According to an article in the Boston Globe, an informal poll taken among 200 teenagers has revealed that almost half of them blame the pop star Rihanna for her recent beating, allegedly by her boyfriend, Chris Brown.
It’s just one survey. But it’s very bad news. And feminists are to blame.—Kathryn Jean Lopez, “What Feminism Wrought”, National Review Online
The need for some return to sanity is presented pretty clearly in an article in the April issue of O, the Oprah Magazine. The article details how some women find themselves leaving men in favor of relationships with partners of their own gender.
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This article isn’t about closeted homosexuality. It’s not making the case that there is a vast population of women who were born to be with women, who are instead trapped in unfulfilling heterosexual arrangements. No, this article, despite its celebration of unconventional lifestyles, boils down to something much more orthodox: Femininity and masculinity mix well together. And women are taking masculinity where they can get it, even if that’s in the arms of another woman.
This article? Is about that?
Feminist theorists were among the first to begin to uncouple sex from gender. In 1949 French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published her groundbreaking book The Second Sex, with the famous line, “One is not born, but becomes a woman,” suggesting that classic female characteristics—passivity, shyness, nurturing—aren’t just biological but are embedded by parents and culture. Today, after the women’s liberation movement’s crusade for equality between the sexes, thinkers like Halberstam are challenging the very definition of gender roles. And as with sexual desire, the idea of fluidity is gaining currency, as evidenced by an ever-expanding vocabulary: transgender, transsexual, transvestite, boi, heteroflexible, intersex. And many who embrace fluidity are adopting the term gender queer with pride. —Mary A. Fischer, “Why Women Are Leaving Men For Other Women (p. 6)”, O, The Oprah Magazine
I mean, the O Magazine article isn’t exactly the most transgressive piece I’ve ever read. But neither is it wholly reductive, and neither does it—for instance—actually say what Kathryn Jean Lopez wants it to say. Actually, Fischer’s piece in O does a decent job expressing the experiences of a variety of women. Some women she talks to are certainly attracted to qualities in their partners that are idealized in romantic masculinity. But other women, plainly, aren’t. Some of them find that they’re attracted to qualities typed feminine, some women find they’re attracted to qualities not generally gendered. In at least two of the couples she discusses, one partner expresses unambiguously non-binary gender identity.
Certainly though, the Fischer article isn’t without problems. Each couple she highlights appears to have least one cisgender woman with a fairly traditional westernized feminine gender presentation, and one woman with less mainstream gender presentation and, frequently, gender identity. (I say appears, because that’s how the couples are portrayed in the article; it doesn’t necessarily reflect these women’s experiences.) Also in each case, Fischer centers the narrative on the experience of the cis, feminine partner. Macarena Gomez-Barris clashed with her husband over the fact that she made more money than he did, eventually separated from him, and then met Judith Halberstam—who we learn two pages later prefers to call herself Jack and has a non-binary gender identity, and who was apparently hanging around waiting for Gomez-Barris to arrive.
And when she talks about non-binary gender identities, we get quotes like this:
In the fall of 2007, at a Buddhist gathering, she met Jian Chen, now a 36-year-old graduate student who identifies as a “boi,” a place somewhere between butch and transsexual. “I’m interested in androgyny,” DeClue says with a playful smile. “I like a masculine exterior and feminine interior.”
Which… is it terrible? No. I quite like the love and playfulness that’s shining through. But using a cis woman’s words to define the gender identity of a non-cis person? That’s problematic. And imposing a spectrum (“a place somewhere between butch and transsexual,”) is, yes, an improvement over the two boxes / no overlap model, but is hardly the best description of gender as it actually exists or as it is actually experienced. And while I appreciate the inclusion of Chen and DeClue purely from the standpoint of improving the visibility of non-cis people—and the implication that, yes, non-cis people can have loving meaningful relationships with people who don’t vomit upon seeing their genitals—I’m far from convinced that including a genderqueer person in an article titled “Why Women Are Leaving Men For Other Women” isn’t just a teensy bit, well, essentializing.
(I’m not even going to touch page 3, where we learn that J. Michael Bailey thinks that women’s sexual desire is, “more changeable over time,” which constitutes, “a fundamental difference between men’s and women’s brains.”)
All of this means the article—so close to being a genuinely-moving-if-shallow exploration of gender and sexuality—actually reads at various points more like it’s titled, “Why Women Are Leaving Men For Other Women (Who Are Actually A Lot Like Men, So Your Patriarchal Notions Of Gender Identity And Presentation Need Not Feel Overly Threatened)”.
That said, Jean Lopez’s point in referencing O’s article is that it demonstrates how confusing and harmful all this gender theory whoziwhatsit is. Those poor girls! Having to (put on suits | turn to women wearing suits) to get their fix of masculinity! To Kathryn Jean Lopez, these profiles demonstrate with blinding clarity how much we need a “return” to traditional gender roles.
Fischer’s article does not demonstrate that.
Whatever traps she may fall into, Fischer gets one thing across very clearly: these women aren’t troubled, confused, or harmed. They’re happy. They’re in love. Whatever it is they’re doing, however difficult it may be to analyze, and however deeply it may confuse Jean Lopez, it is blindingly obvious that their lives are filled with exuberance, joy, and fulfillment.
So I don’t think their experiences support Jean Lopez’s thesis. I don’t think she gets to use their lives to prop up her cardboard longing for a return to a simpler, pre-feminist time. A time when Men were Men and Women were Women and nobody was ever confused with or unhappy in their proscribed gender roles, and husbands never beat their wives, never raped them, never killed them—and if these things happened somehow, well, they happened in bedrooms and whispers, not on the front page—and certainly, women were never, ever blamed for their own suffering, pain, and death.
Thank you for introducing me to the word “cisgender”. I never knew it, and it’s clearly one of those words that is very useful in any discussions about gender, isn’t it?
That article is so incoherent that I can’t even figure out what her point is, other than that she personally hates feminism.
Extremely useful. Trying to discuss gender without it is like trying to discuss race without the word “white.”
Lisa: I think she’s just confused. And confusion, obviously, is very very bad.
She’s definitely confused. I have to say that whenever I read antifeminist articles I feel like people who hate other people because they’re different–especially feminist-hating women– are really confused and rely on weak, subjective arguments to get their points across. It would be really pathetic if so many people didn’t follow them.
Then there’s lil’ ol’ me, a bi, cisgendered woman who now identifies as lesbian because I got tired of trying to have meaningful relationships with men in a society that told me I wasn’t as good as the person I was dating. No thanks, I’ll skip. My girlfriend and I have been together for 2 1/2 years now and we’re quite happy. Well, aside from the fact that society now tells me that I’m not as good as EVERYONE ELSE instead of just the person I’m dating.
And K.Lo fails. We all knew that already.