, and why I’d encourage others to give it some thought as well.

 First, the history of these words makes it clear that they have a very specific meaning and narrow usage, which I don’t think should be generalized to “hello, I am addressing a group of humans outside of a medical/reproductive context.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “female” popped up in European languages in the 1300s to mean “A person of the sex that can bear offspring; a woman or a girl.” In addition to the noun usage, female also has an adjective meaning: “That belongs to the sex which can bear offspring (contrasted with male); characteristic of or relating to this sex.” And while I’m less upset by the use of the word as an adjective, it still has that icky reproductive-connotations thing going on. And for what it’s worth, I’ll point out that there are way more entries under the adjective section of the word than the noun section of the word.

Second, I believe addressing people as males and females is potentially exclusionary. I look at all the wealth of information we have about different genders (there are more than two!) and sexes (also more than two!) and I think, why would I address people using binaristic language that’s bound to leave someone out? Maybe someone in my classroom is intersex, trans, or non-binary. Remember, according to some research estimates, around 1.7% of people have an intersex condition and around .5% of the U.S. adult population is trans so combining those facts and knowing that if I teach around 100 students every semester means I’m gonna choose less exclusionary language, even if it only helps one person in one hundred. Not all of these identities are visible to the naked eye, either, so it’s entirely possible that there are others in my classroom who don’t know they’re intersex yet (I mean, I haven’t had karyotyping done, have you?!), or they’re exploring their gender identity, or…there are so many possibilities, I’d rather err on the side of being more inclusive.

Third, as Carrie Cutler points out in a Slate article, “female” is often an adjective used to manage the meaning of a noun…when it’s assumed the noun is a broad category that usually includes men. So we’d say “female scientist” because upon hearing “scientist” one might assume we were talking about a dude scientist. And something about that just sets my teeth on edge, that we have to keep specifying that it’s a woman doing the job that used to be only done by men, and we still need modifiers to do this work instead of just assuming that women can be included in the catch-all profession of scientists.

Fourth, there are some, uh, connotations. In the Slate article linked above, the author points out the use of “female” in song lyrics (which I shan’t reprint here) to refer to sexually available women. And I think this is an equity issue: women are often discussed in terms of their sexual availability and desirability to men (let alone how we might feel about ourselves or one another!), and until men undergo the same level of objectification women do, I’m gonna be a little prickly about it. Not that feminism should be a tit-for-tat leveling of the playing field so everyone gets equally dehumanized, but these discrepancies bother me, since I don’t think any gender is more sexually anything than another.

As one researcher in STEM writes, this has professional implications too: “In a work setting, would you refer to the Vice Chancellor as a girl? Probably not, because we are accustomed to being respectful to people in senior positions. So should we extend that respect to women in other roles as well? (hint: yes)”

Some scholars go so far as to argue that gender difference (often expressed in terms of sex difference) exists in the first place to police who has access to power, and honestly, I’m not far away from this stance myself. In Sex Is As Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity by Paisley Currah, for example, it’s argued that:

In European, and, later, American legal traditions, gender difference was codified in laws designed to limit the rights and resources available to white women. From coverture to inheritance laws to the inability to vote to exemptions in the criminal sphere for marital rape, the law’s distincions illustrated how deeply patriarchal norms were incorporated into state structures. (20)

Oh, but that’s all changed, we’re sooo much better, yay feminism has done its job, you say? Currah (and I) would disagree: “gender subordination remains one of the organizing principles of domestic life, the workplace, and cultural production” (24). Why on earth would I use binaristic language that supports this historical and ongoing suborbination?!

Finally, there’s the question of audience. When I’m addressing my college students, I don’t really need to say “Greetings, males and females, today in class we’re going to read…” because drawing attention to my students’ (presumed) biological sex is simply not relevant in most if any classroom settings. Is it relevant in other settings? Gotta say, I’m drawing a blank. The 2024 Paris Olympics brought the debate about biological sex traits in elite sports to the public stage, and I mostly don’t feel qualified to weigh in on it (see my response here); yes, there tend to be some distinctions between the bodies of cis men and those of cis women in terms of muscle growth, metabolic functioning, and so on, and in certain sports those differences may matter. However, I know from research (and honestly, having a lot of trans friends, whom I appreciate sharing their experiences with me) that the human body is extremely malleable and responsive to hormonal interventions, so I don’t see it as my place to weigh in on this except to urge us all to remember that bodies have so much diversity and variation beyond the element of sex, it just doesn’t make sense to me to make it a really rigid distinction unless the athletes in that sport agree on it. (and please recall, one of the boxers who fought Imane Khelif was basically like “yeah, whatever” when her biological differences were brought up, so if athletes within the sport aren’t bothered by it, I don’t see why non-athletes should be bothered by it).

Hm, okay, when are other contexts where we might wanna say “males” or “females”? Do I ever want to signal something that feels very womanhood-specific to my fellow females? Not really, because I don’t care to enter any debates on how we’re defining femaleness and womanhood. For example, if the connotation of female relates to reproductive bits, are we still calling cis women who’ve had hysterectomies females? What about trans men who started out with that kind of anatomical equipment but ditched it? I don’t see a need to get into the weeds with this sort of thing, so I’ll say what I mean: “Ugh, I’m on my period and it sucks, who can relate?!” and that gets the job done in my opinion. Or if I want to talk about experiences of having my worth tied to my perceived beauty or sexual availability, then I’ll address fellow women, noting that this leaves room for people to weigh in whether you’re cis or trans, because trans women are women and they’ve had many of the same experiences as me, whereas some people who started life with XX chromosomes and a uterus might have had similar experiences at first which then diverged if/when they transitioned to something less binary or something more masculine. I think my choice of language lets people opt in or out of these kinds of conversations as they choose, and I’m okay with that.

At the end of the day, I’m not the language police. I’m not here to grade you on every single aspect of language use, though I will point out places where I think there’s room to grow in terms of word choice, nuance, and so on. If this is a language choice that you are consciously making and you’re aware of all its implications and you still want to run with it…you do you! We can have one conversation about it in class (which has already happened this semester) and that can be it.

Also, language is constantly evolving! Maybe in 5 years this conversation will be completely irrelevant for whatever reason. That’s fine too. I’m going to make the choice that makes the most sense to me right now, based on what I know and on my desire to signal to the broadest audience possible that yes, you belong here in my classroom, and learning is for everyone.

Defending gendered language that reinforces a binary is a weird hill to die on in my opinion, but whatevs.

 

*Bit of a rant here and I didn’t want to derail myself while still getting to my main point, but holy crap, fascist and bigoted and authoritarian belief systems are so lazy. Like, they are utterly devoid of both critical thinking skills and empathy, both of which absences annoy me to no end, I mean, at least pick one of the two to go with?! Every -ism or -phobia out there is rooted in essentialist thinking, generalizations, and stereotypes that are simply not true, and if the people believing these things took like 2 seconds to look at history or at the variety of cultures and human variation around the world they’d see the mounds of evidence disproving their irrational and mean-spirited beliefs, but I guess they’re not gonna do that because a) it’d take some effort and b) they’d have to admit they were wrong, and nobody likes that, especially when you’ve made your whole identity into hating some group you think takes away your power. Oh honey, late-stage capitalism has already done that, you really think we queer people are somehow outdoing corporations in making your life miserable?! There would be far more sparkles involved if we ran this shitshow!

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For F*ck’s Sake, Treat Women Like People

September 16, 2024 in Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

It is an astoundingly simple proposition, and yet here we are.

I shared this blog post about the men who dislike women and how we can tell on my Facebook page, and immediately, friends and acquaintances leapt in to discuss it. Most women were like “yep, that tracks.” Some men were like “Wow, I’d never thought about it that way before,” and I thanked them for taking the time to read it, because really, what system of oppression (and patriarchy is one among many) incentivizes those with power and privilege to actually sit and ponder it? Very few if any.

Then there were some men who wanted to add nuance. Which, sure, nuance is great!

But I noticed at least some of the comments came down to the following: Well, I do like women and enjoy their company, but I don’t act as though I do, because I don’t want them to get the wrong impression (that I’m flirting, that I’m available, etc.). And on the one hand, this is totally valid, because not everyone is available for every romantic configuration at every moment, and no one should have to be – so if people are assuming you are, and that’s making it weird, then yes, dispel that assumption with whichever tools you have at your disposal! And the guys on my Facebook page were respectful in their discussion, so this isn’t aimed at them as much as the general responses I see to this conversation.

However, something strikes me as odd about this idea, that men must manage women’s expectations by acting in unfriendly, antisocial, and even cold ways.

I figure that every single one of these men has social interactions that don’t revolve around the premise or promise of courtship without making it weird. They manage to have daily interactions – from the friendly to the mundane – without making it about sex.

How, dear reader, is such a thing possible?

These men are interacting with other men (and apologies for the assumption of heterosexuality here, it’s among the patterns I noticed in commenters on my post).

In the social world, men interact with other men as part of business transactions, while shopping, while dining, while doing a whole ton of activities. And unless I am missing out on some rad gay subtext happening 24/7 in mainstream social spaces, most of these men are probably managing to do so without hitting on or being hit on.

This is what most of us women want: we want to be treated as human, as a whole-ass person who can have conversations and manage business transactions and throw parties and play sports. If (presumed straight) men can manage to interact with other (presumed straight) men and have a friendly chat while doing whatever other task brings these people together in that moment, why would such a thing not be possible when interacting with women?

And yes, this is a throwback to feminist scholar Catherin MacKinnon’s classic “Are Women Human?” essay, wherein she repeatedly asks the titular question while listing numerous well-documented and sadly common instances of violence against women (rape, assault, domestic violence, street harassment, labor and sex trafficking) and asking why, in each instance, these aren’t framed as horrific human rights abuses to be battled but rather are seen as unfortunate things that simply happen repeatedly to women, as if by complete happenstance.

So I don’t mean to conflate the human subject with the masculine subject; culture has already done it for me! Hence I am borrowing some useful shorthand.

The scenarios men seem to be playing out are ones where they want to avoid inappropriate types of social conduct (wherein sexual availability is falsely presumed), and so refusing to engage with women is the way to go.

Now, I will grant that some men might hesitate to fully engage because they know many women are hit on, preyed on, objectified, and the like, which is an especial bummer when we’re just trying to live our daily lives and suddenly have to live with the reminder that some people see us as walking sex banks (don’t be that guy! Or gal, on the occasions when it happens!). Some men know they occupy tall and large bodies, and want to avoid coming across as threatening. That’s legit too.

But overall, I see some troubling assumptions embedded in these conversations, and so I feel compelled to reminder y’all: WOMEN AND MEN ARE NOT SEPARATE SPECIES!!!

And the really problematic theme I see embedded above is that men apparently feel they need to treat women differently than they’d treat a “regular” person (a.k.a. a fellow man)…because they are worried that women will treat them differently (as a sex object, a conquest, and so on).

Here is where my irony-meter goes through the roof: my good dudes, while this may seem like a problem to navigate when you encounter sexually aggressive women, this too is a symptom of patriarchy. Many women are socially conditioned to pursue higher-status male partners because we goddamn know we’re paid less, and we’re not gonna get maternity leave in this hellhole of a country, and nobody is going to protect us from all the horrific kinds of assaults visited upon women (and often in much worse ways upon women of color and trans women) unless we explicitly recruit those people to our sides by, I dunno, putting a ring on it or whatever. And don’t get me started on how domestic spaces are often even more dangerous for women; I’ll drag out my favorite terrible stat from the CDC about how half of American female homicide victims are killed by present or past male partners.

Feeling like someone doesn’t respect your boundaries or consent, hence you need to put up barriers that make you seem rude or cold or misogynist? That’s a patriarchy problem, because patriarchy teaches that sexual conquest = status, mostly for men, but women are starting to be able to take advantage of this attitude too without the only option being slut-shaming.

Feeling crummy and like someone only wants you for your money? Granted there are greedy people out there of every gender who are just assholes regardless, but, and say it with me: That’s a patriarchy problem, because Western women for centuries couldn’t own property because we WERE the property, and so snagging a man was the most reliable way of guaranteeing one’s quality of life. (brief addendum to remind that the transatlantic slave trade also made people into property, with ongoing consequences even today in terms of generational wealth disparities, state criminalization and violence, and so on; these facts can be discussed in conjunction without detracting from the severity of one another because white supremacy and patriarchy enable one another, and hopefully drawing attention to one starts to poke holes in the armor of the other)

Feeling like it’s more respectful to engage with a woman’s partner socially before engaging with her socially? That’s a patriarchy problem, because it classifies women according to their relationship to the nearest man, making men the gatekeepers of women’s ability to have a social life, just like men have long been the gatekeeper’s of whether women could enter male-dominated fields, or get medical procedures like hysterectomies, ands so on.

And of course—of friggin’ course—the irony-meter is going off when men say things like “it’s really uncomfortable to have women sexually pursue me and treat me like a conquest when I’ve already said I’m married,” because that is an experience women have all the damn time. Yes, it genuinely sucks! People shouldn’t do that to other people! It’s rude! But the overall pattern that exists in this world is one where men relentlessly pursue women, up to and including throwing harassment and violence into the mix, and so when a dude experiences this treatment from women, it is by definition and by the weight of empirical evidence a less common problem, hence not the one I want to devote extensive resources and bandwidth to. Again, yes, very crappy to experience that, but as I’ve pointed out above, these are patriarchy problems, as well as individual-people-being-assholes-regardless-of-gender problems.

One of the reasons why we keep having these damn conversations, and keep trying to explain using clear language what it’s like to be a woman stonewalled by men, or talked over, or whatever, is that by the very definition of being marginalized and socially oppressed, we cannot get our oppressors to listen to us. This is true for pretty much every social justice issue; this is why bystander interventions matter; because dudes are more likely to listen to other dudes than to listen to women, since women are presented as lower-status, less-intelligent, far-more-likely-to-be-hysterical irrational beings who are mostly good for having sex and having babies. We are constantly gaslit about our own experiences, social and professional and medical and more.

So yes, we need dudes tuning into these conversations and realizing “huh, yeah, that’s problematic” and speaking up when they see this behavior from other dudes. Because they’re more likely to be listened to and believed than we are.

If my tone is off-puttingly aggressive, please consider that a) tone policing is bullshit, and b) many of us women have experienced these frustrating dismissals a ton, and we’re tired of being polite about it. It sucks to feel sidelined and dismissed, and my guess is that a lot of dudes can relate, perhaps because racial or class-based discrimination has factored into your lives. So even if gender discrimination is still something you’re trying to wrap your head around because you haven’t experienced it much, chances are good that in this shitty racist and classist society, you’ve been put down for a trait that is not your fault, that is some arbitrary nonsense, and that hurt. The parallels don’t always function 100% but hopefully you see what I’m getting at—being judged and treated differently for an inborn trait suuuucks, and by being a dude who listens to women when we have these conversations, you have the chance to make a difference and stop perpetuating those small acts of bigotry and prejudice that add up and make things shittier.

To conclude, for fuck’s sake, please treat women like people. Don’t make it weird by assuming that you need to jump through all these bizarre hoops in order to fulfill the minimum politeness required in social interactions. Just, like, talk to us like human beings!

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In the Olympics and Elsewhere, Patriarchy, Misogyny, and Racism Misdirect Our Rage and Fear

August 2, 2024 in Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

Image of the Olympics rings imposed over the Eiffel Tower

If you look at news headlines or social media, it might seem that trans athletes have come out of nowhere at this year’s Olympic Games to violently pummel women.

Except that’s not what’s happening. At all.

First, I find it a bit odd that people who formerly didn’t give a shit about women and women’s sports are suddenly rallying to this cause. In just the U.S., “men received $252 million more in athletic scholarships than women” and athletes with other aspects of marginalized identities face even larger barriers. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation:

“Girls and women of color, those with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ athletes consistently receive less access to sport than their peers.

  • Girls at high schools where the majority of students are Black and/or Hispanic have only 67 percent of the opportunities to play sports that their male peers have, compared to their counterparts at heavily white schools, who have 82 percent of the opportunities that boys do.
  • And while women make up 44 percent of all NCAA athletes (compared to 15 percent in 1972), only 14 percent of female NCAA athletes are BIPOC.
  • In addition, of the more than 15,000 high school students who participate in adaptive sports, only 44 percent are female.
  • In a recent study,  77.6% of LGBTQ students avoided school functions, 71.8% avoided extracurricular activities, and 25.15 avoided school athletic fields or facilities because they felt unsafe or uncomfortable.”

Further, I’ve trained with boxers, and part of the sport involves getting hit. Sometimes in the head. Sometimes quite painfully. So it just shows me that people who know absolutely nothing about boxing are seeing footage of women boxing for their first time ever, and losing their minds about how violent it is. That is…just how the sport is? And there are rules to protect people as much as possible. And none of those rules were violated here.

You also may have noticed that whenever an athlete’s gender is called into question, that athlete is not white. Related to the above paragraph, it seems a lot of white people are conditioned to absolutely freak out when it looks like a white woman is being assaulted by a person of color. Which, yes, nobody should be assaulted! But in a sport where we see women of color getting ahead of their white peers, and suddenly it’s only women of color whose gender identity is being called into question? That speaks of the intersection of racism and sexism.

South African athlete Caster Semenya went through this. As ESPN documents in a history of gender tests in the Olympics, Indian athlete Santhi Soundarajan also went through this, and was disqualified. Both are poor women of color.

So, too, is Imane Khelif, who is certainly not trans (which is illegal in Algeria, among other reasons). This next bit gets a bit convoluted so please bear with me.

The IBA – International Boxing Association – filed a report saying that both Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting “did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential” and this confidential test “conclusively” that “both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.”

Which sounds kinda official, but then again, what kind of testing was it? Did they conceal this information to protect the athletes’ privacy, or because their testing standards were perhaps not as rigorous as they might otherwise be?

Further, the IBA is currently discredited in the eyes of the Olympics. The International Olympics Committee (IOC) announced that it’s no longer recognizing the IBA due to issues like lack of financial transparency and not following procedures to ensure its integrity.

So in light of this, it does not seem like we should be listening to the assertions of a discredited organization, meaning, it doesn’t matter what (unspecified) testing these two athletes went through, if the Olympics Committee is like “nah, they are not trustworthy.”

In fact, the Olympics Committee has stated:

The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years.

And this part is worth focusing on, because Khelif has competed in the Olympics before…and lost. According to the sports website Give Me Sport, Khelif has suffered losses at both World Championships and Olympics Games, notably losing to Irish boxer Amy Broadhurst, who said: “Personally, I don’t think she has done anything to ‘cheat’. I think it’s the way she was born and that’s out of her control. The fact that she has been (beaten) by 9 females before says it all.”

If her fellow athletes are saying she’s not unbeatable, then maybe we should listen to the people who know their sport.

Indeed, according to the National Organization for Women, trans women have been allowed to compete in the Olympics since 2004, and not a single one has medaled. That kinda destroys this narrative about trans people coming to sports to dominate and humiliate, doesn’t it? Not that Khelif is trans, but some ignorant people are saying that’s the case.

Because in athletics, a wide range of variation is allowed, as long as it’s not due to gender differences, apparently. The classic example is Michael Phelps, who according to the Washington Post has a disproportionately large wingspan and double-jointedness along with a different production level of lactic acid that allows him to dominate his sport…and his physical differences are celebrated, yet those of Caster Semenya and other more gender-ambiguous athletes are not?

In case you need a brief lesson on anatomical sex, it is not as binary as we’ve been led to believe. According to the Intersex Society of North America, there are a variety of conditions we might classify as having indeterminate anatomical sex, whether that’s seen in chromosomes or hormones or reproductive and pleasure anatomy. Some people have mosaic genetics, with some of their cells having XX and others having XY chromosomes in them. In all, around 1 in 100 people have some form of intersex display, whether it is medically knowable or so subtle that it has escaped notice until now, or ever.

I’ve never had genetic testing, and I doubt that you, dear reader, have either. The question of determining one’s biological or anatomical sex is so much more complex than it appears at first, and squeezing the amazing diversity of natural human variation into binary boxes is a clumsy method at best.

The science is complicated here too. I’d recommend talking to someone with a PhD in this stuff if you can get your hands on them, or reading some Anne-Fausto Sterling, a widely recognized expert in the field. If you don’t want the incomprehensible jargon, well first, I think you’re missing out on a chance to learn that the natural world is inevitably more wondrous and uncategorizable than we make it out to be, but I guess you can learn about the most relevant implications of all this in a Scientific American piece on sex testing in the Olympics and other elite athletics.

And beyond the physical attempts to categorize an individual’s sex, there are, of course, people who are gender-non-conforming in a variety of ways, whether they are transgender, or cisgender but leaning non-binary, or intersex and learning that a gender was arbitrarily imposed on them at birth to make them seem more normal (there is a horrifying history of surgeries and other interventions on intersex babies before the age of consent, which you can read about here and elsewhere).  And in case it needs to be said, gender-non-conforming identities are valid. They’re not sick or deluded, nor are they inherently predatory. We can and should allow gender non-conforming and trans athletes to compete in their chosen categories because they are – like Michael Phelps – just a normal human variation on the spectrum of what we generally see humans being and doing, sometimes a bit more towards the end of the spectrum, but rarely the ridiculously stark differences transphobes make them out to be.

As noted above, fellow athletes who have faced Khelif are like “yeah whatever, I’ll box here, it’s fine,” for the most part. Let the athletes make these decisions for themselves, in conversation with scientists where necessary…but again, the scientists are probably going to roll up with 100+ slides of a Powerpoint deck to explain why this is so damn complicated, and they won’t have concrete answers either, so let’s just go with the “trust athletes” angle I’m suggesting here, yeah?

Finally, to the title of this post: we are being sold a narrative that some men are so into the idea of hurting and violating women that they will put on dresses and try to pretend to be women to do so.

This is not what’s happening. It has never been what’s happening. Men violate women with impunity, without donning skirts, all the fucking time. According to the CDC, 41% of women experience intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. Do you seriously think that the perpetrators need to pretend to be women to get away with it? They get away with it—in homes, in bedrooms, in workplaces—all the fucking time. This is a worldwide problem; the UN states that one in three women have been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetimes. It happens everywhere in the world, all the damn time, and it is primarily being performed by cisgender men (those assigned male at birth, who continue to live as men).

Patriarchy misdirects us, though. Patriarchy says it’s only a handful of bad men committing such crimes, which cannot logically be true given the upsetting prevalence.

Misogyny misdirects us too; it says women are weak and must be protected from those bad men, or worse, those bad men who think they are women and use those disguises to gain access to women-only spaces like bathrooms and women’s sports.

Racism gets in on it as well, telling us that women of color are unnaturally masculine, needing policing, fit only for hard labor, not deserving of protection.

I get that a lot of women fear sexual violence; I do too, I have a “rape schedule” of when and where I do and don’t walk alone, just like my female college students do.

But if you are a woman who’s afraid, and you’ve allowed yourself to become afraid of trans people, or of women of color who seem a bit too masculine, then you have been sold a package of bullshit, because patriarchy and misogyny lie to us, and tell us to look around for convenient scapegoats that are already marginalized, instead of looking the actual problem—patriarchy—in the eye and refusing to hold men accountable for their abusive behaviors (not all men, obviously, but enough men that it’s a continual concern of who we can trust not to rape us when given the chance).

If you never gave a crap about women’s sports til now, you are responding to sexist and racist dog whistles about who the real threats are. Please read up on the history of gender testing in sports, and on how complex biological/anatomical sex actually is, and the harassment of women of color who excel in athletics and elsewhere and are then taken down a notch. Please listen to actual trans and gender-non-conforming people talking about their lives, because mostly they want to exist in peace and they are not the predators they’re made out to be—which, again, if you are paying attention, is exactly the same rhetoric that was weaponized against us gay/bisexual people from a few decades ago. Almost like it’s a convenient way to marginalize and oppress a group as it starts to gain equal human rights.

(oh, and credit where credit is due: women of color have been leading these discussions for a long time now, and for example, Imani Gandy has shared a lot of valuable resources on Twitter that I benefited from in composing this post; this tweet of hers said it best: “None of this hullabaloo is about protecting women. It’s about reifying gender roles and femininity.” Yes, yes, a million times (unfortunately) yes; cisgender women are already being stopped in bathrooms and so on because we don’t look feminine enough, and other similar nonsense things are happening, so a lot of this fuss is indeed about patrolling womanhood, which is discriminatory and gross)

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Thinking about Gender & Harm in Relationships (yes, this is about the recent accusations)

July 7, 2024 in Feminism | No comments

A person wearing a blank white masking, holding a finger in front of their mouth to indicate silence.

Caveats and trigger warnings are in this paragraph; read or skip as desired. This piece is mostly written about instances where (presumed cisgender) men assault (presumed cisgender) women, but of course there are other forms abuse can take. There are more than two genders and more than two sexual orientations, but again, the bulk of the evidence points towards men being the perpetrators of sexual violence (and other forms of violence) towards women, so that is what I’m focusing on here. This post mentions domestic violence and gaslighting but does not go into detail about any forms of abuse.

As I write this, another prominent man is being accused of sexual assault (you can likely fill in the blank whenever you’re reading this, which is one of the points of this piece: harassment and assault are pretty ubiquitous).

This piece is not about the truth behind said accusations; I rather like the framing here, Someone you care about was just outed as a sex creep: a beginner’s guide, which counsels patiently listening in order to learn and understand more.

Rather, I am trying to work out the following argument for myself while sharing it with an audience, in case it’s of any use to y’all: why does it matter, or why should it matter, that a public figure quite possibly has abusive or exploitative sexual relationships? Why should anyone care? And I also want to explore the implications for women in particular, because so many of these conversations revolve around consented-to sex.

In the recent example on my mind, a few of Influential Man’s (IM’s) past partners have come forward stating that he acted in non-consensual ways during their relationship. Some people’s response is to shrug it off and state that sometimes people hurt each other in relationships, that’s normal, that’s just life.

While I’m not a philosopher, I’m deeply curious about what’s going on here and why we should care—whether we should care at all. I do read a fair bit of feminist philosophy these days, and so I’m going to bring some of those sources to bear on this topic.

As Amia Srinivasan writes in The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century: “Sex, which we think of as the most private thing, is in reality a public thing” (xii). By this, she refers to the gender roles we learn and project onto sex in terms of who deserves pleasure, who must be the most giving, and so on (surprise, these are highly gendered roles). But I think this phrase also applies to the kinds of sex that are legible as deserving of privacy or not. If you’re having sex in some kind of culturally legible relationship (probably heterosexual, probably monogamous, probably not transactional in the sense of being sex work), then what happens for you sexually is deemed to be your own business.

In other words, the sex we have in relationships is seen as private, even as the gender roles we are socialized into quite publicly dictate how the sex we have privately should look.

What makes sexual assault accusations tricky to navigate, in part, is this cultural sense that what is perceived as being private should stay private. Trying to take private business public feels off, because it goes against this cultural logic.

Why, then, should we care about what happens privately between two people?

If I try to put this in the most neutral terminology possible, this is what I end up with: a person has repeatedly hurt someone close to them, either intentionally, or by simply being ignorant of that person’s consent, comfort, and boundaries. Maybe they even got off on abusing that person’s trust (though I must say, all the sadists I know are quite careful to ensure that their partners are a) masochistic and b) consenting).

If we put this scenario in any context outside the bedroom, it sounds a bit different: “Yeah, Joe is a nice guy, but he has tortured the last few pets he’s had.” “Oh I’m still friends with Brad, he only harasses his coworkers.” “My cousin Finn is so much fun when we go out, unless you’re working at the places where we party, then he’s kinda a dick.”

If we swap the category of “person they’re in a relationship with” to “any other type of human” then this framing gets real concerning real fast. Saying that someone’s a decent person except to One Type of Person sound pretty bad. Especially if that type of person is, like, historically marginalized. “Oh yeah, he’s a good guy, except to Black people…except to Native Americans…except to…” you can fill in the blank as you chose.

So why is it different to be like “Oh yeah, he’s a good guy, except to his partners” when his partners are mostly women? How does this not leave us with some sort of conclusion that this person views women’s experiences as less important, less worth prioritizing, than their own? How is that not a tad bigoted or even perhaps dehumanizing?

The issue is magnified when I put it like this: a person with large amounts of social and/or economic power has repeatedly hurt someone close to them, either intentionally, or by simply being ignorant of that person’s consent, comfort, and boundaries.

This is…concerning. Because one of the slippery things about this current round of Influential Man accusations is that they were in a consenting relationship…but one person having significantly more social power than another is definitely a form of power, and it can be make saying “no” that much harder. One party having more power than the other can create its own coercive context, even if everyone technically counts as a consenting adult.

I’m not alone in wondering whether the power disparity of gender roles in a patriarchal/misogynist society like ours counts as a coercive context, especially when it comes to public discussions of when things go wrong. In Srinivasan’s words:

The question, from a feminist perspective, is why sex crimes elicit such selective skepticism. And the answer that feminists should give is that the vast majority of sex crimes are perpetrated by men against women. Sometimes, the injunction to “Believe women” is simply the injunction to form our beliefs in the ordinary way: in accordance with the facts. (10-11)

False accusations occasionally happen. This case—whichever one we’re on, as of when you’re reading this—could turn out to be one of those, or not. As The Jennifer Conspiracy reminds us in their Medium post linked above, when it came to the allegations against George Takei: “Fandom was heartbroken by it, but over time as more information came out, it became clear that it was very likely not true. This is why it’s so important to keep paying attention no matter how you feel about the potential validity of the accusation upon first hearing about it.”

I think I’m inclined to view this phenomenon as a metonym for problematic sex, much in the same way that Srinivasan suggests that feminists in the 1980s and 1990s collectively lost their shit over pornography:

The intensity of the “porn wars” is more understandable when you bear in mind that porn came to serve, for feminists of an earlier generation, as a metonym for “problematic” sex in general: for sex that took no account of women’s pleasure, for sadomasochistic sex, for prostitution, for rape fantasies, for sex without love, for sex across power differentials, for sex with men. (35)

Perhaps these discussions of whether Influential Man did it, and whether or not and how it should matter, are ways of talking about so many of the other issues women feel silenced on…at least when it comes to being heard and seen by their male partners. Domestic violence rates remain high. My female friends keep getting assaulted. If no one will listen when we talk about what happens to us, maybe they will listen when we use public figures to have a very similar conversation. Again, Srinivasan says it best:

Men have chosen not to listen because it has suited them not to do so, because the norms of masculinity dictate that their pleasure takes priority, because all around them other men have been doing the same. (21)

To paraphrase from one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits, “Welcome to Hell:”, when asked why they didn’t say anything about the constant harassment: they definitely did! for hundreds of years! but, like, no one cared!

To again return to the question of why we should care about strangers’ sex lives (because mostly we don’t, and when we do, it can be deeply invasive and bad; see, like, all of American history with sodomy and contraception laws and all that nonsense, which I discuss in my book Sex Education 101), I find it telling when we suddenly care and want to discuss all the details we have and don’t…when it’s an Influential Man perpetrator. Would we have cared about the women coming forward otherwise? Would we have even known who they are?

(and for fuck’s sake, people, stop with the “why is she only coming forward now” nonsense—you’ve seen how the collective treats those making accusations, right?)

The extensive pondering of what might have happened in these relationships, how bad his actions really were, seems to result in a punitive shitstorm for the women coming forward, while the men mostly wriggle free from lasting consequences. Again, there are exceptions, but it’s a pretty damn noticeable pattern.

And looking at all of this stuff, it seems to me that one of the messages to women is that when we consent to sex, when we are in a relationship with a man, we are consenting to potential harm. And yeah, people in relationships are gonna hurt each other no matter what, blah blah blah, that kind of truism is both true and vague enough to not really be helpful. And yeah, there are always exceptions to the pattern I’m focusing on here.

Because the more I look at these instances, regardless of which Influential Man is being accused today, the more I see the subtext of what we’re asking the women: “But what did you think would happen? Why are you surprised you got hurt? Why are you even talking about it?”

This pisses me off because not only is it some gaslighting bullshit, but it also, as noted above, presumes that when women are in relationships with men, some hurt is inevitable, and it’s pretty one-sided (again, FFS, not all men, I know). American culture (and perhaps Western culture more generally) continues to view women as human givers, in Kate Manne’s terms: as humans who owe their sexual, domestic, emotional, and/or reproductive labor to the full human beings who inevitably happen to be men.

Not only that, but as I noted above, the abuse rates keep climbing—and by golly, by gosh, who are the men abusing these women if they’re not Influential Man #1, Influential Man #2, Influential Man #3, and the rest of the Influential Men we like? If being a (heterosexual-ish) woman means entering a social contract that our consent and our pleasure don’t matter as much as men’s do, are we supposed to only date Influential Men because they can clearly never be abusers?

There is no good conclusion to this post because there is no good conclusion to this topic—another year, another Influential Man dealing with sexual assault or harassment accusations, another very public debate about what actually happened, another bout of grappling with what this means and why we should care and so on. I’m a teacher, so I believe we are innately capable of learning, but I don’t know that rehashing these conversations will do us much good until roughly half the population learns that the other half deserves to have their consent taken seriously (with apologies for the binaristic phrasing, but again, that’s the pattern I’m talking about here and it’s the pattern the bulk of the data points towards as being a huge problem).

At risk of sounding hideously second-wave-feminist, women aren’t just sex objects, passive partners in sexual interactions that, while consenting, don’t really matter apart from their presence. And until we figure this one out—and inform men that yes, abusive or otherwise shitty behavior in the context of a relationship does actually count in the real world—we’re just going to keep having the same conversation over and over again.

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Sex in a Limited Good Economy

July 30, 2014 in Feminism, Folklore, Gender & Sexuality | 2 comments

When a friend shared a link to Why We Care About Other People’s Sex Lives, a look at the evolutionary psychology behind ideas of sexual morality, I was skeptical. As I’ve ranted about to anyone who will listen, I have a hate-hate relationship with evolutionary psychology and related fields such as literary Darwinism. They’re just so… essentializing. Ugh.

But the above-linked article caught my interest. The author looks at a number of recent studies about how people judge casual sex. In one instance: “Even after controlling for variables like age, religiosity, and political affiliation, the study authors found that people who saw female financial dependence on men as more common were also more likely to negatively judge promiscuity in both sexes.” Why does this occur? I’m not inclined to go with the evo psych reductionist reasoning that women are less horny than men but simultaneously more calculating; instead, I’d like to draw some parallels between sexual and economic principles.

What do sexual morality and financial dependence have in common? The concept of limited good. As folklorist Alan Dundes explains in this interview about evil eye beliefs: “The idea is that many peasant societies have what anthropologist George Foster refers to as the concept of ‘limited good.’ There’s only so much wealth and health. So you want to conceal your wealth because people are going to wish that they had it, otherwise you’ll lose it.” Dundes goes on to argue that expressive culture (in this case, folk belief about the evil eye) reflects a society’s underlying worldview of paradigm about economic exchange.

So when we have an economic system that commodifies certain kinds of social and sexual interactions (such as marriage) by directly tying them to one’s ability to survive and thrive, it’s not surprising to see that same attitude reflected in a society’s sexual attitudes. The fear about not enough potential (and desirable) spouses to go around (hence not enough access to married-life-resources) affects beliefs about sexual practices, turning sex into a commodity when really, it doesn’t have to be that way. We know from the non-monogamous emotion of compersion (feeling joy when someone else feels joy) that it’s possible to react to sharing your partner with another with positive, constructive emotions rather than destructive, possessive, jealous ones.

I sometimes wonder how sexual behaviors and stereotypes will change in my utopian vision of the future, wherein we move from a limited good economy to one where marriage isn’t required to obtain health insurance, citizenship, or other concrete goods. Will sex ever be de-commodified? I’m not sure, but I hope we move more in that direction.

Oh, and there’s another, simpler idea that I’d like to extract from the essay on sexual morality: the notion that a society’s attitudes about sexuality can (and perhaps should) change over time. The authors of Sex at Dawn (which I review here) also implicitly explore this concept. What I like about the idea that attitudes about sex are always evolving is that it recognizes that sexual behavior is always culturally constructed. Our ideas about sex are always changing due to a confluence of various factors: the ways in which we have sex change, our social paradigms (some of which explicitly relate to sex) change, and our scientific understanding of sexual functioning is always evolving too.

Basically, there’s always been an amazing diversity of sexual practices throughout human history. In my mind, that’s as it should be. There is no one way to have sex. There is no universal, monolithic meaning of sex. The only thing that’s universal about sex – other than it happening to continue humankind’s existence on this world – is that I believe sex should be considered among the list of universal human rights.

So, let’s keep up the dialogue about sex and society. Hopefully a greater understanding of how these paradigms intersect and influence one another will lead to more tolerance and progressive social change.

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Consent Discussions in California

June 2, 2014 in Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

Thanks to Wikimedia for the image.

One of the things I love about my family is that they take an active interest in my career and hobbies. So when I flew into L.A. to see my folks, my dad handed me a big box of newspaper clippings, related to literature, folklore, dance, sex education, and so on.

Among them was an opinion piece from the L.A. Times about a recent piece of California legislation, SB 967. This would mandate, among other things, that all California universities include the following language about sexual contact that occurs on campus:

  • An affirmative consent standard in the determination of whether consent was given by a complainant.
  • Prohibition on an accused perpetrator using self-intoxication or recklessness as a defense.  It would also not be a defense if the accused failed to take reasonable steps to ascertain consent.
  • An explicit provision that an individual is unable to give consent for sexual activity if the individual is asleep or unconscious; incapacitated due to drugs and/or alcohol; or unable to communicate due to a mental and/or physical condition.
  • A preponderance of the evidence standard in the determination of disciplinary action.

And so on. So far, so good, right?

Well… no. One of the opinion pieces, published in the Sunday June 1 L.A. Times, thinks that an affirmative consent standard is not only unlikely, but also unsexy. He writes: “The legislation’s affirmative consent requirement doesn’t apply just to sex. It covers all physical contact for which consent is required by a college’s sexual assault policy, like intimate touching. In real life, such contact is welcomed after it begins, not affirmatively consented to in advance.”

I hope y’all see that this is really problematic. This statement exemplifies the sex-negativity prevalent in our culture, specifically the idea that having to obtain consent by explicitly asking for it is un-sexy. It’s not hard to see where this idea comes from; in practically every Hollywood flick the characters experience mind-numbing chemistry, kiss, and wind up in bed together, with nary a word spoken.

Is it really all that terrible to have to ask for someone’s consent before touching or kissing them? Would it really be so soberingly un-sexy to say something like, “Hey, I’d like to kiss you. How do you feel about that?” Apparently, yes, there is no greater boner-killer than verbally obtaining consent.

What’s even more  troubling is that this opinion was expressed by Hans Bader, an attorney and former U.S. Department of Education Lawyer. In other words, the people making our laws don’t think obtaining verbal, explicit consent is sexy or feasible.

Another person, Sandra Perez, wrote in to say: “Legislation in Sacramento essentially would mandate that a would-be Romeo obtain an express opt-in before proceeding to bed with his sweetheart, as if any such target of Romeo’s desires doesn’t have ample opportunity to communicate her unequivocal wish to opt out.” This is another WTF comment, since it both assumes that men are always the initiators of sexual contact (which is a harmful construct of performing idealized masculinity) and that there are never coercive situations wherein women – or men – don’t feel safe saying no.

I’m saddened and disturbs that both of the quotes in this opinion piece reinforce negative, harmful, and untrue ideas about consent. Whether or not you’re in California and hence potentially affected by this law, I recommend reading up on consent and figuring out how to make it a more prominent part of your conversations and your practices. So here are some links:

Please read and consider passing on these links. I’m aware that there are more sophisticated (often feminist) conversations happening around consent, specifically problematizing the notion of “enthusiastic consent“ (and this discussion too), but hey, we have to start somewhere.

P.S. June is  Adult Sex Ed month! Consider this post a contribution!

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Would You Do It To A Pet? …and Other Ways to Discuss Deviance & Consent

April 23, 2014 in Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | 2 comments

My post Claiming the Title of Sex Educator recently went live at MySexProfessor, and in that vein, I’m going to start posting more sex education and sex research content here at my personal blog (update: now that I have a blog at my sex education site, more content of this nature will go there!). I’ll begin with a post about how we talk about deviance and consent, and where these subjects (maybe surprisingly) intersect.

There’s a journalistic account going around about a young man who identifies as a pedophile in that he’s attracted to children, but he has never acted on that attraction. In fact, he’s actively seeking help in order to keep from acting on it. Pedophilia is one the most taboo and reviled sexuality topics in our society, and I like how the interview humanizes the man. It’s worth a listen if you have the time (it’s around 30 minutes long).

The story got me thinking about how we tend to talk about sexual deviancy. The more taboo a topic is, the more likely the discussion of it is to be framed in terms of morality or wrongness. In other words, stigma has an incredibly polarizing effect on discourse.

But you know what? Pretty much any sexual act has the potential to be just as “deviant” as the most stigmatized and taboo acts out there. This is because every sex act that involves more than one person hinges on consent, and even the most innocent-seeming act can become a violation if consent is lacking.

This is where the “would you do it to/with a pet?” question comes in. Think of something you might do to, say, a cat or dog as a friendly gesture:

  • Hug
  • Pet
  • Feed
  • Walk or play with

You don’t have to ask your cat or dog whether you can interact with it in a low-key, friendly way, in a manner that presumes some familiarity but does not transgress the animal’s bodily boundaries or cause it pain. Similarly, you usually don’t have to ask a friend consent before hugging her, or offering him food, or shaking zir hand.

Then think of some other activities, which you would NOT do to your pet. These could involve forcibly penetrating it, or beating it. Why would those actions be wrong? Because your pet cannot consent to sex with a human, nor to receiving pain. Animals think differently than humans and we haven’t figured out how to bridge a lot of those gaps just yet. Humans, on the other hand, are capable of communicating with one another about marvelously complex things, including giving and receiving physical pain in the pursuit of pleasure as with kink/BDSM, or choosing to enter into sex work.

My point here is that if it’s not an act that you would feel okay doing to an alive-and-feeling being that is incapable of communicating consent — it is potentially a “deviant” act. Being kissed without consent can be an invasive, horrible experience. Having sex without consent – that’s called rape.  Whether it’s the most vanilla thing in that world or as taboo as it gets, any partnered sexual activity has the potential to be traumatic if its occurs without consent.

Obviously the pet analogy falls apart at some point. Some people enjoy sloppy wet dog kisses, and the dogs seem to enjoy them right back. The activity of wrestling with one’s pet may cross into rough play, rougher than you’d do with a non-consenting human. I just wanted to come up with a metaphor that would resonate with people, that would make you think about the activities which require explicit consent and the activities that do not.

The flip side is that if any act, no matter how innocent or well-intended, can become monstrous when it occurs without consent, then any deviant/taboo/bizarre act can be seen as okay if consent is granted. Or at least, I’ll see it that way, and encourage others to have an open enough mind to do so.

Once again: if you’re a consenting adult, I support you doing anything. Consent should always be communicated, negotiated, and re-negotiated, so the more we read and talk and write about it, the better!

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Opposing “Women for Academic Freedom”

July 31, 2013 in Academia, Feminism | No comments

A friend brought to my attention this letter by an anonymous group, calling itself Women for Academic Freedom, claiming that a critique of a soon-to-be-published book’s transphobic aspects is actually part of a well-orchestrated attempt by transgendered folks to oppress women. More than they’re already oppressed. Or something.

If that’s what academic freedom looks like, I don’t want any part in it.

Academic freedom does not mean that you get to invent agendas or twist facts to your liking. It should not mean that you get to target a minority group and then blame them for your own problems. It should also not mean that you twist feminism to be a rallying cry in the oppression of others.

According to the CDC, transgender people are among the highest risk groups for HIV infection. This round-up of transgender murder statistics suggests that transgender people are far more likely to be murdered than cis-gendered people (though by how much is difficult to determine, as this is a population often forced to work underground, so statistics can be hard to come by). More stats on physical and sexual violence can be found here.

Somehow the “Women for Academic Freedom” seem to have not noticed any of these truths about how much violence and hardship transgendered people face on a daily basis. It makes me suspect that they’re not, in the end, very good at research. It also looks as though they’ve bought into a zero sum game, similar to what we folklorists like to call a limited-good worldview: the idea that there’s only so much “good” (whether wealth or good luck or general prosperity) to go around in a given community, and thus anyone who’s able to get a piece of the pie is automatically depriving someone else of theirs. Paying attention to the struggles of transgender people need not detract from feminist concerns about the oppression of women.

If anything, this is a rehashing of the old “can a feminist really choose to be a stay-at-home mom?” debate. The important thing, from my rather third-wave vantage point, is that feminism encourages women to choose their own life paths, regardless of whether they’re engaging in a traditionally feminine pursuit or not. What matters is that they’re able to choose it, in a more-or-less unconstrained manner (and I know, we could sit and debate all day about whether any choice in a patriarchal context is unconstrained, but hopefully, eventually, all people, both men and women, will be able to make choices outside unduly coercive situations). And really, I thought we’d gotten over this question – but here it is again, rehashed in a new setting. These “Women for Academic Freedom” seem to be saying, “But those terrible transpeople are adhering to rigid gender roles, which are exactly what we radical feminists are trying to destroy, so that they can no longer oppress women!” Um, people, let’s try this again: it doesn’t matter whether you’re choosing to do something masculine or feminine, whether it’s a woman choosing to stay at home with kids or go out working or try both, or whether it’s a person choosing their gender identity to conform to given gender roles or not… it’s the same debate.

Prescriptive gender roles suck for many people, so let’s simply accept it when people choose to embrace any and all aspects of a gender role, whether or not it’s the one they were assigned at birth. Let’s encourage people to figure out what works for them as individuals, in this weird world of conflicting messages and multiple waves of feminism and lots of backlash against both feminists and non-gendered-conforming individuals. Why can’t we see that this is the same struggle, to police identities?

This excellent Shakesville post already refuted most of the point that the “Women for Academic Freedom” tried to make in their letter. It’s a stellar post, so you should go read it. In case you don’t, however, here are two of my favorite paragraphs:

Simply put, ignoring the lived experiences of trans* folk, sweeping aside the violence they live with, the employment discrimination, the fear that can accompany something as simple as going to the bathroom or shopping for clothes, or all the million other ways that trans* folk are treated as less than? That’s wrong. Trying to teach students that they should hate and fear fellow students, teachers, loved ones, colleagues, who happen to be trans* men and women, is wrong. Re-centering discussions about trans* issues to focus on a relatively privileged group, cis women, is wrong. I know readers of this space know this, but it cannot be said enough.

But academic freedom (although it is far from perfectly applied) is supposed to work both ways. It protects the right to cover trans* issues accurately in class. It protects the right for professors to be trans* activists and allies off-campus and on. For trans* academics, to make their voices heard, and for cis academics to support them. That’s what academic freedom is supposed to do, and by Maude, I will be using mine as much as I can.

Academic freedom is not about teaching hate. It should be about teaching rigorous research skills, and spreading knowledge, and showing students how to sift through facts in order to reach a bigger picture, even knowing that there are often multiple interpretations of a given situation, and no single one may be the only right one.

I’m learning how to become a trans ally, which in no way conflicts with my feminism, or my academic freedom. That’s part of why I write about this stuff, to hopefully promote tolerance, and encourage people to think about the ideas they’ve been indoctrinated with (and I include myself in that category, as I don’t doubt that my cis-gendered privilege sometimes gets in the way of me seeing the actual risks and realities of trans issues).

I engage with trans issues with little risk to myself, which is an indication of the privilege I as a cis-gendered person hold. For an intelligent, compelling rumination on what it is to engage with risk and teach (trans)gender from a sociology perspective, check out this guest post at Conditionally Accepted. I highly, highly recommend it.

And in the meantime, let’s all keep fighting for an academic freedom that doesn’t invent enemies and further the oppression of already-struggling groups, eh?

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In Praise of Oversharing

July 24, 2013 in Feminism | No comments

As someone who wears the “blogger” hat quite frequently, I always wonder how much sharing constitutes oversharing. Does my audience really need to know if I’m feeling cranky and bloated because I’m on my period, or that I made yet another batch of jam with farmers market berries, or that I’ve been lifting weights for X number of consecutive weeks and I’m happy with the results? On a less formal level than blogging, do I write about these things on my Facebook, to keep my faraway friends and family appraised of how I’m doing?

After giving it some thought, I’ve decided that yes, I’m in favor of what might be considered by some to be oversharing. There are both personal and political reasons for this.

On the personal front, I was raised in a household that was very tolerant of difference. We held (and continue to hold) some rather non-conformist values, and I was exposed to multiple cultures at an early age (it helps when your mom is an art teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, working primarily with mentally handicapped high-schoolers). As my parents took me and my sister on various trips, we wandered through art museum after art museum, and later ventured to Europe. It became incredibly obvious that what is considered polite or appropriate varies by subculture and by region. This awareness of how arbitrary social norms are influences me to want to challenge them on principle, to push people to see if they realize whether their responses are due to socially conditioning or individually held values (as though it were easy to distinguish between the two!).

I’m a firm believer in respecting other people’s boundaries, whether we’re talking about giving consent for intimate acts or social interactions. And yet I see no reason to artificially enforce cultural norms that are arbitrary to the point of being silly. Don’t get me wrong, my parents raised me to be polite – but I will bring up politicized issues like the way women’s bodies are treated in our culture, from advertising to fat-shaming, at every opportunity. I will also include my own personal experiences in these conversations. If that kind of oversharing offends you, well, you’d better own that and tell me so, because I’ll respect your boundaries – but you need to be self-aware enough to set them in the first place.

This leads us into my political reasons for oversharing. I hinted at them above, when listing activities that some people might not care to hear about, whether thinking they’re extraneous or icky. What did all those descriptions have in common? They relate to bodies: eating and cooking bodies, menstruating bodies, exercising bodies. As I’ve discussed over at MySexProfessor.com, dualism is an insidious Western mentality that separates minds from bodies, valuing the mental over the physical, the rational over the passionate, and the masculine over the feminine. By talking so much about my body and related activities, I open myself to various kinds of criticism: that I spend too much time in the physical world and not enough in the mental realm that as an academic I’m supposed to inhabit; that I am shallow; that I am vain. The gendered dimensions of dualism make it clear that women are more likely to be aligned with the body than men are, resulting in our devaluing and degradation.

So I share about my life in a small gesture of resistance to the prevalence of dualism. I share about my life in order to say yes, I’m a woman, and yes, I happen to be extraordinarily intelligent, but I do not neglect my physical existence, and if you have a problem with that, well, you should work on those unconscious biases of yours while I’m over here busily (and happily) living my life.

There’s another reason that I share, sometimes to the point of oversharing. I’m painfully aware that people like me did not and do not always have a voice. Very few written records of historical women’s daily experiences exist. Those that do are, in European history at least, overwhelmingly noble (as not many lower-class women could read or write). Other people at the margins of society – gays and lesbians and transfolks, people of color in white-dominated societies, and so on – have also been voiceless and powerless in many situations, throughout many centuries. This makes me angry. I know that our oppressions and struggles are not equal or symmetrical, but I’m angry nonetheless. I’m angry that our experiences get lost and neglected because literacy and education are not yet considered universal human rights. I’m angry that history was written by the victors, most of whom were wealthy, Christian, heterosexual, monogamous, cis-gendered, neurotypical, European white men. I’m angry that even with the wealth of information at my fingertips thanks to the Internet, I still won’t be able to learn about what women’s lives were like in historical periods when men’s lives, and the lives of the rich, and the religious upper castes, were the sole ones being documented.

As a folklorist, I believe in the transformative power of personal narratives, those stories we tell based on our experiences. I want to see everyone’s lives documented. We all have stories, and those stories are treasures.

As a feminist, I want to see women, women’s lives, and women’s experiences and stories valued at least as much as those of men. I want to see that for all oppressed peoples no matter why they’re being oppressed, whether it’s skin color or religion or social class or sexuality or gender identity or nationality or (dis)ability.

So I share about my life. Sometimes I overshare. I broadcast it to the world, documenting it on the screen and in pen and ink. Maybe these small acts of resistance matter as such, and maybe they don’t, maybe they border on solipsism and narcissism. But I share because I know there are people like me living right now who cannot. Because if I’d been born perhaps one century ago, and definitely two or three centuries or more ago, I would not have been able to document my life.

Again and again, I return to the feminist slogan “the personal is political.” And yet I long for a day when it will no longer be useful. Perhaps documenting lives, even to the point of oversharing, is a step that will help us imagine that future.

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Being Busy & Being Ungrateful

October 31, 2012 in Feminism | 1 comment

Ack, I’d meant to post more this month. But this month turned into moving (which involved a multi-state roadtrip to accomplish family and furniture goals all in one go), plus facing the academic job market, plus traveling to New Orleans for the American Folklore Society’s annual meeting (which was a blast, as expected).

So I’ve been busy.

But I’ve also been thinking about where we stop, where we set our goals, where we declare ourselves complacent. For me, as a feminist, that’s a touchy issue; I don’t know if we’ll ever satisfactorily determine the extent to which men and women are different or the same. Nature and nurture are notoriously difficult to entangle. So part of the issue is: when should feminists stop demanding equal rights for women? What if we find out that there are, in fact, ways in which men and women are substantially different so we can’t really aspire to equality in certain sectors to begin with?

I don’t tend to take that argument very far, as I think we can aspire to a ton of equal rights sorts of things while core similarities/differences remain unresolved. Such as, ya know, eliminating sexual violence and rape and lack of access to contraceptive rights. Basic stuff.

However, Laurie Penny’s post on feminism and gratitude really resonated with me. She writes about how

Women have made enormous strides in the past hundred years, yes, of course we have, but let’s get beyond this idea that we’re supposed to be grateful that some of us are now permitted a warped sort of equality in a fundamentally unequal labour market. We have no reason to be grateful. We have every right to want more. We have a right to want everything, including not being morally and financially attacked by bigots in government with a business agenda every time they want to distract attention from their own fuckups. We have every right to demand more than this.

Yes, yes, and yes. Being told to be grateful for how far we’ve come is a derailing tactic, as well as an implicit threat. I am cheerfully ungrateful in the face of everything we have left to accomplish.

This, I suppose, is a nice lead-in to the harvest holiday season. I spent most of yesterday talking about Halloween with my folklore class, but we also discussed the wheel of the year and how seasonal change affected (and continues to affect) agricultural societies. Harvest holidays are especially prominent and widespread, because people use them to mark the time of the year when they have enough to eat, and have to work hard to pull in the last of the crops before the winter comes.

So gratitude has been very much on my mind lately, between folklore topics and personal ones (we live in a nice place; we have food; we have supportive friends and family).

But I refuse to be bullied into being “grateful” for how far women have come. The day when someone can legitimately pull that is a long way off in my view, unfortunately.

In the meantime… yay for autumn and colored leaves and pumpkins!

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