[Martian anthropology] On Womanness Again

[kiya]

It seems to have come around on the gee-tar again, this thing -- the experience of being a woman, what women are like, expectations based on gender. (A couple separate places on LJ, alt.poly, elsewhere. As far as I can tell, the group semiconsciousness of the internet throws the subject up every so often, sort of like the Mammoth Check.)

What's been striking me so much about it this time -- from when it came out in the Pit on the SDMB a little ahead of the pack -- is how much of it strikes me as cultural. Several people cited sitcoms as evidence that people are really like that (for varying forms of "like that"). Sitcoms. And commercials. Not exactly what I think of as being the high end of character plausibility, that. Caricature, sure, but not character plausibility.

Which leads into my thoughts about that sort of thing as enforcing norms rather than describing them. Which is sort of tangential. But worth mentioning anyway.


I have to come to the conclusion that a lot of these mainstream things about how-people-are and I are oil and water to each other, that we can carry on fundamentally oblivious of each other's existence. Because a lot of the encoding that people discuss is alien to me. (I commented to teinedreugan a while back that reading the SDMB is my major source of awareness of mainstream culture. This was during one of those men/women threads. . .) It not only isn't how I function, it's not something that most of the people I know seem to use on a regular basis. (Though I know people who do mainstream-gendered things as a hobby. Sometimes I'm one of them.)

One of the threads that went into getting me off on this was a post about how women are expected to be a size six, more or less, and how the enforcement of this conformity ideal is exceptionally damaging. (I summarise the summary here.) And one of the sources of this ideal is listed as fashion magazines. One of the people commenting on this pointed out that this vector only transmits to those people who read the things. (As opposed to people whose primary exposure to them is desperately needing something to read in supermarket checkout lines.)

I'm trying to remember the sort of periodicals that came into the house when I was a kid, trying to get a sense of what was normal. When I was a kid I got Ranger Rick and Cricket and, I think, Highlights; I remember very little about them. We subscribed to Science News and Sky and Telescope; I'm not sure if we subscribed to National Geographic or not, but there were a whole bunch of them around. We got catalogues -- things like the Sears catalog, and also Signals, and some other things. I remember going through them and wanting interesting tinted crystal glasses and duck egg incubators, which is probably indicative of a lot. No cultural expectation of fashion rags, y'know?

I got given a subscription to YM when I was fourteen or so. I flipped through them a few times and then ignored them until the subscription ran out -- that stuff was already alien to me, being all full of makeup and fashion and stuff. (I went through a period where popularity was sufficient reason for me to reject things; I had mostly grown out of it by then.) It was all so effortful, and effortful without a payoff that I could perceive. I think I understand now that the effort was supposed to lead to look-like-the-girls-in-the-magazines, but that was pretty much beyond my understanding at the time. (As far as I can reconstruct, it simply never occurred to me; there was all this information out there about how to improve one's makeup skills, but none on why one would find this more useful to know than how to play Eleanor Rigby on the piano or, for that matter, hatching duck eggs in an incubator. I mean, knowing how to hatch duck eggs means there are ducks. Priorities!)

The makeup that existed as a default in my family was my mother's foundation to cover her I-think-rosacea. That isn't terribly, y'know, glamourous and exciting, and since I didn't have a similar condition that I wanted to address, it didn't occur to me that there were skills there I might want. She would do a little other stuff for special occasions like gallery openings. (Here is where I put in an interjection: I hated gallery openings. They were long and full of grown-ups talking about things that didn't interest me and far too often they either didn't have any food at all or didn't have any interesting snacks. I suspect this of being a mild component of my allergy to art galleries.) When I was in my mid-teens, she had a Mary Kay rep or some such come over to do makeup settings, and we both did that, and it was an Amusing Thing To Do Once, but it still didn't inspire in me any urge to do that sort of thing on a regular basis. Again, hobby-level. (Wandering back to my thoughts about getting erispope to give me girliness lessons.)

So somewhere I missed whatever cultural hook was supposed to set this behaviour -- my family's culture didn't strongly encourage it, and I didn't get whatever was supposed to catch the stragglers in the rest of the world. I know people who have the skills, but not actively using them to the level that's up to the mainstream joke of the woman who spends hours a day on it; a hobby. Hell, my major cosmetic thing (dyeing my hair) has the net effect of reducing the amount of time I have to spend on it, because it makes the hair that much more manageable.

Either the mainstream culture isn't strong enough to enforce this sort of thing on its own in the absence of reinforcement from the family, or I'm just that oblivious. I give it fifty-fifty, huh?

I go into that one in detail because there's way too much that's like that with me and "how women are". Especially as, in the majority of cases, the women I actually know don't fit the mould -- because most of the people I know and spend a lot of time with are geek-gendered to a greater or lesser extent, and that and mainstream gendering don't seem to coexist much.

. . . I just realised that of the people I know who are roughly my age and have small children, I think all but one of them have the husband as primary caregiver . . . and I don't know what my sister-in-law does. I live in a pocket reality. See?

I wind up wondering where these women-are-likes come from. It's where I get that oil-and-water theory, because they must exist somewhere, even if in social circles so different from mine that I never encounter them -- otherwise there wouldn't be so many people positing them, right? Talking about their traits. Asking how to deal with them. Publishing books about how they think.

The women I know aren't like that; I'm pretty sure they're real women who really exist.

I'm pretty sure I'm a real woman, too. If I'm not, whoever issued me this breast pain is in for some serious hardware compatibility lectures as soon as I find my fucking receipt.


There's a Feri-related exercise I'm toying with on and off in my head lately -- under what circumstances do I feel more female? Less female? More male? Less male? It's an interesting gedankenthingy.

Comments

[elf]

Part of me thinks our culture has to divide gender concepts by makeup and hobbies and clothing, because if they didn't, they'd have to realize that the differences are about sex. And, in general, we (they?) would much rather deal with "women are the ones who wear eyeshadow; men are the ones who wear heavy boots" than "women are the ones who get wet; men are the ones who get hard."

I have no idea why I didn't pick up on the makeup-and-hairspray thing. I was exposed; I was somewhat interested (it certainly seemed like a *fun* thing to learn, and we all want to be pretty, right?), but it never connected as important. Or maybe just wasn't worth giving up reading time to learn.

In Jr. High I was even kind-of "adopted" by a couple of the popular girls, who decided I was nice & they'd teach me to, umm, do whatever it is they thought girls do. Hang out in the sun & pretend to get tanned. Wear trendy clothes. Apply eyeshadow without looking like a raccoon; apply nail polish without leaving red smears on the fingers.

So now I can co-ordinate my tie-dyes & leather skirts, apply glitter to my upper eyelids without smearing it, and put a black strip on green nails without getting any on my fingertips. Somehow, I don't think that's what they had in mind.

[mindways]

Part of me thinks our culture has to divide gender concepts by makeup and hobbies and clothing, because if they didn't, they'd have to realize that the differences are about sex.

Hmm, I could see this. The vast majority of the times I consciously
self-identify as "male" have to do with either sex or other physical
differences such as beard trimming.