Becoming a woman means giving things up
My internet connection will be fixed Monday (it’s an actual physical problem with the physical infrastructure, not my technical incompetence), so posting will probably still be light until then.
Meanwhile here’s something to read by the excellent Sarah Ditum.
Boys grow up by getting bigger, stronger, louder. The things that a male child is encouraged to be good at are, by and large, things esteemed in the male adolescent too. But for girls, adolescence is a time of loss. Becoming a woman means giving things up, explains Deborah Cameron in The Myth of Mars and Venus, and taking up new and feminine occupations: “In particular, [girls] abandon physical play: instead of using their bodies to do things, they start to focus on adorning them.” Somewhere in the passage between being a child and becoming a grown-up, girls learn that our bodies are not ourselves, but a portable property that we must cultivate, display, and trade for the best bargain we can make.
I stopped climbing trees. I learned to shave my legs. The grazes on my knees faded. The scabs on my shins bloomed where my clumsy razor peeled away ribbons of skin. I was embarrassed to sweat. There were no lunchtime games of netball for girls at my school – just the option to walk circuits of the field, talking, looking, always wary of a rogue shot from the boys’ football game. I decided I was not a physical person. It would be undignified to run – and so began a long career of dodging PE, which got even easier once I was at secondary school and could claim period pains. I was not a physical person, I was just rendered physically incapable of taking part by my female physiology.
I occasionally try to remember when I stopped climbing trees. I was stopped by age almost-fifteen because we moved back to town and the place we moved to had no big climbable trees. It’s possible that I was still climbing them until that move; I can’t remember. I hope so.
There was a carob tree and some eucalyptus trees in our yard which we sometimes attempted to build tree-houses in, probably until my early to mid-teens. Then schoolwork took over my time, messing with electronics took over my brother’s.
Few kids of any gender played on the school playground past 7th grade, but those who continued were mostly boys. We still had PE every year and were pushed to participate in diverse activities. In the later years the teacher emphasized exercises we could do even in limited space in hope we would continue them once out of school.
I climbed trees less after I got too high in one and was afraid to come down. (Meow.) Fortunately, there were people to help point out the holds I’d used getting up that I could no longer see.
Then I found a tree in college so climbable I could go up it after dark, sit on a comfortable branch, and climb back down safely.
It was my favorite after-dark spot. I like night time, but we were taught it wasn’t safe out after dark for women. So I climbed the tree (hidden. unexpected. high. safe), with my fencing foil (armed. high ground.), and sang to the stars and the leaves.
Because I’m a weirdo. :)
@samantha #2
Love that story. Awesome.
That gives me a big awwwwwwww
Maybe you’re a weirdo, Samantha@#2, but you’re the kind of weirdo whom I appreciate.
I grew up with the idea that girls could play any sport except maybe football. Although in middle school there was subtle pressure to shave my legs, mostly because other girls were doing so. It has made life a little more difficult because I have to make sure my legs aren’t too Harry to wear shorts or a swimsuit. I climbed trees until age 9 when we moved and there were no good trees to climb
For some of us, being a woman doesn’t so much mean we give us things as being a girl means we never get to do them in the first place. In my family, we were supposed to be all pink and frills from birth (I have only occasionally worn pink by choice). “Little ladies” didn’t climb trees. “Little ladies” didn’t play with cars. “Little ladies” were quiet and prim and practically invisible, though it was okay to giggle now and then (I never giggled much – not my style).
My sisters loved being “little ladies”. I wasn’t that physical, but I did want to do things “little ladies” weren’t suppose to do, like take physics and biology, and read non-fiction (that last was allowed for me only if the non-fiction was the Bible – borrowing my dad’s books on history was permitted for my brothers, but I would instantly be directed toward a more “suitable” book)
I took a walk in the woods just a couple of days ago and my daughter was up a gnarly old oak like a squirrel on speed.
She’s 28.
She even left my grandsons in her wake.
And all three went higher than my son-in-law dared to.
The male body is a threat/weapon. The female body is merchandise.
This split is made so long before any individual has grown into their own sexual identity that all connections between men and women are poisoned thereby.
@Samantha Vimes That is a great story…’I shall protect myself from danger outside at night by…challenging my foes to a duel, like the Scarlet Pimpernel!’
I grew up somewhere without trees, so to me ‘climbing a tree’ was one of those fantastical Ray Bradbury-esque things no one actually ever did in real life, like building a snowman or drinking a root beer float at the soda fountain or riding your bike down to the stream to go fishin’.
But yeah, really eye-opening article. I can literally remember the actual day I ‘got back into my body’ as an adult woman–taking a ‘model mugging’ class in my 20s. It’s something I think and talk about a lot now–that we are not ‘in’ our bodies, we ‘are’ our bodies. And now I understand that, of course, there are aspects of this concept that are gendered, and it’s always going to be more problematic for women.
The idea that we’re ‘in’ our bodies seems really solidly rooted in our culture–stories about people ‘changing bodies’, either via brain transplant or via weird science of some sort, seem to make complete intuitive sense. Is this trope gendered? Freaky Friday is about two women swapping bodies; the most recent time I saw it in Doctor Who, I think, a man and a woman swapped bodies….
Huh. Fictional body swaps do usually seem to involve at least one woman, although part of that, I think is just for sex change humor. But there is maybe more of a tendency to feel removed from their body when one is a woman. However, in my case, fibromyalgia is my primary reason for feeling out of place in my body, so I can’t generalize at all from my own experience.
Our college had a volunteer escort service to walk the women after dark for safety, but I really didn’t feel safe having a strange guy walk me for safety and learning my habits. You know what I mean? Sure, they are unlikely to misbehave on duty, but they might turn stalkery later.
Since I took fencing to fulfill my P.E. requirement, I realized that having a metal stick on hand that creates quite tender bruises was an excellent way to discourage unwanted male attention. I could deal with anything but a gun with my foil in hand, because most people will back off from a psycho chick with a sword, even if it isn’t sharp. And I didn’t have to worry about inflicting more damage than intended. Better than keys in your hand!