On being a woman

I love being a woman. I have never once thought I'd like to be a man. Well, I guess I must have at least once, given one of our most famous Stout family stories: me, at three or four, my urine-soaked pants down around my ankles, shuffling into the kitchen where my mom was cooking, tears streaming down my face, crying out, "I tried to go pee-pee just like the boys, but it didn't work at all!" But other than that, I have spent my life grateful to be a girl.

And yet.

Being a woman is, after all, being a part of an oppressed identity group. These days, it's not necessarily something I think about on a daily basis, but in little ways, slights accumulate. A "bitch" here and a cat call there, a glance at my breasts or the dismissal or appropriation of my good idea by a man accumulates and then one thing happens and the reality hits home: I am a member of an oppressed identity group. I alluded to a "trespass" by a man in my last post. I knew that all the taste of blood and bitter it left in me had something to do with this, but it wasn't until he left a message for me this evening, his voice full of tears, letting me know that he doesn't want our friendship to end, that what his "mistake" meant for me. This was my response:

For me, this has highlighted what being a woman in America often means. I love it, and have never wanted to be any other gender, but we always have to be ready, at any moment to be misunderstood, misread, judged to be seeking sexual attention when we're just being flirty or kind, and then when we see our mistake and try to back pedal, men get defensive and accusatory and we end up questioning ourselves, and often, we end up trying to comfort or assuage a man who's ego or masculinity we've somehow damaged when they did the misjudging in the first place.

You don't know that we go through this in our lives time and time again because you don't need to know about it in order to survive in this society, but you need to understand it. You need to get that you didn't just make one little mistake in your life here. You participated in the ongoing oppression of women and, at least up to this point, you have individualized it into a singular mistake that shouldn't have wider impact than this one event in your life. I've done a good job in my life so far of only letting the kind of men who don't behave this way into my inner circle. I trusted you weren't one of these men, and I do trust that this incident doesn't reflect who you really are, and how you want to show up in the world, but you behaved in this way because you are not conscious of all the ways in which male privilege influences you and nothing in the way you've reacted to me or my dear friend in the aftermath of what you did gives me confidence that you wouldn't behave in a similarly oppressive way again in the future.

You see, your regret isn't enough here. Your sadness that we might not be friends isn't enough. Doing some research on gender oppression, reading the book The Gender Knot, really examining what it might mean for you to claim and learn about male privilege, seeking to transform your privilege into creating a more equitable world, those are things that could help me eventually learn to trust you again. You may not think it's worth it, just to (maybe) save our friendship, and if that would be your only motivation anyway, don't do it. But if you did delve into learning about male privilege, you would see the benefits in all your relationships with women, even if it doesn't salvage our friendship.

I do hold you in compassion and love, but for now, and I don't know for how long, I need to do it from a distance.

So, dear blog readers, three men are readers of my blog, that I know of, and I am quite sure they are of the equality-minded sort, so if any of this resonates with you and you know some men who may benefit form reading it, please feel free to forward the link to my blog to them, or to anyone who might get something form it. Also, I know it's from a pretty hetero-viewpoint, but this has been a very hetero experience, so here I am...

Many blessings, and prayers for a more just society,
Mandie