I'm curious to hear from y'all how adolescence affected your sense of self, your feeling about where the locus of your power lies--within or without?
And talk to me about androgyny.
xo
Monday, April 12, 2010
androgyny and such
Today in my "Girl Power" class, which Eva told me was sort of suspect and retrograde when I was designing it over the holiday, we talked about androgyny--Mary Pipher says that androgynous persons can change a tire or a diaper, fix a meal or a washing machine, and that "studies have shown" that androgynous people report greater life satisfaction. This is in the first chapter of Reviving Ophelia where she discusses the pressures girls feel to become object rather than subject, to gain our power, as Simone de Beauvoir asserts, from the ability to get men to do what we want, from being acted upon rather than acting.
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Taylor and I (before either of us knew anything about feminist theory, etc.) once discussed how if we could have any power it would be to be able to make anyone around us be more attracted to us than to anyone else.
ReplyDeleteThe theory was that this could get us pretty much anything we wanted.
Kind of interesting with respect to this conversation, I think. Taylor and I are both smart, have been treated well and valued by our friends and families, etc. So it's not like you have to be disenfranchised or particularly manipulative to get the impression that you get the most power by being "acted upon", if you get what I'm saying.
Why did I say it was suspect and retrograde?
my generation is in a really weird sandwich of growing up with feminism just a given but also with the media completely saturating all our waking lives. or maybe that's just me. but i think i grew up thinking that there wasn't really any difference between boys and girls. in many ways that didn't prepare me for the way the world really works.
ReplyDeletefashion in ontario is very androgynous. you want to look natural and elegant and well-heeled, not sexy. looking sexy is embarrassing and kind of desperate here. christian famously hates that about canadian women, but for a woman, it's fantastic. you can walk around feeling comfortable and thinking about stuff other than...well the kind of stuff you think about when you know you're dressed in a sexually provocative way: "what's hanging out/bulging" "that guy is looking at me" "why isn't that guy looking at me" "when can i take off this skirt"