Life as an Extreme Sport

At the height of the Vietnam era, the women’s liberation movement and the antiwar movement were cross-pollinating, forming hybrid ideologies. The idea that grew from this period and gained ascendancy in popular media representations of feminism and “women’s lib” – the version fo the feminist zeitgeist I saw on TV as a girl – was that women were natural pacifists. If women had been running the world, the argument went, the war would never have happened. In [Gloria] Steinem’s formulation, women “communicate,” while men “subjugate.”
-Emily White, Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut

Although Emily White writes of a childhood slightly before mine, I too grew up with the ever-present notion that women were the caring nurturers, who, if they could have control of the world and its power structures, would instantly create a peaceful utopia full of flowers and fawns. I actually believed it, too, until ten or eleven, at which point I made a serious, moral transgression against women that tipped me into the category of the “other.” What did I do? I hit puberty earlier than most girls. By the time I was twelve, I had the body of a mature woman – full hips, breasts, curves in all the right places. And by becoming different, by needing a full bra and underwire when classmates were in padded training bras, I became the subject of debate, conversation, ridicule. I was the sexualized, terrifying self they could see in themselves, a shadow made light and visible. And more to the point, I was a threat.

Emily White goes on to talk about the creation of the high school slut, a label I “missed” out on, largely I believe by virtue of leaving high school early. It was only through luck, or perhaps naivete on my part, that I wasn’t so labeled at the junior high level. Naivete because I’m not certain if there was that label to begin with, or if I just wasn’t aware of it – certainly the name calling that focused on my anatomical bits existed, but we were all somewhat in the dark and mystified by the concept of sex. It was still urges and longings that were unexpressed and perhaps unexpressable.

Still, it was this era, this age of pre-high school, ending of childhood and entering adolescence that shattered my innocence about women. Women were not kind, nurturing, peaceful souls. They were vicious, backstabbing, violent and cruel, willing to throw you to the wolves and torn apart if you looked different, dressed different, acted different. To have your own body betray you to these supposedly compassionate and caring people, to leave you subject to their cruel ministrations… it was the ultimate in betrayal, on a level of self and of society.

I remember writing, once, in tears for having been called some cruel name or other, that if these were the peaceful women who could bring us utopia, just let the men keep power – it wasn’t nearly so hard to deal with.

I found this article to be very interesting, especially as I just watched the remake of The Stepford Wives over the weekend. I want to actually write a more comprehensive rebuttal of her argument, but for now wanted to comment immediately on Chaudhry’s brief thought on gender war and homosexuality:

Then there is the ‘butch’ lawyer plotting to replace his flamboyantly ‘femme’ mate. The yuppie gay couple has the effect, intended or otherwise, of changing the terrain of engagement from gender roles to consumerism

Not surprisingly, I think Chaudhry has missed the point here, by assuming that you can’t have a gender war between a homosexual couple. Chaudhry is buying into the concept of gender equalling biological sex, that gender is inherently male or female, and there cannot be conflict between male and male, female and female. Somehow, by making it a conflict between the gay couple it changes things to consumerism – a charge never followed up on or adequately explained.

Perhaps more surprisingly is Chaudhry’s reliance on feminism to form the central focus of her argument; surprising because in recent years feminism has strongly wrestled with conceptions of gender and biological sex, and to free the two from one another as well as emphasize the gendered war that exists in the homosexual community, as well. Sadly, the feminism that Chaudhry appears to be writing about and from has one distinct parallel to the Stepford subject of her article: it, too, is a relic from 50 years ago.

And sort of related, I feel like I should be here:

Every year more than 10,000 literature scholars gather at the end of December for the convention of the Modern Language Association, the 120th of which begins today in Philadelphia.

Past conventions have yielded papers with titles that were rife with bad puns, cute pop-culture references and an adolescent preoccupation with sex, from “Victorian Buggery” to “Bambi on Top” and the tragically hip “Judith Butler Got Me Tenure (but I Owe My Job to K. D. Lang): High Theory, Pop Culture, and Some Thoughts About the Role of Literature in Contemporary Queer Studies.”

So apparently during the move to the new server, I lost both access and data. How… irritating. As you can tell, I have access once more, and I’ll work on finding the lost data. (Thankfully, the data is actually there, it’s just not showing up, for reasons I don’t quite understand.)