"the idea of a vernacular gender was widely misunderstood in the antagonistic atmosphere of the 1980s, in the anger that repudiated four thousand years of male sovereignty. men and women are unlike because of their evolution, a matter not to be deplored but to be celebrated and fulfilled, with the caution that power over the other is not part of the difference. roles and duties are divided, but not to make inequality. a vernacular society, divided in many of its social and familial responsibilities and privileges, would be inappropriately dominated by either gender. men and women have different roles int he group, similar but different bodies and psyches, shared but also different satisfactions, desires, fears, and sorrows."
-paul shepard, coming home to the pleistocene
so here's a thing that encapsulates that feeling that all guys occasionally get (or that for some seems to be a constantly-burning fuse of rage in the back of their caveman skulls): the fact that girls are different and that that is sometimes weird.
getting people to accept this is often a lot like trying to get white freshmen from the west side of washington to understand that yes, racism actually still exists, and no, they don't really "get it" because they live in a country and a culture where they are the majority (and no, once having a black friend long ago doesn't fix this). this lack of awareness isn't anyone's fault (except for when it's intentional, like in the case of the hypothetical cavemen referenced above who aren't actually hypothetical because i used to work with some of them), but more a cause of the "everyone's equal!" rhetoric that we superficially layer atop all of our discourse nowadays. now,"everyone's equal!" is a nice sentiment, of course, but the reality is more complex. some races (read: different melanges of cultures than the melange that makes up american white people, with different amounts of melanin in their skin) are different from others in significant ways. women are different from men in significant ways. to completely ignore this is to do violence to one's identity.
it matters to me that i am a man and not a woman. i didn't choose to be a man and i don't (in an abstract sense) prefer it to having gotten to be a woman. but, if someone were to tell me (as my students often do) that men and women are "equal"...well, that's kind of silly, because i'm aware of a lot of ways in which my biological/embodied experience of the world as a man is fundamentally different than that same level of experience is for a woman, and i know that that difference informs my thoughts/actions/what-have-you on less fundamental levels like how often i'm asked to help people move cabinetry or push cars out of snowbanks. telling me men and women are equal is sort of like telling a firefighter who finds meaning in his/her firefighting that "everyone can fight fires equally well!" you just hurt my feelings, man. seriously.
it's sort of like that. sort of.
[reheats cinnamon tea, sips.]
anyway, back to my fun story. so i was walking past valhalla (the horrifically trashy undergrad bar just on the legal side of the border between pullman city and campus proper) the other night, and there was a group of girls crossing in front of the building in front of me. they were clearly bar-hopping, but couldn't have been older than 21 or 22. despite the 20 degree temperatures and freezing wind, they were all dressed in short skirts and those wrap-things that pass for shirts these days (no long jackets were in sight, alas)*.
so, valhalla has recently renovated its top floor. this means that while you can still go drink and make out in its creepy, creepy basement if you so choose, you can also sit upstairs at a table and drink or eat cheeseburgers while you look out the gigantic front window at the sidewalk. well, these girls crossed directly in front of the window, pretty much every curve of each of them either visible or outlined by their clothes tightly enough that there wasn't anything really left to the imagination.
as they walked by, of course, the eyes of every single guy in the bar locked onto them and followed them for the length of the window. they weren't unaware of this, and as they finally passed from view, one of them remarked "ugh. i cannot believe how disgusting that was. i hate how every guy at the bar is always staring at my ass". then they proceeded down the street, turned right, and walked directly into the next bar down.
so basically the point of this post is for me to say: ladies, please explain this to me because it makes no fucking sense.
from my perspective as a guy, this is what i see:
first, i see women expressing disgust at the concept of the bar as a device for men to check them out and then choose their mates from the pool of women available. this disgust makes sense. bars are (generally) disgusting places, with people not on their best behavior. when it comes to men, young twentysomething ones are (generally) disgusting when it comes to their behavior around women. if i was a woman (and we've established that i am in fact, not), i would probably never go into any bar full of twentysomething men after, say, eight o'clock for this reason. but, i've "accepted" the fact that the dating M.O. for most kids nowadays is to go to the bar, get smashed, and try to make out with someone in the hopes that afterwards, when they've regained their inhibitions and their actual personalities, they'll somehow be compatible enough to function in a long-term, non-sex-centric relationship. and so...
second, these girls were obviously engaging in that exact same process, whilst criticizing the grossness of it. they didn't want to be ogled by the guys at valhalla...so why go into the next bar, where the same thing will happen while you are stationary targets for a goodly amount of time?
third, if you're not trying to draw sexual attention to yourself, why dress the way that you're dressed at all? this is sort of the crux, here. i'm forced to assume that maybe dressing scandalously is just a status symbol among young women nowadays? maybe you have to dress this way for your female peers to consider you cool, in the same way that guys apparently have to wear tank tops, basketball shorts and a backwards baseball cap for their brahs to think that they're cool. is that it? if that is in fact the case, isn't there some other "cool" way that women could dress amongst themselves that isn't so baldly sexual? i wonder about the side effects of young women essentially parlaying their sexuality into social currency among their "girlfriends" while seemingly assuming that that shift in intention should make that same sexuality suddenly invisible to guys. because it doesn't. obviously.
following this (possible) line of inquiry makes me sad. every single woman i've ever known (including the ones i've found extremely attractive) have had many other qualities that make them potentially "cool" to others besides how physically attractive they are or how revealingly they dress. i certainly don't promote my own sexuality in the way that i dress, and yet i have a lot of friends who respect me (some despite having seen me make a drunken asshole of myself while trying to impress girls at bars in lifetimes past) and at least one person who (for some reason) finds me attractive. so actually trying to get others to respect you without wearing short shorts can work. have we really reached a point where not just any sexuality but egregious, totally public sexuality is assumed to be the primary currency for negotiating social and sexual relationships for the majority of our young women?
i'd like to hear what people (and especially women) think, because i just don't get it. you know, on account of my penis and all.
*incidentally, both men's and women's refusal to dress practically for inclement weather is a whole other blog post entirely, dealing with an all-consuming rage that is fueled by my years of winter survival training and prizing of pragmatism over the desire to look "pretty" or "cool" for a large crowd of people who don't even know who you are...i can only hate one thing at once, sadly.
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