Topic of the day: paper and art project addressing the above titled question. Due tomorrow and starting it today, thanks to having tests the past couple days and being quite unmotivated before that. It brings up the question of recycling papers, but I only seem to do that for personal statements for scholarships and whatnot, so here I am having to bring up the gender question again. Art project? Perhaps decoupage, maybe using some of those Classico jars we have around, maybe something with duct tape? Alas, the one time where it would actually work to do a collage (actual art collage, not high school type collage), they tell us that it's the only form of expression we can't use. If only I can relate my gender to stars or duct tape wallets, or tattoos and piercings (although I don't think they would necessarily want pictures of pierced vulvas to be turned in for this project. Then again...).
So I'm going to do this out of order (because technically we're supposed to create the visual piece first) and do a semi-writeup. Hopefully I can incorporate any explanation of the art piece into the paper without any huge gaps.
. . .
It's an all too frequent occurrence: I put on a skirt, or a dress, or just a cute pink/red top, and my friends make a big deal about it. Not necessarily a big deal in a good way, more like "So you've actually decided to be like a girl today" or "Come on, you definitely can't pull that off". Now I could understand this if I was oh, say, male. But the fact that I am female and my friends laugh at me every time I try and look recognizably "feminine"... well, that just makes things complicated.
Not that I can uncomplicate my life by dropping most feminine ties and acting more masculine either, mind you. Those same friends that laugh at my attempt to "look like a girl" also chastise me when I wear slightly baggy pants and a sweatshirt, pointing out that no one will take me serious as a female if I routinely walk around like an androgynous (or slightly feminized) guy. I'm constantly caught in the crossfire of "Oh, she's trying to be like a guy! Well, you can't deal with this can you! (and my male friend picks me up off the ground and shows that I am not as strong as men are)" and "Oh how cute, she's trying to look like a girl! Now if only you could look like this (holds onto his girlfriend) then you would be a bit more believable! (note: said girlfriend is stacked, has curly hair, wears makeup and short skirts, and girlishly giggles at all the right times)".
On the one hand, I feel kind of cheated because no one really "taught" me how to be feminine. When I look at other girls, I wish that I could look as pretty as they do with their hairstyles and makeup and cute tops and short skirts and coordinating heels. But on the other hand, I really hate how makeup feels and how fake it makes me look, I can't really stand wearing skirts or dresses because you can't do anything physical in them, and I'm pretty sure that I would break my ankle if I tried wearing high heels. Since my appearance hinges directly on me being comfortable (how many women you know that wear heels are actually comfortable in them?) the result is my looking less feminine and more like "one of the guys". Who just happens to have boobs.
How did I start out this way? Well, the way I look at it, it's simple. I have an older brother, so when I came along my parents were already used to raising a boy child. Since we were always together, I just started doing what he was doing: playing outside in the mud, wrestling, playing sports, and generally running around. My parents were of the mind that girls could do anything boys could, and so they let me play around with my brother, seeing that that's what made me happy at the time. My brother was my only playmate up until I got into school, and even after that we were each other's primary play friends. So I grew up learning boy things. Sure, I was well aware that I wasn't a boy, that I was biologically female and inherently different from boys, but it seemed that boys were always the ones having the most fun. Because of this "fun factor" (and the fact that growing up with my brother gave me more of a boy mindset than a girl mindset) I had much more boy friends than girl friends, was always playing in one of the boys' games at recess, and generally (since I hadn't reached puberty yet and so looked pretty much like a little boy if you disregarded my long hair) regarded myself as "one of the boys". Oh yeah, it really helped that my clothes were hand-me-downs from my brother and that I was better at sports than most any of the other girls. I guess it really was one of those things where it didn't matter if I was a girl as long as I could keep up with the boys I was playing with: "It appears that for girls to be fully accepted in the boy's sports games they need to be physically fit and skilled. There were no exceptions to this unwritten, unspoken rule. (Boyle, et al, 2003)"
Of course all of that changed when we got into midschool, when boys started looking at girls as sexual entities, not as playmates, and when the only thing on girl's minds was to impress the boys. It was then that I finally figured out that I didn't fit in - I wasn't girly enough for the girls and I couldn't hang out with the guys because, well, I was female. So I found the next best thing: drama club. "Don't fit in anywhere else? Don't worry, join Drama Club, we're all as confused and left out as you!" The best part was, since we were all playing characters of all types and genders, it didn't matter how we looked or how we decided to display our gender. If you wanted to do drag, you could. If you were a male and wanted to act super masculine, or a female and wanted to act super feminine, you could. Everyone could mix and match and it was perfectly ok to do so. Well, a lot of the kids not in drama club thought we were all just a bunch of queers, but their approval didn't matter to us anymore. We gave each other encouragement, became best friends, helped each other when needed, and stood up for each other. To me, it seemed that each group in school was painting it's own picture: the jocks' was pretty much full of blue, the cheerleaders' was pretty much all pink, but our picture was by far the most colorful. What we liked most was that we were so colorful, that we weren't all just strictly masculine or strictly feminine. It was like what Fausto-Sterling said at the end of The Five Sexes, Revisited: "Sometimes people suggest to me ... that I am arguing for a pastel world in which androgyny reigns and men and women are boringly the same. In my vision, however, strong colors coexist with pastels."
No comments:
Post a Comment