Gentlemanliness: Sexist Slavery?
Stephen Morgan
Child of the Glacier
This is an extract from an essay -- I think it was called Child of
the Glacier by M.Adams which appeared in Men
Freeing Men (edited by Francis Baumli). I'd like to find some more
stuff by Adams because I think it is a great piece.
Unfortunately because of copyright this is only an extract.
(paragraphing may be different from original)
One Sunday morning in the spring of 1961, my family had invited our
next-door neighbours to go to church with us. I
was nine years old. After parking the car, the seven of us were
walking the several blocks down St Paul Street to the
Church. My mother, my sister and the woman from next door walked and
chatted together, while my father and I, the man
from next door, and his son walked silently behind. It was a bright
spring day and I was full of a child's energy. I
decided that I wanted to be the one to point out our church to the
visiting neighbours, and I began to run ahead of
the group to do so.
I never got the chance; as I ran ahead, my father grabbed my wrist
and yanked me back violently, hurting my arm and
almost pulling me off my feet. "Never walk in front of the ladies!"
he said sternly, still holding my arm. "That's not
polite! Always walk _behind_ the ladies!" Immediately, two thoughts
came into my nine-year-old mind. First I wondered
why in the world men should have to walk behind women, and I decided
that I didn't like that rule. Then it occurred to
me that my father would never have yanked on my sister that way, no
matter _what_ she had done. From that moment on, I
hated - consciously - anything that anyone expected from me simply
because I was male.
I imagine I was one of the first masculinists... or at least one of
the youngest, for it was with _conscious_
awareness and a _conscious_ opposition that I mentally noted and
logged every form of discrimination against males
that I encountered for the remainder of my childhood. At that age, it
was athletic expectations and the training in
points of etiquette that plagued me. I was expected to participate in
every boy's sport, to _want_ to participate, and
to do _well_ -or at least to keep trying until I _could_ do well.
Whenever I tried and failed, I was mocked and
chided; whenever I said I wasn't interested and refused to try, I was
severely scolded. Girls, I could see, were not
expected to perform in these capacities, and though I could never
quite see what it was they were doing on the other
side of the playground, it always looked a lot more interesting, a
lot more imaginative, a lot more creative... a lot
more fun.
In addition to "walking behind the ladies", there were such customs
as opening doors, pulling out chairs, having to
stand whenever a woman entered or left the room, and having to pay
for things. The "ladies first" syndrome always made
me fiercely angry. The old "I can hit you, but you can't hit me back
because I'm a girl" routine angered and
humiliated me beyond description. That boys were always dealt much
more severe punishments for a given act than were
girls would throw me into a rage. It was significant to me that these
unfair customs and punishments were condoned and
administered by adult _women_ as well as by adult men. No matter how
many times my parents and teachers told me that
these things were traditional and correct, none of it made sense to
me and I couldn't tolerate any of it.
Though these were conscious sensibilities, I learned quickly never to
express them to my elders, who considered them
naughty and maladjusted. From about the age of eleven, the pragmatic
ramifications of sexism became more serious; any
task or chore involving physical strength or exertion was
automatically to be done by males; any task or chore
involving risk or danger was automatically to be done by males.
Meanwhile I continued to catalog, in my mindful of the
sexist attitudes, policies and laws that I had observed or
experienced. Sometimes, I would try to talk about these
ideas to other kids my own age. None of them understood, none of them
were interested. In the course of growing up,
they had managed to adjust, and they didn't seem to care. During
those pubescent years, I discovered that the sore
spot on my life created by etiquette was malignant, and that it
festered and grew, with the coming of adulthood, into
something horrible called "chivalry".
Chivalry dictated that men risk their lives for women, and accept
death outright if it meant saving a woman. It was a
fearful moment when I realised that the term "innocent women and
children" no longer included me. It was at the age of
fourteen that I decided to strike the word "coward" from my
vocabulary. The word and the concept were entirely sexist
to me, and had no meaning. I entered high school in 1967. I was
growing closer and closer to the Viet Nam war. At age
fifteen, I began to have an obsessive, maniacal fear of the military
draft. The urgency of the draft/war situation
prompted me to start expressing my beliefs about sexual equality. I
did so compulsively, crazily thinking that if I
convinced enough people that I was right, the wheels of sexism and
war and selective service would grind to a
screeching halt just before my eighteenth birthday.
I would try in my own confused way, to describe a society where men
and women would be truly equal. I always tried to
demonstrate that the advantages of such a system would be tremendous
to _both_ men and women. I had been able to
figure out the more basic, obvious aspects of women's liberation on
my own, and I never failed to include them in my
argument. But this was in 1967, and not even the current wave of the
women's movement had reached our part of the
world then; of course nobody shared my views, nobody really even
understood, and most people thought I was crazy.
There was little else in my life at that time to offer any solace or
diversion.
These were my adolescent years, and my avant-garde outlook on
sex-roles played havoc with my concept of sexuality.
There was the normal emotional bind created by the clash between my
sexual attraction for women and the Mariological
guilt-complex instilled in all young men. While I was trying to
convince myself that I shouldn't feel guilty about my
sexual desires, the whole thing was further complicated by a feeling
of deep hurt that women did not seem to return
those desires (to men in general). I not only wanted girls, and felt
guilty about it, but I also wanted for them to
want _us_, and was insulted by the fact that they didn't. There were
some girls who were more sexually free and aware,
but they invariably favoured the macho-jock types, and regarded me as
a waste of a male body.
Those girls who intellectually prefered more sensitive boys were
almost always extremely prudish, which served only to
aggravate my sexual guilt. Despite the fact that my sexual feelings
were completely heterosexual, I began to realise
that there were certain aspects of the female sexuality of which I
was jealous. Women seemed to have a purely
aesthetic sexuality, while the male sexuality was mostly functional,
more directly related to role performance.
Certainly, I was able to see that the aesthetic value placed on women
had been taken to a dreadful extreme, and that
women suffered some brutal consequences for it. Nevertheless it was
easy to see that, in ways both passive and active,
women _enjoyed_ the aesthetic nature of their sexual image. The male
"aesthetic" was really just another measure of
their capacity to live up to the role expectations; men didn't really
enjoy any of the kind of sexual attention that
women got.
It occurred to me that in terms of sexuality, men and women needed to
move _toward_ one another; women moving away
from the aesthetic extreme that made them sex-objects, and men moving
away from the opposite, functional extreme that
made them objects of risk, strength and performance. I would have
liked to have been a little more of a sex-object,
myself! But I didn't dare express those feelings then. Not in 1967.
High School phys. ed. was, for someone like me, pure hell. The
expectations were bad enough, in addition to having to
put up with the usual bullying from most of the other boys in the
class. I was labeled a "sissy" and mocked
accordingly. But they could see that I was a different breed of
sissy. I was an angry _assertive_ sissy - something
they had never seen before - and for that they hated me. The teachers
were perplexed to hear blunt expressions of what
I thought about their sessions of mindless semi-violence. It was less
fear than pure contempt that I showed for sports
like football and lacrosse. I told them that I saw no reason why I or
anyone should be required to participate if they
didn't want to.
The bullying would often become violent - it was a pretty miserable
time for me. Finally in the winter of 1968, when
it came time for the annual four-week period devoted to wrestling, I
rebelled. I refused to wrestle. I told the
teacher that I would _not_ wrestle, and that furthermore, I would not
even don my gym suit. The teacher warned me that
if I did not wrestle, he would fail me for the entire year. I told
him to go ahead and fail me - a pretty bold move,
considering that the Baltimore County Board of Education had just
passed a law requiring every student to pass three
out of four years of high school phys ed. in order to graduate.
......
--
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave those kids alone
-- Pink Floyd