My dive into gender inequality, starting with a class I took in college
When I was a sophomore in college, I took a Gender Studies course. Under the Sociology department, it was the first class I took that focused on that kind of subject matter, and, for me, it was the first experience of an expert providing sexual, gender, and reproductive information in a classroom setting that I had ever had.
My professor was a man; I knew him before the class started because he swam recreationally with the club swim team. I had never thought much about him besides the fact that he had a young son, liked to swim more than I did, and had a loud, boisterous laugh. I was confused at first, why he would be teaching a class called “Gender Studies” — or, I was confused at first why he would care about a subject called “Gender Studies”. His charisma and the way he enticed us to make the class one of participation was the first thing that changed me. Our main textbook was written by Michael Kimmel, a well-known sociologist and feminist made famous for his in-depth studies and critique of American masculinity. I was a freshly declared Sociology major, but had not heard of Kimmel before. All I really knew about sociology was that sometimes it focused on global social trends, and that I enjoyed reading about and analyzing things like GDPs and birth and death rates.
When I started reading my textbook for the first assignment in my Gender Studies class, I nearly burst into tears. There isn’t a way to describe, really, the feeling of intense wholeness that comes over you when you receive validation of one of your core beliefs for the first time. I was alone in a classroom on a Wednesday afternoon, and I felt so free.
I have always felt marginalized (at least in the minor ways that my middle-class upbringing have allowed) as a woman and as a person of color, but at the time of reading Kimmel, I had grown used to feeling invalidated for my understanding of my own experience. It isn’t that I had been completely blind to the obvious inequalities of women in society, instead it’s that I had grown accustomed to hearing arguments (by both women and men) that women and men were treated differently because they were inherently, biologically different. Different treatment was the intention of nature itself, and men and women were destined for different lives, from birth. People like my mom, and families like mine, who don’t fit neatly into the design of a heterosexual, married couple with children, were unnatural. I had believed, and had been made to believe, for my entire life, that my mom and I didn’t fit in because of some fault of our own. But Kimmel changed all that. Kimmel’s textbook brought my gut feelings out into the open, acknowledged that my life wasn’t meant to conform to society, and that the definition of society I had grown to understand wasn’t the only, universal one. Not even close.
My mom is a lesbian, and for years I pretended she wasn’t. I pretended because my dad told me to, because my school told me to, because my family quietly pushed that aspect of her identity away, refusing to acknowledge it and refusing to acknowledge the subsequent hurt they caused. It didn’t occur to me for years that my mom had quietly ripped out a part of herself, had locked it away and screamed only silently at the injustice of it all. It took me until recently to understand the depth of her hurt, to unpack the reasons why she was so quick to anger at dinners with my grandparents, why she could never keep friendships with people who outwardly expressed their distaste for those who fall outside the “norm”. It took me even longer to acknowledge that she had hidden herself, but that I had kept her hidden too.
One of the subjects that Kimmel’s textbook The Gendered Society talks about in relative depth is evolutionary biology, as far as its explanations for sexual behavior. I remember reading about the studies he referenced, and the researchers he quoted, and getting so angry for the way this science still had a platform, but also for the way I had been so quick to believe it. A few years before my Gender Studies class, I would’ve been one to defend the idea that men are stronger than women, that men like sex more than women because they’re predisposed to need to release as much semen as possible in order to spread their offspring, that women tend to want to nest, and that in the scheme of cheating in monogamous relationships, it was always women who are more at fault. Men chase down a younger woman because it’s natural, it made more sense to our ancestors, and since our bodies are wired that way, it makes more sense now. A few years ago I did find it normal that the only time my dad referenced my maturing had nothing to do with the maturation of my mind.
I’ve gone to private Catholic school for every school year of my life except one — in preschool. I was harassed by a little boy to the point that I was afraid to go to the bathroom, and my mom, who worked in the public school system in my town, took me out and refused to put me back in. I’m grateful to her for the sacrifices she made throughout my life, for the sacrifices she is still making.
If you know me relatively well, you’ve probably had a conversation with me about how very very little sex education I got as a child/teenager, and about how I attribute this heavily to my exclusively Catholic education. I probably told you something about how I only remember two health classes in my entire life, one in fifth grade where we learned about periods, and one in freshman year of high school, where for one semester a 70-year-old male gym teacher had us copy notes about nutrition from our textbooks to our notebooks. I don’t know anything about STDs, had to learn about birth control from trial and error in college, from watching 16 & Pregnant and Teen Mom 2 on MTV. No one showed me how to put on a condom, and in my junior year of high school, my religion teacher told our class that we should use abstinence as birth control since birth control pills make you fat. My mom gave me a sex talk of sorts, but it was more awkward than it was informational, and the one thing I remember most clearly was that I should tell her when I was having sex, and that as an 11-year-old, sex seemed as far off as another planet.
I didn’t lose my virginity until I was seventeen. I didn’t know what I was doing, neither did he, and though he didn’t come inside me, I was still scared for weeks that I was pregnant, that this one time would be enough. It wasn’t. I didn’t have someone go down on me until college, didn’t go down on someone else until my first relationship, at the behest of my boyfriend.
But these things matter less to me, are less surprising or tragic or even typical of my existence as a heterosexual cis woman in 2018, than the fact that I have only recently become comfortable enough in my experience as a sexual human being to talk about it. I still harbor an engrained sense of shame about certain things, like masturbation. In my past I have been pressured into sexual acts, and I have only recently come to understand that I don’t have to give a blowjob if I don’t want to, don’t have to let someone put their fingers inside me if I don’t want them to, that the time when I came home from a party in high school and scrubbed at a hickey until my neck was raw, I shouldn’t have glanced in the mirror, felt a little disgusted, and blamed myself for being a girl who just let that happen to her. I have only recently stopped feeling guilty for wanting to stop having sex before the guy was finished.
In middle school, I remember hearing for the first time this analogy that was supposed to explain why girls can be sluts while boys can’t. It goes like this: When you have a key that can open a bunch of locks, it’s a master key. But when you have a lock that can be opened with a bunch of different keys, it’s just a shitty lock. I thought it made sense at the time, after all, who would want to invest in a lock when they knew that almost any key could open it? But I remember feeling a little nag at the back of my mind, wondering why it could be fair to compare boys to keys and girls to locks just because of a loose parallel between those inanimate objects and the genitalia we don’t have any say in being born with.
I’m grateful for a lot of things. I’m grateful for my Gender Studies class, and for my professor who made it all that it was, and for my mom, and for the Sociology of Sexuality class I took in my junior year of college. I’m grateful for articles like this one and this one and this one and this one so much. I’m grateful for the pope, and for the way the Catholic Church is changing, even if I’m no longer a part of it. I’m grateful that I have had the opportunity to come to some of the realizations that I have so early in my life. Some people go much longer than me before having that moment of clarity when their core beliefs are validated. Some people never have that feeling at all.
But I am also bitter, sometimes. It saddens me to be in a society where the dominant narrative is the one that blames me, and people like me, and my mom and people like her. The one that rewards people like my dad, and that has my cousin feeling more sympathetic for Kevin Spacey and his acting career than for the people who came forward with their stories of abuse. The one that rewards my twin seven year old girl cousins for having boyfriends, who engages in their silliness and their exploring, but spurns the boys who want to play dress up, refuses to take seriously the little girls who want to be president. It saddens me that I ever had to feel like it was my fault for not wanting to have sex with someone who wanted to have sex with me, and that young women still feel like that, and will continue to feel like that. It saddens me that I had to take a class in college to understand the basics of gender inequality, and how I had become an active participant in it.
I don’t know where I go from here. But the more time I take to research and understand and dissect the way I’ve fallen prey to the brainwashings of this society, the more hopeful and the more grateful I become.
My professor was a man; I knew him before the class started because he swam recreationally with the club swim team. I had never thought much about him besides the fact that he had a young son, liked to swim more than I did, and had a loud, boisterous laugh. I was confused at first, why he would be teaching a class called “Gender Studies” — or, I was confused at first why he would care about a subject called “Gender Studies”. His charisma and the way he enticed us to make the class one of participation was the first thing that changed me. Our main textbook was written by Michael Kimmel, a well-known sociologist and feminist made famous for his in-depth studies and critique of American masculinity. I was a freshly declared Sociology major, but had not heard of Kimmel before. All I really knew about sociology was that sometimes it focused on global social trends, and that I enjoyed reading about and analyzing things like GDPs and birth and death rates.
When I started reading my textbook for the first assignment in my Gender Studies class, I nearly burst into tears. There isn’t a way to describe, really, the feeling of intense wholeness that comes over you when you receive validation of one of your core beliefs for the first time. I was alone in a classroom on a Wednesday afternoon, and I felt so free.
I have always felt marginalized (at least in the minor ways that my middle-class upbringing have allowed) as a woman and as a person of color, but at the time of reading Kimmel, I had grown used to feeling invalidated for my understanding of my own experience. It isn’t that I had been completely blind to the obvious inequalities of women in society, instead it’s that I had grown accustomed to hearing arguments (by both women and men) that women and men were treated differently because they were inherently, biologically different. Different treatment was the intention of nature itself, and men and women were destined for different lives, from birth. People like my mom, and families like mine, who don’t fit neatly into the design of a heterosexual, married couple with children, were unnatural. I had believed, and had been made to believe, for my entire life, that my mom and I didn’t fit in because of some fault of our own. But Kimmel changed all that. Kimmel’s textbook brought my gut feelings out into the open, acknowledged that my life wasn’t meant to conform to society, and that the definition of society I had grown to understand wasn’t the only, universal one. Not even close.
My mom is a lesbian, and for years I pretended she wasn’t. I pretended because my dad told me to, because my school told me to, because my family quietly pushed that aspect of her identity away, refusing to acknowledge it and refusing to acknowledge the subsequent hurt they caused. It didn’t occur to me for years that my mom had quietly ripped out a part of herself, had locked it away and screamed only silently at the injustice of it all. It took me until recently to understand the depth of her hurt, to unpack the reasons why she was so quick to anger at dinners with my grandparents, why she could never keep friendships with people who outwardly expressed their distaste for those who fall outside the “norm”. It took me even longer to acknowledge that she had hidden herself, but that I had kept her hidden too.
One of the subjects that Kimmel’s textbook The Gendered Society talks about in relative depth is evolutionary biology, as far as its explanations for sexual behavior. I remember reading about the studies he referenced, and the researchers he quoted, and getting so angry for the way this science still had a platform, but also for the way I had been so quick to believe it. A few years before my Gender Studies class, I would’ve been one to defend the idea that men are stronger than women, that men like sex more than women because they’re predisposed to need to release as much semen as possible in order to spread their offspring, that women tend to want to nest, and that in the scheme of cheating in monogamous relationships, it was always women who are more at fault. Men chase down a younger woman because it’s natural, it made more sense to our ancestors, and since our bodies are wired that way, it makes more sense now. A few years ago I did find it normal that the only time my dad referenced my maturing had nothing to do with the maturation of my mind.
I’ve gone to private Catholic school for every school year of my life except one — in preschool. I was harassed by a little boy to the point that I was afraid to go to the bathroom, and my mom, who worked in the public school system in my town, took me out and refused to put me back in. I’m grateful to her for the sacrifices she made throughout my life, for the sacrifices she is still making.
If you know me relatively well, you’ve probably had a conversation with me about how very very little sex education I got as a child/teenager, and about how I attribute this heavily to my exclusively Catholic education. I probably told you something about how I only remember two health classes in my entire life, one in fifth grade where we learned about periods, and one in freshman year of high school, where for one semester a 70-year-old male gym teacher had us copy notes about nutrition from our textbooks to our notebooks. I don’t know anything about STDs, had to learn about birth control from trial and error in college, from watching 16 & Pregnant and Teen Mom 2 on MTV. No one showed me how to put on a condom, and in my junior year of high school, my religion teacher told our class that we should use abstinence as birth control since birth control pills make you fat. My mom gave me a sex talk of sorts, but it was more awkward than it was informational, and the one thing I remember most clearly was that I should tell her when I was having sex, and that as an 11-year-old, sex seemed as far off as another planet.
I didn’t lose my virginity until I was seventeen. I didn’t know what I was doing, neither did he, and though he didn’t come inside me, I was still scared for weeks that I was pregnant, that this one time would be enough. It wasn’t. I didn’t have someone go down on me until college, didn’t go down on someone else until my first relationship, at the behest of my boyfriend.
But these things matter less to me, are less surprising or tragic or even typical of my existence as a heterosexual cis woman in 2018, than the fact that I have only recently become comfortable enough in my experience as a sexual human being to talk about it. I still harbor an engrained sense of shame about certain things, like masturbation. In my past I have been pressured into sexual acts, and I have only recently come to understand that I don’t have to give a blowjob if I don’t want to, don’t have to let someone put their fingers inside me if I don’t want them to, that the time when I came home from a party in high school and scrubbed at a hickey until my neck was raw, I shouldn’t have glanced in the mirror, felt a little disgusted, and blamed myself for being a girl who just let that happen to her. I have only recently stopped feeling guilty for wanting to stop having sex before the guy was finished.
In middle school, I remember hearing for the first time this analogy that was supposed to explain why girls can be sluts while boys can’t. It goes like this: When you have a key that can open a bunch of locks, it’s a master key. But when you have a lock that can be opened with a bunch of different keys, it’s just a shitty lock. I thought it made sense at the time, after all, who would want to invest in a lock when they knew that almost any key could open it? But I remember feeling a little nag at the back of my mind, wondering why it could be fair to compare boys to keys and girls to locks just because of a loose parallel between those inanimate objects and the genitalia we don’t have any say in being born with.
I’m grateful for a lot of things. I’m grateful for my Gender Studies class, and for my professor who made it all that it was, and for my mom, and for the Sociology of Sexuality class I took in my junior year of college. I’m grateful for articles like this one and this one and this one and this one so much. I’m grateful for the pope, and for the way the Catholic Church is changing, even if I’m no longer a part of it. I’m grateful that I have had the opportunity to come to some of the realizations that I have so early in my life. Some people go much longer than me before having that moment of clarity when their core beliefs are validated. Some people never have that feeling at all.
But I am also bitter, sometimes. It saddens me to be in a society where the dominant narrative is the one that blames me, and people like me, and my mom and people like her. The one that rewards people like my dad, and that has my cousin feeling more sympathetic for Kevin Spacey and his acting career than for the people who came forward with their stories of abuse. The one that rewards my twin seven year old girl cousins for having boyfriends, who engages in their silliness and their exploring, but spurns the boys who want to play dress up, refuses to take seriously the little girls who want to be president. It saddens me that I ever had to feel like it was my fault for not wanting to have sex with someone who wanted to have sex with me, and that young women still feel like that, and will continue to feel like that. It saddens me that I had to take a class in college to understand the basics of gender inequality, and how I had become an active participant in it.
I don’t know where I go from here. But the more time I take to research and understand and dissect the way I’ve fallen prey to the brainwashings of this society, the more hopeful and the more grateful I become.
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