I just finished reading a book called Sugar and Spice by Sue Lees. She was an old professor of mine during my 1st year of school and an amazing woman. Read her obituary here.

The book is a study of adolescent girls and sexuality and was published in 1993. The study includes girls from 15 to 18 years old, so these girls are my peers. It’s really interesting to read it and remember who I was then, think about what my responses would have been to the questions and situations posed and then also, to understand the woman/women I/we have become.

In reading though, I do find it very striking how different I was/am to these girls being interviewed. I think I can thank my mother for that one because whilst I was never a normal girl, I was never told that I wasn’t normal and so, for me, my abnormality was just a different way to be normal. That might have set me up for several rude awakenings, but it also gave me an amazing strength and power to see through mirages and cling to myself. Something I am still thankful for today.

For instance, the book contains an alarming amount of girls and boys who believe that boys sexism (and sexuality) is natural and somehow uncontrollable. That boys and men were somehow justified in their denigration of girls and women. It’s just never crossed my mind that it is okay to be sexist but then again, by the age of 15 I was already, of my own volition, deconstructing female imagery in the mass media for essays in English class. I’ve just never been a normal girl I suppose…

What really bothers me though, is how I still now, at the age of 29, very strongly experience the reported control of young girls by their sexual reputation. It is still very evident to me that my use and function in a male dominated environment is directly hinged upon my sexuality. I am an object who has to follow very complex rules in order to survive.

If I think back to my recent time in London I experienced an extreme amount of sexism in an office environment I was in. Granted it was an industry office and so rules governing conduct and behaviour are far more lax than in a conventional working environment, but still, it was really outrageous. As an example, on a recent telephone conversation to this office, where I was asking someone to help me in something, it was suggested by his colleague that I fuck him as a repayment. These kinds of comments leave me with a really difficult space to negotiate.

My immediate reaction is to take extreme offence at a statement like that - it is sexuall abusive language but if I do take offence at that I then become labelled as the angry feminist who needs to chill out and get a sense of humour.

Oh, okay, it’s a joke and so if I laugh, hahaha, you boys are so funny, then I am left with feeling like a sell out for not defending myself/women. Or, if I take the route of a quick, dry wit, I can undermine them somehow but be left still with a bitter taste in my mouth for not challenging such sexism. I might have “given as good as I got” but the rules have not changed and I have somehow supported them by matching their “wit” with mine own. I am now, perhaps only mildly, colluding in my own oppression. I’ve condoned the joke by responding to it in, if not the same language, one very similar.

Or, I can say nothing but make my disdain evident or say nothing and remain passive about the abuse.

Of all of my options, only the first one does not undermine my existence but none of them will guarantee that the sexist remarks will not continue. Sexism is never recognised, in these kinds of environments, as a real problem. Since I have my legal equality, I should be content and allow myself to be objectified and defined by my sexuality on explicitly male terms. Get a sense of humour right? Because jokes have no real effect on my ability to get a job, right? Except that those making the jokes are not the topic of hilarity yet are doing the hiring and so, again, my sexuality gets “legitimately” pulled into the public sphere.

Effectively, with every sexist remark, I am being made to choose sides. I am asked to either participate in the sexism and keep my job and my male friends or to rebel against the sexism alone. Historically I have tried to navigate the realm which challenges them but maintains the friendship, but I am tiring of that now because what I have learnt is that it is impossible to do so. My maintenance of the friendships becomes an implied approval of the sexism regardless of my words to the contrary. Or at least that is why I am presuming the sexism never stops despite my vocal opposition to it.

One thing I noticed, or learned very quickly when working in America, was that I had to have a very fine balance between being seen as a sexual person with a very definite feminine sexuality, but never to use it. If I didn’t have it, I was not interesting enough to the males in power to take seriously, (although one could argue that I was never taken seriously and that my perceived sexuality was simply enough to hold men’s attention long enough for me to get my job done), but if I was ever perceived as using it, then I would immediately be labelled that slag of Sue Lees’ teenage girls. And I’m at fucking work, you would have thought I’d have enough to think about as it is. Men rarely, if ever, have to negotiate a sexual space at work and perhaps one could argue that this is one reason that they traditionally do fare better. They have less to think about and as such can concentrate their attentions accordingly.

As Lees says, “sexist abuse is so taken for granted that unlike racist abuse, which is now usually recognised as such, sexist abuse is normal and common sense. The power relations underlying such abuse are rarely recognized and any tendency to rebel is seen by men - and other women too - as unwarranted behaviour.”

If I take umbrage at sexist remarks, I am the one with the problem and you know what, that just isn’t right but these sexist comments are so rife nowadays that I would have to axe half my friends in order to stop having a problem and that ain’t right either. Somewhere, someone has to change and since if I do, I loose my self-respect, it doesn’t seem fair that I should be the one changing.

Another discussion I had was with a guy who insisted that sexism didn’t even exist anymore. Granted, I should have walked away from him when he started comparing women and men to cats and dogs - “we’re just different species, man.” Uh huh. However, what really drove me up the wall was that he could not seem to grasp that by he, as a man, telling me, as a woman, that I do not experience sexism, that he was, in essence, making an extremely sexist statement. He was implying that as a man, his experience of the world was more valid than mine, which is to say that he was defining my existence and undermining the validity of my experience as a woman in today’s society.

One of his arguments for the fact that there was no more sexism, that women were on an equal footing, was that he had lost plenty of jobs to women. (He is self-employed.) Because he can see women in the public sphere, he decrees that there is no more sexism. What, of course, he is failing to consider is women’s experience in the public sphere, what the public sphere actually entails and how on average we fair. Yes I might have a job, but I am still paid less, given less responsibility, and on top of that I am constantly subject to lewd comments or looks. But I need to shut up and quit being such an angry feminist because I have a job right? I can get a job. Uh huh. Lees again, “the anti-feminist backlash has been set off not by women’s achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it. It is a pre-emptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finishing line.”

It’s funny as my time in America was spent in one of the most overly misogynistic environments I have ever encountered but I stuck it out, rightly or wrongly so, for the experience. I can’t do that back home. Being a foreigner gives you certain diminished responsibilities - these are not my people or my problems - can easily be invoked as a cop out and I would be lying if I said I didn’t occasionally use it. When I first got there I was fired and amped and got into so many arguments with people for their ridiculous sexism and the irony is, that by the time I left, these people that I first argued with were actually the ones I considered the least sexist. Frightening.

But as I said, I can’t do that back home. That land belongs to me, as do the people in it and so now I have a greater responsibility, but you know what, somehow that makes me feel freer, more light. Now, as an actual citizen I am able to create my own environment and my own ideas and to act on them, not be a mere, passive observer. To finish with another Lees quote: “Cixous, a French feminist, argues that women’s writing will create an ‘elsewhere’ in which ‘the other will no longer be condemned to death’ and in which ‘that something else (what history forbids, what reality excludes or doesn’t admit)’ can emerge.”

December 28th, 2004 | Category: Gynocentric, My Life Love, Politics, The Dordogne | Subscribe to comments | Both comments and pings are currently closed