Your Friendly Neighbourhood Feminist

The Vagina Monologues are in town! As many of you know, the Monologues - performances celebrating the woman and the vagina - inspired a global movement to end gender-based violence against girls and women. This movement was titled V-Day and, happily, it's been a relatively successful universal effort to promote an end to violence against females as we know it. So if you get a chance to attend the Vag Monologues, the performances are definitely worth it. Even if you can't attend, I highly suggest checking out some of the monologues on Youtube. They'll make you laugh, they'll make you cry - but most importantly, they'll make you think. =)

Today I had an ... experience. I don't think I would have immediately classified it as a "good" one, but after a while I've decided that although I was initially offended when first confronted with it, it ultimately gave me some good thinking material to mull over for the day (even though I should have been paying attention in class).

I was sitting on a crowded bus on the way to campus, in the seat facing the rear door. Two women stood in front of me, hanging onto the poles for support and discussing their recent experiences with boyfriends. Somehow the conversation turned to a male friend who loved having deep conversations with his female friends. These females would all subsequently 'fall in love with him' because of his willingness to share sensitive information with them – as one of the women said, “They must think, ‘Oh, you’re willing to tell me all these secrets about you – we must have a special relationship!"

Anyway, I digress.

The first woman continued to complain that the male friend was completely clueless as to why his female friends would “fall in love” with him. The other woman chimed in:

“He needs to stop thinking there’s something wrong with the women, and re-evaluate what he might be doing. I mean, it’s the same as a woman who walks around with her cleavage hanging out, wondering,” and here the woman affected the voice of a typical ditzy airheaded girl, “‘why are all these guys staring?’”

I slightly winced; I was myself wearing a shirt with a relatively low neck and these women were literally hovering over me. Apparently they noticed my flinch, because there was an awkward silence before the other woman piped up again:

“It’s not the issue of asking for trouble, it’s the issue of demanding attention.”

The first woman nodded in agreement. “If a woman goes to the same bar every night and she gets raped each time, she needs to realize that maybe it’s something that she’s doing that’s causing it to happen.”

At this point, we had reached the bus stop on campus and everybody was getting up. The women both briskly walked off and I watched them continue their conversation out of my hearing.

The myth we’ll be busting today, as you may have figured out, is:
Do women ask for attention of the bad sort when they dress in revealing clothes?

The quick answer is: Of course not! Do men ask to be wolf whistled at, grabbed at, or even raped when they walk around with tight spandex shirts or their pants sagging halfway down their butts? Why don’t we call these men sluts? Why is it just women?

Look at them, walking around like that. It’s scandalous! They are so asking for it.

Labels: gender-based violence, mythbusting, V-Day

Have you ever filled out an application or a medical form? If you have, you'll remember that under the area where you fill in your name, the forms will ask you one of two things.

(1) Sex: _______ (or Male/Female),
or
(2) Gender: _______ (or Male/Female)

Now, it's never both, so by that token we can assume that these terms are interchangeable. But...do they really embody the same concept? Are sex and gender one and the same?

I remember this very clearly, because it was the very first thing I learned when I sat down for my first Women's Studies lecture. The professor asked the class if we knew what the difference was, and aside from a few knowing nods from the savvy individuals who decided to do the readings ahead of time, she largely received blank stares.

"Sex," she said, "is biological. Gender, however, is not."

Simply put, we are all born with a sex, whether it be male, female, or otherwise. The birthing doctor checks between our legs the minute we are born - if we have a tiny vagina we're female, if we have a tiny penis we're male, and if we have both then we're hermaphrodites.

So sex relies on the biological set of genitalia we have. Gender, on the other hand, is a social construction. Based on whether we have a vagina or a penis, society gives us a role to play out. If we have a vagina then the gender ascribed to us is that of a woman, and if we have a penis then the gender ascribed to us is that of a man - and if we have both, then our guardians and the doctor just pick one (either woman or man) and we go along with that one.

From birth we are taught gender, and it affects every single thing we do. It's been with us so long that we've grown to accept (and defend) gender as something 'natural' to us, something we were born with instead of being socialized into. For instance, we've all seen babies before. The toys, the clothes, even the design of the baby room all are determined by what gender we have attributed with that baby. Male children are taught to be boys by society - they play with trucks, they get into fights, and are told not to cry when they scrape their knees. Female children are taught to be girls - they play with dolls, they are prim and proper, and they are fussed over when they fall and bruise their elbows.

It's no surprise that we've grown up to conflate our biological sex with a certain gender. Deviation from your prescribed gender, which is identified when you act out behaviour that conflicts with your sex (for instance, a female who sits on the bus with her legs wide open - a behaviour very, very common with 'men' as any quick trip on public transit will prove), is immediately chastised. You are told to stop being "so unladylike" or to stop being "such a sissy".

Labels: biological vs. social, gender, gender performance, gender studies, sex, transgender, two-spirit