The strides that women have made in the last forty years in the U.S. are truly incredible. High school girls are achieving higher test scores than their male counterparts, more women than men are attending college, and professions that were traditionally the bastion of the male, such as law, academia, and business, now employ more women than ever before. Our lives have been revolutionized, and the possibilities that lie before us are seemingly endless. Ostensibly women are equal to men, yet what was the price of this success and liberty? The so-called equality that has liberated us from pinafores may have had a more nefarious effect on women: it has wiped out all gender differences. It has forced us to become—well, macho men.
The messages that women are getting are that in order to succeed we must never show any emotion. I distinctly remember working hard to organize a dinner attended by over 150 people for an organization I was part of as an undergraduate. At the end of the night, a fellow board member made a negative comment to me about the dinner that I felt was completely unjustified, as I had followed all the protocol that the board had set. It was the end of a long day, and I was exhausted and still had to clean up, and I felt an overwhelming sense of injustice and frustration. My eyes welled up with tears, and I had to turn away. Upon this demonstration of “weakness,” my colleague told me that I cried at the drop of a hat and stalked away.
I couldn’t believe it. I had worked hard, done my job, and then responded to undue criticism by getting upset, a completely natural response, given the circumstances. But I hadn’t responded the way a man would have, and therefore my demonstration of emotions was considered inappropriate. The strong, manly response would probably have been a scowl (or perhaps a few choice four letter words), but my nonconfrontational, personal response was deemed weak. I was a woman, and a sensitive person, but I was being held to standards of manly behavior that society had arbitrarily established just because I had entered a man’s world.
Women are forced to be comfortable in a man’s world, now that we’ve gotten admission into it. And that’s all that’s happened—women have merely been allowed entry into the playground reserved for men. We’ve been informed of the status quo and told to adapt to it, without being given any realistic possibilities of changing it to fit our personalities.
Just last week, a group of classmates and I were discussing our professors. One woman asked the only man at the table what he thought of our female professor, who happened to be a young, attractive woman. His response, which focused in a crude way solely on her physical figure, shocked and disgusted me. Immediately, I told him that was an incredibly disrespectful comment, and he defended his statement by declaring that he was a full-blooded man. It was a question of virility, and my classmate normalized this vulgar comment by implying that all manly men thought and spoke this way. It was just a man being a man and expressing himself. None of the other women supported me and instead chose to remain silent.
The underlying message was clear: it was a man’s world, and we women who had entered it had better get acclimated to it fast. The good old boys’ club now included a lot more estrogen than before, but the rules were unchanged. Disparaging remarks such as this one, which in an earlier, less “enlightened” era no gentleman would have ever voiced aloud in the presence of a woman, were now accepted, even encouraged by women as a way to demonstrate their camaraderie and gender equality.
“We’re the same as you,” is the message modern-day women give to modern-day men. No, I beg to differ, we are not. Women and men are different, and these differences should be respected, not obliterated. When people say women are just like men, they don’t empower women or give them autonomy—they take it away. The message is not that we have achieved as much as men, it’s that we have achieved as much as men because we have become like men. What happened to recognizing women’s innate strengths and capabilities? We should be proud of being women who are sensitive and outspoken and won’t stand for sexual objectification. Yes, we’re different, but we deserve equal opportunities, equal amounts of respect, and equal rights, just as our male colleagues do. In claiming that we are like men, people are robbing us of the very femininity that has enabled us to succeed. It’s time for us to demand it back.
No comments:
Post a Comment