How Gender Fucks Women

A while ago I was engaged in a Facebook debate (the best kind, lol) in which I was explaining the different ways in which gender norms pressure cis-men and cis-women. Cis-men’s relationship to the masculine is quite simple: do it. Be masculine and you will win at the gender game. Their relationship to the feminine is pretty simple too: don’t do it. Don’t be feminine, or you will lose at the gender game. There are some caveats to this, of course, because nothing in society is ever as simple as it might first seem. But generally, the way for men to win at gender is to be masculine and eschew the feminine

Cis-women’s relationship to gender is a hell of a lot more complicated. Women are working under the same gender system as men, the one that privileges and values masculinity. So, their relationship to masculinity is also: do it. In order to win at gender (or at least come as close as she can), a woman needs to be masculine. However, because she’s a woman, she must also be feminine. A woman who is too masculine (and not feminine enough) is viewed as not doing her gender correctly and is totally screwed. So for a woman to win at gender, she must be feminine and masculine, but not too much of either. She must not be too masculine, and she must work harder to have her masculinity recognised at all. Because the feminine is undervalued, hyper-sexualized, and openly mocked, she must not be too feminine.¹

Enter school dress codes and the current debate about them. There are two narratives running right now about this issue. The first is the conservative one: girls shouldn’t dress provocatively because it’s “slutty” and it distracts the guys. The second is a feminist response: girls should be able to wear whatever the hell they want and not be stared at. Not surprisingly, I agree with the second: regardless of what a woman is wearing her body should be respected and not ogled or objectified. And certainly, the onus should never be on a woman to prevent a man from objectifying her. The onus is on the man to not do the objectifying.²

However, both of those narratives leave something out: the pressure put on women to be sexualized, in part through their clothing choices. I just read this little article about the ridiculously sexualized version of Brave’s Merida revealed when she was officially made into a Disney princess. Throughout the article, the complaint is twofold: they sexualized her and they made her look more “adult” like. The two phrases are used almost interchangeably because for women (or in this case an animated teen girl) to be “adult” like is to be sexualized. Young women are constantly bombarded with the idea that maturity and sexaulization are synonymous, but at the same time told that contributing to their own sexualization is bad and “slutty,” etc.

So here we are back at the relatively simple relationship men have with the feminine, and the very complicated (and fucked up) relationship women have to the feminine. Would a man who wore an extremely low-cut top or tight-fitting shirt to prom be told to change his outfit? It’s possible. It almost certainly wouldn’t be described in terms of potentially “distracting,” the girls, though. It’d be spoken about as being “inappropriate,” because he would have dressed in a feminine way and he’s a man. It is relatively simple: all the social pressure in western society is on men not to do this, not to dress in a feminine way, particularly not at a prom.³ Women, on the other hand are told that they must dress in a feminine way, but not a way that is too sexualized. This is nearly impossible when the adult version of femininity is so highly sexualized. All of this is compounded by the way in which women’s sexuality is that of an object, never the subject. A woman who is viewed as taking too much of an active interest in her sex life is performing a masculine role, and is condemned for it. So she must dress in a feminine way which means being sexualised, but not too sexualised or it can be perceived as her taking too active a role in her own sex life which is no longer feminine.

So women are basically fucked by gender, or at least by our current gender system. They must be feminine, but not too feminine because feminine is undervalued and hyper-sexualized. They must be masculine, but not too masculine because they are women and thus trying to be too masculine is viewed as not being feminine enough and threatening. I actually think that the whole “women are more complicated than men,” thing stems from this. Women aren’t more complicated, we’re just navigating a much more complicated set of gender norms and expectations. However, that is, of course, another topic for another day.

—————-

¹ I’m going to show my over-educated privilege here for a moment and mention that I’m not going full Irigaray or Kristeva over here. It’s more based off of de Beauvoir, really.

² This applies to any combination of genders, but right now we’re talking about the prevalent problem of cis-men objectifying and ogling cis-women.

³ This totally screws over anyone who is perceived as a man and is gender variant in any way, of course. However, that’s another topic for another day. Also, of course, the acceptable level of femininity in men’s appearances and masculinity in women’s appearances is always shifting. But again, the specifics of this are left for another topic on another day.