Who says I like right angles?

[tim]

I've been reading Carolyn Heilbrun's _Reinventing Womanhood_. I have the seeds of a post or an essay germinating in my head about geek-as-third-gender[*], genderqueerness (especially in female-assigned people), and how that does or doesn't relate to the idea of successful women aspiring to be "honorary men" as Heilbrun argues against, and to feminism and/or the rejection thereof. It still all comes down to the need to make gender both matter and not matter at the same time. To the apparent contradiction between saying, "fuck it, your labels don't apply to me, and I refuse to attach any of them to myself" and the idea of accepting the label of "woman" and living your life as an example of what being a woman can mean. To do either of those seems to be giving more credence to the concepts of "man" and "woman" than they deserve -- but that's what it means to live in a man's world. So, sometime, I will write something better-thought-out on this point.

[*] is worth noting because it's an essay that I and many other people in my circle have enjoyed, yet it seems somehow quite revealing that it's titled "The Anti-Girl Manifesto" -- why is it so frequent that when somebody writes something rejecting gender, it's always the trappings of the female gender that get attacked far more harshly? The author writes, "I'm not a woman, I'm a geek;" yet why does it seem so natural for a woman to write that when it would seem almost unnecessary for a man to declare, "I'm not a man, I'm a geek"? It's not that no one would ever say such a thing, but there doesn't seem to be anything contradictory in our discourse about being a man and a geek. I mean, duh. So when you say, "I'm not a woman, I'm a geek," is this a daring statement of individuality, or does it just reveal you've bought into the same poisonous stereotypes we all have, that you've bought the idea that you can't be a woman and a geek? When I say that I don't identify as a woman or a man because I don't feel like either one, am I just buying into the idea that man is default and woman is special-case? If I were exactly the same as I am now, with the same mind except with convex instead of concave bits (ignoring that I'd have lived a different life if I'd been born with them), would I feel the same need to repudiate my assigned gender? Or would I just take it as a given that I was a person first and a man later, because all men grow up with the privilege of being able to take it for granted that they are a person first, whereas a woman has to spend her life proving it?

To put it another way, there's something really quite broken about the fact that if you call a man a "lady", you're cruising for a bruising (unless he's gay or has an unusually good sense of humor), but if you call a woman a "gentleman", she's supposed to take it as a compliment.

Comments

[kest]

I think there's two axes. One is power. In our society, men have power. Therefore to want to have power becomes synonymous with wanting to be male. If one postulates that a 'geek' gender rests somewhere between 'male' and 'female' (although I'm not entirely sure that that is what you're postulating), then to be 'geek' *raises* the status of women, whereas it *decreases* the status of men. While most geek men are ok with this (it could be said that there is a geek status which to most geeks is more important than conventional status), there's still the social pressure to not talk about it much.

The other axis is, well, I want to say gender roles, but more like traditional/stereotypical gender traits. The things we say are 'girly' or 'manly'. I think there's a growing movement for not just equal power for women, but being allowed to have equal power *without* necessarily having to become 'manly', but this is hard, because women have long felt like we are forced to play men's game. Especially as one of those strong feminine traits is a desire to not rock the boat, to make everybody happy. There is also an equally strong movement for both men and women to have some freedom from these stereotypes and be able to be male or female without necessarily being 'girly' or 'manly'. In both cases I think it all comes down to respecting other people, and respecting difference. Female traits have value in their own right and should be respected by both men and women, just as male traits should.

[etb.livejournal.com]

There is also an equally strong movement for both men and women to have some freedom from these stereotypes

There is? Where?

[kest]

genderqueer is part of it, as are a number of subcultures, like goth/punk or hippies. The stereotypical gay man leans towards feminine traits and the stereotypical gay woman leans towards male traits. We have a growing number of not only women in pants, but men in skirts. (Although sometimes they call them kilts.) Men are doing more childcare, and are more interested in being 'sensitive', at the same time that women's career opportunities and confidence are increasing. It's kind of hard to see, because its slow, and a lot of it is 'underground', but its definitely there.

[etb.livejournal.com]

Bringing up "the stereotypical gay man" just emphasizes how off limits the idea of men-acting-like-women is. If you have sources for any of the rest of it, I'd like to see them; I don't mind being convinced that reality is less grim than it appears.