I don’t like thinking about gender because I genuinely get fucked up when I think about it too hard. My mother has been an unrpentant sexist all her life. But in a very weird way. Why weird? Because she did everything she did to cater to my father, and one of his firm ideas was that she had to work outside the house. Not because he was a feminist, but because he was obsessed with money. Or rather, obsessed with the fear of not having enough. Here was my last post about it.
Quick background: My father was from a poor farm family. His father (and I’m hearing this third hand from a heavily biased point of view) got mad because my father’s mother wouldn’t do something or the other, can’t quite remember what, and refused to work on the farm for a decade or so. According to my father, my grandmother had to take over the day-to-day running of the farm.
My father was my grandmother’s favorite (out of five children). He was the youngest boy. He was excused from helping out, apparently, and he was the only one sent to America to get his graduate degree. He was a Fulbright Scholar, full, I think, which is probably the only way he was able to come to the States to study.
The reason I mention that is because it shows how my father’s narcissism was indulged throughout his life. His mother worshiped the ground he walked on and made it quite clear that he was the golden child. Then he married my mother who treated him the same way. When he was the president at the company where he worked, he had a secretary who also did everything for him, including printing out his emails and putting them on his desk for him to read. He would read them, answer in writing, and then give to her to type up and send out for him.
I’m saying all this to point out how reliant my father was on the women in his life. Or rather, how much they catered to him.
In tandem with this, my father has spouted noxious (and toxic) sexist beliefs all his life. When I was fifteen or so and didn’t have a boyfriend yet, he told me unprompted that in order to get a boyfriend, I needed to raise my voice a few octaves (I have a very low voice), ask a boy to teach me something, and let him beat me in a game (pool, ping-pong, whatever). I looked at him and said, “If that’s what it takes to get a boyfriend, I’d rather be single for the rest of my life. I still stand by that.
He’s also said things like this: After seeing a castle in Banff that did weddings, “I would pay for your wedding to be in a castle.” After one of my cousin’s weddings: “I don’t know if I could give you away.” While talking about doing chores at home: “I know Minna will not like this, but I worked full-time.” (As an excuse for not doing chores at home.) “Women like gifts.” (Holding out a wrapped gift he was given to me, in response to me asking what that was for.)
The worst one, though, occurred the last time my parents were here. We went to CostCo and when we got home, my father said, “It must be so hard for housewives to shop at CostCo. Smart people like us have no problem with it, but it must be so hard for your average housewife.”
Here’s the thing with my father’s sexism. It’s so deeply engrained, there is no use in arguing with it. Also, it comes out twisted because the root cause of it is not usually what you would think it would be. The last one in particular confounded me because it was so disconnected from, well, anything. I pointed out that very few women were ‘housewives’ these days; that 80% of the customers were women; and that it wasn’t any different than shopping at Cubs. You knew where things were and how things were done, and you just went about your business. True, CostCo is huge and sometimes switches out what they are selling without telling anyone, but you just deal with it the same way you would if you found out your favorite item was no longer being sold at Cubs.
Even as I was explaining all this, I knew it was hopeless. I could see the blank look in his eyes. He checked out whenever he heard something he didn’t want to digest. I couldn’t help it, though. I had to counter his really silly assumption. (And, yes, again, I knew it was not worth my time.)
It wasn’t until later when I relaized what he was really saying when he made that ridiculous statement. Or rather, what was going on.This is the thing with my father. Anything he says relates to him somehow. It was clear in the comments about my purported wedding. Wth the gifts, he expanded on the comment that he always gave those gifts to my mother because–I have no idea why. My guess is that he gave gifts to his mistresses or they nagged him for gifts so that was his takeaway.
As for the housewives and CostCo comments, I finally figured out what was going on there. My father was feeling overwhelmed in CostCo. He did not like that, so he projected onto a group of people he had disdain for in order to feel better about himself. He wasn’t doing it purposely, of course, but that was what was happening in his head. I could tell as we walked through Costco that he was overwhelmed. He cannot tolerate feeling bad about himself. He looked around and saw all the women–a group of people he disdained.
I want to be clear. He doesn’t respect any group of people in general, but women, as a group, is probably the lowest of the low. Seeing them en masse being competent and capable when he was overwhelmed had to be a blow to his shaky ego. That’s why he projected upon them the insecurities that he was feeling himself.
He can only feel up if someone else is down. That’s something you have to know about him. He has a pathological need to be alpha, even though he would not describe it like that. Itt’s wild that in the fifty-plus years I’ve known my parents, they are pretty much the same as they were when I was first cognizant of their existence. They have not made progress in their thoughts and beliefs; if anything, they have regressed.
That’s all for today. More tomorrow.