Sexism
This post marks the beginning of a new theme here, one to which I’ve given little attention in the past, and one that, shamefully, I’ve only really begun to understand with the birth of Essie. It begins with a story…
We took Ess along to see Out on a Limb’s Nutcracker show at the Rosedale Mall. Mykala was occupied running the music, so Ess was my charge for the evening. Just the sight of her mama, without the ability to run over and get a hug was a challenge for Essie, so after feeding her, she and I began doing circuitous laps around the first level of the mall, biding our time, on each lap showing Ess the dancers while avoiding sightings of Mykala.
It was on one of these laps that Ess began going “booba booba booba” which I thought was a bit odd since (1) Ess only says that around Mykala and (2) Mykala was behind many storefronts about 300 yards away. Why was my 16-month-old daughter saying booba? I knew it wasn’t anybody in the area, so I began scanning shop fronts. You’ve probably guessed it already: mannequins. At Gap. Wearing sweaters. That’s how obnoxiously out of proportion these lady mannequins were: Ess perceived obvious, beat-you-over-the-head breasts on them through winter sweaters. As the father of a young daughter, this grated. What was worse was the men mannequins: you’re probably thinking they were overgrown steroid-adled gladiators, right? Wrong! They were, for all practical purposes, slim, humanly-proportioned individuals.
Sexism is awful. Double standards dump salt in the wound.
I’ve always been respectful of women to the point of obsequiousness, though that has been more an outgrowth of my personality than any true understanding of what it is like to be a woman. Recently, with the help of the Twitter stream of John Siracusa and, in turn, his following of Everyday Sexism, has the concept of what it is like to be a woman in the world begun to sink slowly into my thick head.
It probably began in earnest with my viewing of a video of a woman wearing a bog standard black t-shirt on the streets of New York, surreptitiously filming the amount of harassment a woman endures in public. Then a few more anecdotes expressing similar experiences. Slowly, slowly, these anecdotes strung together in my mind into a theme, a theme of outright and implicit verbal and physical abuse. Then, under the overwhelming weight of countless recollections and summaries of double standards, tacit gender norms, molestation by the male gaze, more double standards, violence, parking lots at night, walking in the city, walking anywhere, interviewing for jobs, keeping jobs, makeup, subtle sexism, overt sexism, snide comments, rude implications, the heartbreaking stereotypes endured by women bosses, OFFENSES DISMISSED AS JOKES, minimization, accusations deflected as overreaction, more parking lots, more city streets… well, this theme then became generalized into universal experience. It is not one type of woman that endures this hell: it is all women.
It was upon finally arriving at, and trying hard to empathize with, this shared female experience, that I felt like I finally began to understand being a woman in this world.
And it enrages me.