* from the song by Stealers Wheel.
Female, feminine, girl, woman. I have been puzzling over this issue more so for longer than a month now and rather intensely in short spasms, and some years ago there were some thoughts that swam through my mind when I read (finally read) Virginia Woolf’s A Room of one’s own only because of my friend’s blogpost. I’ve very rarely thought of myself as female, girl or woman – and especially with the passing of years. Being female impinges upon my being-ness very rarely, and very rarely have I been made aware of it or felt it myself – for better or for worse. I think I was innately somewhat more of an individualist than anything else for most of my life. I cannot see myself as a girl any longer, and I remember it was in college when I suddenly realized with a yelp that ABBA and The Beatles were singing about girls who were younger than I was. I cannot see myself as a woman because a very romantic and ideal-type and culturally embedded (yeah, yeah) notion of what a ‘woman’ is sticks to my head. But a woman brings to mind a female in a very lush and rich forest. A very beautiful female and of indeterminate age, and very wise and enchanting and amusing and active and who lives there somewhere with a man. So I do use the general word women to describe other older females but hardly ever to describe myself and when I do I feel dislocated from the word itself.
Some years ago I read an article penned by a female professor, which I actually still remember. In the article she noted how difficult it was for a female of colour to be a professor because such women always feel threatened and intimidated by the male students in their classroom. While reading that I realized with a strange awareness that in all the years that I had been an instructor and a T.A such thoughts had never once crossed my mind. My race and my sex had never entered my realm of consciousness. I taught like my race nor face nor sex mattered, and I had never felt threatened by any of the male students in the classroom – not once. I’d been heckled by male students because they wanted As but never heard back from them after I had explained that ‘wanting’ an A didn’t mean that they deserved one. I had some fun conversations with some of the male students out-of-class too. At a second layer, the thought entered my head that the place I teach probably has a lot to do with feeling safe on an everyday basis. I wouldn’t like to be teaching at a school where knives and guns are brought in as a matter of course and I had heard of a friend’s friend who teaching in Brooklyn I think it was, and she had to flee because of the colourful epithets that had been used to describe her and because she had been threatened of unpleasant consequences to her body if she didn't get lost – not just by the males it may be mentioned but by the female students too. My third level of understanding while going through the article was that the female professor writing that article and pontificating had nary a leg to stand upon while making what she claimed was a “general case”. None of the little narratives that she presented made me think or feel that just because a professor or an instructor is a female and is brown or blue, she should by default experience a loss of power or authority in the classroom or while talking with her male students. A professor who always, always remembers she’s a female first (and the insidious assumption being made was that a female of colour even if a professor was a "weak female" because of something embedded in the collective conscience apparently) does so only because she is far too attached to her female identity, and this becomes her primary identity in all possible encounters. I have a strong suspicion that this is one of those stupid instances (and there are many such stupid instances) where the feminists keep brainwashing us about how we should and ought to feel victimized because sex is such prominent marker of identity, and so we must always wear our "sex" close to our skins (!), always experience a loss of power, and then make a hue and cry for being a victim and then seek payment because we seek to be empowered.
I’ve seen female graduate students up close and personal. It’s only over the last some years, once I got internet at home that I stopped working in the computer lab in the department, but I’ve had the privilege of hearing females talking among themselves. I have seen a woman working on women's rights and crying by the bucketfuls because she was in terrible debt but not a couple of days later she's also talked of how lovely and soothing stone and gem massages are (I didn’t know there were such massages available). Females who complain about not getting enough graduate stipends have come in with sassy and obviously expensive haircuts and with their hair coloured and highlighted (and no, this is to answer an ex-friend – just in case that somebody happens to be reading my blog – I have never coloured my hair), and fancy clothes and make-up on their faces, and I’ve seen other females coo and gush over the new hairdo and all else. I’ve heard females talking of cheap deals on sweaters (I didn’t know that $80 for three sweaters was what made up a deal). I’ve heard conversations right after Valentine’s Day when the females tell each other stories of candlelight ‘surprise’ dinners, amazing gifts, and the roses that their boyfriends got them and of getting the most delicious body massage ‘ehvuhrrr’…and of being pampered. I’ve heard one extremely dainty, sweet, pretty and amazingly fashionable young thing telling a matter-of-fact graduate student that she was planning to have a baby because she and her husband were bored and were having problems. The matter-of-fact graduate student who went on to get her PhD told her quite firmly, ‘you have to sort out whatever problems you’re having. Having a baby won’t fix them nor solve them...’ The pretty young thing sighed and I don’t remember what she said (but she got her PhD and a job too). Maybe she spoke terribly softly because I’m sure my ears must have been wriggling by then even though my back was turned to the conversation, and my wriggling ears must have given away my interest in overhearing the conversation. The rest of the stuff heard in a computer lab isn't fit for a public blogpost. And these are students who all get their PhD, and write papers, attend conferences and have not read anything beyond their sociology texts.
I have heard Indian females of different feminist groups holler about patriarchy and androcentric norms. I had one telling me off about figure skating because I didn’t know that it was such an-oh-so-obviously sexist sport meant for old leery men who got turned on by nubile or pre-pubescent females dressed in body hugging outfits. But what about gymnasts or divers or swimmers? And what about the male figure skaters? And surely at age 6, I couldn’t be called a leery old man for watching figure skating, diving, and swimming on TV?…the same female had proceeded to show me how incredibly flexible and agile she was by spreading her legs all of a sudden in the middle of a conversation where there were males and females sitting around. I was challenged to show how flexible I was. I demurred. Yet another feminist scholar who knows all the right jargon and has read the right people starting from Judith Butler to Helen Longino proceeded to gyrate in the living room space where a couple of people were dancing to some feet stomping numbers. She started clinging and moving up and down one of the males and pressed her body in such an embarrassing manner that the male, friend though he was started moving off in another direction. And yet when one female is stared at by some Indian male because she's smoking in a public space, the female raises her voice in protest while talking of the "disgusting" incident later for the male is displaying a "general sense of entitlement" by staring at her when she's smoking.
These females they know – all of them know the correct jargon, they know that their male friends are simply too nice to actually point out that middle-class women should really stop complaining while doing all they do but these females know they can call a man an MCP if he dares to voice the same. Well how about calling these women FCSs? Female chauvinist sows, that is. They can't stand males in general and they can't stop talking of androcentric values and they can't stop talking about patriarchy...they can't stand males and they talk about males as a 'species', and they see all men as belonging to one indistinguishable category. And there are plenty of the identical sort sitting in India too. There was one particular female who had a little blogpost titled, ‘Let’s kill chivalry’, which still gives me the creeps. Right. Let's do away with chivalry and politeness, and decency and good manners and general courtesy but let’s also call the rare man who does put into practice courtesy and good manners a ‘sexist’ while we’re at it, and when the rare man objects let's call him an "MCP". FCS, I think is a stunning descriptor for these females.
There are other feminists too who believe that feminism is a way of addressing the structural problems that women face within a gendered society. I don’t disagree that there are problems that females face in situations simply because they are females but it also makes very, very good sense to ask ‘which females’ and address the particular issue at hand rather than ranting emptily and vaguely. When middle-class females call themselves feminists and rant and bleat and complain about facing so much psychological pressure to do this and that (and all because of male hegemony) and that they aren’t getting a fair deal, they would do well to see what I do: 'they want to eat their cake and have it to!'…but of course they haven’t been blessed as I've been (thank God that I am), so I can’t entirely blame them. The matter goes down to seeing individuals too and not just seeing and parroting these terms of patriarchy and sexism because they're cool and radical while also being painfully politically correct at least within academic institutions (a male professor could most likely be thrown out for saying that middle-class women should do something else other than shopping or spending their time bleating and complaining while proclaiming they're proud feminists). This is what the females miss - seeing the individuals and seeing the specifics and seeing what is dislocated between even their own talk while writing papers and what they do in their real lives, although they refuse to see what the average middle-class female is like, and they refuse to acknowledge that females have as much of a hand in the social injustices as much as the men. So they neither acknowledge the average when that upsets their apple-cart and neither acknowledge the individual and specific encounters when that jars their pre-conceived prejudices. Add to this that they've never in their entire lives come across a man with a mind and the courage and who has the ability to call a chalk a chalk (or a spade a spade), and so many of them lead lonely and depressed and angry and sad and sick lives.
To see these females from middle-class backgrounds who are educated and living cushy lives while facing absolutely no exploitation and no subjugation bandy around these terms even when they are talking of themselves and other women much like themselves used to make me wonder whether they were blind or just stupid or just creepily insane. "Frankly...I don’t give a damn" (yes, I rather like this liner). I try to see less and less and hear less and less of these types. These same females who talk about media oppression, the right to one’s body, the androcentric norms which define beauty, the right to express their sexuality and the rest will dress up when they please, use expensive make-up like proficient models when they so wish and bare their cleavage too when they so feel like it or look and sound like unhappy, vituperative angry hags or just pompous pontificators on patriarchy all the time in public, and the double-standards never seem to end, and then they say that I’m the one with a problem (and I have absolutely no issues with dressing up or using make-up or wearing heels or looking like a grumpy aunt – it’s a matter related to the ‘why’ would I do what I do and to see as well one is able, and since I laugh at the whole deal of ‘feminism’, it seems awful to their ears and they say that I should learn to agree to disagree; but why indeed does one have to be a feminist to be aware of structural inequalities or be sensitive to human beings who haven’t gotten a fair deal in life? - No answer to that one, of course. I seem to come across as being disagreeable and most improper. But then this post isn’t about feminism really; it's just about to-be-PhDs and doctorates with degrees and other types of females I've come across the most in these years).
I can’t say too many pleasant things about average males but I’ve seen myself as being pretty much the average person most my life, and I am female going by my sex – so that makes me an average female on almost every count but one, and that makes all the difference. I can’t say that I feel any sense of companionship or any fondness or any sense of kinship for the females I’ve seen and spent most of my time with, here in this town and that too some of these are females who have read more than a fair bit and are in institutions of higher education and who believe that they are doing useful things and advancing knowledge, and they think that they know much about the world and about themselves, and more than the ‘average’ person. Well, they make me sick and tired - the lot of females that I've had to be with for more than most of my time here, in social situations. So personally, I'm much better off having conversations with the couple of rare humans and beings who come across as being human and real, and make me feel human. There will be a second part for this post maybe after a suitable intermission. This was just to give an overview of some of the different kinds of clowns and jokers that I’ve seen much too often in this university town and in my social circles….
