The F Word

Ian and I hosted a housewarming at our new condo on Saturday. Expecting upwards of 25 people to attend, I decided to buy two dozen Do-Rite Donuts for a fun, local dessert. This turned out to be a GROSS OVERESTIMATE because my dear friends ate only 17 of the 24. So, left to my own devices, I ate four old-fashioned donuts in 36 hours over the weekend. Maybe it was five. Whatever. I just know that by Sunday evening I was wearing my stretchy pajama pants because I felt bloated and fat.

But, if I’m honest with myself, I’ve felt fat since 3rd grade.

I had a chubby little tummy by the time I was 8, which is when I started to revere thinness. I bragged to my parents about my meager accomplishments on our now-dusty treadmill; I squealed with glee in the dressing room of Abercombie & Fitch when, once during junior high, I fit into a size 8 pair of green cargo pants; and I hugged my high school boyfriend when, after a day of “feeling fat”, he put one hand on my back and one of my stomach to physically show me that I wasn’t. As a dutiful, nice American girl, I grew up fearing the power of the F word: you could call me stupid, you could call me a bitch, but whatever you do, please don’t ever call me fat.

Nothing has changed. I’m a 28 year old woman, but I’m still a nice American girl, and if someone called me fat tomorrow, I might curl up in my bed and cry.

The mirror has always been my biggest critic. In high school, I didn’t think I was thin (I weighed 145 pounds); Freshman year of college I didn’t think I was thin (I weighed 170 pounds); After two semesters in Europe, I didn’t think I was thin (I weighed 150 pounds); A year and a half ago in Indiana, I didn’t think I was thin (I weighed 180 pounds); today, I don’t think I’m thin (I weigh 161 pounds).

These days, I could not imagine feeling thin enough until I weigh less than 150 pounds, or at least until I could comfortably zip up the pair of pants I bought in London. But then I must remind myself that I did once make those benchmarks, and I still felt fat.

One day, upon pondering this absurdity, I decided to focus on the deluge of Skinny that usually blends into the white noise of everyday life. For a few hours, I counted the number of Skinnygirl and Special K commericals on Bravo; I studied the Hydroxycut ads in Ok! Magazine; I tuned into the bikini body and baby weight articles online; and I listened to Jennifer Hudson sing to me about "Feeling Good" on Weight Watchers. I even watched the oft-shared Dove Real Beauty Sketches commercial only to hear: “She was thin so you could see her cheekbones. And her chin, it was a nice thin chin.” And “She looks closed off and fatter; sadder, too.”

Then, like slamming a book shut, I tuned it out. In the silence, I laughed a little at the ubiquity of the Thin = Better messages I’d just paid attention to. They were everywhere, obscene in their commonplaceness.

I finally realized that it’s not that I’ve never felt thin; it’s that I’ve never felt fully satisfied with myself. Ever since I became aware of an outside gaze, my body has been a work in progress. In other words, all the Biggest Losers and the Hydroxycuts and the Atkins diets - all of these images have been working in tandem to form a singular, powerful subliminal message that I, and everyone I know has always embraced:

That I am incomplete until I am thinner.

Fuck that.

Gender & Belonging, Part 3: How Feminism Left Men Behind

Even with the wage gap and gender discrimination and all the feminist literature sitting on my bookshelves, something has me questioning my “second sex” status. If I could turn back time, I’m not sure I’d want to go through life as a man. Even with pervasive patriarchy in today’s society, I’m grasping my Girl Card with a firm grip for one big, selfish reason:

I know I’m getting a seat on the lifeboat.  

You see, men’s large-group social structure may provide them with big rewards, but it also comes with a big cost: male expendability, or the “women and children first” dynamic.  Patriarchy has led men to the boardroom, but also to the bottom of the ocean and the cold dirt of a battlefield.

So why are men disposable?  

Male expendability makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.  For a species struggling for survival, every woman counts.  But one man can do the job of many.  In the words of Dr. Greg Hampikian in the New York Times, “If all the men on earth died tonight, the species could continue on frozen sperm. If the women disappear, it’s extinction.”

According to social psychologist, Dr. Roy F. Baumeister, this male expendability traditionally meant that men could engage in riskier behaviors.  These risks could have been for good (standing in a lightning storm with a kite to discover electricity) or bad (mustering up in a warzone).  So the next time your boyfriend talks about the male need to “spread his seed,” just remind him that his ability makes him disposable to society (and then give him a hug).

Curiously, patriarchy may have evolved as a disproportionate backlash against this male disposability.  If their disposability breeds insecurity, then perhaps our male ancestors desired increasing levels of control over societies as a means of securing their futures within it.  Or, more generously, the biological need to care for women may have morphed into restrictions on their rights. As explained by this non-academic-yet-very-thought-provoking YouTube contributor, Karen: “The drive to protect women from harm has resulted in extreme limits being placed on women’s mobility, their agency, and their power of decision to direct their own lives all throughout history...”

Fast forward to the 19th century, and women’s rights movements began the long struggle against these limits on their rights.  Feminism - a movement I proudly support - is a backlash against patriarchy. I remain deeply indebted to the courageous women who came before me, who stood up for the radical idea that I should be thought of as equal to my husband.  And the Feminist mission is hardly complete. The quest for equal gender rights continues today, in distant corners of the world and in the minds of our political leaders speaking on TV.

But male expendability is something that modern Feminism has not addressed, and I think it’s a significant omission.  As YouTube Karen explains, the omission of male disposability pollutes the Feminist mission:

Feminism’s greatest victories have only reinforced in everyone that society still owes women provisions, protection, health and support just because they’re women... [It] teaches us to put women’s needs to the forefront of every single issue, whether that issue is domestic violence law, sexual assault, institutional sexism, [etc.]... Feminism has done nothing but exploit this dynamic, this expectation on men to put everybody else before themselves, especially women.

She also addresses female privilege, which is a byproduct of male disposability:

Feminists will insist that... restrictions placed on women...are the ultimate form of objectification.  You lock up your possessions to make sure that they will never be...harmed.  Honestly, if I were a guy on a battlefield, I might appreciate being objectified that way.  If I’m going to be an object, I’d rather be a sexual one.

This omission of male expendability is a very first-world, 21st-century feminist problem.  To even consider it presumes the evolution of women’s rights to an acceptable point.  I can hardly imagine rape victims in the Congo or Elizabeth Cady Stanton considering men’s rights in this way.  

But male disposability is still a feminist issue that needs to be addressed.  If women seek gender equality, then we need to acknowledge our disadvantages and our privileges.  Men may run the world for now, but they also run into battle for us.  To get to the boardroom, women might need to give up our seat on the lifeboat.

Gender & Belonging, Part 2: The Social Roots of Patriarchy

I have something in common with biology professor at Boise State University.  We both published articles espousing the virtues of femaleness this weekend.  Mine on my humble little blog; his on the New York Times.  Chock-full or Y-chromosome shaming, Greg Hampikian’s partially satirical article “Men, Who Needs Them?” might get him kicked out his fantasy football league this year:

It’s true that men have traditionally been the breadwinners. But women have been a majority of college graduates since the 1980s, and their numbers are growing... Meanwhile women live longer, are healthier and are far less likely to commit a violent offense. If men were cars, who would buy the model that doesn’t last as long, is given to lethal incidents and ends up impounded more often?

For the record, I would buy the man car because it’s cute and has a nice rear.

Even with these pro-women articles, including my own, it’s hard to feel bad for men, isn’t it?  They have it pretty good these days, at least from the vantage point of my couch. The two folks running for President are both men (though I wouldn’t mind if Hillz was added to the ticket); men lead 488 of the Fortune 500 companies; and even influential women in academia and government struggle with gender discrimination.

So where did patriarchy come from?

Patriarchy's theoretical roots are numerous and oft-debated. But one interesting explanation for the origin of male-dominance of our societies comes from Dr. Roy F. Baumeister, a professor of social psychology at Florida State University. He credits the evolution of patriarchy to the structure of men’s social groups.  While women prefer smaller, more intimate social groups, men seek larger, shallower groups.  Being part of a larger group encourages individuals to specialize and take risks to distinguish themselves from the rest:

…[M]en think of themselves based on their unusual traits that set them apart from others, while women’s self-concepts feature things that connect them to others.  [S.E. Cross and L. Madsen] thought that this was because men wanted to be apart from others. But in fact being different is vital strategy for belonging to a large group. If you’re the only group member who can kill an antelope or find water or talk to the gods or kick a field goal, the group can’t afford to get rid of you.

As specialization occurred, culture developed around men's social groups, and hence evolved patriarchy:

…[I]t’s just that the women’s sphere remained about where it was, while the men’s sphere, with its big and shallow social networks, slowly benefited from the progress of culture. By accumulating knowledge and improving the gains from division of labor, the men’s sphere gradually made progress.

Even today, this gender discrepancy of social ordering may be holding women back.  Take the wage gap, for example.  A study published in Organization Science called “Engendering Inequity? How Social Accounts Create vs. Merely Explain Unfavorable Pay Outcomes for Women,” found that the perception of women in the workplace puts them at a disadvantage.  Kerry Hannon wrote about this study here:

“Research on stereotyping shows that people assume that women care more than men do about communality and belongingness and that men care more than women about their own attainment and self-interest,” wrote Maura Belliveau, the study’s author, an associate professor at Long Island University. For this reason, the managers generally felt that the women would be able to recognize the need for the cutbacks and would not feel as personally offended as the men if they received small raises.

So women may be willing to accept less pay because of their strong social desire to belong. 

This intimacy/attainment trade-off has interesting implications for both genders. If women value intimate relationships, they may bring home less bacon; if men attain positions of power, they may have more shallow relationships.

In second grade I asked everyone on the playground a precocious question: “If you could go back to when you were born, would you rather be a boy or a girl?”  All the boys said boy, and all but one of the girls said girl. (The dissenter said in all seriousness that she would have rather been born a boy, which was quite the playground controversy back then.  It may have been a playful hypothetical on her part, but I can’t help but wonder if that little girl might have known that something was different about her sexual orientation, even at 6 years old.)

Even with the wage gap, gender discrimination, and all the feminist literature sitting on my bookshelves, I think I’d still answer “girl” because, in a most significant way, I feel more valuable than a man.  Maybe patriarchy is really just a backlash against a fundamental male insecurity: that they’re disposable.  I’ll explore male expendability in Part 3.