Thursday, May 6, 2010

Flirting with Danger [Chapter 5]


Psychology of Women

I think the point of this chapter can be headlined with one word: contradictions. Humans are complex creatures capable of being emotionally torn in more than one direction at a time. Just as laughter can turn to tears, our underlying feelings can bubble to the surface and interrupt us at unexpected times. This is simply proof of a subconscious and a conscious mind which co-exist simultaneously. More so, however, it is also proof that we have more than one discourse influencing us at any given time.
Claudia is the first example Phillips uses to illustrate the contradictory nature of what we want and what we do. As we’ve read throughout this book, it’s not always so easy to just stand up and say, “I don’t like what’s going on here” and walk away. Based on a variety of discourses, a woman seeking to be a good woman must abide by supporting what a man wants. By nature, not discourse, a woman is also a sexual creature with desires. These ideas can exist together, but their overlap can cause pain when a woman’s sexual desire is taken advantage of and manipulated into desire to please men. Only through extreme and illogical rationalizations can we make our “minds” match up – our actions and our desires – and so pretend we had control all along. Or at the very least, that we understand what happened.
The strategies outlined here are employed before, during, and after a sexual encounter, and are also seen by the woman as her individual choice – something private – when in reality her choices are repeated from woman to woman with some variation. It’s almost as though women are trapped in their own private fairy tale – believing they’re living out a story, but it isn’t real.
The before strategies of “just letting it happen” is something I’ve heard my friends say in the past. Rather than take accountability (and pride) in their choices and desires, they chalk it up to “fate” or “luck”. Not only in sexual relationships where they didn’t want to seem like a “slut”, but in the classroom as well where they didn’t want to be a “Goody-two shoes” or some kind of nerd. Good grades and awards were never something you received on your own – modesty was the best way to go in any situation. It is in the vein that women can never be “too much” of anything – we must be objects acted upon – something seduced, something rewarded, something being tangled in the strings of fate, or luck, or god – never our we powerful enough to even acknowledge our own power because that would be blasphemous, or in smaller terms, slutty.
The “everything but” strategy is pretty similar to “just let it happen” because they’re both ways for a girl to keep her mental illusion of purity while being sexual, but the “bad girl” one is much more interesting to me. It reminded me a lot of Brown’s (?) book, where we talked about how girls must either align with social constructs dictating femininity or else throw it out all together, and it was this war between the good and bad girls that was a part of girl fighting. Looking back now, I actually was best friends with a girl who used this exact strategy. We just said that P was “extremely sexual”, and she would admit her own sexual drive as well. In the end, however, it was obvious that she wasn’t always happy with her relationships and her constant sexualization by everyone else. It was a role she played in order to have permission to do as she pleased, but like T – there was a price. It was a cycle of just becoming what everyone expected you to be, I guess, but every laugh and every innocent gesture was instantly flirtation with her. She could never not be sexual.
I feel that the “become a desired object” strategy goes hand in hand with the “bad girl” strategy, but it can also be applied to the first two as well. The “playing with fire” also feels to connect more closely to “bad girl”, but again can be mixed-and –matched. Both of these seem like more aggressive strategies, despite still being illusions. The “Change Him” discourse, however, is the one I’ve most personally struggled with. My parents were never married, and my grandmother was single at the time I was living with her. My sister is the only person in my immediate family who has been married. I learned a lot of the actions I employed when I dated from her. Teasing as a means to gain power, the constant catering and doing spontaneous things like driving 400 miles every weekend for a semester to see my college partner (who had no car and no job). I played out her relationship in my own. The biggest one in high school was the “change him” idea – I was also so intellectually mature and I thought for sure that I could make anyone become a better person with my advice (which tends to be rather eloquently stated).
Of course, the “changing him” thing isn’t just from my sister. I love Beauty and the Beast – what better fairy tale to tell young girls that if they’re beautiful enough, they can change monsters into princes?  Being able to “change” a man is like the ultimate merit badge of femininity. My last partner’s parents both died before they were out of high school, and I was so sure that had something to do with their behavior and seeming inability to have a decent relationship. I thought for sure I could – pathetically – “show them what love is”.
As they say, it takes a special kind of woman to make a man settle down. Everyone wants to be special – men and women alike – but the ways we’re told will make us stand out are vastly different. No man needs to show more skin and whisper in a girl’s ear to feel sexually empowered. No man needs to convince themselves that they’re a sexual tool. The idea of a man changing a woman is preposterous….The worst part is that all these strategies have also been devalued by men. It’s not like they work – in fact – many of my guy friends and exs explain that they hate it when girls do this stuff. Girls who “do anything but” are “leading them on”, girls who want to “change him” are being picky and the boys say they “hate being read”. Perhaps it’s a mix of the missing discourse of male accountability, but it’s also just painfully ironic that the strategies employed by women attempting to keep a shred of mental dignity turn guys off.
In the final set of discourses, “stroking the male ego”, “mastering the male body”, “trying to like it”, and “hoping he’ll notice” I saw a link between these discourses as being used in sexual situations as well as in day to day life. Women don’t only employ these when they feel victimized (unless, one could argue, they feel victimized all the time). In my own relationship, as well as my sister’s and my friends – hell, everywhere – I see the same messages. Kind of like the “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” lies – as a woman the message is clear to “stroke the male ego”. Make him feel “like a man”. Also, and again with the “things that we do that seem to actually annoy men”, is the “hoping he’ll notice”. Not only in the bedroom but in daily life is that tactic used to the utter unhappiness of women everywhere. He’ll say to you, “Don’t do that – don’t just assume I know what you’re thinking. Tell me” but then you tell him and you’re a nag or something. The truth is, he just doesn’t want you to be thinking anything at all, except maybe how great he is (stroking the male ego), or how much you want him (when in reality you’re just “trying to like it” or being a “bad girl”, or “just letting it happen”, or “playing with fire”.)
It’s sad in a way, because just as harmful to a woman’s psyche it is to live under a veil of rationalizations, it’s really this big joke on men too. Our relationships start having nothing to do with people connecting at all, but instead are these repeated “individualized” wars to be something that no one really is.

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