In the last post, I talked about the secret to small talk. It’s pretty simple–listen to what the other person is saying and build on it. I say it’s simple, but it’s much more difficult to execute effectively, apparently. I say apparently because it’s second nature to me by now, but other people act as if it’s a completely foreign idea.
This is also a great way to make it seem like you’re interested in a person when you’re not. In otherwords, coworkers or other guests at a party. I’m an introvert. I do not like being around a lot of other people. Talking about THEM is a way to put me at ease because the focus is off me.
I don’t know when I realized that people were desperate to talk about themselves. For someone who would truly listen to them. Not wait for their turn to speak, barely paying attention to what was being said. But actually listening. With all of their attention.
When I was in college, I had a female friend who complained to me that all the guys liked me. There were a ton of things wrong with me back in those days, but one asset I had then is one I still have now. “It’s because I treat them like human beings,” I told her. This is the same friend who, when she had a crush on a guy, memorized his class schedule and made sure to be outside each class after it was over so she could ‘accidentally’ run into him.
I was so snotty back then, and I was very invested in being a ‘cool girl’. I looked down on the other women for being into frivolous things like makeup and clothes, but I didn’t realize that my tenuous place in the boys’ club was predicated on me acting like them. If I dared to slip and be ‘feminine’, I would have quickly been kicked out of the club.
Which, well, that’s messed up in all kinds of way. I had no interest in typically feminine things, but I shouldn’t have felt pressured to look down on them, either. There’s nothing wrong with caring about those things. On the third hand, though, there’s no reason for them to look down on me as well for not liking those things.
Resists impulse to go into a thousand-word screed about performative gender roles.
This is one of the reasons I started questioning my gender, damn it! I have been told I’m not a real woman for: not wanting children, not caring about makeup or fashion, liking sex, imagining having sex with strangers, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The sex with strangers thing was really irritating. I was working as an admin assist at the county. There was a woman about my age who was…project researcher? Not sure what she was doing. But, we would have chances to talk, and I found out that shewas bi as well. She was in a bad relationship with a dude, so I gave her a listening ear to talk about that. We talked about sex as well, and at some point, I mentioned that I would imagine what it was like having sex with a hot stranger on the street. That is, the stranger was on the street, but the sex I imagined with them was not on the streets.
She looked at me as if I were an alien and said that no woman would do that. I was taken aback by her vehemence because I, an actual woman, was telling her I did that. It seemed bizarre to me that she would deny my experience to my face. I was telling her I did this, and she was saying, I wasn’t?? She said she had a group of female friends and they had all talked about this before (maybe 10 women). All of them agreed it wasn’t something they did. So….no woman did?
I let it go, but it really bothered me. In general, I’m very much not into gender determinisim, Especially when it denies me of my humanity. In addition, any time anyone says ‘no _____ does this thing’, my automatic response is, “So you know all 4 billion of these ____?” There’s a saying, “Anecdotes are not data”, and yet, people always want to think that what they went through is universal.
It’s funny. My Taiji teacher and I have talked about being told we were not women all our lives. She grew up in very conservative state and was constantly berated for not being a traditional girl. I was raised in a very traditional Taiwanese Christian household with the same message.
She’s married and wears lipstick (and perfume), but that’s about the extent of her outward signs of femininity. She has said that her reaction to being told she wasn’t a real woman was to say, “Fuck you. I AM a real woman, and you can just deal with it.” So, in essence, we’ve had similar experiences and were treated the same way (but for different reasons), and she went that way. I went in a different direction. “You don’t think I’m a real woman? Fine. I don’t want to be one, anyway.”
I don’t think either is right or wrong. Both are ways of making peace with the knowledge that society thinks you’re defective because you’re not being a woman right. Hers is to embrace the word and redefine it to fit who she is. Mine is to reject the word and say I don’t want to be a part of your stinking club, anyway.
Neither is giving into the stereotypes or to the notion that a woman has to be a certain way. She’s ignoring the gatekeepers whereas I’m rejecting them. She’s saying, “I am a woman; therefore, what I do defines a woman.” I’m saying, “I don’t want to be a woman if it’s so restricted and punitive.”
Real talk. Women are part of society. They hear the same toxic messages about gender that men do. It’s not surprising that many of them soak in the messages and are changed by the messages as well.So it’s not surprising that there are some women eager to push the gender conformity as well. When I realized that I did not want children, so many women were angry at me for this simple statement. That they elicited from me after much reluctance. They would ask if I had/wanted children, and I would say no. That’s it. That’s all. And yet, you would have thought that I said I wished for a world with no children rather than just say I didn’t want them.
It wasn’t until years later that I understood. I upset the status quo. I didn’t question it; I just decided it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to have children because of some unspoken (and sometimes very vocally spoken) societal ‘rule’ that women must procreate. The women who got angry were mad because they were playing by the rules and I wasn’t. If they had to suffer by being mothers, so did I. I wasn’t playing fair, and I should not be allowed to get away with it.
That was 20 to 25 years ago, and I still remember the pushback I got from answering their stupid question with a simple no. I didn’t even say why unless they asked. I always belabor this point because I want people to understand that I never brought it up myself.
Holy hell. How did I end up here? Well, that’s fine. Obviously, I needed to get it off my chest. As a result of a lifetime of being told I was not a woman, I threw up my hands (metaphorically) and said, “Fine. I’m not a woman. I don’t care to argue it any longer.” If society were more accepting of gender fluidity, I probably wouldn’t reject the label of woman. But, it feels so constraining right now that I just don’t want any part of it. I don’t want that label because of all the negativity I associate with it. Or rather, the negativity that others pile upon me because I am not stereotypically feminine.
Running long yet again. I will write more on this topic tomorrow.