Girlfighting [Chapter 6]

Psychology of Women

Firstly, you were absolutely right to probe me into doing a response to this chapter, especially after my Ch. 5 response.  To start off this one, I’d like to present you with two brief and very contrasting, antidotes from my life and how deeply my perspective of them has been sharpened after reading this chapter. Just as a disclaimer, please do not use these stories for any overheads.

1)               At XXXl, in 11^th grade (I was 16/17 years old), I lived with a girl named J. J was not only a freshman, but a dreaded “new kid” to the school. White, stocky, with poor hygiene and suffering from obesity; J was a target for snickering, teasing, and scorn by everyone in our student home (some 13 high school girls). What really made it possible for all of us to be so cruel to her was that even our houseparents in that particular house, the “moral compasses” in our lives, humiliated her too. They would publicly get on her for not doing her chores, her poor grades, for her terrible merits, for being lazy – often making her (though sometimes all of us, too) walk to and from school (we lived on the other side of campus, it was maybe a mile and a half). In all our eyes, J was a weak link in the structure of our student home. Someone who caused stress and slowed every down – but the reality was that she was someone we could direct the spotlight on while we had more freedom in the shadows.

     I was a leader in the house. I had excellent grades, decent merits, established friends (having been there for 6 years already, I “paid my dues” as the hated new kid long ago), and my own insecurities about weight were mostly self-established. Yet, I spent energy detesting this girl. At first, the houseparents asked me to help her out. She liked Harry Potter, and I’m a maniac about it, so they thought I could be a mentor for her. That first comparison to her is probably what seeded my thoughts. I remember the times I was kind to her, but it was sugar coating a seething and irrational hatred I held for her. What’s really sick about it, is that even back then I knew precisely why I didn’t like her so much – there was no innocence about it at all – I hated her because she reminded me of myself; my inner self, my worst self.

I had been exactly her once, when I first came to XXX. Way back in the 5^th grade, as a new student: white, ignorant, chubby, and needy. I was friendless for months. I cried every day. I was the weakest link, the one who just couldn’t fit in with the rest of our home. I quickly became the “tattle-tale” (words that still viscerally sicken me even now) in order to gain some kind of “in” with my houseparents (to be fair, they were pretty evil people, pitting us against each other so they could remain totalitarians). Either way, it was to gain some kind of power in the home. As much as these ideas, ideas from Brown’s Girlfighting, rationalize the darkest parts of my personal growth, they do not justify it in my mind. And yet, I did not learn from the experience how much that extreme oddball needed to find a voice: instead I learned to hate myself, to change myself into a “leader” someone with “character” to make the adults around me “proud”.  So when I crossed paths with the personification of my own worst nightmare, I treated her like sludge when she claimed she was unable to transform as I had once done.

2)               My second story is from the following year, the 12^th grade. My entire class moved to “transitional living” a new concept at XXX where seniors live in apartment style housing, hopefully getting the specific experience (and a little more freedom) that they need to survive outside the XXX bubble. Senior year brings out, not the best and worst in people, but I think a special kind of desperation: to make a mark.

        In telling this particular story, I hope you’re familiar with the TV show “Gossip Girl”. In the show, there is a voice-over narration which very coyly oversees all the drama and scandal. A popular show at school, I caught an episode here and there. After a while, e-mails began circulating around the senior class from someone called “Gossip Boy”. We had a regulated Novell system similar to the e-mail system here at Ithaca, and “Gossip Boy” was from an outside gmail account. The whole thing was laced with mystery and intrigue, since no one knew who “Gossip Boy” was.

       Not everyone got these e-mails because a mass e-mail would draw extra attention.  I never received these e-mails directly, but was told later that it started off with just stories about Alumni, people who weren’t on campus anymore. Coming from poor and dysfunctional situations, there was plenty of gossip to go around I suppose. However, things turned nasty. My roommate was so shocked over it one night, she read them aloud to me. In a nutshell, the various e-mails involved members of our class, friends of mine (though we were such a small class, everyone knew everyone even if they weren’t friends) especially girls. It trashed them, saying they were sleeping around with all of (a boy’s studenthome) and so on. First, I was pissed because this whole thing was so screwed up – so unreal that people would actually do that. Then I was mad because our student body president and members of National Honor Society (which I had just missed getting into by one letter grade) were recipients and had done nothing to stop it.

      So, I did what I thought was right. I wrote an e-mail in response and sent it to my entire class (something pretty taboo, actually). I wrote how disgraceful it was; how cruel. It was really an inspirational and empowering speech, and the next day in school boys and girls alike thanked me (especially the subjects of the e-mails). Notably to our topic, one boy told me I had “balls”. Administration took over and threatened disciplinary action, which would have meant possible loss of scholarship money, so it stopped. I thought myself a real hero that day.

   In reality though, deep down, this was the same move I made with J in my previous story – just using different pieces. It was a power move, an opportunity to use my voice and “make my mark” in the final year of my XXX life. Whether it’s sticking up for the little people, or secretly hating them, it’s about all power: agency, identity, and voice.

        I felt this chapter of Girlfighting was more clearly written, with the point almost overly defined. The central point of this was that Girlfighting is caused by the existence of a lie in our society that says there are two choices in how to go about being a female – either embrace femininity or repel against it – and then the consequence of a girl making that choice from the two options. It is a multilayered problem beyond gender, encompassing race and class, but ultimately it leads to a civil war amongst women: one that distracts us all from the bigger picture (as I presented myself to be in Ch. 5) and therefore allows us to be puppets for the status quo.

                  My initial reaction to your comment from my Ch. 5 paper about having disdain for “rich, white, little girls” was to say that I believed my feelings fell in line with the idea of “don’t frown/ it’s not a pretty color on you”. In other words, that I shouldn’t be bitter because it’s not an appealing trait, though very human (if not moral, but that’s a different topic really). Now, however, I do see the bigger point: as Brown quotes Bernice Johnson Reagon as saying “we don’t have to like each other or be friends to work together against injustice”. Further, the issues with how we define femininity goes past the color pink, choices about colors and dresses are not the problem, the issue is when a person’s right to peruse happiness is taken from them – when being female means being abused and having to tolerate it no matter which choices you make.

My question, however, is still this: what happens when the lines of masculine and feminine are so blurred, that traits seem to fall in either category? Will Brown’s argument that we’re trying to either be loved by boys to be accepted as boy-ish falls apart? One day, hopefully, “powerful” can be a term used for both sexes. She talks a lot about that distinction, and I guess I would fall jaggedly into the side of “girls trying to be boys”, but then when does it become so assimilated that there is no longer a barrier between the two? Isn’t that the goal? To make these words, these traits, gender neutral? That “powerful”, “beautiful”, “strong”, “professional”, “brooding”, “ambitious”…they can belong to either side of the gender line, that the civil war can end? Or is that impossible? Will we just be lying to ourselves that things have changed? Is being a man or a woman so deeply a part of our identity that we don’t want to let go, no matter what it means. If we have that scrap to hold onto, we can build from there. On top of the foundation of our genes (which include our gender) we form the house that is “us”: religion for the windows, sexuality for the stairs; disability, class, race, for the floors and walls. What’s left to do but show off our completed work? If you built a house with your bare hands, you’d want credit too – you’d want to be in the local newspaper, win awards, and lawn contests. If we have an instinct, a need, to be visible – then can we ever get rid of those building blocks? I suppose Brown would say that we just need to change the materials.

To tie all of this together: I am a girl. The stories I have presented here involve my interactions involving two other girls on separate occasions. Both share another common thread: in the background, there were male instigators. My housefather in 5^th grade and a different housefather in 11^th grade set up situations where “tough love” was the answer to dealing with the odd girl in their homes. It was done to me, and I helped do it (with my houseparent’s support) to a girl years later. It was specifically a boy who sent those horrible e-mails in 12^th grade, and I was assimilating myself with his behavior by sending my own mass e-mail and making my voice heard by his very same methods. I see now the extreme truth of the civil war among women being financed by patriarchal forces in our culture. In writing they say that there are really only two stories, “home, and finding home”. While women are said to have only two stories, it is the men and women who support the patriarchal society which are the story tellers.  I can’t wait to ask my friends who are boys (and have teased my often about women’s studies) whether they put themselves in which on two categories: do they base their self-worth on whether they are loved by a woman, or do they forgo masculinity in order to be “one of the girls”? – Their faces will be priceless.

That leads me to another separation, not of girls fighting for boys love vs. girls fighting to be like boys but of another riff which is kind of the same, but not: girls aware of the script and desiring to change it, and girls aware of the script and believing themselves unable to change it. I know there are further separations, girls who are all together unaware and aware girls who do not want to change – so maybe I’m being a little idealist. Nevertheless, I think that separation is the underlying difference: how much power we allow ourselves to have, and further, how we choose to use it.

To leave with an analogy: the world is like being born into a vat of bubblegum. If you want to break free, for the most part you’ll have to pull yourself out because everyone else around you is stuck too. Then, even when you’re out, there’s always going to be little traces of pink goo stuck in your hair, or under your sneakers, or that spot on your back you can’t reach. Still, you shouldn’t lose hope: now that you’re out you have a couple choices. You can help pull others out (but careful not to get pulled back in) or you can try your damndest to find someone else who made it and start future-bubblegum-free generations. The twist is that one day you’ll realize that big vat of gum in actually surrounded by a whole other barrier – let’s say cheese – and so the process of breaking free begins again and again, but it’s always worth getting out.

Laughed Out of Town

I want to write a letter and make everything okay.

I don't even know what "okay" means anymore.
So what if by magic or summertime or luck I can wake up tomorrow without the weight of a million and one thoughts on my mind. So what? I'll still be a female in, as my psych of women professor says, a "white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society". I'll still be part of an invisible system; so ingrained in everything we are, and we do, and we see, and we think that people would rather laugh than take the time to realize it exists - to see how the world could be different one day.

Arendt said that evil was the product of inattention, not a creation by hateful minds. Like weeds in a garden, evil exists when we ignore what's really going on; when we deny the bitter or overwhelming truth. The truth is that in America and most of the world, men/males are the power-holders - specifically white men, but men nonetheless. It's a passed down mentality, an inherited system, not something the boys of this generation just came up with one day on the playground.

Power: "possession of controlling influence, authority, might".

Yes, we've come a long way through history (in a relatively short amount of time) to establish women as equals with men. Even just 40 years ago, women didn't have the same experiences or opportunities available as they do today.

Remember, men did not give women the right to vote. Whites did not give blacks civil rights. It was raged for, fought for, and only then was it won - not given.

There is a lingering oppression among women. An internal oppression. We are always talking talking talking about the media: ads and TV shows, films and songs that objectify, categorize, simplify women. As both men and women, we know in our hearts that we do this to ourselves; allow ourselves to listen and soak in these messages, to perpetuate and personify what we see because all we want to do is belong. Those women who rebel against this definition of femininity must abandon our gender in order to be taken seriously, to be "one of the boys". As I've learned in my classes, there are generally two kinds of women (as there always seems to be), the ones who seek to be liked by men and those who seek to be more like men. Everything is in relation to the powerful; the characteristics or desires of the ruling force. The sinners vs. God. The slaves vs. the master. The pawns vs. the president. Women vs. Men.

The good girls vs. the bad girls.
The cheerleaders vs. the fighters.

If you don't believe me (and you're male), ask yourself:
Which is more like you?
A) Does who you are depend on whether you are ever loved by a woman?
or
B) Do you forgo traditional masculine traits in order to be "one of the girls"?

I bet you laughed at that, didn't you?

These are the two choices, the two scripts, that women are told to choose from. And we are told to unconsciously pick a side before we ever know the whole story, so by the time we see the truth, it's too late - our choices are too ingrained in our chosen identity. The resulting civil war and policing among women, the competition and manifestation of insecurities, is why we have the reputation for "cattiness" or "girl-fighting". Even if you managed to reject either script entirely, you will still be surrounded by either side of that civil war. And moreover, if you try to show them how they've fallen in line, distracted from the bigger picture, they'll join together then -- and laugh you out of town. Good luck with that.

The truth is that, through some trick of time travel, things could easily be reversed. There could be an alternate universe where Women are the ones given agency, unspoken authority, unchallenged visibility while Men must adhere to a strict set of social rules about what it means to be a "good boy". Power is situational, men and women still hold the same strengths and weaknesses within themselves - are more diverse among the different personalities and nationalities and cultures and choices within a gender than between genders. The words "power", "ambition", and "anger" do not have to belong to men, just as "beauty", "kindness", and "sensitivity" are not exclusively female. The only differences remain in our perceptions, the stories and scripts which we have internalized - what we have been lead to believe.