The essence thereof.
I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a difference feminist or a gender essentialist; there are differences, yes, of course there are, but they’re scattered in bell curves that overlap to an extraordinary degree, and even if one’s labeled Man and the other Woman, well, you never meet Man or Woman, do you? Just people. Who happen to be. And so.
I’m not a gender essentialist: for it to be at all meaningful (as essence, mind, essentially), you’d have to convince me that any conceivable woman has more in common with every other possible woman that she could with any conceivable man, and vice-versa. There are differences, of course there are, but we have so many different ways to be different together; why waste all your time looking for the Men who Always Do This or the Women who Never Do That and risk missing the people that are all around you?
Blanket statements like that, when the polarities are Male and Female, end up inevitably circling around one particular This ’n’ That which Men Always and Women Never (well, Hardly Ever): SEX. And while they can seem relatively harmless on the surface, leading to silly head-scratchers such as—
Men are simple creatures. Protoplasms. It is a strange irony that a woman can pretty much get whatever she wants from a guy with no arguments and no disagreements—nothing but “Absolutely, dear” and “Whatever you want, honey”—by doing just one thing (but doing it two or three or sometimes four times a week).
(And while I don’t doubt there’s some folks nodding along with the beat out there, there’s a whole lot of other folks going now hold on just a minute, what?) —But such seemingly harmless homilies can twist all of a sudden into duties and expectations the rest of us never knew were in the social contract—
What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.
What woman would love a man who was so governed by feelings and moods that he allowed them to determine whether he would do something as important as go to work? Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can—indeed, ought to—refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?
—and what was a seemingly harmless stupidity has become a collectively punishing generality, getting uglier with every Men Do and Women Don’t twist until we end up clutching at Spider Robinson’s Screwfly:
We’re all descended from two million years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishing thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot.
Now Tiptree wrote “Screwfly” for a reason, and people who said shit like that were definitely part of the unbearable wrong that fueled that particular pocket of outrage in her head. But the coldly horrible what-if of the story is precisely what if Men Always Did; what if there really is an US and a THEM and an unbridgeable gender war between. —It wouldn’t look like a John Gray sitcom, is what.
(Yes. I know: Black mollies. —I never said the idea doesn’t exist. I said it isn’t true.)
I’m not a gender essentialist, but—
(Ha ha.)
No, seriously. Or at least as serious as I want to be, whistling once more past this graveyard. —When I’m out and about with the Littlest Wookie (so named because of her fluting and hooting and not at all because of her furry back), I’ve noticed it’s always women who are smiling at me, nodding, saying hello and oh my and how cute. It’s always women who are suddenly stepping close to rub her head without asking. It’s always women, and never men.
(And before you tell me it’s because as a father strolling through downtown with a baby Björned I’m clearly good breedstock and willing to invest energy in my offspring which does something all unconscious-like to her uterus or maybe it’s her hormones which explains why, you should note the crucial grammatical difference between “women always” and “always women,” and start maybe questioning what you should have been questioning all along: my perceptions, and yours, and theirs. —I’m lying, for instance: the cashier who gave us a 20% discount on a hefty load of groceries because the Littlest Wookie was fussy was, after all, a man.)
Okay, babies, but how about salesmen? —In my job I see a lot of email ripped from a lot of corporate email accounts and let me tell you: salesmen? Hands down the worst for the nasty jokes and the porn and the shockjock photos. Saleswomen? Not at all.
So there’s that.
Ugh, I hadn’t seen that Spider Robinson quote before. I knew there was a reason I never liked the guy’s books. It’s not just the noxious idea; it’s the smug, paternalistic tone, like we silly little women with our tiny lady brains have never noticed that a) there are men who want to have sex with us, and b) there are men who want to hurt us. Believe me, those are two things every woman knows.
He’s wrong, anyway. Rape—as in forced sex on a struggling, unwilling female—is not a common reproductive strategy in the animal kingdom, because females quickly evolve defenses against it. In species where rape exists, it’s usually the last resort of males who can’t get laid any other way. (There are some exceptions, which you can usually identify by the outlandishly complex reproductive systems the females have evolved to block unwanted sperm. Ducks, for instance.) Robinson’s fantasy of some caveman past where it was standard procedure to bonk a woman on the head and go at her is just a fantasy. And a nasty one.
I had to stop reading the comments on Ace’s post because they were making me ashamed to be human. All those guys urging women to fake orgasms so their egos won’t be bruised and threatening to cheat on them if they don’t. Who the hell wants or enjoys a relationship like that? No wonder their girlfriends don’t want to have sex with them.
I don’t think you have to be a gender essentialist to notice that there are some pretty large cultural differences in men and women’s accepted and commonly practiced behavior. I think a feminist awareness rather requires an understanding of the way that, well, the system of gender is practiced and enforced. Women are expected to be interested in babies, and strange men are viewed as dangerous to children, so some women engage with strange babies and no men do (actually, I routinely engage with strange babies by making faces, but I would certainly never touch a strange baby). Misogyny and gross-out tactics are both part of a standard library of male bonding tactics, and are also an effective way of excluding women from a profession.
Oh, most women don’t touch Taran either; only one has, in fact, and it was weird. I was pushing a little, rhetorically. —But I must admit the one time I walked Taran back to the parking garage without a Björn or a sling I thought somebody might stop me, thinking I was stealing a baby. Unnatural, I know, but.
Anyway: that’s what I was trying to get at, with the difference between “always women” and “women always.” Or, of course (but of course!), vice versa.
—Shænon: I’m sorry you felt compelled to read anything at Ace’s. Really, truly, I am.