Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted,” for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.
[…]
When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
As women continue to break into traditionally masculine professions and defend their right to exist in unsafe spaces, the rest of us have a responsibility to do more than cheer them from the sidelines. We should also make clear that we understand this work is hard, that it often takes an emotional toll, that there are no easy answers, and that, when they acknowledge their feelings and admit their struggles, they’re all the more badass for it. This wouldn’t just help women with challenging jobs or in dangerous situations. It would also benefit men who have long been expected to bury their emotional responses and carry on as if they are unaffected by trauma. It’s not “badass” to survive a horrible situation without shedding a single tear. The real badass move … is to fearlessly acknowledge how something has affected you and make space for others to do the same.
Writing — coming to writing — is a profound act of self-realization that can be as arduous and painful as it can be exhilarating. I try hard not to coalesce all men into one lumpen category, including those who doubtless have also overcome struggles, internal and external, to be where they are. Struggles are often invisible. But one need only look at the pages of our literary magazines to see that women’s writing has a wholly different status culturally — Alice Munro, Hilary Mantel, Eleanor Catton notwithstanding. Our idea of serious, intellectual writing appears to be overwhelmingly male.
[…]
Women often resist being described as “women writers,” and with good reason. The need to prefix “writer” with a tag suggests that writer really means male writer (or perhaps, more specifically, white, straight male writer). It implies that readers need to be warned; that women are intruders on the default terrain — which, in the pages of many magazines, they are… The implication is that women are trapped within their particularity, unable to speak to those who don’t share it, while the writing of (straight, white) men is universal rather than particular.
[…]
But everyone is shaped by their experience of gender, whatever that experience is; there is no view from nowhere.
We’re living through a major shift in the way our culture deals with gender, rape, and sexuality, in large part led by a new generation of feminists (men and women).
Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”
And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man.
Ursula K. Le Guin on being a man – the finest, sharpest thing I’ve read in ages
Man Meets Woman – graphic designer Yang Liu explores gender differences and stereotypes in minimalist pictogram infographics, from breakups to bonuses to bathroom breaks.
The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf—that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie. Perhaps it should be.
In her
cover essay on silencing women in the October 2014 issue of
Harper’s,
Rebecca Solnit once again proves that she is one of our era’s greatest essayists – further evidence
here and
here.
By using words such as “girly” or “manly” we inadvertently buy into gender stereotyping. We play with toys designed for our gender, we play different sports based on gender, we often go to segregated schools…
If we want equality, it will take more effort than paying women the same as men, or giving women equal opportunities. We must all make an active decision to change our language. We must stop pressuring each other to fit stereotypes which more often than not leaves us feeling repressed and unable to express ourselves. We must not let gender define us.
While bias has been experimentally demonstrated, it’s hard to study in the real world: Just as it’s hard to isolate a single environmental pollutant’s effect on human health, it’s been near impossible to isolate gender as a variable in the real world and watch how it affects a person’s day-to-day experience.
Until now. Trans people are bringing entirely new ways of approaching the discussion. Because trans people are now staying in the same careers (and sometimes the very same jobs) after they change genders, they are uniquely qualified to discuss the difference between how men and women experience the workplace. Their experience is as close to the scientific method as we can get: By isolating and manipulating gender as a variable and holding all other variables—skill, career, personality, talent—constant, these individuals reveal exactly the way one’s outward appearance of gender affects day-to-day interactions. If we truly want to understand women at work, we should listen carefully to trans men and trans women: They can tell us more about gender in the workplace than just about anyone.
Interesting
New Republic article revisits the question NPR’s Shankar Vedantam posed in his
excellent meditation on our hidden biases by looking at how transgendered people are uniquely positioned to know what it’s like both to swim with the current and to struggle against it.
Because the golden age of modern children’s books took place in the middle of the twentieth century, on the cusp of the civil rights movement and decades before the second wave of feminism, it is unsurprising that the genre, even today, is burdened by the cultural baggage of inequality — only 31 percent of contemporary children’s books feature female heroines, many of which purvey limiting gender expectations, and of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013 only 93 featured people of color.
And yet here is a book about an independent middle-aged woman who defies the still-prevalent stigma against singletons and is financially self-sufficient by her own creative labor, who is white and services a wealthy black client, and who is helped into the dénouement of her challenge not by a patronizing Prince Charming but by a little black girl dressed in preppy plaid. There is, too, the many-hatted citizenry of wildly diverse backgrounds and callings, joined together in a common cause of goodwill.
Happy Birthday, Madame Chapeau
I am not one to advocate for a blind quota-filling approach, where there must be equal representation on all levels at all cost. And yet it’s rather disappointing to see only one female scientist alongside her twenty-two male peers. To be sure, Edge itself is far from gender-balanced – one could rationalize that this is simply the state of science still – but the site’s vast archive, spanning fifteen years of conversations and essays, does feature a number of female scientists, which renders the 5% female representation in this collection editorially lamentable.
This gender gap lends double meaning to [physicist Leonard] Susskind’s reflections on the progress of science in the twenty-first century as he notes: “Man’s place in the universe is also being reexamined and challenged.” Woman’s, evidently, is not.
