Hiya friends! I'm coming back from my 'hiatus' because my coworkers have been yelling at me and I'd like to offend some more people. I wasn't necessarily planning to revisit gender as a blog topic, but a few nights ago I arbitrarily got really upset about it again, so here we are! Before I dive in, I wanted to mention that I was really thinking about couching some of what I'm going to write in really neutral, non-gendered language, but I've decided... not to do that. If you're a man and you're reading this, yes, I am talking about you!
Before I get to the meat of what I'm interested in/upset about this evening, it's important to address compulsory heterosexuality. For those of you who aren't familiar with compulsory heterosexuality, it's basically the idea that the only option society gives us for our sexuality is straight. Sure, there are gay and bisexual people, but you're straight. Perhaps the most tone-deaf example of compulsory heterosexuality I've seen recently is admonishments from people who reject same sex pairings in fandom spaces because you shouldn't "assume sexuality," the implicit reasoning being, of course, that an assumption is necessarily inappropriate or unfounded if it is that a person or character isn't straight. It's everywhere though, from relatively benign situations ("my baby son is looking at that woman, what a flirt!") to socially fraught ones (the complete absence of same-sex sex education).
Compulsory heterosexuality is bad for everyone, but it's worse for women than it is for men, both because it compounds the particular difficulty women have in recognizing same-gender attraction, and because heterosexuality generally is worse for women than it is for men. That's because men are, by and large, worse romantic partners than women. It's not totally their fault, though. Women develop the emotional expertise to be excellent partners (and friends, coworkers, roommates, classmates, etc.) because we don't have a choice: our social survival depends on our ability to perform emotional labor. This is more or less the opposite for men. Not only are men not expected to perform emotional labor, the expectation is that they will not express or experience emotion at all. When men do, inevitably, experience emotion, it often falls to women to do much of the work of processing these emotions. Because I'm on the cusp of basically plagiarizing an entire article, just read the more diplomatic version here. To dredge up an old argument, this is what I mean when I say "men are stupid." Men are worse at doing emotional labor than women are, and as understandable as that may be, it makes it really frustrating to be a woman who has relationships, of any kind, with men.
I know what you're thinking: "Cut to the chase, Amanda, does this all mean you're a lesbian now?" Sadly, no, although I haven't given up hope. That's a little bit tongue in cheek, but it's also true to the extent that I think things could change as I continue to "unlearn" compulsory heterosexuality. What does that mean? For me, it means thinking about women more as human beings. This has, horrifyingly, sometimes been challenging, even as a woman. In fact, it has occasionally been challenging to think of myself as a human being. I have prioritized trying to earn men's respect and admiration by acting the way I think they want me to act, rather than the way it felt right to act. I have thought of my life as requiring the participation of men. To be clear, it hasn't always been because I've wanted a relationship with these men, but instead because it was always easy to believe that men's opinions and feelings had intrinsic value. Where women had always been presented as objects, men have had rich inner lives, profound ideas and philosophies: in other words, men have always seemed more human than women. Under those circumstances, I guess I have to forgive myself, for the moment, for not experiencing attraction to women. I'll keep you updated on my progress, though.
I love this! Especially the part about having a hard time seeing yourself as a human being. It reminds me of this situation with my dad. He always used to tell us things like "Women can't do math," "women can't drive well," "stop being a woman and be on time instead," etc. And for the majority of my life I believed him. I thought of women as these lesser beings, but I couldn't also see that I was a woman because it didn't make sense. I would ask him for help with math and science homework instead of my mom (who minored in math at an ivy league school). And when I would get awards in math and science I would be proud of myself not as a successful woman, but as some other undefined thing, because I couldn't possibly be both a woman and good at math. My mind kind of compartmentalized that part of me because it was too paradoxical. It took me until my third year of college as a geophysics major to realize that I was a woman, I was the one getting A's on my tests, and I was the one who actually knew more math than my Dad, and I was the one who was better than the majority of the over-confident men in my predominantly male classes. I had to retrain my mind to actually accept the fact that women are real people with actual brains and abilities, and that I was one of them. And I think you're right that even as women we still have a hard time seeing ourselves and other women as more than objects, because society and our upbringings have all this crap hard-wired into our brains.
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