Gender and Emotions

One way in which the patriarchy acts to the detriment of men is by robbing them of the right and the capacity to express their emotions verbally. From early childhood, girls observe their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and their female friends discuss openly and clearly what they feel and why they feel it. This is how we acquire the extremely important skill of verbalizing our emotions. Later on in life, we emulate our mothers' and aunts' example and create our own networks of emotional support. We learn to build a core group of people whom we can always turn to, call on the phone, email, and say, "I'm feeling really sad today, can we talk?"

Boys, on the other hand, are schooled to conceal their emotions as much as possible. "Boys don't cry,"  they are told from an early age. So in order not to jeopardize their gender identity, they learn to repress the emotions they experience. Sadness, grief, depression, loneliness - these emotions often don't get verbalized in many men's lives. They are taught to hold it all in, never show what they really feel because that would be unmanly. Few things are as bad for one's psychological and physical health as this stiff-upper-lipping through negative emotions.

At the same time, women who find it more difficult to verbalize what they feel also find themselves castigated by the patriarchal vision of gender. Women who lack the capacity of being as openly emotional as the patriarchal standard expects every woman to be are branded as unfeminine. 

This gender disparity in how well men and women can express themselves emotionally makes it more difficult for people in heterosexual relationships to get along and understand each other. This, of course, is one of the goals of the patriarchal system which is bent on turning gender relations into a constant war between men and women whom it positions to be so different as to come from different planets. Patriarchal media try to convince us that these differences in the ease with which men and women verbalize their feelings have to do with how differently our brains are "wired." This popular belief has been rejected by actual science more times than one can count. Still, many people choose to uphold it because their only alternative would consist of realizing how much they are being hurt on a daily basis by the patriarchal view of gender. Since that would simultaneously imply a rejection of the advantages that the patriarchy offers to both men and women who comply with its basic norms, many people are not prepared to do so and prefer to soothe themselves with platitudes about different "wiring" of their brains according to their gender.

Gender Relations in Russian-Speaking Countries

Mary was beautiful, with thick dark hair, huge, slightly protruding eyes, and a touch of condescension in her smile. At the age of sixteen, she married Zinovi Stolberg, an energetic, intelligent and enterprising young man. Three years later, in 1929, she gave birth to Klara and left her husband because he annoyed her with his opinions. Not his opinions as such since she never listened to what he said anyways but, rather, with his daring to express any opinions at all. 

                                                                                                          Michael Blekhman, Reflection

When I became a college student in Canada in 1998, I was shocked to see that male students spoke out and expressed their opinions both in class and outside of it. I was used to my male classmates sitting in the back rows of the classroom and giggling. My idea of men was that they constantly needed to be told what to do by women. Who would then have the task of putting right everything that inept, helpless men would inevitably mess up. My favorite sentence in dealing with men at that time was, 'We are going to do what I say, when I say, and how I say it.' And if you believe that this attitude made my romantic life problematic, you couldn't be more wrong. Nothing is easier than abandoning responsibility for your life to somebody who is willing to assume it, so there were crowds of candidates for the role of a man who is being bossed around by a strong woman. (I've changed since then, of course, and now resist all attempts of people to assign me the role of the boss of their lives.)

We are a culture of powerful, bossy women and immature men who never speak out. They just mumble. Obviously, not everybody is this way, but this trend exists and it is very powerful. So if you think that the quote I gave above is a joke or an exaggeration, think again. I knew Mary when she was a lot older but she was exactly the way she is described here. She was my great-grandmother.

You Know What Makes Me Sad?

That at least once a day somebody alights on my post My Husband Doesn't Help Me Around the House after entering something similar to the post's title into a search engine. I truly hope that after reading the post these women at least begin to consider how their way of thinking about household chores infantilizes their male partners and ensures that being female transforms them into permanent domestic slaves.

Dear female reader! Please remember that it isn't "my dirty dishes." It's "our dirty dishes." You male partner is not supposed to "help" you take care of your shared space, meals, laundry and groceries. He is supposed to take care of his own shit like an adult that he is. 

Please also remember that there is no better way to bury the sexual passion in your relationship than to be the person who always runs around with a mop while the other partner snoozes on the couch. Slaving permanently over housework will not benefit you in any way whatsoever. So instead of trying to figure out why he doesn't "help," simply stop doing more than your fair share. Just stop. 

Dorothy Seymour

I'm sorry for posting so much, people. I often resolve to stop inundating people with posts so often but there are so many things going on everywhere that are worth commenting on that I just can't help myself. This is a story that was brought to my attention by reader Patrick whose controversial comments we all appreciate. Thanks, Patrick!

The baseball lovers among us must have surely heard about Harold Seymour's seminal studies of this sport. I know nothing about baseball but even I have heard his name and know of his importance to the writing of baseball's history. Now it turns out that much of the research for all of the books and most of the writing for the last one had been done my Seymour's wife Dorothy, his life partner of 30 years whom he refused to acknowledge as a co-author. 

Dorothy contributed a lot to Harold's career from the moment they married. She was helpful in helping him get through the writing of his doctoral dissertation:

As a good '50s wife, she typed the 632-page dissertation in which Seymour traced baseball from a childhood pursuit of boys into a full-fledged business and American cultural centerpiece. Cornell University awarded him his doctorate in 1956, and the dissertation helped launch sports history as a legitimate scholarly pursuit. It grew into his first baseball history book, published in 1960.Dr. Seymour's wife knows now that she probably contributed more to that dissertation than the academic world would consider appropriate. In the preface, Seymour acknowledged "the help of numerous individuals and organizations."He did not mention Dorothy.

Everybody knows that being the partner of a person in the throes of writing a doctoral dissertation is very hard. Those of who who suffered through the process of researching, writing, revising and going nuts over the dissertation know how much we owe to those people who were by our side and put up with us in the process. Seymour, however, felt nothing similar. A wife for him was not as person. She was a convenient object who was supposed to produce and shut up.


The most frequent argument male chauvinists use to disparage women is that the entirety of human civilization was created by men while women just sat there twiddling their thumbs and sometimes managing to look pretty which only served to distract men from their all-important endeavors. I wonder how many of the great works of literature and scientific advances owe their existence to the silenced wives who toiled in the background and whose input was never recognized.

Not A Real Woman

I finally figured out why this whole discussion about "gendered research" bothers me so much. My entire life other women have been telling me that I'm "not really a woman" or that I "think, act, speak just like a man." Things that disqualify me as a "real woman" range from tiny and insignificant (e.g. my indifference to chocolate) to more important ones (my bookishness, my directness in interpersonal communications, etc.). I might move from one continent to another, from one country to another but there will always be some women somewhere who will explain to me that I don't fit into the "correct" version of womanhood. Women, mind you. Never men. (I realize that men do that to other men, of course. But I'm not a man, so I only get this from women.) Of course, discovering that my passion for research now also characterizes me as not really female couldn't fail but annoy me. 

Gender relations are a lot more complex than "bad horrible men oppress nice kind women" (or vice versa). Both men and women are actively engaged in keeping existing gender stereotypes in place. Both men and women are victimized by these stereotypes in certain ways, while being favored by them in a variety of other ways. 

Often, people who pretend to denounce a gender stereotype end up perpetuating it. In the discussion of "gendered research" I was told several times that "women are expected to be nurturing as teachers." The curious thing, though, is that I have never in my life heard, read, or saw on TV any man use the words "nurturing" and "teaching" in the same sentence. So who hides behind the seemingly innocuous passive construction of "women are expected"? Who really expects us to be trivial, giggly, chocolate- and boyfriend-obsessed, nurturing, self-sacrificing, cookie-baking, wasting our lives on household chores, and incapable of producing valuable research? 

Mary Winkler and the Price of Patriarchy

This story happened a while ago but ever since I learned about it I couldn't stop thinking about how detrimental patriarchy is for men and women alike. And how, at the same time, it benefits both men and women in strange ways. 

In 2006, Mary Winkler shot Matthew Winkler, her husband and the father of her children, in the back with a shotgun as he lay sleeping. He could have still been saved but Mary Winkler simply turned around, took her children and left as her husband lay dying. She lied to her daughter and told her that help for Daddy was on its way and just left. It was later revealed that Mary Winkler had invested all her family savings into a Nigerian money scam. To cover for her money losses she started writing bad checks, which got her further into debt. The bank had threatened to contact her husband for clarifications. So the night before the bank was due to contact her husband, Mary Winkler shot him with a shotgun. There was never any question that she was the killer.

So how much time in jail do you think she got for this murder? A murder aimed at concealing her financial machinations, no less? A murder of a sleeping, helpless individual? A week. That's it. Just one week for the murder of her husband, a preacher, a man deeply respected in their community. At trial, Mary Winkler alleged abuse at the hands of her husband and suggested that he had wanted her to engage in "unnatural" sex. There was absolutely no proof of any abuse. Except, that is, for a pair of stripper shoes that Winkler's lawyer brought into the courtroom from God knows where. The stripper shoes that her husband allegedly asked her to wear gave the jury an excuse to let the murderer go free. Well, not completely free. There was that week in jail.

There is hardly any need to point out that if a man shot his wife and the mother of his children in the back while she lay sleeping in bed and then left her to die, he could have brought every pair of freaky shoes under the sun into the courtroom only to get laughed right into a prison cell where he'd spend the rest of his life. 

Patriarchy damages women in a multitude of ways. It strives to push them into marriage and motherhood, which many women neither need nor want. It traps women in lifestyles that do not fulfill them and that leave them angry, miserable, and depressed. It makes it so much more difficult for women to succeed professionally and financially. However, patriarchy doesn't treat men all that much better. Men's lives are always valued a lot less than women's lives. In every developed country in the world, men have shorter lifespans than women. Men are expected to wear themselves out prematurely while keeping not only their children but often also a wife. Who can shoot them in the back and get off with a week-long sentence.

Ain't patriarchy just grand, people?

Gender Roles: Why Do Women Live Longer Than Men?

U.S. men die on average almost five years before women, far sooner if they're minorities, and a medical journal is calling the disparity a "silent health crisis." The American Journal of Public Health reports: Men have higher death rates than women for each of the 15 leading causes of death except Alzheimer's disease. Men's death rates are at least twice as high for accidents, murder, suicide and hardening of the liver. Women have lived longer for the past century, and although the gap is narrowing, men's life expectancy remains almost five years shorter than for women, with black men dying almost 12 years sooner on average than white women. Men are slightly more likely to get chronic diseases like high blood pressure or cancer, and twice as likely to consume more than five alcoholic drinks a day.

This trend is present in all developed countries. Obviously, I don't do research in this area, but a couple of things come to mind whenever I think of this disparity in life expectancy. Every time I see yet another study on this subject I immediately remember one of my freshmen intoning in a dejected voice: "I have to graduate, find a good job, start a family, and support my family. I can't think of travelling or doing things I like because supporting my family should come first." Would you care to guess the gender of this student?

I conducted a little experiment once and asked my students whether being unemployed and unable to support a family would be detrimental to their gender identity. "Would you feel less of a woman / less of a man in this case?" I asked. Would you like to venture a guess as to how the answers varied according to the students' gender?

Men are schooled to think that they are not really men if they don't spend their entire lives dragging around the burden of being financially responsible not only for themselves but for a bunch of other people as well. And as central as her career might be for a woman, job loss, while undeniably traumatic, does not endanger her gender identity. When my Visiting Professor contract was about to run out and no new job offers were forthcoming, I felt like a professional and academic failure. I did not, however, feel any less of a woman. If my inability to find a job at that point had hurt not only my professional sense of self but also my gender identity, the resulting stress would have obviously been even more difficult to deal with.

Since we are talking about trauma, patriarchal societies offer women more ways of dealing with traumatic events productively. Whenever anything bad happens, I can turn to my group of firends and verbalize every single little thing that happened and that I feel as a result or might feel in the future. Then, I can repeat my sad story as many times as I need in order to heal, without any fear of being considered deficient in terms of my gender identity. And men? How can they deal with trauma without being accused of being wimpy, girly, or anything similar? Well, as we have seen in the quote that opened this post, they always have alcohol. Or violence. Do I need to point out that neither of these outlets is very conducive to improving one's life expectancy?

This is not a let's-pity-poor-miserable-men post. This patriarchal system was put - and kept - in place by both men and women and it benefits both men and women, albeit in different ways. I believe, however, that, ultimately, we all end up losing a lot more than we gain as a result of patriarchal gender roles. So maybe we should just stop, you know? Scrap this ridiculous, unwieldy system that cannibalizes our lives and stop organizing our lives in terms of something as inherently meaningless as gender.

Female Academics

New research on women in academia offers some interesting findings on what hampers the progress of female academics:

In a blind analysis of more than 600 letters of recommendations submitted for about 200 applicants for academic positions at a single university, researchers identified descriptors generally used to recommend females versus males. When these letters were used to rank candidates, those with more “feminine” descriptors (compassionate, supportive, caring, etc.) were ranked lower. In other words, “…a much higher proportion of female candidates — regardless of their overall qualifications — are praised with these words that appear to hurt their chances of being hired for faculty jobs.”

As someone who will never be described as "compassionate," "supportive" or "caring," I have observed that female academics in North America often put the needs of colleagues, students, their departments etc. ahead of their own, which, as we can see from this study, hurts their careers. However, powerful women who do not see supporting others and serving someody else's needs as important are also disliked because they end up being considered "aggressive," "cold" and "bitchy." Which ultimately also hurts their careers.

The problem lies, of course, in the social construction of femininity in a society that requires women to be subservient while despising them if they comply and punishing them if they do not.

Why Is Eat, Pray, Love So Popular?

We have already discussed the imperialistic and racist dimensions of Eat, Pray, Love. Today, a movie based on this book is coming out and it is predicted to be a huge success. So why is there such a huge (mostly female) following the book and movie about what one reviewer calls a "pampered princess on constant display" with a "petulant, overblown ego"?

Female life choices are still pretty limited. Marriage and babies are touted as an only acceptable path for women from the TV and the movie screens, newspaper and magazine pages. Even within this limited model there are further limitations: planning the wedding the right way, giving birth the right way, breast-feeding the right way, bonding with the baby the right way, even holding the baby the right way. Female weight, appearance, mode of behavior, drinking habits, the volume of women's voices, etc. are endlessly policed. We are routinely stopped in the street by complete strangers and exhorted to smile, lose weight, quit smoking, and (as happened to me the other day) stop reading.

It is no surprise that women are sick and tired of this restrictive model. They gulp down rubbish like Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia because it offers a celebration of an escape from the obligatory marriage and motherhood, from the ubiquitous and unattainable standards of female thinness, from the condemnation of women who put their own pleasure before the that of men and children.

What saddens me is that this female discontent is not being channelled in the direction of political activism. Feminism does not have much to offer to these women since "choice feminists" have made the movement completely toothless. "Choice feminism" proposes that the greatest freedom women can desire is the freedom to be obedient little consumers. It is terrified of questioning any aspect of the gender status quo. The two major ruling parties in the US (which are mirrored by regional equivalents petty much everywhere in the West), have no use for women. Hatred of women is part of the Republican agenda. As for the Democrats, the first thing that Obama did when he came to power was to sell out women. Politically, such topics as parental leave, accessible and affordable daycare, equal pay, etc.  are dead. If politicians talk about women at all, it is to patronize us and condescend to us. Women are needed to come to the polls, vote, and shut the hell up afterwards. Which is what women do because, as usual, the eternal female role is to do what men want them to.

Until there is a legitimate political force interested in channeling female discontent into activism, women will have no alternative but to escape into idiotic fantasies like the one offered by Eat, Pray, Love.

Women as Furniture

If you have been around this blog in the past month, you must already know how much I hoped Spain would win the World Cup. When they did, I was ecstatically happy but only until I started watching the after-game award ceremony. Just watch the following appalling video, and you will know what I mean. It disturbed me so much I didn't even feel like celebrating.



So here we have the happy Spanish athletes getting their well-deserved medals. We see a group of paunchy older gentlemen handing them the medals. So far, so good. But look at who is standing behind the row of paunchy medal-giving gentlemen? A group of women. Lined up in a neat little row, all dressed the same, all made up the same, all with the same frozen Stepford-like smiles glued to their faces. All white, except for a token black woman. We are in Africa, you know. Gotta represent that population.

The women's sole purpose of being there with their forced toothy smiles is to hold the trays with medals. I just wonder, how did that job search go? "We need people to hold trays while wearing idiotic getup and smiling stupidly. That sounds like a subservient position. We need to hire us some women for that!!" How was the decision to base this particular hiring on gender? Is there some way in which having a vagina makes one better suited to holding trays?

How nice of FIFA to show us women exactly where we belong in their worldview.

Infantilizing Men

Recently, I read a very interesting post by Hugo Schwyzer that made me think about how often men are expected to pay a role of infantilized, immature and helpless little creatures in a relationship. Hugo's description of how he used to feel in his relationships is very telling in this respect:
"In my past marriages and relationships, I found myself– like so many men — taking on the part of the "naughty boy" and the "helpless child." Time and again, I turned wives and girlfriends into mother-figures, and the result was inevitably disastrous. I’m not going to pretend to have all the answers as to why we do what we do, or even why I did what I did. I do know that I’m not the only man who found "courtship" easier than "relationship." Over and over again, I devoted time and energy to "getting the girl", and when I succeeded, soon felt vaguely let down and confused about my role. It was all too easy for me to become increasingly childlike. I figured out that most of partners were students of my emotions, and most of them were eager to make the relationship work. So they were the ones who took over the "feeling work" of the relationship. They were the ones who brought up when something wasn’t working, they were the ones who took on the primary role of keeping what we had "oiled and running", as it were." (The rest of Hugo's interesting post can be found here.)

This is precisely the balance of power within a romantic relationship that the media always portray for us. Women are bustling around men, trying to figure out "how to make a relationship work", "what is wrong with the relationship", and "where the relationship should go". Think about the endless discussions on these topics on Sex and the City, where women seem to do little else other than engage in endless attempts to figure out men and relationships with men. Think about such shows as Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens, According to Jim, and the like, where the relationship inside a middle-aged couple looks more like a relationship between a.mother and a teenage son.
Many women automatically think that being in a relationship means that they have to take upon themselves the greater share of work needed to maintain the relationship. This goes both for housework and for any practical and emotional issues attendant upon being part of a couple. This sad reality robs women of time and energy that they invest into all that housework combined with having to work as a psychologist and couples' therapist within their own relationships. As a result, being with somebody becomes for many women one more full-time job rather than an opportunity to relax and enjoy themselves.

Hugo Schwyzer tells us honestly why men agree to play the part of a helpless child within a relationship: it seems easier. Of course, as he also recognizes, this stunts your emotional growh and robs you of power to decide what actually goes on both inside the relationship and inside your own house. For my part, I'm more interested in why women agree to take on this model of behavior.
The answer, I believe, is manifold. On the one hand, there is that feeling of being indispensable that I discussed in my post on gender and housework. There is also a need to conform to the patriarchal standard that presents all women as more emotional as men, better at communication than men, and more capable of resolving emotional issues than men.

And then, of course, there is this whole issue of empowerment and control. As women, we often feel disempowered in view of continued gender inequality within society. We still don't get equal pay for equal work, we are still often prevented from career advancement, our right to control our own bodies is still in grave danger, we still have to fight extremely hard to get taken seriously, we still get the least prestigious, badly paid, menial and monotonous jobs, we are still severely underrepresented in the Senate, the Congress, the Supreme Court, etc. Our society offers us the romantic and emotional sphere as pretty much the only space where we can be completely in control. If you are infantilized by men at work, in a classroom, in the public sphere, it often seems like the only solution is to infantilize them in return in the personal sphere.

What we get as a result, is an unhealthy and unequal balance of power both in the public and in the private sphere.

Gender and Housework

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

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

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

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

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

Scientific Sexism

Chauvinism pervades every single area of our lives to an incredible degree. Even scientists, whose job is to discover and report objective data, prefer to push their patriarchal ideology instead. A recent article in Science Daily is a perfect example of that.

The article is titled "Unnatural Selection: Birth Control Pills May Alter Choice Of Partners." Its main goal is to bash the most important scientific breakthrough of the XXth century: the birth control pill. Many patriarchally-minded people hate the pill because it liberated women from having their lives controlled by their biology (as I discuss in my last post.) So they come up with studies which are aimed at scaring women off of the pill.

The main problem with taking oral contraception is that it will destroy your personal life. Giving birth to an unwanted child every year of your life, of course, will not do that. But taking the pill definitely will. So how does the oral contraception damage our lives? According to the article, by "interfering with a woman's ability to choose, compete for and retain her preferred mate." Women who are on the pill, the article claims, are less likely to prefer "men showing dominance and male-male competitiveness." Of course, female interest towards domineering jerks is diminishing (which in my book is great). This is a natural process for a society that is trying to move away from patriarchal stereotypes. The only group of people who might find this tendency scary is domineering men. So, in reality, the pill doesn't prevent women from "retaining their preferred mate." What happens is that domineering losers cannot retain a woman in a new reality where women aren't tied forever to these idiots by constant child-bearing.


In order to sell their idiotic propaganda to women, these pseudo-scientists tell us that if we dare to mess with nature's design that destines us to be perennially pregnant, we will not be able to find us a man: "The authors also speculate that the use of oral contraceptives may influence a woman's ability to attract a mate by reducing attractiveness to men, thereby disrupting her ability to compete with normally cycling women for access to mate."   I have no idea since when specialists in Animal and Plant Sciences, as these pseudo-scientists are, qualify to talk about purely sociological issues such as mating and dating. But from personal experience of someone who has been on the pill for 15 years, I can tell these stupid women-haters that they can relax. My attractiveness hasn't suffered and I have never in my life had to compete with any women ("normal" or otherwise) for access to men. Somehow, men never give me the chance and just keep competing for me, as annoying as it is to me.

Marriage

As we all know, marriage is an institution that is beneficial to men and detrimental to women. Married men live longer than single men, while married women live shorter lives than married women. Married women still do most household chores for the family, so while men gain a cleaner and a cook, married women lose time and energy needed to serve two people instead of one. As Susan Faludi demonstrated in her great book Backlash (which reads like a mystery novel, so I highly recommend to any one), single men suffer a much higher rate of depression and neurosis than married men because of their single status. Single women, however, suffer from depression due to their single status a lot less than single men.

Since the institution of marriage is so detrimental to women and beneficial to men, ideological devices needed to be created in order to make it seem desirable to women. In our societies, marriage is presented as the only way for a woman to gain an acceptable status and a certain legitimacy as a member of society and a representative of her gender. We are bombarded with TV shows, movies, articles, books, etc. that show us an endless succession of women desperate for a marriage proposal. Why that proposal is a good and a necessary thing for a woman is never explained. The way ideology works is by presenting something as simply existing. As a result, it never occurs to most people to question why these movie and book characters are so desperate to enter an institution that will shorten their life span and bring them a lot more boring housework.

These ideological devices often go to ridiculous lengths to make their point. We have all watched Sex and the City, a profoundly patriarchal show that has no connection to reality. In real life, beautiful accomplished women like the characters of this show receive marriage proposals by the bucketful from a very early age to the day when they die. Never would women like Carrie, Miranda and Samantha have to humiliate themselves for the sake of getting some loser to validate their existence by an offer of a relationship. Still, the television and the movies create an alternative reality where women are desperate to get a proposal pretty much from anybody. As a result, women see themselves as incomplete without being married and consent to getting married so much more readily.

Of course, there is always another side to this story. Women would not participate in the "get-married-or-society-will-see-you-as-worthless" ideology if they didn't gain something from it. Marriage is such a nifty little institution that it manages to accomodate everyone. What women as a group gain from it occurs precisely at the point where they lose something else. We have known at least starting with Aristotle that human beings are social animals. We all need to feel socially accepted and validated by our peers. Getting married is pretty much the only way for a woman to feel that she has been successful as a member of society and a representative of her gender. As limiting as this is, it is also very easy. Proving your social value through working, through having a career, through having enough money to maintain yourself and your family (which is the only way that men have to prove their social and gender worth) is a lifelong enterprise. It is something you have to engage in on a daily basis. No matter how successful you were yesterday, if you lose your job today, you will feel like a lesser citizen and a lesser male. Getting married, however, is a one-time thing. You do it once, prove your worth as a member of society and a woman, and you are pretty much done. If you lose your job, or fail to graduate, for example, it will be painful for you, but no woman (that I know of, at least) feels less of a woman because of unemployment.

What's Happening to Canada??

God knows I love Canada. It's the place I call home, it's where my family lives, it's a beautiful country with amazing people. But recently news from Canada have been more and more and more disturbing.

In an article titled "Can a busy female politician give reliable evidence? A judge says no," Globe and Mail reports: "Lisa MacLeod's evidence in trial of Ottawa mayor was dismissed because she was commuting to Toronto, ‘leaving her husband and child in Ottawa'. MacLeod is a young female politician who commutes to her job at Queen's Park from Ottawa and leaves her husband, Joe, and four-year-old daughter, Victoria, at home. Mr. Justice Douglas Cunningham of Ontario Superior Court said this is a big distraction for the 34-year-old woman and as a result he felt he could not accept her evidence as corroboration of the Crown's key witness in the recent high-profile, influence-peddling trial of Ottawa Mayor Larry O'Brien."

It's unbelievably disturbing that in Canada a woman's evidence at trial isn't given any weight because she dares to be a working mother. This is beyond disgusting. Shame on you, Justice Cunningham! You give a bad name to all Canadians.

Now I have a question: is the growing frequency of such outrageous events a result of the noxious influence of Canada's Conservative party? Does the conservative ideology trickle down from the Prime-Minister's seat to infect all strata of our society?

A Letter to the Man I Love

My Love,

I always thought how great it was that you and I split the household chores evenly and never have to argue about whose turn it is to do the dishes or make dinner. I always appreciated your belief that there are no male or female activites, duties, or capabilities. I know that for a feminist like you it's crucial that I hold the same beliefs.

Today, however, UK's Daily Mail has informed me that the fact that you do household chores has made you "abandon [your] natural manly instincts and become [a] hybrid of both sexes." Even though you were the one to suggest we split our household duties, it turns out you must have been bullied into it by bad horrible me. According to a relationship expert Francine Kaye (yeah, I know, this "profession" can better be described as "loser-swindler"), you are now a "male-female hybrid." I have recently had an ample opportunity to verify that your "manly instincts" are perfectly fine, but who knows what could have occurred in these few hours we haven't seen each other? Maybe two years of all this dishwashing and bathroom cleaning have finally kicked in.

I got upset at first but then I realized that this "expert" considers me a "masculine-like female." I know this suggestion makes you laugh. But remember that time I stayed at home waiting for the fridge repair person? Remember how I sometimes book airplane and Greyhound tickets? This is what turns me into a masculine-like female in our expert's opinion.

So everything is fine, sweetheart. A male-female (you) and female-male (me) can surely find a way to mesh our male and female parts quite nicely.

And believe me, contrary to this article's assertion, I will never resent you for not treating me like your household slave.

Lots of love,
Clarissa.

Cooking and Chauvinism

Michael Pollan's "Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch" New York Times article is one of those annoying thinly veiled attempts to bemoan the ways in which modern women have abandoned their housewifely duties. I have written before about my love for cooking and my struggle to keep this hobby secret because of the chauvinistic connotations attached to it. Pollan's article is a perfect example of how a chauvinistic culture attaches all kinds of ideologically manipulative beliefs to cooking.

People seem to love cooking shows (Top Chef, Hell's Kitchen, Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares), Pollan says, but this fascination with TV programs doesn't make them want to cook on their own: "Here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves?" For some Reason, Pollan doesn't ask himself why all the people who watch "So You Think You Can Dance?"and "American Idol" don't rush to take dancing and singing lessons, why all the fans of Law & Order don't seek careers in law enforcement, or why everybody who watches 24 doesn't engage in torturing people on a regular basis. "A great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves", says Pollan, but forgets to add that there is a score of activities that we love observing on television even though we never engage in them in real life.

Pollan doesn't stop at lamenting the lack of popularity homecooking enjoys. He goes on to look for people to blame. The answer is easy for this journalist: blame the feminists. Big, mean and nasty feminists, it turns out, duped poor innocent American women into believing that housewifely chores might be boring, repetitive and unfulfilling: "The year Julia Child went on the air — 1963 — was the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression." According to this male chauvinist, women loved dedicating their entire existence to cooking, cleaning, and doing the laundry. Then Betty Friedan came and magically convinced them they were miserable. Since women are inherently brainless, one book is more than enough to convince them that they hate activities that they, in fact, enjoy. It's surprising that these utterly stupid creatures even managed to read and understand the book in question, but this is yet another contradiction in this quasi-journalist's idiotic argument.

This kind of antifeminist reasoning inevitably leads Pollan into a breathless description of happy prelapsarian (that is, before cooking was "thoughtlessly trampled" by nasty feminists "in their rush to get women out of the kitchen") moment when women cooked and men sat around and observed their efforts: "Even when “everyone” still cooked, there were plenty of us who mainly watched: men, for the most part, and children. Most of us have happy memories of watching our mothers in the kitchen, performing feats that sometimes looked very much like sorcery and typically resulted in something tasty to eat." It doesn't matter to Pollan if the women he is dying to see back in the kitchen are interested in providing him not only with homecooked food but also with entertainment. The journalist then proceeds to enumerate his mother's cooking miracles in a tone of a whiny 5-year-old who wants mean feminists to give him back his mommy.

This kind of attitude is precisely why I don't tell people I cook. Chauvinists of Pollan's ilk are incapable of seeing cooking simply as a hobby, they need to attach ideological meaning to it.

Susan Faludi's "The Terror Dream"

It's great to read books where the author expresses everything you believe. Pierce's Idiot America was such a book for me. But it's equally great to read an author who offers you a completely new perspective on things. Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream gave me an opportunity to analyze the post-9/11 media and politics from a feminist point of view. Or rather, from the point of view of the damage that the collective trauma of 9/11 did to the feminist movement and its achievements.

The terror attacks of 9/11, Faludi argues, punctured the myth of America's invincibility. The feelings of fear and insecurity that everybody experienced as a result led to the emergence of a series of phenomena aimed at restoring this feeling of invincibility and security. Sadly, this restoration was conducted along the lines of the patriarchal vision of gender: "The myth of American invincibility required the mirage of womanly dependency, the illusion of a helpless family circle in need of protection from a menacing world. Without that show of feminine frailty, the culture could not sustain the other figment vital to the myth, of a nesting America shielded by the virile and vigilant guardians of its frontier. As the pageant of domesticity played out on the lifestyle page, the spectacle of virility unforlded on the political stage." Faludi's book analyzes the ways in which the media attempted to convince us of the validity and the profound relevance of the patriarchal worldview for the post-9/11 world.

Armed with her truly extensive research, Faludi demonstrates that the responses to the trauma of 9/11 represent a coherent whole, fueled by the call for the return to the traditional gender roles: "Taken individually, the various impulses that surfaced after 9/11 - the denigration of capable women, the magnification of manly men, the heightened call for domesticity, the search for and sanctification of helpless girls - might seem random expressions of some profound cultural derangement. But taken together, they form a coherent and inexorable whole, the cumulative elements of a national fantasy in which we are deeply invested, our elaborately constructed myth of invincibility."

Faludi analyzes the reasons behind many events that in the aftermath of the trauma we might have failed to notice and address. The push to present the heroes of 9/11 as exclusively male and its victims as exclusively female (even though this goes against all available evidence). The evisceration of female intellectuals (Barbara Kingsolver, Susan Sontag, Katha Pollitt) for saying the exact same things that their male colleagues were saying with impunity at that very moment. The promulgation of unsupported myths about women deciding to abandon the workplace in massive numbers, women choosing family over careers, and women desperate to get married and have babies as a result of 9/11. The push for the return to traditional gender roles. The fictitious image of "security moms." The treatment of 9/11 widows and the complete marginalization of 9/11 widowers. The story of Jessica Lynch that was based on an incredible number of lies and distorions.

Faludi delves into the depths of American history in order to disinter its foundational myths and discover why the collective trauma of 9/11 provoked such an unequivocally gendered response. Well-written, brilliantly argued, beautifully researched, Faludi's book is definitely worth reading.

Flowers for a Man

It's always great to see how the feminist worldview becomes more and more acceptable and accepted in daily life. Last night, my boyfriend and went to a restaurant. There was a man there selling roses to the patrons. So I decided to show my affection for my boyfriend by buying him roses. He had given me flowers many times, so it made a lot of sense for me to do the same for him.

A great thing about the whole experience was that everybody reacted completely normally. My boyfriend reacted exactly the way I do when he gives me flowers: happy but as if it were a very natural thing to happen. The man who sold me the flowers, the waitress, the hostess, and the other patrons who observed this scene took it completely in their stride.

I hope that gendered understanding of the appropriate ways of showing affection for the person you love will soon disappear. It makes no sense that our gender should dictate the way we express ourselves in any setting, especially in a romantic one.

The Standards of Beauty

The following statement just appeared at the Womanist Musings blog:

"No matter what it is that we endeavour to achieve it is always questioned. We are either too sexy or not sexy enough. Our bodies are continually deemed for male consumption and can be considered either a detractment or an enhancement to the task at hand in a way that males are never positioned. Men get to exist simply as they are. No matter the privilege for women it all comes down to the same thing…negotiating a patriarchal sexist world while attempting to maintain our dignity. "

In my opinion, this attitude stems from a deeply flawed belief that patriarchy is a 100% detrimental to all women and a 100% beneficial to all men. In what concerns physical appearance, it is true that every time we open a magazine or see a commercial we see women who look the way a normal woman wouldn't be able to achieve even if she dedicated her entire existence to it. But these women are always accompanied by equally impossibly looking men. They are all tall, wide-shouldered, muscled, have no or little body hair, no skin problems, and chiseled chins and noses. Pick up a male underwear catalogue and tell me if you actuually know any men who look this way.

We have finally arrived at a stage of our society's development, where women can at least talk about their body image issues, get diagnosed with bulimia and anorexia, and get help. Now we have to accept that men suffer from these problems just as much. There is no emotionally and psychologically comfortable public (and often also private) space today for men to acknowledge that they have body image issues, that what they experience might be anorexia or bulimia, and that it's ok to discuss it and get help for it.

Patriarchy is a Procrustean bed that gives us a set of rules that we have to adhere to because we are of a certain gender. In order to fit into this mold, we - men and women alike - have to chop off pieces of ourselves, of our bodies, of our personalities. And this is bad for everyone.