I am not a woman. Are you?
I realized this very recently, when several factors forced gender into awareness. In a psychology course a few quarters back, the professor asked the class to list the groups to which we each thought we belonged. My list looked something like this: “Student; Intellectual; Atheist; Independent; Skeptic; Young Adult”. As students read off their answers, I noticed a big glaring gap in my own response: gender. Most women had mentioned that they saw themselves as “women”. In fact, “women” was usually the group at the top of the list. I wrote this off as an example of how much I value my intellectual life over my more superficial life-on-paper. Or something.
Then one day, I became ensnared in one of my Hillary-Clinton-supporting roommate’s little tirades about women and power. He considers himself a big feminist, and he loves powerful women and the gender questions it creates. At one point he said something like, “When people look at you as a a woman-” and I quickly, instinctively replied, “But I don’t really think of myself as a woman.” He seemed to understand what I meant instantly- I see myself as a person.
Don’t mistake this for a discussion on gender dysphoria. I don’t feel out of place in my body; I don’t feel forced into a category that doesn’t fit. Instead, I don’t really feel that category at all. The matter has no salience for me; I don’t move through life with a constant reminder in my head of womanhood. You probably all feel this way about your shoe size, or your eye color. It doesn’t restrict you, it doesn’t represent you, and most of the time, you entirely forget about it.
One of the oft-mentioned benefits of belonging to a powerful majority is this sense of personhood without the burden of a heavy label. White people in the U.S. don’t often think about their “whiteness” or how they fit into a “white culture”. They don’t have to, because whiteness is so frequent it is transparent. Instead of thinking of yourself as a “White Person”, you get to think of yourself as a “person”, an individual. Feminists also make this claim about men- their manhood has no salience; male is the default and female is the “other”, and so on.
So while I’ve always agreed with the basic ideas of feminism, I guess my androgynous situation makes me more of a post-feminist than a bread and butter I-am-woman-hear-me-roar feminist. My experience is more like: I-am-a-person-that-deserves-respect, hear-me-do-uh-whatever. But I don’t know how odd my feelings are at this time, generations after feminism first bloomed.
For that reason, I’d really like input on my realization/musing. To the women: do you think of yourself as a woman, a person, or both? Do you feel like a woman? Does it depend on the situation? Men: is your “manhood” more salient than I’ve come to believe, or do you see yourself as the default? Do you feel manly? I’d really like some response on how others hash out the labels that reflect their identity, because I’ve written this post from a very intuitive place, and I could have a warped understanding of things.
- Never assume that a woman is pregnant (and other lessons I’ve learned)
- Sin, Sex, Secret Societies
- Hey, how many biases do YOU have?
- Read All About It! Abortion Causes Labor Shortage! Stock Market Crash Looms From Lack Of Buyers and Sellers! Farmers Worry Over Too Few Mouths To Feed!
- I created a woman so beautiful she made me melt
CC- I don’t have any secret. I just don’t happen to have those physical ailments you do, nor do I think most women have them to the extent that it sounds like you do. Obviously you could try birth control or other medical treatment for it, but otherwise I think the big difference has to do with how you conceptualize the process. I guess I don’t think of menstruation as some “womanly” process, but rather some natural process that some of us happen to encounter, and that others of us don’t. Yes, menstruation indicates your “femaleness”, but does it make you “a woman”? Perhaps this seems like a silly nuance to you, but a see a distinct difference between the biological and the sociocultural labels. One will always exist, but mostly doesn’t matter; the latter is the big basket of associations and expectations that are handed to you, that do matter, but that you could throw away.