Why women aren’t actually ruling the world

SInce I have an odd lack of overflowing opinions lately, I dug up a draft (that’s why it talks about France in the present tense) and added a little to it. Voilà:

Lauredhel at Hoyden About Town and Shakesville does a great job of explaining something I’ve never been able to express intelligently before. You know when guys (thinking of a girl they like who makes them feel helpless) complain that women have all this power and it’s not fair and why would we need feminism when women are running the world anyway? They’re mistaken. Let’s use me as an example. I get hit on a few times a week here [edit: towards the end it was at least once a day]. Like three guys in my dorm have professed their “love” for me. I must have so much power! I must like, run France by now! Except I don’t, because instead of having sex with them in exchange for stuff, I tell them I have a boyfriend - then they give me a quizzical look, keep trying to get in my pants, and I finally just say no and walk away and make yet another mental note that having a boyfriend isn’t enough in this country - and then they walk out of my life forever. Unless they decide to try to get into my pants again a couple weeks later, in which case the above is repeated. [I got way more cool stuff from my female friends there, who are definitely into dudes.]

If I’m not willing to perform the duties of the sex class - whether that means having sex with them or giving them the impression that I’m going to have sex with them - my “power” vanishes. They don’t even want to talk to me. If they do keep talking to me, it’s only out of denial of the fact that I’m really not going to have sex with them.  (I’m only talking about the guys who hit on me in the first place, by the way; there was a very very small handful of guys who treated me like a friend the whole time, which I appreciated.)

But can you ever get stuff just for being attractive, without having to have sex or play a part or fulfill other demands?  Yeah.  It is true that people treat attractive people better, or at least, that’s what I learned in high school psych, and it’s confirmed by how my friend got out of paying a penalty fee by being pretty recently. But men and women can be attractive. If women get stuff for being attractive more often, the most reasonable explanation would be that it’s because there are more heterosexual men than homosexual men, and more men than women are in financially/politically powerful positions from which they can bestow perks. In other words, because men control the real power.  So if women get more “pretty perks” than men, it’s probably just evidence that things are still far from equal.  There’s also the issue of female beauty being far more valued in our culture than male beauty.  That could have something to do with it too, but just thinking about how willing I am to bend over backwards for a guy I have a crush on makes me think the availability of perks really does have more to do with who has the power to hand them out.

Sometimes pretty perks do turn into financial or other kinds of power, kinds of power that I think carry more weight than mere sexiness does, but this apparently doesn’t happen on a wide scale in a consistent way or else we’d see the results - more women in positions of non-sexual power.

To sum up: a) Women are rewarded for playing the role of a sex object, but of course, that requires playing the role of a sex object.  b) Men and women are rewarded for merely being attractive to people in power, and more men are in power than women.

I’ll be back

I wasn’t posting for a few extra days after my trip because my internet subscription ran out in Paris, and I didn’t renew it because I was leaving.  Did leave, in fact.  I’m hooooooome!  But I’m also out of the loop a little, because I wasn’t reading blogs and all that, so I have surprisingly little to rant about right now.  I’ll be posting, it’ll just take a little while.

Um.

A man on the metro just flashed me.  It was sort of subtle, it wasn’t like a guy in a trench coat running up and opening it.  He was sitting across from me and his fly was open - actually it looked like there was no zipper, nor underwear, just a gaping hole - and he had a bag with him that he kept over it most of the time so you couldn’t tell, but at one point I glanced there while he had it moved.  I gasped and looked away, it shook me up more than I probably would have expected.  Later I saw him move the bag back.  I just don’t think that could be an accident.  There are a lot of beggars in Paris that don’t have proper clothing, but I figured this was intentional.  So I started wondering why.  I wanted to stay because there was a girl next to me who seemed unaware, what if he followed her off the metro?  But then what if he followed me?  I’ve been approached by way too many guys after getting off the metro to think this would definitely be the end of this.  Maybe he was just an exhibitionist, maybe more.  I was very protective of my friends in Morocco when guys were giving them trouble, I always wanted to be there, I wasn’t afraid of yelling at them.  But there, if you yell at them they stop.  I didn’t know about this guy.  And I felt at a disadvantage because I was terrified of being touched by his genitals.  I reminded myself of the girl in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  I got off the metro at the next stop and sat in the next car over.  Thank you line 4 for having separate cars.  When I got off I looked in at the spot where I had been sitting.  The girl next to me was still there, the flasher was gone.  I don’t know what he’s up to, but at least she’s ok.  I wanted to do something about him, because I hate being the scared girl that lets harassment have its intended effect, but alas, there’s a reason why people do what they do - because it works.  Even in this big city in broad daylight where I comfortably speak the language, I just didn’t think I could count on not getting somehow assaulted if I tried to do something.  The idea of trying to loudly out and embarrass him on the metro, which is what I told myself I’d do if I was ever grabbed or anything, didn’t cross my mind until I was already safely inside the building I was heading to.  It seemed laughable.

It’s always a weird feeling when something like this happens to YOU.  I have one friend here whose butt was grabbed by a man in the metro.  I have another friend here who a man in the metro pressed his erection against when it was really crowded and she couldn’t move away.  I have another friend who a guy yelled sexist obscenities at, waved money at while grabbing his crotch, and slapped in the metro.  But this was my first encounter with something more than a guy trying to ask me out.

I’m just writing this because I have to right now, it’s how I deal with things that freak me out.  I’ll check comments from while I was gone a little later.

I like this question better

So a while back I wrote about whether it makes sense to call racism and a lot of other things “feminist issues.”  My point was mostly semantic; I wasn’t arguing that feminists don’t need to worry about racism, but rather that I’m not going to say that everything is a feminist issue just to be fair, because 1) I think I can be fair without doing so, and 2) I don’t think that actually is fair.  And I still believe that, and I’d rather us call intersections “intersections” than try to fit everything under the title of feminism just because.

But Sudy at A Woman’s Ecdysis wrote a post that I just found through Feminist Allies that reframes the question.  Instead of asking “is this a feminist issue?” we can ask “has this issue been analyzed from a feminist perspective?”  That is SO much more useful.  Especially if you combine that with “has this issue been analyzed from an anti-racist perspective?” and all the other perspectives that we know are important and often left out.  Then you don’t have to worry about dividing the news up into the right types of slices.  And you can acknowledge that things are complicated and have many sides and many possible interpretations and affect different people differently; a quick example is how I just interpreted the Catholic Church’s stance against most, but not all, forms of birth control as coming from a belief that physical pleasure is sinful if sought for its own sake, while acknowledging that I could also interpret it as coming from sexist beliefs.  I think it comes from both, but it’s possible to look at one without looking at the other, and we need to try as many perspectives as possible (not necessarily in every individual blog post, but acknowledging that they’re there is helpful) to avoid letting certain people’s problems fall through the cracks.

I need to do more follow-up on the ideas that I laid out earlier about intersections in movements; specifically, how can we fight violence against women, sexual and otherwise, without relying on a racist criminal justice system?  (And racism is definitely not their only problem, but a big one.)  I haven’t gone into immigration issues yet because I’m not yet informed enough to give any worthwhile opinions. But I think the criminal justice issue is pretty important, since we appeal to the system all the time.  Can we work outside of it?  Can we fix it?  My problem here is that not only do I not know how to answer either of those questions, I don’t even know which one holds more promise (not that they’re mutually exclusive, but I think people tend to pick one to work with).

Another thing I wanted to mention is the idea that there are two sides to a lot of issues.  Take reproductive rights.  That means the right to have babies AND the right to not have babies.  A lot of times, and this example is no exception, two-sided issues affect different populations differently; some have to worry about one side of the right being taken away (sex ed, birth control, abortion), and others have to worry about the other side of the right being taken away (forced sterilization, forced abortion, poor pregnancy care).  And some people lack both.  So I think a rule of thumb to avoid letting some people fall through the cracks needs to be to keep both sides of these issues in mind whenever we deal with them.  That’s what gives women real human rights, after all; a woman who’s protected from rape but not given license to express her sexuality, for instance, is the madonna, and the one who can have sex but gets assaulted with impunity is the whore, and neither the madonna nor the whore is treated or viewed as a full human being, which is, you know, why we bother being feminists in the first place.

Marrakesh and Madrid

Are my next destinations and the reasons why I won’t be around for the next week.  I doubt anyone will notice, but if your comment isn’t approved for a while, that’s why.

Link on gender and math skills

At Feminist Philosophers. No time to comment now but I wanted to save the link for future reference.