Psychology of Women - A Letter

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” - Socrates

Dear Person,

            This is the letter I told you about; the one that when I told you, you smiled and joked: “It’s not that I’m dismissive of Women’s Studies, it’s that I just don’t care.” As your friend, your ex, and your school family – as a person you care about - I am asking you to suspend your existing opinions for this letter; suspend your disbelief. Give yourself a chance to see how feminism is your issue too. I want to convince you that Women’s Studies is not only important, but it is important to you. You are being affected by unacknowledged forces and socially constructed ideas about gender just as deeply as a male as I am as a female. I know that your reflex is to laugh this off and not really care: so ask yourself two questions.

1)      Does your identity depend on whether you are loved by a woman?

2)      Do you forgo traditional masculine traits in order to be “one of the girls”?

Do these questions seem ridiculous? Switch the genders and then these become real issues that scientific study after study is able to recognize; issues which take many forms, some more subtle and dangerous than others. Feminism is merely a lens, a perspective you use to see the world more clearly. You will recognize how being dismissive of these issues comes at your own peril – whether it is in your relationships and friendships, your teaching career, or even your development as an individual. This letter is about you in the context of a bigger picture, and you will do yourself a lifetime of favor by giving it a chance to – not change you – but broaden and connect what already exists within your mind.

This letter draws concepts and information from four books, various handouts, and class discussions from my Psychology of Women class. The books are: Same Difference by Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers, Girlfighting by Lyn Mikel Brown, and Appetites by Caroline Knapp. I am required to synthesize and summarize what I learned in these texts during the course of this letter, and my arguments will revolve around the theme of gender as identity. How dismissing feminism and subscribing to preexisting social constructs – stories produced by cultural, social, and historical forces about what one is or is not, should or shouldn’t be - is detrimental to personal development and fulfillment. These social constructs or “stories” are pervasive, and ultimately determine every choice we make and how we see ourselves - who we are. You may not realize it, but these very stories – these scripts we seem to follow– are what have made feminism so laughable to you and countless other men and women. You’ve been set up to believe it’s all the nonsensical ramblings of “Nazi Feminists” (which is both antisemitic and sexist, though said often and causally). That’s just another story, another script that we’re taught to abide. Women aren’t unfamiliar with it either, and often can’t even call themselves feminists. Each book I’ve studied exposes a different element of those misperceptions.

One major story about gender is that men and women are innately different. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray was published in 1992 and reinforced this misperception: that men and women are so vastly unlike each other that the best explanation is a metaphor that we come from separate planets, effectively making us different species – neither being human, completely alien to our own gender and each other. This false story has been repeated throughout generations, like an echo through time, making it invisible to us because we see it as simply the way things are and have always been. It is a struggle to fight against our habits, which include the natural processes of our mind, but it is necessary if we want to live a satisfying and justified life – to know the true possibilities and limits of our being.

Just look at us: both considered intellectuals, we have a passion for music, poetry, trivia, TV shows, literature, and are pretty much introverts. We both came out of lower income families and had to experience the death(s) of our only true parental figures. We’re both excellent writers, and have clearly defined ambitions in life (even if they’re very different ambitions). I could go on, but the point is we’re more alike than we are different: more like each other than, for example, I am like bubbly XX or you are like conservative XY – all four of us are friends – and yet me and you have always paired off.

Same Difference, which I will now refer to as SD, evaluates the story of man vs. woman with statistical data and critical examinations of texts about gender, including John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. The conclusion of SD is that there are more differences among genders than between genders. In other words, there is a bigger range of difference from girl to girl or boy to boy than between boys and girls. Behavior – personality - has no gender.

As Barnett and Rivers describe on page 35 of SD, “People in power expect others to listen to them”. This applies to men and women depending on their situation. A politician like Hilary Clinton or a female professor would have plenty of people around to help them out or be willing to cater to them, because they hold power. People without power are sensitive to those with power, mostly in order to gain a little power themselves through association or by having helped in a critical time. This can seem a little manipulative, but “people who have power don’t have to resort to manipulative techniques; they promote the rules because they benefit from them.” In other words, while behavior has no gender, essentially neither does power. Instead, it is the situations created by social constructs which have pushed the power toward the men, and thus leave women without agency.

Therefore, the true difference between men and women is the existence and/or response to situational power. SD’s critique of John Gray’s arguments show that, not only does he perpetuate the lie that men and women are dissimilar, but he leaves out any mention of power at all. Gray is subscribing to a social construct that denies the power men hold by default, perhaps because as a man himself he is unaware of his privilege to do so. It’s important that you don’t feel attacked by the recognition of your privilege: think of it as something you’ve just always had and no one told you what it was. It’s not your fault you have it anymore than it’s your fault you were born male or white. 

Further, by writing books which act only to reinforce this widely repeated story, Gray is helping to continue the echo of differences into the future. Are you asking yourself, “Why should I care?”  You should care because it is this widely held misconception that made our relationship so damn difficult. We both bought into a story we never remembered reading – a social construct embedded in our minds from the very time and place where we happened to be living. That story was something along the lines of what was expected of me as a girlfriend, and what was expected of you as a boyfriend. Those expectations weren’t very fair to either of us, and left us both unhappy.

Think of it like religion. Various religious theories affect us no matter what we believe, sometimes becoming so widespread and repetitious that we forget its origin or connection (think OMG, or “bless you” when someone sneezes). They are ancient and ingrained into cultures and societies. Even religions and mythologies that have been abandoned and rejected remain part of our modern dialog, and are incorporated into how we come to see the world. As atheists, we have both fought battles to hold the religious people around us accountable for their beliefs (especially when held against us, despite believing different things). Gender with its rules, principals, definitions, and illusions is just as ancient, ingrained, and cause for alarm and reform.

As reported in SD, Gray makes claims that seem familiar and safe, but are actually extremely dangerous because these ideas are what shape the boundaries of gender. The fact that they are so familiar proves how unconscious yet influential they are. Gray argues that:

“Men…are naturally programmed to go into their “caves” and not communicate with other people…A woman must not offer help to a man because it makes him feel weak or incompetent. A woman must never criticize a man or try to change his behavior [my italics]. She should never be angry; she must wait until she is “loving and centered” to talk to him…If a man pulls away from her, ‘he is just fulfilling a valid need to take care of himself for a while.’”

Does any of this sound familiar to you? These are the socially constructed ideas that have shaped our parents, grandparents, houseparents, sisters, and ultimately us. Every adult, every role model, we’ve ever known has been exposed to this misinformation and most of them bought it – accepted it. When reading that excerpt, did you feel it resonated with you – that is was truthful? For me, it is a sample of the messages I’ve been hearing since I was a little girl – messages I have tried to ignore with varying success. Ignoring those messages has made me the person I am today – and is what made us incompatible as a couple. I was torn constantly between the kind of girlfriend I wanted to be and who I wanted to be as an individual; for me, the expectations are too contradictory.

While we were dating, there were a lot of frustrations between us. One major thing that really upset you was when I started to make fun of you, picking on you, even in front of friends. When you asked me to stop, I said that I was “leveling the playing field” – an explanation that you found to be unacceptable. However, when you retaliated, you were merely defending yourself, which is perfectly acceptable. While I did stop teasing you, I came to realize I was defending myself as well, and having read SD, I am now able to explain that it all has to do with power.

As the authors of SD would say, I was responding to what I perceived as your power over me. Since I had the vehicle and the job, I was able to drive to your apartment every weekend for nearly four months to see you. I wanted to do it, enjoyed it, and won’t deny that. I would pay for gasoline, and often for your meals, movie tickets, and anything else we did together. I would ask you what you wanted to do, and you would say it was up to me; you believed you were giving me freedom when really it was just more responsibility. It’s interesting how stereotypical gender roles were switched with us, and so I have a unique insight in what it might be like for the typical scenario of boys pursuing girls – in the end, power whether from resources or emotion, cancelled each other out and we were both left unhappy. You were the one with power, and I was the one sensitive to that power.

As personal preference, I like to go out. I love to drive, try new foods at restaurants, and see movies. As we both know, these are expensive hobbies. Nevertheless, I wanted to do them, and I wanted to do them with you – and so I paid your way as well. My frustration with my lack of income became my frustration with your lack of contribution. I began to see myself as catering to you, and supporting the relationship by myself. You held the power because by definition you were the controlling influence. My actions did not change you or influence you, while you had undeniable influence over my choices. Understand that I’m not asking you to apologize and I don’t expect you to feel regret; I’m asking for your awareness.

This is an example of situational power. Since I thought you were reaping all the benefits of the relationship without emotional or financial cost, you held the power. It was beyond whether you paid for meals, planned a weekend, or did anything to surprise me – it was an emotional power. Think of it as going to a casino. I was hemorrhaging money by counting on statistics and probability to win a jackpot (admittedly, not the right strategy). By withholding investment, you were not gambling at all, and “won” by default because there was no way to lose if you didn't play. So, instead of investing more positive emotion in you, I retaliated, and began teasing you instead – investing negative emotion. If I had not been so concerned about your feelings and the investment I’d already made, I would have just broken up with you, or gotten upset and expressed that more directly. I did not do that because, as a girl, I have been told that kindness is my only real option for getting results. Social constructs would say I was being a sore loser and would deny me my desire to be angry. A wider, feministic lens says it is okay for me to be angry and interprets me as someone who realized they were playing a fixed game they could not win.

So, I got angry, but still loved you, so my response was passive aggressive. Yet, I see how from your perspective I may have been the one with the power. In your own words, “it was up to [me] whether to come down or not. No one was forcing [me] to come down every weekend.” However, instead of helping all you did was continue to shoulder the relationship onto me. You believed you were somehow comforting me when you were actually, unconsciously, sticking me in a box where I was not allowed to be angry or express unhappy emotions. I was in an obviously failing relationship with my best friend, who I loved but who I realized early on didn’t love me, and yet I wasn’t supposed to be upset or frustrated or disheartened? If you have an emotion, a desire, a thought:  it is part of you, and you have a right to feel it and express it responsibly – no matter your gender – that’s the power of feminist theory.

In Appetites, Knapp illustrates that desire is a form of power and that how we attempt to satisfy our various desires depends on our subscribed gender roles: what we’ve been told we are allowed to want. For you, our relationship was an experiment, not a gamble. When I asked you why you started dating me without being in love with me, you said: “you thought you might love me, eventually.” While it was an honest answer and I appreciated that, the ability to be so carefree is part of your male privilege – the invisible permission you’ve been given as a male to enjoy impermanence and satiate your desires for only as long as you have them. No one sees you any differently now than they did before we dated (except me, of course).

Being a female in a patriarchal society, and having been raised by three generations of women, I had something considerably more heavily invested in you. My desire was to have a relationship, to prove that I could, and thereby legitimizing my female identity (as I understood it at the time). This meant I had to become a relationship superhero. I was torn between not wanting to compromise myself and my beliefs (not kissing your ass), and wanting to be successful, good, at being your girlfriend. This, obviously, did not end well – but it was a learning experience. What is important to note is that, true, my expectations of you are not your fault – but that those are part of a vast web of boundaries and rules that go beyond you or me.

To understand this, you need to see relationships as currency of power, and in a different way for women than for men. Men are told to collect relationships like badges – the more the better – and the more explicit the better. Women instead have to savor them and hide them like having candy in your room at school. If you have too many (candies, men, desires) then you are wanting too much – and that is a problem. You become fat, you become a whore, or you become a bitch: a woman can easily become simply “too much”. A woman who is “too much” (a woman like me) is dangerous to the status quo. On the simplest level, I’m refusing to obey the laws of the land, and that’s not fair to everyone else who does, so I get called out and pushed into corners by men and other women alike – even if they don’t recognize what they’re doing or why. As long as these laws, scripts, remain intact then socially men are the ones in power with women supporting their power structure in order to vicariously feel like they have any power of their own.

 You have an unacknowledged power, one you never have to take responsibility or feel guilty about as long as it remains unacknowledged. No one is going to hold you accountable for it, except for me, but what the hell: ignorance is bliss. Ironically, being poor yourself and having medical concerns, you would never laugh at someone who is poor and cannot afford health insurance. Having had to go through the process of being ill and worrying about money and health and all that goes with it, you are in a position to relate to and understand those concerns. You may even be persuasive enough to act as an advocate, to make people who are not poor or ill aware of the difficulties of being in that position. It is the same with Women’s Studies. Whether or not you choose to see the true structures of class, race, and yes, gender in society, you still remain at risk for the adverse effects these dynamics have on every person who you will ever know - because when we accept these social constructs, we lose the ability to determine our own fates, to decide who we are: to write our own life stories.

Power is only one reason why our relationship didn’t succeed, but what about our future relationships? You were able to benefit heavily from this particular scenario because I rejected the idea that you should be the “provider” and I should be the “chosen”. It’s not that I wish you ill; I sincerely hope you’ll find love and that our friendship will endure. Yet, you have to accept that everyone has been touched by these stories, and whether they accept, reject, or are unaware of them will have an effect on the outcome.

            Girlfighting is a book which has already helped me to identify and reject the life-scripts that all too many women easily subscribe to in matters of relationships. Girlfighting reveals the “relational aggression” of girls: cliques, gossip, backstabbing – things Ivy and I rolled our eyes over in high school. However, through the book it becomes clear that girls are having this aggressive and competitive relationship with each other because of our denial of power. Essentially, our worth is determined in relation to boys (whose worth is determined in relation to themselves). For the girls, it becomes a personal fight for identity and for the boys it becomes daily and oblivious stroll through a marketplace called high school where compliments can buy you anything. Anyone who isn’t buying or selling simply doesn’t count.  

            When I saw you flirting with a new girl, according to Girlfighting, I should have instantly hated her. Even as your ex, she was stepping into a territory that – supposedly – I should feel is my own. In fact, when I later relayed the story to someone I respect, she reacted in just that way: “Oh and that girl too right? Don’t you just want to rip her hair out?” They surprised me, being my mentor and normally above-average in the advice department, but she’s still human and therefore a product of these influences as much as we are. According to social norms, I’m not supposed to be mad at you for flirting in front of me (instead of just going in the hall) – no – I’m supposed to hate this nice enough girl who I’ve never met. And who benefits from that? The one who suddenly has two girls with him on their mind; you.

             The situation remains, however, that if you two do get together – I know better than to fall into the easy trap of hating her – but how will she react to me? I want to recommend you to tell her simply that we tried to date, it didn’t work out, and that you didn’t love me. Calm her unspoken worries about either intimidation or the possibility that I want you back. I’m no threat to her, and if I’m going to be hanging out at your place this summer – I’d like to do it without the drama of social constructs getting in the way. I would also appreciate if you kept any exploits to yourself as well for the time being. We did date after all, and I want you to respect that.

            So you see: feminism isn’t just about equal pay and bra-burning – and not at all about man hating. It has many possible definitions, but to view it psychologically is to see it as breaking free of restrictions on behaviors that are currently not defined equally for men as for women – acting on desires that have different consequences based on your genitalia. Thinking about why you’re so easily dismissive of feminism may be the road to understanding how feminism relates to you better than any argument I’ve made in this letter. If you believe that we’re all equal and should “shut up” now, then you’re merely subscribing to the same story that’s been told throughout history. You’re going to be a history teacher, and if there is a slightly cliché phrase that applies more here than anywhere else it’s: those who forget history are bound to repeat it.

            You know how much you love Mad Men? 1960s corporate glamour and cigarette smoke? The show is praised for how it’s able to balance the dramatic plot with such realism for the time period – a mere 50 years ago. I’ve heard professors say more than once: “it was really just like that”. You may then also enjoy a recent article in the New York Times titled “Coffee, Tea, Then Equality” about Gail Collin’s book When Everything Changed – The Amazing Journey of American Women  From 1960 to Present. It’s evident that, like everything else, we have progressed more, faster, in the past 50 years than we have in the past thousand years before that. And just as with technology, Feminism has grown so quickly that it’s easy to take it for granted.

            Everyone we know over the age of 40 has been a witness to a world we would not recognize today, and the others are an echoing descendent – hell – everyone younger than us is growing into something we don’t even recognize either (3 year olds on IPhones are creepy). Did you know that women were added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a joke? It was a last-resort attempt by Howard Smith of Virginia to block the whole effort.  The battle to be fought now goes deeper than rights and civil liberties. It is an issue of social psychology; like fairy tales, there are stories that everyone knows in one version or another and they act as the scripts we follow in certain situations based on who we think we are, or believe we should be. That does not mean the scripts are accurate representations of who we actually are, but by following the predetermined script, we put our behavior (the actions that define our lives) into the manipulative hands of others. We have a right to live our lives to the fullest and to realize ourselves as individuals. It takes courage to change yourself, but with it you may be able to change something even bigger. I hope you understand.

Love,

L.

CITATIONS

Barnett, R & Rivers, C. (2004). Same Difference: How gender myths are hurting our relationships, our children, and our jobs. New York: Basic Books.

Bloom, A. (2010). Coffee, Tea, Then Equality. The New York Times, p. 9

Brown, L.N. (2003). Girlfighting: Betrayal and rejection among girls. NY: New York University.

Knapp, C. (2003). Appetites: Why Women Want. New York: Counterpoint.