Ain’t I a woman?

A few weeks ago, I attended a series of meetings with people from my workplace in which we talked about gender performance. It was mostly folks I didn’t know, but I was enjoying getting to know them. Almost everything I said seemed to be shocking, though I certainly didn’t intend it to be, and I didn’t realize how weird other people think I am.

At one point, the facilitators asked us to silently indicate if we felt that various statements described us. One of them was, “I am proud to be my gender.” I seemed to be the only person in the room—certainly the only woman—who didn’t move. Now, I said a lot of real shit that weekend, about things far more shocking than not feeling pride about being female, but that was the one that seemed to upset people most. What do you mean, you’re not proud to be a woman? I didn’t know what to say. I don’t feel like my gender has much to do with anything important about me.

I sometimes think that if I’d been born male, I’d be somewhat different, having been encouraged toward, instead of away from, my natural aggressiveness and emotional inertia. I’d definitely have a narrower range of acceptable clothing options and style choices. I’d probably be more professionally successful, and I’d be slightly less likely to have gotten myself into traumatic/violent sexual/romantic situations. If I were a guy, I’d probably worry about getting an erection at work. But I’d be basically the same, I think.

I really only think about the fact that I am physiologically female when… menstruating, maybe? But not really even then? I’ve been wearing a bra so long that it isn’t some kind of ritual reminder of the difference between my body and other bodies, and aside from a few enlightening experiences with a strap-on, I don’t know what it would be like to be a male sexual partner. I don’t think about my femaleness. When I put on extra makeup, I’m not thinking, “I’m going to be such a beautiful woman!”; I’m thinking, “If someone takes photos, I’d like to have visible eyes.”

When people say they’re proud to be a woman, do they mean they feel some kind of extra-special connection with, like, historical women of great accomplishment? I mean, white people have done some incredible things too, but I’m certainly not proud to be white. I don’t think one gets to take credit for John Donne’s poetry but not for 400 years of slavery and genocide. Women aren’t some rare minority of the earth’s population, some chosen people who have spent all of recorded history being uniformly amazing. And even if they had, I didn’t have much to do with their accomplishments or with coming into being with a vagina.

When other people try to gender me by reminding me that I’m female (whether it’s “let’s have a girls’ night!” or “nice tits!”) it takes me a second to figure out they mean me. Why would I want to be in a homosocial environment, or acknowledge that you can see my body? I don’t yell at the body parts I perv on. Being reminded that I’m a woman, and so there is a natural thing that I’m supposed to do, or have, or act, always sounds like unfreedom to me. No thanks!

I’m proud of a lot of things, but my gender isn’t on the list. It almost never even occurs to me to think that I have a gender. I’m realizing in these conversations I’ve been having lately that other women, even women who do what I do for a living, experience their work, life, and thoughts as highly gendered, either internally or from externally, and that I am lucky in some ways and a freak in others for not feeling the same.

Are you a gendered person all the time? What reminds you that you are a gender? Would you say you are “proud” of your gender? If so, what are you proud of?

16 responses to “Ain’t I a woman?”

  1. FPS says:

    The idea of being proud to be a man has me tumbling the word “proud” around in my head and forgetting quite what it means. Proud to be a carbon-based life form! Proud to be three-dimensional! I mean, ok, pride is mostly for people who’ve been told something about them is terrible all their lives, I guess, and certainly that could apply to being a woman, but still, pridge/gender feels like a weird match.

    Here’s an embarrassing confession: I have some kind of reflexive pride about my…well, cultural background? Which is to say, when I read of the accomplishments of fellow yids, I get this “see?!” feeling, which is weird because 1) I’m not that Jewish 2) It’s been a long time since “Jews are not as good as everyone else” has been a thing in this country, certainly before my lifetime, and 3) It’s not like I’m somehow buoyed by the accomplishments of these people anyway. (There’s a great Grace Paley story where one character mocks the other for participating in a contest to name Jews in the news, but I’m forgetting the details, too many years since I read it.)

  2. AWB says:

    Are you proud of being gay? My own sexual orientation doesn’t really yield itself to pride (I am proud of… not really having very fixed or purposeful ideas about sex?)

  3. FPS says:

    From google books…she describes the contest to him and he says:

    “A hundred Jews in the news?” I said. “What a tolerant country! So, Dot, what do you get for this useful information?”

    “First prize, five thousand dollars and a trip to Israel. Also on return two days each in the three largest European capitals in the Free West.”

    “Very nice, “I said. What’s the idea, though? To uncover the ones that’ve been passing?”

    “Freddy, why do you look at everything inside out? They’re just proud of themselves, and they want to make Jews everywhere proud of their contribution to this country. Aren’t you proud?”

    “Woe to the crown of pride!”

    **

    Anyway no, proud of being gay? No. It’s not some clever little hat I made, what’s to be proud? If pride means “resolution not to be treated badly because of it”, as it often does, sure. But it’s a funny use of the word.

  4. LP says:

    I don’t feel “proud” to be a woman, but I definitely experience the world as gendered, and I don’t forget about my female-ness ever, really. As you say, AWB, if you were a male, you’d be “somewhat different.” I have no doubt that if any of us were born male we’d be very different indeed. Something about the entire world’s being skewed toward very defined gender roles will do that to people.

    As for “gay pride,” I’m with Smearcase: If pride is defined in opposition to, or to combat, shame, then hell yes I’m proud. If it’s pride in the sense of “I did a good thing,” then no. I didn’t make myself gay, after all, so taking pride in it, like it’s some sort of accomplishment, would be odd.

    Gene Weingarten, he of the ill-suited shirt, believes he has come up with a near-perfect test as to whether a person skews Democrat or Republican. Ask the person, “Are you proud to be American?” If they say yes without hesitation, Republican. Anything else, Democrat.

  5. Josh K-sky says:

    I enjoy performing my version of heterosexual masculinity. It would be in poor taste to call it pride, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a little fun with it. And yeah, what FPS said about Jewing it up.

    I think the pride vs shame formulation is the exact right way to think about it. There are plenty of things about femaleness that women get shamed for. Pride and not giving a fuck are both powerful responses, each with their own advantages. There’s probably a thank-you-feminist-foremothers lens worth applying there too, like mother’s pride makes way for daughter’s not-giving-a-fuck.

  6. Ivy says:

    I agree with LP on the world as a gendered experience. When you see a random stranger in the street, gender is something you clock right away and if you can’t, you might scratch your head a little. It is just so present most of the time. Personally, I am quite pleased to be female and I never forget it, either. (Although I change gender in dreams, sometimes, which is odd, but not distressing at the time.) But I experience that as a sort of rightness, rather than pride. I certainly don’t expect it to limit me. Having said that, though, I realised yesterday that if I weren’t a female still in my childbearing years, I would be completely content taking the medication I have to have to combat persistent, debilitating vertigo, would indeed likely take a higher dose. Grr!

  7. AWB says:

    Something about the entire world’s being skewed toward very defined gender roles will do that to people.

    But what if not the entire world is skewed toward very defined gender roles? What if certain professions are worse than others, certain cities worse than others, certain groups of friends worse than others? I really do mean it when I say that I don’t feel like I am deeply gendered by my environment, so I don’t feel that it is universal just because lots of people, even most people, experience it that way. Does that make sense?

  8. AWB says:

    One of the other questions that was asked during this retreat was whether people feel more defined by their race or by their gender. To a one (myself excepted), white people said gender, and that race had nothing to do with how they conceive of themselves. People of color said race or equal influence. I was the only person who said that I feel myself to be a white person before I feel myself to be a woman. I conceive of my whiteness in a much more frequent way as something that defines me.

  9. LP says:

    But what if not the entire world is skewed toward very defined gender roles? What if certain professions are worse than others, certain cities worse than others, certain groups of friends worse than others?

    Sure, certain professions / cities / groups of friends are worse than others. But even in pockets of “not so bad”-ness, the world is really, really skewed toward defined gender roles. The way women and men are portrayed in film, television, ads, books, on talk shows, on the news, etc etc etc. backs up a certain gender definition. It’s incredibly deeply entrenched. Do I believe you don’t feel deeply engendered? Sure. Do I think that’s rare? Yes, extremely.

    The other day, I had lunch with a hedge fund analyst I know. We ran into a mutual friend who works as a nanny.

    Don’t think, just answer: Who’s the man and who’s the woman in that scenario? If we’re honest, 99% of us pictured it exactly the same way.

  10. swells says:

    I agree with LP: the gendering is impossible to unentrench if you live in society at all. (We’ve all heard the stories about how it begins in the womb with people cooing in a high shrill voice to girlbellies and speaking in a chin-chuckin’ hey-sport deeper register to boybellies.) While my gender is not the first thing I think of about myself (although I don’t know what is instead), I think I’m more conscious of it (and more at peace with it) the older I get. I do know that I was deeply dissatisfied with it as a kid, mainly because it was so clear to me that boys had so much cooler lives. (In fact, I have since read a terribly vindicating article about the beginning reader at my school–a text that was taught only in my state and for only the few years I was starting school–and how it was later yanked because the gender stereotypes were so pervasive and the girl character was so passive and lame. I often wonder if that’s what started my disgust with being a girl, which fortunately ended many years later. I say fortunately since I was and am one.)

  11. A White Bear says:

    One does have to recognize that things have gotten so much better over the past ten years, at least among young people. Even five years ago, I’d have said that my students think of me first as a woman, then as an instructor, then as whatever else, and that I used to hear them say things like, “You [act like or care about] that? But you’re a woman!” Now they just don’t. Students used to get frustrated with me when I wanted to talk about gender, in a defensive way–don’t take my stereotypes away!–and now they look at me like I’m talking about some other planet, taking diligent notes about how aliens used to use “she” as a brand of shame.

    In an independent study, a student and I are working on several texts right now about the construction of masculinity in the 1990’s, and he’s sort of baffled by them. Why would anyone feel an attachment, he says, to that bad old masculinity that didn’t do anyone any good? He says he had the opportunity to love his father without being particularly anxious about it or feeling afraid of him. His sister was the athletic one, and while he acknowledges that maybe that was difficult for her in some sense, he was never ashamed of his own inclinations, and enjoyed her successes.

    In general, I think the biggest strides have been made with (admittedly a small subsection of) young men. I’ve got several guys in my classes this semester who, in some former time, would have been deeply freaked out by me, and tried to get in my face or show everyone who’s the real man in the room or whatever chest-puffing thing they used to do. I almost never feel that with students anymore. I don’t feel looked at as an object of contempt because I’m female, especially after moving away from NYC–the city where you are a WOMAN or a MAN and don’t you forget it.

    I think my sense of peace in this matter might just be attached to getting older, in that I am not an object of potential lust for most of the people I encounter, and that’s a relief. I can mostly get around and do my business as a person without worrying about whether I’m being gendered or not. There is discrimination, I feel, but it’s much more (in my current place at least) because I’m single and queer, and therefore definitely not an appropriate friend for anyone who isn’t.

  12. AWB says:

    On reflection, I’ll agree that other people might be trying to gender me all the time, but I’m just way, way less sensitive to it than I used to be, as I come to realize more and more that being a woman has almost nothing to do with how I think of myself. It really comes as a shock when some little bit of that gets through. Today at the airport, some TSA dude called me “young miss” and I only looked up to see what preteen must be standing next to me. It comes off as hilarious more than insulting these days.

  13. LP says:

    In general, I think the biggest strides have been made with (admittedly a small subsection of) young men. I’ve got several guys in my classes this semester who, in some former time, would have been deeply freaked out by me, and tried to get in my face or show everyone who’s the real man in the room or whatever chest-puffing thing they used to do. I almost never feel that with students anymore.

    plus:

    On reflection, I’ll agree that other people might be trying to gender me all the time, but I’m just way, way less sensitive to it than I used to be, as I come to realize more and more that being a woman has almost nothing to do with how I think of myself.

    …leads me to think that while new generations of young men are no doubt different, the difference in your classroom is no doubt also related to how you have changed.

    Also, I’m not sure I understand the construction of people thinking of you, or anyone, “first as a woman, then as an instructor, then as whatever else.” For the students, you’re obviously a woman and obviously their instructor. Does one really outweigh the other? Or is it possible that the responses they had to you in earlier times were responses they had to how you felt / taught in the classroom?

    That all said, I believe you are right that people are changing and gender norms / roles are softening. I just think that for all the progress, there’s still a loooooooooooooong way to go before we get to any semblance of a non-gender-roled world.

  14. Ivy says:

    LP, funnily enough, when you posed your who is who gender test, until you said anything, I’d had them BOTH as women in my head.

  15. LP says:

    Ivy, you are a rebel and a rogue. Ha! As if women can be those things.

  16. AWB says:

    I also think that gender is a real experience for some people, in themselves. They feel very female in some way that I don’t. Others feel very male. These feelings have no absolute tie to one’s biological sex, of course. And it’s not just a product of their environment, having been treated as a woman or a man.