David, precisely. It wasn't so long ago, maybe a handful of years ago, but definitely up until my late teens that I scoffed at feminism and wanted to distance myself from it as much as possible. In my mind, there was a difference between old school feminism which secured the right to vote and all these needed advancements and today's feminism, which seemed to me like just a bunch of women overreacting and getting offended by jokes or compliments or models in the media. But, as Berberella would have guessed at the time, it was result of my own ignorance and my own privilege.
Being a woman has worked out pretty well for me thus far. Men are pretty nice to me, and total misogyny seemed like a once-in-a-blue-moon thing to encounter and I just figured the offenders were outliers and that was that. It took me a long time to realize what I was missing, Gal. Yes, there are going to be extremely obvious gender issues that needs addressing, at least where I live, and I always knew that, but I never had the appreciation for the casual misogyny or sexism that is, unfortunately, all over the place.
I'm pretty privileged in a lot of ways. Middle-class white girl from Connecticut. I'm told I'm not terrible to look at. I have a very polite and quiet demeanor in person, residual from my early shy years. I'm friendly, and I receive all compliments that a man might give me very well.
So I had to tweak a lot of things. I had to switch from nursing to mechanical engineering and be the only woman in most of my classes to become acutely aware of how my capabilities and limits were perceived by students, even the kind students, even the students who weren't so bright themselves, and even the professors. I had to, once or twice, accidentally not respond appropriately to a compliment by a stranger in public and get called a bitch for it, those few times I didn't act as though a man had bestowed upon me a priceless gift by giving me attention.
I had to jump into a Muslim community and marry a Saudi to suddenly be confronted with the sort of misogyny that I couldn't have even imagined growing up in the safety that I did, and for it to become an actual problem for me, not one that I could look at from my ivory tower or turn on and off at my whim, but one that followed me to school, followed me home, framed the way I lived for a couple years, and will still follow me so long as I live in this town and attend my university.
So then you start noticing things more. What used to seem like an innocent comment or banter between men doesn't seem all that innocent anymore. If you press an off-colored comment a man makes about women, or even about one woman, you might figure out a lot about him. And, if you're really paying attention, you'll start to see that some sort of sentiment detrimental to the plight of women or in some way harmful to them is very common, more than you'd think if you were like me, sometimes so casual that even the person who has those beliefs won't realize it it first, either.
Now I'm listening to the kind of compliments I get and have gotten all my life, and I'm seeing them for what they are. I can't tell you how many times I've heard: "You're not like those other girls." "I hate women who act like x and y, but you..." "I love that you're shy/polite/quiet/pretty but not stuck-up/don't drink or party/don't dress like a slut." "You look so pure/innocent." Well, alright, cool, but then there's the other side of the coin, the stuff they're not saying, or maybe the stuff they didn't even realize: I don't like most other women because they don't fit in to my ideas of what a woman should be. I don't like behavior that's not womanly. You should be shy, and you shouldn't dress like a slut, and you shouldn't be drinking and partying, and I don't like loud women, and you look pure and innocent, and if you removed any of these from the equation, you would be less deserving of my admiration, like all those other women are.
But I can live with this. I'm still fucking lucky, gal. I have a ton of male friends who do respect me and who have been with me for a long time, some for two decades. I am considered, for now, one of the "good" women by many misogynists, at least in person, since I've rarely spoken out against them or even had the opportunity to in real life. I have to go on the internet and just become a woman without her looks to hide behind to get people to be brutally honest with me, because almost everything I say IRL is awesome, because it's coming from a cute girl, and the bar is set pretty fucking low for those, and I'm reminded of this a lot. I've not once but twice gotten employment on looks alone. And all that stuff about living in the Muslim community and being subjected to all these requirements and expectations for women? I fucking chose that, man. I decided to get married into that, I brought it into my family, I accepted it. And I can walk away easily if I want to.
So what happens, gal, when a woman isn't as lucky as me? I've shut up and listened to how men speak about them. I've seen women stand up for themselves and just be fucking shredded. I've seen women who were considered ugly by some men and be treated as though they're subhuman. What happens to victims of violence, of rape? Oh, you better hope it's Lucretia, because if she wasn't dressed well, if she was black-out drunk, if she had a bad reputation, she will hear that she deserved it, and now that I'm listening, so will I.
Topic: CEMB Greatest Hits - posts you may have missed