I have more to say about gender, imagine that. I am almost resigned at this point to have this be an outsized issue because of the way the world is.
Side note (and this may be the soonest I have included a side note in a post) : The Super Bowl happened last night. There was a big cacaphony on the right because the halftime performer was Bad Bunny. Man, did they let their racist freak flags fly high, proudly, and very loudly.
One of the things that they did was rush to have an alternative half-time show starring Kid Rock. There were other country singers, but some of them dropped out (most likely because of all the outrage they received, and rightly so), but there was one country guy who was still in it. Don’t know who he was because I only saw it through the outraged lens of Jon Stewart.
He was singing about how hard it was to be country in this country these days, which Jon Stewart immediately ripped into. The singer goes on to say that he wants to drive his truck, feed his dog, wear his boots–here, Jon played innocent and said that all seemed easy to do. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, which it of course did. The singer went on to say that in this (he called it earlier cancel-culture country, which, ugh. I have done that rant before, and I will probably do it again, but not right now) country, he can’t have a birthday party for his daughter and tell her that boys aren’t girls–or something close to that.
I knew it was coming (or something like it), and yet, I still winced. Jon was right when he said that for a gorup of people who spent so much time complaining about how the left were such snowflakes who were triggered by everything and needed safe spaces, they were just projecting. I mean, we all knew it, but wow did they make it so obvious with their Bad Bunny outrage.
Back to gender rigidity. I was writing yesterday about reading The Rules and how horrifying the book was. It did tickle my funny bone that the version I read noted that one of the authors divorced her husband between the first print of the book and that one. I left off the last post by saying that the last line of the book was something like, “And it doesn’t stop once you’re married”, which caused me to groan, roll my eyes, and toss the book in the trash. Well, probably not literally*, but I wanted to.
Ever since I was a little child, I never got gender. I mean, I well understood how society viewed it (binary and restrictive, not to mention reductive), but I never understood it for myself. I just knew I was wrong and bad, and I needed to change my entire being. do you know how daunting that is? To change everything about yourself? And how dismaying?
Side note: I think this is why tradwives lose their shit at some point. You can’t suppress your entire personality all the time without completely losing it. You just cannot as I can attest. At some point, you’re going to let it out. That can be in a positive way or in a not-so-positive way. I’ve done both, and believe me, the former is better than the latter.
Here’s the thing, ladies. You can never ever ever be enough. Ever. I have not been married, but I had an exacting mother who had a very narrow definition of what was acceptable for as a girl child. She was so critical of everything I did unless I was docilely listening to her problems. I have mentioned several times that I was (am) her emotional support person. That was my purpose–at least until I graduated from college, got married, and squeezed out several kids. Then, my sole role in life would be to serve said husband and children.
I know about tradwife life, believe you me. I wanted none of it, though I did not have the words to articulate why. I just know that any time I thought of it, I felt like shit. I did not want any part of it, even though I did not have the words for it.
Side note: When I turned twenty-six, my mother commented that she had my brother at that age. I thought it was just a tossaway comment, but no. For the next fifteen years, she pushed me to have kids. Hard. Every time we talked on the phone, she mentioned it. When she visited me for six weeks one summer, she said it every day.
She said that she would come back to help take care of them. She said I could adopt black babies to match my (then) cats(!!). When I mentioned that I didn’t want children, she said that didn’t matter. It was my duty as a woman, whether I wanted them or not. When my grandmother (her mother) was dying of cancer, my mother told me that my grandmother wanted to be a great-grandmother before she died.
I was the oldest (assumed) girl child on that side of my family, so I would be the one most likely to give my grandmother that ‘gift’. I mentioned that it would take a long time to find someone to marry, get pregnant, and have a child. My mother said with a straight face that my grandmother would forgo the getting married part. This from a super-religious, fundie Christian? How easily her morals were thrown right out the window for a selfish desire. (She was not a good mother or grandmother, by the way.)
This is my long-winded way of saying there is no way in hell I want anything to do with anything that my family insisted a woman should do/be/feel. Sometimes, people with kids are puzzled why some people who don’t want kids are so insistent/loud about it. It’s because of how pushy they are about having kids. And even if the kid-havers aren’t explicitly pushing it, our society as a whole certainly does (but god forbid you need any help once you actually have the kids. Then you’re on your own and good luck to you!).
Once I realized I did not want to have children, I started questioning everything I had been told about being a woman. And I mean EVERYTHING. At one of my jobs, I was talking to a woman, and I don’t know how we got on the subject, but I mentioned that when I walked on the street, I would imagine how someone would be in bed (Look. I was young and not raised well. I would never talk about that in the office now, but it wasn’t a major faux pas with this person). She looked at me and said, “No woman thinks like that.”
I looked at her as if she’d grown two heads. I, who identified as a woman at that time, had just said it about myself. And she was denying it to my face. She said she had had that conversation with ten friends of hers, and all of them said they never thought like that.
That settles it, then! If a dozen women said they never did something, then no woman does it, indeed! It boggled my mind because she was so set in her gender rigidity that me saying that I did that thing had to be rejected or she would have to redefine her thinking on gender.
This is another reason that I don’t get gender rigidity. Let’s say I identified as a woman still. Then, anything I do is what a woman does, right? That seems evident to me, but apparently, it’s not to other people.
That’s all. I’ll probably write more about it tomorrow.
*I borrowed the book from the library. I wasn’t going to actually pay for it.