Connecting Across Gender Lines
Mar. 12th, 2008 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kateelliottWhen I was in 7th grade, my wonderful language arts teacher, a young woman named Sandy Campbell, gave all her students a page of fill-in-the-blanks questions of the 'getting to know you' variety. For instance: "I don't like__" or "When I'm twenty I want to___".
The last question was "I wish__"
I was twelve years old, and I finished the question in this way: "I wish I was a boy."
The next day the teacher took me aside and expressed concern over my answer. She was genuinely bothered, on my behalf, that I did not want to be who I was. "Boys get to do all the things I want to do," I told her. "Why wouldn't I want to be a boy?"
Remember, this is in the early 70s, when health class still warned girls against riding horses too enthusiastically while virgins because they might break their hymen or taking really hot showers or baths when they were having their menstrual period because they might faint. We didn't have a league of our own, girls weren't hired for the well paying summer jobs moving irrigation pipe, the real jobs out in the real world were (seemingly) all (or mostly) held by white males (my father was heavily involved in bringing in, via Affirmative Action, the first female and African American administrators into the community college he worked at). I can assure you that the books I devoured had male heroes who did things while females--well, if females had been invented yet, they rarely *did* things. Beyond romance, that pursuit which we were to frame our lives around, the lives of girls and women didn't hold much appeal for me. And romance was a darned long way from anything I could hope to aspire to since, trust me, I was the girl in junior high my friends would hide behind when they wanted to discourage a boy from asking them to a dance.
But Mrs. Campbell forced me to look very hard at what I was wishing for. Did I actually wish I was a boy? (If I had, I'd no doubt have ended up on a very different journey.)
When all was said and done, I didn't specifically want to be a boy. I wanted what boys could take for granted, what they could aspire to, what they could accomplish and what they could do. I wanted the things girls were either told they could not do, or the things it was simply assumed--through absence of discussion--weren't appropriate for girls or that girls wouldn't want. I wanted adventures.
By expressing concern and making me think about what it really was I wished for, and the unfairness of what was being offered to me, I suppose my young teacher set me on the road to becoming a feminist.
Later, of course, as I saw more of the world, I began to realize that "boy" in this context really meant "white boy." It was easy for me to identify with female characters, being female myself, but over time I began identifying as well with male characters who weren't white because I felt I had something in common with them although I wasn't always quite sure what that was.
Which brings me to the post that triggered these reflections.
Over at Naamenblog, Naamen muses on Female Protagonists and Why I Connect with Them Across Gender Lines
This is also around the age that I started to become more aware, mostly subconsciously, that being African-American separated me from most of my friends in a really profound way. The large majority of my friends were white and a lot of that had to do with where I went to school (Private School, Beverly Hills, San Fernando Valley, Chino Hills), not to say there weren’t people of color or that I wasn’t friends with them but the majority of my friends were white. I felt isolated a lot throughout high school and didn’t really know why consciously except that I saw that some teachers treated differently, some people were colder to me, I was ignored sometimes compared to the way my white friends were treated.
I felt that I needed to be on guard a lot, that I was alone. Now this is often the the storyline of a lot of F/SF: the loner that is outcast for some reason and might be more than she seems. Yes, it’s true of male characters as well but I felt the deep kinship for the female characters because often in that storyline it was their gender that was hated: something they were born into, something they couldn’t change/alter and just had to deal with. The normal resolution of such a storyline is the protagonist finding their own way to accept themselves and yet still be accepted by society in some way. But at the end of the story the women were still women, it was nothing they could change and they often had to prove themselves over and over, sometimes to the same person. It was something I could relate to.
Go read the whole thing. It really hit a nerve for me.
The last question was "I wish__"
I was twelve years old, and I finished the question in this way: "I wish I was a boy."
The next day the teacher took me aside and expressed concern over my answer. She was genuinely bothered, on my behalf, that I did not want to be who I was. "Boys get to do all the things I want to do," I told her. "Why wouldn't I want to be a boy?"
Remember, this is in the early 70s, when health class still warned girls against riding horses too enthusiastically while virgins because they might break their hymen or taking really hot showers or baths when they were having their menstrual period because they might faint. We didn't have a league of our own, girls weren't hired for the well paying summer jobs moving irrigation pipe, the real jobs out in the real world were (seemingly) all (or mostly) held by white males (my father was heavily involved in bringing in, via Affirmative Action, the first female and African American administrators into the community college he worked at). I can assure you that the books I devoured had male heroes who did things while females--well, if females had been invented yet, they rarely *did* things. Beyond romance, that pursuit which we were to frame our lives around, the lives of girls and women didn't hold much appeal for me. And romance was a darned long way from anything I could hope to aspire to since, trust me, I was the girl in junior high my friends would hide behind when they wanted to discourage a boy from asking them to a dance.
But Mrs. Campbell forced me to look very hard at what I was wishing for. Did I actually wish I was a boy? (If I had, I'd no doubt have ended up on a very different journey.)
When all was said and done, I didn't specifically want to be a boy. I wanted what boys could take for granted, what they could aspire to, what they could accomplish and what they could do. I wanted the things girls were either told they could not do, or the things it was simply assumed--through absence of discussion--weren't appropriate for girls or that girls wouldn't want. I wanted adventures.
By expressing concern and making me think about what it really was I wished for, and the unfairness of what was being offered to me, I suppose my young teacher set me on the road to becoming a feminist.
Later, of course, as I saw more of the world, I began to realize that "boy" in this context really meant "white boy." It was easy for me to identify with female characters, being female myself, but over time I began identifying as well with male characters who weren't white because I felt I had something in common with them although I wasn't always quite sure what that was.
Which brings me to the post that triggered these reflections.
Over at Naamenblog, Naamen muses on Female Protagonists and Why I Connect with Them Across Gender Lines
This is also around the age that I started to become more aware, mostly subconsciously, that being African-American separated me from most of my friends in a really profound way. The large majority of my friends were white and a lot of that had to do with where I went to school (Private School, Beverly Hills, San Fernando Valley, Chino Hills), not to say there weren’t people of color or that I wasn’t friends with them but the majority of my friends were white. I felt isolated a lot throughout high school and didn’t really know why consciously except that I saw that some teachers treated differently, some people were colder to me, I was ignored sometimes compared to the way my white friends were treated.
I felt that I needed to be on guard a lot, that I was alone. Now this is often the the storyline of a lot of F/SF: the loner that is outcast for some reason and might be more than she seems. Yes, it’s true of male characters as well but I felt the deep kinship for the female characters because often in that storyline it was their gender that was hated: something they were born into, something they couldn’t change/alter and just had to deal with. The normal resolution of such a storyline is the protagonist finding their own way to accept themselves and yet still be accepted by society in some way. But at the end of the story the women were still women, it was nothing they could change and they often had to prove themselves over and over, sometimes to the same person. It was something I could relate to.
Go read the whole thing. It really hit a nerve for me.