I’m thinking today of the mythical Amazons. I say “mythical” not to make any statement about their actuality, but because I’m thinking specifically of the mythology. That is, what does this mythic idea mean?

The idea is of a woman warrior, but she’s more than that. She is a person who occupies the space between sexes. She cuts off one breast, the better to shoot arrows, but leaves the other: a combatant who can nurse children. All her life is dimorphic. Women are her friends and comrades, men her enemies; her daughters are treasured children, her sons left out to die.

I am being somewhat ahistorical here. I’m interpreting this idea from my vantage point as a 21st century dyke, wondering what the symbol means today — I find its simple endurance as an idea noteworthy — and, to a lesser (and less informed) extent, what it might have meant once, what purpose this idea serves.

So. The Amazon is, I think, the visceral reaction to the gendering of violence. We code violence as male and tenderness as female and, therefore, men as dangerous and women as nurturing. Trapped in such a system, people respond in many ways — most frequently by performing these roles and behaving as if they are natural and inevitable. But I don’t think of any of us is truly comfortable with this incredibly reductive picture of human nature. The life of the Amazon is a life of both protest against this system and capitulation to it: a rejection of the system on the system’s own terms. The Amazon is following an older, crueler Golden Rule — treat others as they treat you. In a world where men, and only men, are brutal, and women, and only women, are kind,* the Amazon, in an imperfect stand against cruelty, becomes callous to men and considerate to women.

This is a profound assent to the premises of the gender system — she accepts that women are one way and men another. But it also, inevitably, gets her kicked out of that same institution. As soon as she practices both violence and tenderness, even in her sexist way, she is no longer qualified for membership in the group “woman.” This contradiction embodies the essence of life under this regime: we are trapped and re-trapped in the system even as we are constantly kicked out of it, constantly deemed unworthy of our assigned class. And that’s the real cruelty of it.

Even in exile there is no escape.

* This is not the real world. It is the world the gender system tells us we live in, though.

Cross-posted at Our Descent Into Madness.

It seems to me that the foundational assumptions of traditional school are: that children, left to their own devices, cannot and will not learn; that children are basically helpless and stupid and deficient in curiosity; that children must therefore be taught, by a competent authority, or they will fail to grasp concepts and gain skills.

I think anyone who has ever spent any time with a child can attest that all of these ideas are patently false. Anyone who was ever spent time around a child who is learning to talk can attest as much with even greater confidence — tiny babies, unable even to feed themselves, crack the code of language with a speed and an enthusiasm most adults could envy. The reality, as far as I can tell, could not be farther from those assumptions.

And I do believe those are the underlying ideas. We would have to believe that children must be forced to learn in order to ask ourselves, “Is our children learning?”

That is an insane question. I know it’s also a much-mocked one, but no one would have laughed at it if our Ivy Leagued-educated* soon-to-be-former President had managed to formulate it correctly. And that’s absurd. There is no such thing as a child who isn’t learning. The only questions is, “Are our children learning things in the arbitrary order and at the arbitrary pace the school system requires?” If that’s more important to us than whether children are happy, healthy, curious, and engaged — and it certainly seems to be — we have our priorities precisely backward.

Instead of creating a safe, engaging environment where young children can explore, we create sterilized institutions where children are policed, herded like cattle. Instead of recognizing children as humans, with interests and desires, we treat them like identical robots, worrying whether they’ve learned to perform the right tricks instead of worrying whether they’ve learned to make friends, have conversations, critically evaluate ideas, express themselves through writing and art.

I know this has been said before. It’s been said so often it was already cliche when I was born in 1989. These things had been said, written, published in many places when, in 1998, I threw up in the bathroom after my first timed math test. Yes, these were well known ideas in 2005, when my incredibly intelligent twelve-year-old brother was identified as a “problem” by his teachers for such offenses as having unkempt hair, a messy backpack, and unsharpened pencils. I’m quite sure these ideas were familiar to the “head learner” (principal) of my high school when he sat me down and, having seen my SAT scores, proceeded to lecture me at length about the importance of attending a prestigious school, in total indifference to my thoughts, feelings, existence. He repeatedly interrupted me as a I tried to explain myself — to explain that I had more than a few misgivings about running off to spend a fortune for the privilege of joining the system currently destroying the world. His unwavering, self-interested concern for his own ability to use my accomplishments in future fund-raising was shockingly transparent. And this was at a small, artsy, alternative charter school. I do not want to imagine the lives of my cohorts in crueler institutions.

These ideas are well known, but the system continues. I have a lot of ideas about what would make a better school system, but very few about how to get out of the mess we’re in. The machine seems unbreakable, and I am terrified that with each passing year my memories will fade, I will care a little less, and eventually put my children through the same thing, safe in the socially acceptable conviction that it’s good for them. That the best training ground for this cruel world, this cruel capitalist economy, is the schoolyard with its bullies, its asphalt, its sand kicked by wind into little eyes, little mouths.

I’m sorry. I don’t have any suggestions. The point of public education is a very laudable and necessary one: we must have an educated populous in order to have a functioning democracy. But while we have a schooled populous, we don’t have an educated one. And while things are looking up for this country in recent months, the state of our republic is still dubious.

And I’m not just talking about public schools here, though that’s where I received most of my primary and secondary education. It’s the strange project of school itself, the centralization of childhood. It’s the strange truth that we live in a society in which young people, like old people, are useless — are unable to contribute anything we consider to be of value — and so must be occupied by pointless, deadening tasks.

I’m still in school now. In many ways college in depressingly similar to high school — the kids are the same as ever — but in others, it is a great improvement. The single greatest thing about college, the single thing that differentiates it from high school, is the fact that my professors respect me. My professors acknowledge me as a human being, with both the ability and the right to make choices for myself. No one is trying to go over my head. No one is trying to deny me my most basic authority over my own time, my own body. No one treats me a like a robot or an animal. No one treats me like a child.

Further reading.

In the comments to this post, I was offered two invaluable links that helped to catalyze my thinking on this subject. My aunt Stephanie recommended this amazing speech by John Taylor Gatto — it’s his acceptance speech for the New York City Teacher of the Year Award, which he won in 1990. Please read it.

Next, ballgame me suggested Compulsory Miseducation by Paul Goodman — that’s a PDF of the 1964 book. It’s a fast, engaging read; much of the language is dated, but the ideas are still timely and revolutionary.

* You know, enough said, really. That’s my whole point right there.

When I was in 10th grade, Emily and I started going to the bookstore during our free periods. We’d get coffee, and then just wander, reading title after title, picking up anything that interested us. We often read whole books in a single sitting, crouched on the carpet at the back of one aisle or another, sometimes reading silently to ourselves and sometimes out loud to one another. We read novels, collections of poetry, nonfiction volumes about science and history and feminism. This was fun — it was great, unadulterated fun, and the things we learned are immeasurable. I would learn more in ninety minutes, exploring an interesting topic with my best friend, than I did in an entire semester in any of my classes. Overall I’m sure I’ve learned significantly more reading with Emily — in bookstores, bedrooms and the blogosphere — than I did in my three* years of high school combined.

Being forced back into class every day after this was incredibly demoralizing. I’ve always been an A student and liked school more than most, but this exposed the great hypocrisy of what I was being forced to do. I was learning, passionately — and it felt nothing like sitting in those classrooms. That framework of school was actively hostile to my education, actively preventing me from learning, by forcing me to sit in my plastic chair as an often pathetic teacher tried and failed to gain control of the classroom, and as the other kids joked and flirted in their stupidly transparent ways.

(Emily simply sat silently reading through every single class, managing to get some value of that wasted time.)

To add insult to injury, those school officials would regularly force me into discussions and activities about “learning how to learn.” Learning how to learn! As if they new the first thing about it! As if learning is some trick children must be trained, like dogs, to perform!

Needless to say, there is something profoundly wrong with the school system when it inhibits learning. There is something profoundly wrong with the school system when the bookish, academic kids hate it.

So what are we doing here?

We’re treating children and teenagers like they aren’t people. People — human beings — are sensitive, curious, self-aware, self-motivating, cooperative creatures. We treat children like they’re numb, stupid, belligerent, apathetic animals, and then we complain when they act that way.

And what happened to Emily and me?

We figured out that we were people. We discovered we were smart, caring, inquisitive and enthusiastic. We discovered we were human beings.

Once the kid knows she’s a person, you can’t expect her to sit back down and shut back up again.

(Thanks to Dave at How to Save The World for reminding me of this a few weeks ago.)

In the next installment, more about the fundamental assumptions of school, plus a suggestion for further reading. Finally, in Part III if it fits or IV if it doesn’t, some ideas about what school should do and be.

* At the end of junior year I started attending college under an arrangement in which both schools agreed to let me count college credits toward my high school graduation.

I’m sort of confused about what this means. It’s a site launched by the office of President-Elect Barack Obama (!), where you can read about our soon-to-be administration’s agenda and policies, share your experience of the election and campaign, and, most startlingly, submit your ideas about how we should deal with the myriad challenges we face.

I feel dizzy, almost giddy. It’s starting to sink in. I live in a republic! The US government is my government! Oh my God!

And I know it’s trivial, but I was so grateful that Obama mentioned gay people in is speech — included us in the list along with people of different races and people with and without disabilities, where we damn well belong.* Included us with respect, and without being asked to. That was an amazing moment for me.

If you missed the speech, you can watch it here.

(Look, I know Obama is a moderate. I’m sure there will be disappointments in addition to joys. But for now, I want to revel in this. I was eleven when George W. Bush took office — I cannot remember having a government of which I was consciously aware that was not utterly abhorrent to me, that was not overtly hostile to my rights, my very existence. So if Obama’s administration can even manage to be decent, I’m likely to be very glad, at least until the shock of it wears off.)

* And where many other folks who weren’t mentioned damn well belong, too.

Cross-posted at Our Descent Into Madness.

I’m at my high school, sitting in the gathering space — the hall where we had our weekly, school-wide assemblies. All my friends are there, and all my teachers. Guest speakers have come in. They are talking and talking, lecturing us about some subject, passing a microphone back and forth. They are saying something that infuriates me — some lie, some bigoted untruth that the teachers and administrators are nodding along to. I’m exchanging glances with my friends, my classmates, uneasy sideways glances as we slowly realize how wrong these lecturers are. They talk on and on and it gets only worse, I get angrier and angrier. I raise my hand to speak but they ignore it. My hand is up for what feels like hours, until my arm is shaking and exhausted and my face contorted. I start to yell, begging to be allowed to speak. I need to speak. I know that no one will correct these liars if I don’t and I can’t let them talk like that to my friends, to all these kids. I love these kids and I can’t let them do this. But they ignore me. I start screaming, and I’m crying, choking around my sentences, my pathetic little points that I need to make so badly. I need only to say them, to be heard. How can they make us sit here like this? Forced to gag on their sentences and not allowed to feel anything, not allowed to respond.

This is when my teachers decide they have had enough of it. They grab my arms, my hair, my shoulders. They put duct tape over my mouth.

It’s more than a year already that I’ve been out of high school, but I have these dreams about once a week. That’s a more mild one. A few month ago I dreamt that the school administration was keeping us locked in rotting facilities on an isolated island a la Lost, and they performed surgeries on us when we were sleeping, putting machines into our bodies. My parents, both in their forties, still have high school nightmares, too.

These nightmares are evidence of trauma. I wake up crying, my hands stuck in tight fists. If my parents are any indication, I may have these nightmares all my life.

What the hell is going on here? What are we doing? What is this system, this methodology, that we refuse to break away from? It’s incredible to me — truly incredible — that virtually everyone has a horrible, permanently scarring experience in school, only to force their own children through the same thing.

In the next segment, I will explore the nature of formal education — what it is we’re actually doing here.

The title, by the way, comes from here.

First of all, Lisa Harney of Questioning Transphobia is a vital voice in the blogosphere. If you’re not reading her work, you should be. She’s in a very tight spot right now, so if you have a few dollars to spare, I urge you to consider donating via the Paypal button on her site. (You can read more about her situation here.)

I want to jump now away from Lisa to the broader phenomenon of folks rallying around a fellow blogger to offer assistance in a time of need, something I’ve seen happen quite a few times. It is, in my observation, starting to become standard practice for bloggers to receive some support from the blogosphere when the going gets tough, which I find pretty fascinating.

In my last post, I talked about our need, as humans, for love and support from more than one person — in essence, our need for community. Community performs a lot of different functions; in the last post, I focused mainly on our social and emotional needs, which are of course very important. At an even more basic level, though, community meets our daily physical needs for food and shelter. What does it say about the state of community today that the blogosphere, of all things, steps in to support people?

(Once again, I’m talking about big-picture phenomena here, not the specifics of the life of any person but myself.)

To me it says that, for a lot of people, the blogosphere, and other non-geographic communities, are the new neighborhood. Instead of having a neighbor to bring over a casserole during a hard month, many of us have, instead, a wide circle allies and readers to click on a Paypal button. (Or, if we’re lucky, maybe we have both.)

It’s great that people have that support. That kind of network is critically necessary; I’m very glad to see the blogosphere step up to meet that need where necessary. What’s interesting to me is that it is necessary — that, for many people, the networks that are presumably more immediate than blogland are either nonexistent or, more likely, just inadequate.

This does make some good sense. Neighborhoods (and, before, villages and even towns) used to be collections of people who shared a culture, complete with shared values, worldview, lifestyle and experiences. Today, many neighborhoods* and other Earth-bound populations in industrialized countries are basically random assortments of people who have nothing more in common than the fact that they live on the same street. (This is not always true — there are still some thriving, supportive neighborhoods around. I’ve never set foot in one, though, and I don’t think my experience is particularly unusual for a middle class US-American.) These neighbors are often, but not always, in roughly the same economic strata. But the real glue of communities is usually totally absent: shared principles, priorities and worldview, shared identity and experience, shared culture and history. It makes perfect sense that my neighbors are basically strangers to me — we have very little in common.

Contrast this to a grouping like any given subset of the blogosphere — the queer blogosphere, for example, or the circle of progressive Jewish blog(er)s, or the online community of women of color feminists. Here we have, instead, a group of individuals who have self-selected for very similar interests, goals, opinions and values. Amongst the group there are typically many people who share an identity and/or similar experiences, not to mention language. The glue of community is there.

As we would expect, these communities function better than many neighborhood communities, and, for that reason, step up to the plate when community support is necessary (as it often is). It’s wonderful that people are crafting solutions to meet unmet needs, even if it is lamentable that the needs are going unmet in the first place.

More lamentable than the erosion of the neighborhood, though, is the related phenomenon of the loss of culture. My girlfriend and watched Fiddler On The Rough this week, so I’ve been thinking even more than usual about this, about the worlds and ways of life that we have lost: that I personally have lost, and that have been lost to countless peoples around the world, in the many tides of war, change, revolution, genocide. Some of these forces are horrible — genocide — and others — change, for example in the form of freedom movements — are very good.

But it’s a strange and complicated sort of problem. How do we move towards justice without eroding culture? Is it possible? How do we change for the better without irrevocably damaging our traditions? My life is better than those of my ancestors — I’m not poor, I’m comparatively free of restrictive gender roles, I can love (and, I hope, marry) the person of my choice regardless of her gender or ethnicity…

But these freedoms come at a price. have an unshakable sense of who I am, culturally — and yet much of that culture is missing from my knowledge. I ache for music and traditions and a language that are lost to me, for a country that shares my culture. (That country doesn’t exist, mostly because my cultural identity is a strange mishmash of many things.)

My grandmother mourns that she didn’t get to grow up in her parents culture: the tight-knit Sephardi community in Sofia, where she was born. Instead she was raised around western Europe (Spain, France), largely ignorant of her own culture. There was a permanent, irrevocable gulf between my grandmother and her parents — in some ways, they could never really know each other, never really talk to each other.

My mother was then raised primarily in the United States. Another culture, another unbridgeable gap. In some much smaller sense the same thing happened to me, because my mother and father raised me in a different part of the country from where they grew up. (New Mexico is very different from New England.)

No one understands this pain better than my grandmother, and yet she does not understand.

“Let’s go back to Europe.”

Where it would only happen all over again, to my children and to me. That world is already gone.

* I am, of course, excluding intentional communities here — they’re the response to this very situation.

I don’t want to be too harsh — it’s a thoughtful post and I agree with its conclusions, and I have a good deal in common with its author — but my heart was half-broken by just the title.

Can I Be a Feminist and a Bottom in Bed?

Uh oh.

Now, let me make this clear, in case I didn’t already: I agree with the conclusions of this post. I’m just really, really sad that we’re still asking this question.

The post continues:

One unfortunate consequence of feminism’s emphasis on the personal as political is that it becomes too easy to discriminate against people for not being “feminist enough.”

This is the opposite of what “the personal is political” is supposed to mean. “The personal is political” is not an excuse to bash other women or take away someone’s feminist membership card. It’s the idea that our ostensibly “personal” problems — like rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment — are actually part of large-scale systems of oppression. Many personal hardships are the result of political injustices.

Now, of course individuals should be held accountable for their own unfair or bigoted actions. But wearing lipstick — for example — is not an act of bigotry, even though it’s caused by a bigoted system. The fact that women wear lipstick is a function of the gender system, but the fact that women wear lipstick doesn’t itself cause sexism. We could have an egalitarian world with lipstick; we couldn’t have an egalitarian world with a wage gap.

I try to be comfortable with my naughty subservience, but as a feminist and a fiercely independent person, it’s an awkward thing to feel and admit to. I get this niggling sense that I should be large and in charge all the time, like my personal politics should be carrying over into my sexual preferences. I’m trying to overthrow gender roles, here. Being submissive in bed is a stereotypically feminine thing. Bad feminist!

I happen to be not at all stereotypically feminine, but nonetheless, I totally disagree that “stereotypically feminine” = “bad/worse feminist.”*

My best friend is a heterosexual with long hair, and I’m a dyke with a buzz cut. She can’t help liking men any more than I can help liking women, and she might feel as uncomfortable with very short hair as I would with a ponytail. Am I therefore a better feminist?

My girlfriend wears lots of dresses, jewelry and girly shoes, while I prefer to wear pants, t-shirts and motorcycle boots. We both wear the clothes we like, feel comfortable in, and look best in, and our choices are both, inevitably, influenced by the gender system. Am I a better feminist?

Of course I’m not.

So getting back to the original question:

Can I Be a Feminist and a Bottom in Bed?

I don’t know, can you?

Do you like being tied up because you think women are inherently inferior? While your partner is telling exactly you what to do, are you secretly thinking that the state should outlaw contraception? While you’re being spanked, are you thinking that boys shouldn’t cry and girls shouldn’t learn math? Are you thinking that everyone should be in a heterosexual marriage in which the man is the head of the household? Are you thinking that women who are date-raped and men who are raped prison deserve what they get? Are you think that sexism is permissible? That equal pay for equal work is a bad idea? While you’re having sex, what are you thoughts on suffrage? How about your thoughts on the ERA? Are you having on ideas about whether women should be allowed to own property?

Our actions are undoubtedly influenced by the gender system. People’s sexual proclivities may be influenced by the gender system — I honestly don’t know, and I really don’t care. At the end of the day, if you’re opposed to sexism — if you believe men and women should be equal, that the gender system in unjust, that our freedoms, both legal and cultural, should not be dependent on our genitals, chromosomes, or our gender presentation, that every person has a sovereign right to reproductive justice — then you’re a feminist in my book, regardless of how you choose to use or not use make-up and handcuffs.

* The author of the original post explains that she disagrees with this, too — this post is not a take-down of her post, really, just of the ideas that caused her to write it in the first place.

As Aviva’s post at Bi-Furious just reminded me, yesterday was National Coming Out Day. So, in the spirit of that (and apologies to Aviva for stealing her question!), what’s your coming out story?

If you came out as any stripe of queer, please do share that. Alternatively, feel free to share any other coming story, i.e. the story of someone else coming out to you (without revealing private information, of course), or of yourself coming out as anything else that’s important to you: as an atheist or as someone with other beliefs, as a liberal, as a vegetarian, with a diagnosis that you have, as an ally to any group, etc. Any part of your identity that you’ve had to reveal to people will do.

Here is the coming out story I left in my comment on Aviva’s afore-linked post:

I had a dear boyfriend for a year or so in middle school, S. We got together both identifying as straight, then both came out to each other as bi. A few moths after we broke up (we remained good friends), the two of us and our female, then-straight-identified best friend, J, decided it would be a good idea to try to form a three-way relationship. We tried very sincerely but couldn’t make it work; J and I kept trying to make out but, despite mutual desire, couldn’t bring ourselves too. (We’re all fifteen at this point.) Anyway, a few weeks later, S the ex-boyfriend comes out to me as gay: I was the first person he told, and our would-be girlfriend was the second. Fast-forward about six months and another boyfriend: I come out as a lesbian to J — she’s the very first person I tell — and then call S, making him the second. Fast-forward another year and a half; J and I start kissing and holding hands and eventually sleeping together, at which point she (belatedly…) realizes she’s bi, telling me first, of course, and then, for tradition’s sake, calling S to tell him second. So it’s a perfect, three-way circle of coming out!

I really like that story.

What is problematic is the massive culture conceptualization of monogamy, which, in my estimation, goes way beyond how many people one is sleeping with. It is, rather, the cultural construction of love itself, which seems to amount to the idea that each person should get (and give) all her love from (and to) just one person. It is the idea that we should have all our emotional needs met by a sole other person, and meet 100% of that person’s needs in turn. It’s the idea that adults should have only one really important adult relationship — that the (sole) person one is sleeping with should become the single most important person in one’s life, that one’s spouse should exist on this sacred plane of total devotion, while our friendships should be basically casual, basically unimportant, or, at best, less important.

I think this causes a lot of heartbreak, both in the form of the strange disappointment of discovering that one’s lover is not, as one had been taught to expect, a perfect carbon copy of oneself, but a complex human being, and in the form of the loneliness, anxiety and frustration of trying to get all one’s emotional needs met by one person and trying to singlehandedly meet all of another person’s needs. And I seriously think that many of our common ailments are the result of the pervasive lack of strong social support systems, the grievous lack of real community. So it’s a doomed mission and we would do well to abandon it, whether we practice sexual monogamy or any of the various forms of polyamory.

(By the way, I first put this idea into words in a comment over at Dave Pollard’s excellent blog How To Save The World some months ago, on this post. This post is largely an elaboration of what I said there.)

So, I don’t know how many sex partners humans are supposed to have — I suspect it varies widely, and I also suspect that that’s not really the point, in terms of what I’m talking about here.

Some people are much happier with polyamorous relationships, and that’s great; others do best with monogamy, and, as I said earlier, that’s great, too. I’m very glad for everyone who’s found what makes her happy. Those are important issues. They’re also, I think, personal issues. I don’t think it’s a matter for political consideration, really, how many sex partners each person has, beyond the obvious statement that we should respect and recognize each person’s choices.* What is a social and political issue, though, is how many people each of us loves — or, more to the point, how many people we are permitted to love, and what love means in our society.

That is the problem with monogamy: that we are expected to love only one person. Family relationships are recognized, but they’re also marginalized — we’re expected to see our parents, siblings, still-living grandparents and grown children only a few times a year (and what of our aunts, uncles, cousins?); they’re not set up as vital relationships in our daily lives.

What a bereft existence! I think it’s absolutely clear that no one is meant to love and be loved by just one person, and that we slowly kill ourselves when try to make this happen. No one can meet all of another person’s needs, and there is no reason to expect anyone to do so. People are complicated, multifaceted creatures; those of us who are waiting for someone who is totally compatible with every facet of our being are going to be waiting a long, long time.

A much better solution is to encourage everyone to have many important relationships (and again, this has no bearing on one’s sex life) — diverse, fulfilling, important relationships with many people, so that some parts of oneself get exercised and appreciated with some people, and other parts with other people. This both assures that our various needs actually get met, and takes the pressure off of other relationships — I suspect it’s much easier to forge a good romantic partnership, for example, if you’re not expecting your partner to be perfect or trying make the relationship as big as your whole life.

Having major relationships is, of course, work. It can be hard work. It is also some of the most fulfilling work a person can do. It is worth it. And the natural outcropping of this, when we do it daily — when we form many diverse loving relationships, as many as will grow, and treat their maintenance as important work — is community.

*And beyond discussions of legal arrangements and recognition, but that’s a whole other thing.

In the upcoming US Presidential election, who should undecided voters support, and, most importantly, why? What’s the critical issue that sets your favored candidate apart, and why should uncommitted voters care?

I wanted to throw this out for people to think about; I’ll give my answer in comments later today. I think this question is important because it can seem so damn obvious to politically active folks that we can’t even articulate it to those who are less involved. So what would you say to the thoughtful, undecided voter to win her over to your side?

Also, if you are reading this as a gender-conforming person, and you think I’m making no sense, please consider that some parts of the gender system may not be apparent to you, in the same way that white people (like myself) sometimes say, in sincere but nonetheless damaging ignorance, that they “don’t see color.”

Introduction

Since I started getting heavily involved in feminism, I’ve had many different takes on gender and sexism. I’ve felt, at different times and to varying degrees, that gender itself is the problem — that this whole business of differentiating between men and women, between femininity and masculinity, is, at best, unnecessary, and at worst, catastrophically damaging. I no longer feel this way. While sexism and oppression are poisons to human happiness, I’ve come to see gender as a critically important part of identity and culture.

I do not know anyone to whom her gender is not a significant, meaningful part of how she sees herself. What that gender is varies widely, from masculine men and feminine women, to masculine women and feminine men, to something in between, to something that changes, to something outside of that, and more. Regardless of what someone’s gender identity is, regardless of whether it conforms to the dominant culture or not, people seem to strongly identify with their own. Gender is a very significant part of most of our senses of self — even those of us who are feminists or otherwise anti-sexism, and/or who don’t fit well into the gender system.

If you’ve ever had someone misread your gender, you probably have a very strong sense of what I’m talking about here. I’m a lesbian, the kind people can spot, and, as a I recently explained here (and do read that post; it’s very much relevant to this one), I sometimes feel like I’m lost in a quagmire between typical feminine presentation and identity and butch presentation and identity. I’m not butch, but I often don’t feel like a “real” girl, and I’ve sometimes had people tell me as much. I’m very happy being female and being read as female, but my queer identity is also very important to me. This ambiguity makes for a lot of misreading, which seems to scatter about equally between people misreading me as butch and people misreading me as straight and/or (for lack of a better word) femme. (Apologies for conflating gender and sexual orientation… They are, of course, often intertwined.) When this happens, in either direction, my heart sinks: I feel like I’ve failed at gender presentation. If it happens intensely, I start to feel sick, and start experiencing something like dysphoria. I get dizzy and nauseated, and begin to panic, losing my grip on my sense of self. “Who am I? Where am I?”

It’s an awful, awful feeling to have someone misunderstand your gender. So, I think that people all over and outside of the gender spectrum need cultural acknowledgment of their genders — not just tolerance, but recognition and affirmation. With this in mind, it is my sense that we can make a bigger, better impact on sexism and gender-based oppression by proactively creating more options, more gender designations, and working to make those accepted, than we can by only trying to tear down gender as it currently exists. A truly just gender culture is not a culture without gender, but a culture with respectful and non-coercive gender.

So, what would a just gender culture look like? What would it mean to have gender without gender oppression?

A Just Gender Culture Has More Than Two Boxes

Thanks to generations of work by feminists, womanists, and queer rights activists of every stripe, gender has opened greatly here in the US and in many other places. At a fundamental level, though, I think that our society still largely assumes that everyone does (or should) fit into two very narrow categories: male-assigned at birth/man/masculine/attracted to women (the culture conflates all these things) and female assigned at birth/woman/feminine/attracted to men. (Male-assigned at birth = MAAB; female-assigned at birth = FAAB). People get punished for any variance from those categories.

We are starting to have some real room for a few more options, for example, MAAB/man/masculine/attracted to men, FAAB/woman/masculine/attracted to women, and FAAB/woman/feminine/attracted to men and women — that is, for non-heterosexual people, whose gender may or may not deviate from the two categories above. We’re also starting to have room for transsexual people, for example, MAAB/woman/feminine/attracted to men.

One commonality between these alternative gender packages, which are slowly gaining varying degrees of social acceptance, is that they have one, maybe two deviations from the starting categories. I’d like to see social space for every possible combination, and for combinations that can’t be rendered in that simplifying framework. I think a lot of people — me for one — would find themselves writing “in between,” “both,” or “neither” for one or more of those fields, which is a sign that that tool is inadequate.

A just gender culture would need an absolute minimum of five categories: masculine man, masculine woman, feminine man, feminine woman, and people who don’t identify as women or men, with sexual orientation completely divorced from those categories (so, for example, it would seem normal for a feminine man to be hetero-, homo- or bisexual), and with broad respect for trans people (so, for example, a trans man would be as accepted as a man as a cis man). Some other very important categories would be ones for people who don’t identify as women or men but who are feminine or masculine, and for women and men who are genderqueer, gender neutral, in between, or something else.

I should say at this point that I think “masculine” and “feminine” are basically subjective, cultural things. I do think humans probably want/need to have some sense of “masculinity” and “femininity” (since most people feel like either women or men, and as I said earlier, feel that that is an important and meaningful part of their identity), but I think there’s a big range in terms of what a given culture codes as one or the other. The existence of some observable differences between women and men (that are probably biological in origin) at the large scale doesn’t negate this. (And, about that, I should say that, obviously, the fact that women are X% more likely to display trait Y is totally meaningless when you’re dealing with an individual woman who doesn’t display Y; that’s why we need more gender categories.)

What I’m talking about is divorcing all those things the culture conflates — sex assigned at birth with gender identity with gender presentation with sexual orientation — so that people can recombine them in whatever way fits. I’d also like to see all those categories nuanced and broadened, and the option to leave out axes and/or add new ones. I do think it would work best to have boxes — that is, understood roles, the kind that get their own noun, for people to select and reject. This is because of what I said earlier about people needing more than tolerance; gender is so important that people need outright affirmation. I mentioned earlier the experience of having one’s gender misunderstood or undermined — having one’s gender actively comprehended and embraced is a really powerful experience, too. As someone who’s gender is often misconstrued, it is not an exaggeration to say that some of the happiest moments of my life are those in which I felt my community and my peers really saw, understood, and accepted my gender. It makes me really sad to think about how rare those moments are, and about how much rarer they are for many other people.

A Just Gender Culture Is Non-Hierarchical

Another critically important piece is, of course, that all genders are valued equally. A just gender culture doesn’t connect gender to power or to inherent worth as a human; a just gender culture respects and values all permutations of gender and all sexualities.* This means that women and men are respected equally, and so are people who don’t fit into either of those groups. It means that the identities of trans people are considered just as valid as the identities of cissexual people.

Creating more boxes — more gender designations — is useless if they’re not respectful. So the work of combatting sexism, misogyny, misandry,** heterosexism and transphobia is equally important. And there is, of course, a lot of badly needed reform of the gender categories we already have.

A Just Gender Culture Is Meaningful Without Being Sexist

This is, by far, the trickiest item. Obviously, there needs to be a cultural sense of what “masculine” and “feminine” mean in order for gender to play its role as an important part of identity — that is, gender has to be meaningful. But, in order to be just, it also can’t be overly narrow or constricting, nor can it be unfair — it wouldn’t be just, obviously, if femininity were defined as “goodness” and masculinity as “evilness.” It would be unjust to define one as “strength” across the board, and the other as “weakness,” or to have one signify righteousness and the other sin.

I think this part of the equation is one to be undertaken at the smallest scale, as we each ponder what it means for us personally to feel feminine or masculine, to be whatever gender we are, to inhabit the identity we do. If we do this with an eye toward fairness and compassion, and with a resolute rejection of misogyny, misandry, and all gender oppression, I’m sure we will develop many beautiful ways of being who we are. And in conversations with our communities, we can compare ideas and experiences, validate and acknowledge one another, and build alternatives within our own (sub-)cultures.

This is, of course, something that many queer people are already doing and have been doing for a long a time. I strongly believe, though, that it’s an important task for all of us to undertake. Whether we feel comfortable in the dominant gender system or not (and I think we all feel both comfortable and uneasy in some ways), it’s an incredibly damaging system. People suffer and suffocate in here. People do terrible violence to themselves and others. We all have a stake in this. A lot of real change could come as a result of straight, gender-conforming cissexual folks seriously thinking about what gender means to them, embracing the parts that work and rejecting those that don’t, and, perhaps most important having the conversation — participating in the dialogue about the ways in which our gender system fails and succeeds, and in the process of imagining new possibilities.

Conclusion

Finally, in order to have a healthy gender ecosystem, we need rich, thriving gender biodiviersity.

These ideas are new for me (though certainly not for everyone); I’m still at the phase of exploring and figuring things out, so I hope that you — my fellow fighters against gender oppression — will join me in testing these waters. I’d love to hear other takes on what a just gender culture would look like, and what gender means to you.

* Referring, of course, only to sexualities that involve consensual acts between adults.

** A note about my use of the word misandry: unlike some other folks, I do think misandry very much exists in our culture. However, I hope it’s clear that I, as a hairy-legged dyke, don’t buy into the “man hating feminist” trope; there are some misandrist feminist out there (feminists are people, too — people raised in a sexist culture), but the vast majority of man-hating comes from the dominant culture and gender traditionalists.

A note to my co-bloggers: I wasn’t at all sure how to categorize this post. Please let me know if anybody thinks it would be more appropriate somewhere else. An “Ethics” category perhaps? And I added the tag under the assumption that there will be a series, which it would be useful to connect — I have no qualms about deleting it if others feel it’s unnecessary or undesirable.

It occurred to me that it might be fun to post a discussion question or several as jumping off points for conversations, especially in these first few weeks. And the “question of the day” is a neat tradition at some other blogs, so why not here as well, especially since we’d like this to be a discussion-oriented space (I think)? I’m sure I’ll think of at least a few (assuming this one is successful), and co-bloggers — do post your own if the spirit moves you.

So, readers and fellow Revolutionary Act bloggers, I invite you to answer this question, provided you find it sufficiently interesting:

What one value or quality is important to you above all others? That is, if you had to reduce your value system to one fundamental principle from which all others flow, what world it be? Or, to come at it from another angle, if you had to rank virtues and qualities, which one would you deem most essential, most worthy of praise?

I think the question is an interesting one for a group of progressives, because I’m quite sure we can all work our way to the same (or similar) positions and priorities from many different starting points.

As I was thinking about this, I found myself weighing the competing values of justice and compassion, as I frequently do. I think striking a balance between those two may be one of the essential question of my life. It is clear to me that horrible damage can be done when one over-emphasizes justice, losing sight of compassion — yet I am no Gandhi, no Christ. Justice is profoundly important to me. Like most of us, I am sometimes deficient in mercy. (I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing.)

The balance I have struck between the two today (the best I’ve found so far, I think) is responsibility. Responsibility is the quality that is important to me above all others — the importance of our immense obligations as human beings and as adults. The root of most of my outrage is my sense that people have failed to meet their critical responsibilities. This is what infuriates me about global warming and pollution, about corruption, about war, about rape and abuse, and so many other things. I believe in the marrow of my bones that each of us has a tremendously important obligation to protect those weaker than ourselves, to use resources wisely and allot them fairly, and to save a life if ever we are in a position to do so — and if we do not meet these responsibilities, we have, in a profound sense, failed as adults, as human beings.

I recognize that it’s more complex than just “responsibility,” because I do have a very specific sense of what our responsibilities are. Ultimately, though, I think that’s the best way to sum it up: that we have duties and must meet them, that we must be accountable if we fail to do so. Justice and compassion both, for me, are derivatives of that: compassion is amongst our responsibilities, and justice a result of meeting them.

(As an aside, my value system has clearly been influenced immeasurably by my Jewish upbringing. The weight of the importance of our sacred obligations is a physical pressure on my back and in my gut.)

This way of looking at things is, of course, very subjective and specific to me. So what do you folks think? Is it mercy, is it fairness, is it something else entirely?

I run a small-time blog called Our Descent Into Madness, with my dear friend Emily, who will also be blogging at Revolutionary Act. There, we write mostly about art, gadgets and oddities, with a smattering of more serious stuff. Here, I plan to write experimental sorts of posts, exploring ideas that bother and fascinate me. I’m interested in learning and sharing and having conversations. Here’s a long but incomplete sort of laundry list of things I’m interested in having those conversations about (that is, what I will be writing about): sex, gender, culture, and identity, history and heritage and our relationships to both, justice and our obligation to do justice, sustainability and survival, and community, isolation, and love.

(You’ll notice a conspicuous absence there of items such as “Obama” and “McCain.” I’m a die-hard liberal, and I’ll be casting my ballot for Obama on Election Day — but, as I’ve said to my co-bloggers, I’m not especially interested in political debating and nitty gritty current events discussions, at this point. I’m somewhat disillusioned about both the US government and conventional forms of activism and change-making. I’ve also had more than one case of blogging burn-out. And I’m expecting our whole civilization to collapse fairly soon anyway. These things color my relationship to politics, especially politics as they play out in online discussions. Anyway, I’m hoping I won’t be too much of an outlier amongst the important work my co-bloggers will be doing.)

I’ve done some writing at Our Descent of the variety I’d like to do here, most notably a four-part series about sex some months ago, which I invite you to take a glance at. Here is part one (the other three parts are pinged in the comments there).

That’s all. Expect proper posts from me on Wednesdays from here on out.