Ah me, My Father (A Continuing Series)
Published by Antigone June 5th, 2008 in Punkass!, What Patriarchy?, FamilyMy father* was in town today, and we spent about as friendly a day as we get. I am one of the weird people that the conservatives cackling about how they are outbreeding the liberals always seem to forget about: both of my parents are conservative. My mother is a crazy, born-again Christian kind of conservative, and my dad is “the government is stealing from me to pay for lazy people” kind of conservative. And I turned out an agnostic, feminist, liberal pinko commie. Go figure.
Anyway, my dad does not actually believe that women are discriminated against “anymore”. Among some of his choice rationalizations for why sexism does not exist, despite the evidence I present to the contrary are “Women Are Just Different**” and “This One Women Was Promoted Over Me, Just Because She Was a Women” and “Women Lie”. He asked me to give him one example of discrimination that I have ever suffered in my life.
After pausing to process the enormity of said request (ONE?!? This week? Today?), I settled on one that was about as unambigous as you could get: when I played baseball as a little girl. When I played, I played on one of the boys teams. I was treated horribly, and the entire time I was told that I should quit. The other teammates did quite a variety of things to me, to make it was fairly clear that I was in boys territory, and that I was not welcome. The coach, while not actively encouraging in this, did turn a blind eye, and was fond of such phrases as “you throw like a girl” and “stop being such a pussy”.
My father, in a process that rivalled glacial races for speed, finally decided that this was a “real” example of discriminiation. But, after that brief moment of cognitive dissonace, out came the rationalizations. The boys who clearly felt okay in pushing me out of their space were “just kids, and kids do stupid things” (so, what about the coach who tacitly endorsed it?), and really it was the fault of the city for not having a girls team** and it was because I just wasn’t as good as the boys who had been playing since they were old enough to walk. From this conversation, I did get him to say that maybe Title IV wasn’t a waste of money, and to admit that perhaps girls weren’t as good as boys (on average) because they didn’t get the same level of socialization when it came to sports.
Two realizations came from this conversation: one, I think feminism is about the right to be an individual. On that baseball team, it didn’t matter how good I was or wasn’t*** I was just the girl. I just wanted to be Antigone, a player learning how to improve in a sport, and have fun. I never intended to make any sort of statement, I just wanted something to do to kill the boring afternoons that the small town I grew up in offered. But, I was part of this monolith called “girls”, and wasn’t allowed to just be me.
Two, my dad flat out admitted that he has more problems seeing a girl get injured in a sport than seeing a boy get injured. This I really, really don’t understand. My dad believes in “protection” of women, yet never had any problem beating up on them himself. This is a very weird disconnect that I have never been able to wrap my head around.
*When Marc first offered me a chance to write a Punkass, I turned him down because I tend to write excessively about my personal life. If people want me to do more serious pieces, or at least less personally-oriented ones, please say so.
**Which I’m fairly sure would have turned into “it was the girl’s fault for bringing it on herself” if the girl in question had not been his daughter.
***In the spirt of full disclosure, I sucked. I wasn’t the worst player on the team, or in the league by FAR, but I was no where near the best player in the sport.
I totally get everything you say here. I was the first girl to make my neighborhood’s all-star little league team back in the day. I batted something over .500 for the season. I was pretty tight. And I’ll never forget suiting up to play the older boys’ team before we went off to the state tourney. I got up to bat four times and was hit by four pitches. The pitchers didn’t hit a single other batter that day. They just wouldn’t pitch to me. They were scared of a girl getting a hit off them and they wanted to show me my place. Funny enough, nobody seemed to care that a girl was getting pummeled in that instance, but would use it as a reason I couldn’t graduate to pony league the next year.
That reminds me of something that happened to me. We were short of umpires, so the slightly older boys in the neighborhood empired. Also, because there was not enough protection, the umpire’s stood behind the pitcher, not the catcher. One of the older guys, who didn’t like me in the first place, told the pitcher to bean me, which the pitcher did, and then he called it a strike.
I accidently let go of the bat on the next swing. I didn’t get beaned again.
If people want me to do more serious pieces, or at least less personally-oriented ones, please say so.
Nah, abstractions get boring pretty fast. True stories are always interesting. Then again, blogging minutiae of your day gets boring pretty fast, too. I’m not sure where the dividing line is. But don’t worry, wherever it is, you don’t seem in danger of crossing it.
About your dad…I think the reason that some men don’t want to recognize descrimination and sexism is because they’d then have to acknowledge that they’ve done and said sexist things. Pointing out descrimination is like holding a mirror up to sexists, and they don’t like it.
I think you should do whatever moves you at the moment…ain’t that the joy and beauty of blogging?
Ouch.
I love the ‘not any more’ thing. It doesn’t require that they ever admit that it was happening. Just deny, deny, deny, then finally say ‘Well we USED to be sexists, but not NOW. Women are just WHINING now. Not like those feminists back in the day!’ If they’re really brave, they can squeeze in an extra between the two stages: saying it sorta might be real but there’s nothing that could be done to change it, not possible.
I am one of the weird people that the conservatives cackling about how they are outbreeding the liberals always seem to forget about: both of my parents are conservative.
Ditto-ish. My father is about 90% pure wingnut. My mother was a devout Christian, but was relatively left-wing when it came to things that weren’t religious hot topics. That bothers me because when morons tell me she ‘would’ve been proud of me’, I (in my head) go ‘Um. Gay’. I wonder if she’d've changed her mind about anything if she’d know she had a bisexual child. I can’t know.
I think my mom was always disappointed that I wasn’t bisexual.
Hell, I haven’t even TOLD my mother that I’m bisexual.