A knife is a girl's best friend

[truepenny]

I am, as I have said, reviewing Joanna Russ's The Country You Have Never Seen for Strange Horizons. This is going to be challenging for a number of reasons, including the fact that it feels hubristic to be writing a review of a reviewer who can write rings around me, but that's not my point here.

In her review of Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology, Russ write:

I could not at first understand Daly's insistence that femininity has nothing to do with women, that femininity--what a bizarre assertion!--is a male trait, and yet she is right. We're still all too prone to talk as if "femininity" were produced by the selective obliteration of some natural female traits and preservation of others or the exaggeration of some traits at the expense of others. But Daly is more perceptive: Femininity is a male projection of a solution to problems in the male situation, which is then imposed on women. That is why Daly states that she will no longer use the word "androgyny." Femininity is not an incomplete part of anyone's character but a man-made mess from the word go.
(p. 158)

Granted both book and review are nearly thirty years old (the review appeared in 1979), this paragraph, this idea made me ring like a bell. I have never been comfortable with my own "femininity" (and it's a great relief to be able to put that word in quotes and just leave it there), and Russ and Daly between them have just explained why. Because "femininity" is something I don't necessarily have to have. It's not just that "feminine" is a gender role, it's that it's a gender role that has no necessary connection to anything inherent in myself. Or, alternatively, since I am a woman, anything I do is "feminine," regardless of cultural conditioning and social opinion. (Somewhere else, in a throwaway line, Russ remarks that we never talk about "race roles" or "class roles" in the way we talk about "gender roles," and she is utterly correct. In point of fact, the idea is almost comically offensive.) In either case, the word ceases to have meaning.

Or, to put it another way, the fact that "femininity" doesn't fit me isn't my fault. It's not that I'm deficient or not trying hard enough; it's that nothing about being a woman has any necessary correlation with being "feminine." I can own my own performance of gender and it's right because it's mine.

I figure reaction to this post is going to be pretty evenly split between people disagreeing with me and people wondering where I've been all this time that I've only just figured this out. (The thing about consciousness raising is, everybody has to do it for him- or herself. And you can't do it to a timetable, either.) But I am talking very specifically about myself, and about the feeling I've been struggling with since puberty that I'm doing it wrong, that I'm at best a fake girl (D cup not withstanding), that I got socialized wrong and am gauche and maladroit and really not fooling anybody ...it feels like Joanna Russ handed me a knife and I've cut myself free of the painful, entangling wreckage.

Not, of course, that it's that simple. But I like this knife. I'm hanging onto it.

And for the first time since puberty, writing female protagonists feels like an adventure instead of an obligation. And you can bet your ass I'm not sending them out without a knife, either.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks, though there's something excessively tempting about finding a book for thirty dollars when most places offer it for about $80. Weirdly, Walmart offers it for $35.

Aside from that, I think Russ and Daley are on to something there. I also believe that "masculinity" is a scam--it's a fantasy invented and to a large extent maintained by a minority of the more aggressive men. It doesn't necessarily have much to do with real-world men.

Well, actually, quite a bit of gender policing is also done by women. I'm not sure how all the pieces fit together, but it's not just a system for the convenience of (some) men.

[tessagratton.livejournal.com]

>>Well, actually, quite a bit of gender policing is also done by women. I'm not sure how all the pieces fit together, but it's not just a system for the convenience of (some) men.

Russ doesn't mean that femininity is something men DO to women, or that women can't participate in the policing of it (everyone self-polices). The discourse she's refering to isn't one in which we can say, "well this man said this and made all these other people do that for his own convenience," but nevertheless, the dominant discourse was (and is, arguably) one that conveniences some men over women. When behaviors/patterns attributed to men are valued more than behaviors/patterns attributed to women (no matter "who" is marking the values, and no matter if it's men or women portraying the behaviors/patterns), then it IS a system that IS about convenience. And even if women are actively participating, it's still the men (whose behavior has greater value) that benefit the most.

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

It's not at all unusual for some members of an oppressed group to police other members of the oppressed group. (I'm thinking here of stories I've heard about some Blacks chastising others during the civil rights era, and about how FGM is largely carried out by women on younger women.) A person who has made peace with their role in the system can feel threatened by anyone who questions the system because it calls into question *their* choices and sacrifices, and of course, there's "the devil you know" too--many people fear and resist change even if that change might be to their benefit, because uncertainty always comes with it.

[flit.livejournal.com]

I was chatting about this sort of thing recently and suddenly realized that even though I've had some very serious sexism perpetrated on me by males, including out and out workplace sexual harassment by someone who was in a position to, and did, make my life incredibly miserable, the things that stung me the most, even though they were objectively far more minor, were enforcement of feminine sex roles by other women, particularly by family members but even from girls or women I actually *disliked strongly* and whose opinions I would consciously reject.

Is it sexism in myself that causes what women do to *matter* more to me?

[pnh.livejournal.com]

The University of Chicago Press's webpage also offers a paperback edition, pubdate October 2007, at $35. Shipping to US addresses only.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It turned out that the cheaper copies were all advance notice of the paperback.

[avram]

I also believe that "masculinity" is a scam--it's a fantasy invented and to a large extent maintained by a minority of the more aggressive men.

Yes, this is true.

[sensawunder.livejournal.com]

Agreed on two points: masculinity is also a scam perpretrated on all men by a minority with power -- most of them men, but also a few women. Most men don't fit the mold any more than most women fit the femininity mold. And definitely femininity is a scam perpetrated by patriarchy on women in whichmen and some women police women to reinforce it. My father once called me a "ball breaker" for refusing to back down on a point. He said it half with admiration and half fear that I would never find a husband. I did. :)

I look around and see evidence of the women gender-police all around me. I am a rather bookish, introverted intellectual-type of person to whom clothing is mostly functional. My sister-in-law took it on herself to tell me that I did my nails the wrong way. They're supposed to be squared off instead of oval, didn't you know? She was amused that I didn't know how to be a proper woman -- she with 36D implants, gel nails done with a french manicure, dyed hair with extensions, year-round tan, buff-bod with requisite tattoo on her lower back, visible thong, who is 40 going on 18.

You bet your life women police gender.