"Any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power over men as the male ruler of the world does over women" declares Satoshi Kanazawa.
Wrong.
Without even getting into the definition of "reasonably attractive young woman" (RAYW) which can lead to a whole lifetime of arguements (and I haven't had my second cup of coffee yet), I'd like to take exception to my distinguished colleague's assertion that pretty girls have as much influence in the world as men with money, guns, property, lawmakers and lawyers on their side. If that were the case, then RAYW would be the ones running governments, owning corporations, deciding the futures of educational, economic, and cultural institutions. There would be no war, no slave camps, no government-graft, and Tampax rather than Viagra would be covered by all health care plans.
I take feminism seriously, and treat anti-feminists lightly.
I also take it personally and here's why:
When I started my first year as a student at Dartmouth College, there were five men for every woman. I thought I had it made. Dartmouth had only recently admitted women, and the administration thought it best to get the alumni accustomed to the idea by sneaking us in a few at a time. With such terrific odds in my favor socially, how could I lose? I'd dated in high school and although I wasn't exactly Miss Budwiser I figured I'd have no problem getting a date every Saturday night. But I noticed an unnerving pattern. I'd meet a cute guy at a party and talk for a while. We would then be interrupted by some buddy of his who would drag him off to another room to watch a friend of theirs "power boot" (the local venacular for "projectile vomiting") and I realized that the social situation was not what I had expected.
Then somebody explained to me that on this campus "they think you're a faggot if you like women more than beer." This statement indicated by its very vocabulary the advanced nature of the sentiment behind it. If a guy said he wanted to spend the weekend with his girlfriend, for example, he'd be taunted by his pals who would yell in beery bass voices "Whatsa matter with you, Skip? We're gonna get plowed, absolutely blind this weekend, then we're all gonna power-boot. And you wanna see that broad again? Whaddayou, a faggot or something?"
It turned out that the male-female ratio did not prove to be the marvelous bonus I had anticipated. But still I figured that the school was good enough to justify spending the next few years getting down to studying and forgoing a wild social life. I thought it would all work out, that at least I would be accepted in my classes as a good student and get through the next couple of years without too much worry or trouble. Okay, I told myself that I could live with that and found in fact that dating guys from other schools to be a healthy practice anyway.
But the real shock came in the classroom where I was often one of two or three women in the group. One professor, I remember, always prefaced calling on me or any other woman in the class by asking "Miss Barreca, as a woman, what is your reading of this text?" I was profoundly embarrassed to be asked my opinion as a woman, since it seemed somehow less authorative than being asked my opinion as a student or as a "general" reader. At first, I jokingly replied that I would be happy to answer "as a person," but that it was hard for me to answer as a woman. When the professor didn't so much as smile, I knew that tactic wouldn't work. Every time I raised my hand to answer a question, I was asked my opinion as a woman. It frustrated and angered me, because I wanted to be treated as an individual and not as a representative of a group.
It took months to understand that in the eyes of this teacher, I'd always be a "Miss" rather than just another, ordinary student. When I realized that there was no alternative, I figured I'd go with it, exaggerate the situation enough so that I could at least enjoy myself. So I started prefacing every answer with the phrase, "As I woman, I think Shakespeare means . . . ", "As a woman, it strikes me that Tennyson's point is . . . " But then I figured, why stop at this? I started to say "As a woman, I think the weather's rather cold for June." "As a woman, I think I'll have the meatloaf for dinner." "As a woman, I think I'll go to bed early tonight." It started out as a joke, but as it caught on (a number of my friends started to use the same strategy to make the professors and guys in general hear how their remarks sounded) we started to examine further. Maybe we really were always speaking as a woman. Maybe there was no such thing as speaking as "just" a person. Maybe we always spoke as women whenever we spoke. Maybe this joke wasn't such a joke.
So that even as I stopped saying "As I woman, I believe such-and-such," I started thinking it. It occured to me that nothing was neuter or neutral. I saw that my responses were in part determined by the fact of my gender--as well as by other factors like my class and ethnicity. I didn't read novels about war in the same way a man would, for example, since I hadn't been brought up to consider going to war as a soldier as a possible future for myself. I hadn't played war games as a kid, I didn't find the idea of war engaging. It did not have "universal appeal" since it didn't appeal to me, a narcissistic but nevertheless compelling argument. In the same way that the male students complained that Jane Austen was obviously a second-rate writer because all she was interested in was marriage (Mark Twain once said that it was "a pity they let her die a natural death"), so I decided to assert that Hemingway's concern for bullfighting was no concern for an intelligent, insightful woman. Of what interest is bullfighting to the contemporary female reader? Hemingway was therefore second-rate, by their definition, since his subject matter had limited appeal and seemed gender-specific. I learned to answer "Of course" when asked whether I responded to things as a female. I learned to accept that and even enjoyed discovering the ways in which my viewpoint differed from the perspective offered by my male peers.
But even understanding that the world identified me first as a woman and only secondly as anything else didn't stop me from being horrified the first time somebody called me a "feminist." I thought being a feminist meant I couldn't wear lipstick or crave men with small behinds. I thought that "feminist" meant I couldn't send "Peanuts" cards to guys who I was afraid wouldn't call back, or buy stockings with seams. I thought "feminist" meant no more steamy flirtations or prolonged shopping trips. I thought it meant braided hair and short nails, maybe mandatory tofu. I certainly associated feminism with humorless, dour, and--worst of all--unblinkingly earnest women. That was because I was accepting the male version of things, which was sort of like believing the mouse's version of the cat, since it entailed being given access to a vision that could see nothing besides teeth and claws.
I was warned about so-called feminists. I was told by boyfriends, relatives, professors and other disreputable sources that such women were ambitious, sharp-tongued, a little too smart for their own good. They told me that only women who couldn't get laid got political. They told me what was perhaps the biggest and most interesting lie of all: that independence and ambition were unattractive in a woman. They also suggested, subtly but seriously, that too much of a sense of humor in a woman made her unattractive (a comment to which comedian Elayne Boosler would reply "Comedy is very, very sexy when it's done right"). Luckily, during a moment that eclipsed all earlier illumination, I heard a female graduate student repeat a wonderful line from writer Robin Morgan, "We are the women that men have warned us about." It was as if the little lightbulb that appeared over Bugs Bunny's head when he got an idea suddenly appeared over mine. It seemed unnerving, actually, that I was gazing reprovingly at all those qualities that I myself possessed. I was certainly ambitious, ready to speak and eager to defend my position on a subject. I liked being a woman, was proud of my femininity and believed myself to be equal to any task set before me by society--at least as well equipped to deal with them as any guy I sat next to in class (he could no more skin a bison than I could and I could probably defend myself on Tenth Avenue more ably than he).
