Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: social construct

Gender is a social construct, part three

Here’s the thing about gender. In an ideal world, I would not have to think about it at all because I don’t care about it (to an extent). Just as I don’t think about religion or children unless someone else brings it up. In that ideal world, I would just be a woman and people would accept that without question. I would not have people telling me that I was womanning incorrectly or pointing out all the ways in which I was not really a woman. I ended the last post by talking about the sexism of my father. His attitude is one big reason I’m a feminist now. He definitely believed that I was a fuckup as a woman, but he wasn’t the only one.

Here are many ways I have been dismissed as a woman:

1. Not having children (always at the top).
2. Not getting married.
3. Not caring about fashion and/or makeup.
4. Not liking dolls (as a girl).
5. Not caring about cooking, cleaning, or sewing.
6. Liking sex.
7. Imaging having sex with strangers.
8. Liking sex a lot. As in every day a lot.
9. I don’t shave anything (I’m also Asian).
10. I don’t do anything to improve my appearance.
11. I treat men, women, nonbinary, genderqueer, agender people as equally as I possibly can.

Just a note on that last one. I’m not saying that women are worse about this, but that women can be as bad about it. Because of how patriarchy works, women oftentimes do the major lifting of keeping other women in check. Patriarchy wouldn’t work if there weren’t women who were willing and/or eager to hold up the status quo. This is just an unspoken truth about sexism. Women are just as capable (if not more) of being sexist against other women.

Side note to the side note: This is part of the insidiousness of sexism. Women learn early on that in order to move up in America, you have to appease the men at the top. One way of doing this was to be more ruthless than men, claw your way up the ladder, and then kick it down below you so no other women can climb up it.

Side note to the side note to the side note: This is why I’m deeply suspicious when people say that the world would be a better place if women were in charge. I say it depends more on the system than the gender of the people in charge. If the system is sick, then it doesn’t matter the genders of the people in charge.

Back to my list.


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Gender is a social construct, part two

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.)


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Gender is a social construct

If I were 20 years old, I have a hunch that I would be thinking a lot about gender. K and I talked about how if we were thirty years younger, we probably would both be nonbinary. I have mentioned before that of all my female friends/family member who are qeustioning/have questioned their gender, we all have had similar journeys–but have come to different conclusions. One of my friends (who is also my Taiji teacher) has reclaimed ‘woman’ as her own. She is defiant in declaring that this is what a woman looks like. What a woman acts like. What a woman feels like. She has been told since she was a weird kid in podunk S. Dakota that she was not a real girl/woman. This was her response.

My bestie, K, is comfortable being a mix of what is considered stereotypically feminine and traits that are considered more male. Once back in our twenties, she said to me, “Sometimes, Minna, glitter can just be fun!” when I was going on a screed about how anti-feminist glitter was. And you know what? She’s right. Glitter can be fun to wear sometimes (though hell to completely remove). She wore some makeup when we were younger as well as dresses when we went out. I did, too, come to think of it. Just lipstick, though. And skirts more than dresses.

As for my family member, they are nonbinary. They use all and any pronouns. They look stereotypically feminine, but don’t feel that way–necessarily. They have some interests considered more masculine and some that would lean more feminine.

Then there’s me. I grew up hating my gender. Not because I thought I was a boy, but because my mother (and my church) kept telling me all the things I could not do as a girl. I could not climb trees. I could not laugh loudly. I could not sit with my legs apart. Things I had to do as a girl. I had to wear dresses. I had to be quiet. I had to emotionally support everyone around me (read, my mother. But also boys). I was never supposed to show my unhappiness, anger, depression, or sadness. I could only be hapy, but I also wasn’t supposed to talk much.

I was also put on a diet by my mother whten I was seven. She had a lifelong dysfunctional relationship with food and her body (not surprisingly for a woman from Taiwan who moved to America). I was a stocky child because there was peasant stock on my father’s side. But also, my grandmother on my mother’s side was pretty stocky as well. As was my mother despite her attempts to whittle away her form on the daily. She agonized so much over the same five pounds. She made me feel that I was worthless because I was so grotesquely fat.


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But whatabout–STFU

Yesterday, I was ranting about ‘reverse _____ism’ and how much I loathe that argument. It’s lazy, derailing, and just boring. Today, at Ask A Manage,r there is a question about high-end gifts to team members to reward them for a job well done. It included money, a trip, and an individual gift (that’s the high-end gift) to each person. It was a product the company made (the letter writer said suppose it’s golf clubs), and the men were give the male version and women were giving the female version. She said there was a 30% differential in the worth of the gifts (men’s were more, of course). She asked if she was wrong to feel upset about it and if not, what she should do.

The number of people in the commentariat (with the gender ratio being roughly 79% identify as women, at least on the self-answering survey Alison asked about salary in 2021) who defended the practice to varying extent was dispiriting. There were those who got caught up on actual golf clubs and why this might be fine (when the LW clearly stated golf clubs was a placemarker for the actual object); those who wanted to know if it was an item from the same line or a different one (I still don’t get why this would matter), and others who were whatabouting up and down as if it was just a t-shirt in different sizes.

It was bizarre that the first dozen answers or so were in this vein with one person clearly saying that the LW was just being an ungrateful brat about a gift. First of all, it’s not just a gift, it’s a reward for doing their job well. Secondly, even if it’s “just a gift”, it’s not good for the morale of women to realize they were valued 30% less.

Alison was quick to say that the letter writer clarified it was items from two different lines (the men’s being higher, of course), rather than two equal lines in which the men’s item was valued more. Suddenly, the people questioning if that was the case (or trying to rationalize if they were in the same line) were saying, “Oh, that changes everything.” Why? No it doens’t. Thoughtless sexism is still sexism. Intent matters to a certain extent, but mpact matters more.

Especially when it comes to discrimination in the workplace. There is no excuse for that. I was really happy with the people who pointed that out. also how tiring it is to have people constantly questoniing as to whether it’s truly sexism. One woman got weirdly hung up on the fact that everyone got money and trips, too. So, this wasn’t sexist? Or it didn’t matter as much? Put it this way. Someone abusing you one-third of the time isn’t any more acceptable than someone who abuses you 100% of the time. In fact, in this case, it’s even more irritating because they have shown they can treat men and women (ugh. I’ll get into that later) equally so why not in this case?


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