A Letter to a Friend

Unusually for nursing school I was at a table with three men (boys?) today. I have had classes with all three and am quite friendly, but one of these young men is someone I count as a really good friend. More than just a contextual 'uni friend' the guy is someone who has said the right thing to me when I was upset, helped me when I wasn't really managing and he's someone I really trust, which is so important to me. I used to have lots of male friends but now I only have a few. I really value this friendship but sometimes I ask myself 'can men and women really be friends?' Not for the usual reasons people ask that question but because of the power imbalance that lets men completely discount what I say because it doesn't suit their reality.

As we sat in class today I was chatting and trading cheerful insults with the table opposite while I waited for you, or one of the others at the table, to tell me what your internet searches had found on our topic. You teased me for me noisiness, asking if we were going to get any work done. At the time I made some snarky remark but I felt like I'd been slapped, and a gut-dropping, chest-tightening sensation of shame. I had been silenced and I wondered if my cheeks were flaming because they sure felt like it.We set about our work and somehow I managed to stay light, and over the half hour or so I managed to get back my equilibrium, but you didn't notice that whenever one of you spoke I hurried to shut up, not wanting to be accused of being the noisy one or talking over any of you or controlling the conversation in any way.When the teacher asked who in our group was going to present our ideas to the class I tried to make eye contact with all or you. I said your name; "you do it" but the three of you refused to meet my eye. This is important - I was comfortable talking for our group but I not only checked if someone wanted to do it, I pushed each of you individually to get up, not wanting to get in the way of a learning opportunity for any of you. None of you declined politely, you all flatly refused to engage in any way, leaving me with choice of pretending I didn't exist and hoping the teacher would pick one of you, or just getting up and doing the job we had to do. As you know, I got up, muttering curses in the direction of the table but as I sat down in front of the class you said, if a quiet voice designed to carry, "she loves it" and again I felt my cheeks flare. Our teacher, who had commented to the class on the fact none of you would make eye contact and that your refusal to volunteer had made it my obligations, then made a joke about you having given up your right to speak when your inaction forced me to volunteer. And that was the point when I nearly lost my cool altogether. I think I spat 'when a woman says no she means no' at you, which wouldn't have made sense to you at the time but what you did was remove the power of choice from me, forcing me to do something against my will, and then despite evidence to the contrary you said that I loved what you had done to me. Again I was humiliated, but because I'm really good at faking it, and because there was a class full of people watching me, waiting for me to talk I pulled myself together, squashed those feelings of betrayal down into a box in my already broken heart and proceeded to comfortably lead the discussion for the next few minutes.I know you didn't mean to upset me or publicly humiliate me but you need to know that your words have weight, your teasing and jokes can trigger nasty feeling from the past and that patterns of speech and behaviour have context in power imbalances. Gender inequality is a real thing and if you can't see it it's because your privilege has allowed your blindness, not because it doesn't exist. 

For my part, I'm sorry I can't talk to my friend directly about this and I'm sorry that things said in jest can start an avalanche of feelings that don't all have much to do with the here-and-now. I wonder if I'm brave enough to send this to him?

I'm baaaack (again)

Life over the last year has been pretty fraught, but isn't it always? I feel like I just lurch from one crisis to the next. Not that these crises are always terrible, or necessarily negative at all, just times when life requires more than I thought I had to give.

There are tough times for a whole bunch of people - a dear friend had a rather serious breast cancer scare and another close friend's preschooler had open heart surgery and yet another one of my closest people has a horrible infection that is proving very difficult to treat. There are others having dramas in their personal relationships and tough times with their kids. I don't think I dwell on this stuff too much, but I'm conscious of all of it all the time, sending my love and good thoughts out to these people I love that are having difficult times.

I have also been the recipient of lots of love and good thoughts - as many people know Sanjay and I are in the process of divorcing. I'm not going to go into detail here and now, except to say it's been a long time coming, it hasn't been an easy decision for us to make and that our focus now is on the kids and making sure that we do what we have to do without too much negative impact on them.

This week I'm back at uni, which is great (structure to my weeks! learning is fun! closer to graduating!), but increases the stress level (assignments! classes, readings and self doubt!) and I received a challenge to write a bit more so I will be procrastiblogging a bit over the next few weeks. I want to write about nursing and bullying on prac, and how it relates to feminism and the performance of gender identity. I'm doing a mental health subject, one on the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, I had a crappy time on my last placement and I have just finished Clementine Ford's 'Fight Like A Girl' so it's all swishing together in my head in some pretty interesting ways.

Feminism and the performance of femininity: at what cost?

Irony can be found anywhere. As I was shaving my legs this morning (!) I was thinking about something two things I saw and 'shared' on FB recently and how they both contradict and support each other in their desire to support feminists (as differentiated from feminism). The first was the ever-inspiring Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the form of a letter to a friend on how to raise her daughter to be a feminist. Powerful stuff, beautifully written and in essence I agree with every word.

The second was sadder and more problematic. Less fire-up-the-imagination oratory, more back room strategy negotiation. Basically Sara Scheafer says that if you behave how your feminist self knows you should behave in order to fight the patriarchy there will be real life repercussions.

...And this is really hard to live with. It's HARD to know that if you live up to your ideals you will be vilified. Yeah, strong words, but the amount rage and abuse women who stand up loudly for feminism get you strong stuff. There are lots of stories about women being in effect forced off social media with the weight of abuse they cop. It's hard to know that if you teach your daughter to fight the patriarchy there are ways in which she will suffer for it. She will suffer in different ways without it. You are damned if you do, damned if you don't.
That's why I posted it on FB, that and the harder part, I could have written most of that myself (except for the part as dressing up as a zit for halloween! That's hilarious!) I added my comment:

Read this and stop beating yourself up about those times when you feel like you aren't 'enough' - I was an awkward child who didn't learn femininity early and it made my life as a kid pretty difficult (there are quite a few FB friends who knew me in primary school and can attest to that).
So next time you, your female friend, or someone your read about doesn't become 'a badass girl-boss' when confronted with male privilege, offer that person compassion rather than condemnation (especially if it's you! that's the hardest!). Fighting the kyriarchy is a long game and it's OK to play to your strengths and disengage in unwinnable battles and conserve your energy for fights that you have some chance of winning.
Learn about oppression and keep your compassion and you are fighting the good fight my loves.

...and I started thinking. Thinking about my past, my childhood, the bullying, my depression and realising that one feminist reading of all that sad soup might be to do with me not 'learning femininity early'. People ask me why I was bullied, and I joke that it was the tattoo on my forehead that has since been removed. They want to hear there was a concrete reason - I had glasses perhaps, or a lisp? It wasn't anything so simple though; it was a combination of being smart, precocious, annoying, and not realising that the only way I was really allowed to be these things was quietly, not taking up too much space and not damaging too many male egos in the process. The boys who were similar me didn't really get a hard time. I never fit into the two stereotypes available for smart girl: I was too loud to be the quiet bookish type, too funny and irreverent to be one of the A+ students. I like this reading because it fits well with my schema and gives history and consistency to me as a mouthy 43 year old. 

I am now going to formally forgive myself for my adolescent assertions that although I was a feminist I preferred the company of men because women were too bitchy and vacuous (I said it, I believed it, I was wrong on every count. Except I still don't enjoy the company of people who habitually put other people down, and I find it very difficult to connect with people who only talk about things or other people). I need to forgive myself for not squaring up for a fight every time someone supports or maintains the kyriarchy (if you don't want to look it up you can use my working definition: patriarchy + white, western capitalist hegemony) and congratulate myself on my small but persistent efforts to dismantle my small corner of patriarchal dominance (let me give you a hint, it start with questioning yourself. Why did I make excuses for not cutting your 3-4 year old son's luscious curls when strangers asked if he was a boy or a girl)

The personal is political, dream life edition.

I go through phases where I remember my dreams. They are often really funny, when they aren't tediously anxious (Why aren't I wearing pants? Why did they change the time for that very important thing that I have to go to, so now I can't get there on time? Why does this bathroom not have walls? All variations on a theme - anxiety is really, really boring). Often they feel like they are a message from my subconscious about the things that are happening in my life or current events but unfortunately my subconscious likes bad puns and is faintly cranky.

Last nights dream was pretty funny. I have clearly been thinking about the wonderful writer Clementine Ford and her recent switch of some boys and girls t shirts in kmart, and the discussion around that. There was also a question on another Facebook group about where a local mum could buy 'gender neutral' clothing. I piped up with my standard rant about no clothing being really gender neutral (go on, google 'gender neutral clothes for kids' and you will get jeans and t shirts, traditionally male attire) anyhow, all this must have been on my mind.

Dream-me was dressed as a bat trying to explain to someone that there was no gender neutral clothing, and things marketed that way were just boys clothes which reinforced the andronormative/androcentric world view. I didn't want to wear boys clothes or girls clothes so I was going to dress be a bat. At that point I was trying to hang upside-down on some stair railing and things got confusing. More confusing. But my fur was delightfully soft!

Not a Joke

Question: What did the penis say to the hairdresser?
Answer: Absolutely nothing.

It's the hair on heads we are talking about here, not genital hair, OK, so the presence or absence of a specific set of genitalia has nothing at all to do with haircuts. Right? Are you with me so far? Not too complex really. Here is another not-joke for you:

Customer: Can I have a haircut please?
Hairdresser: Have you got a penis?

See, I told you. Not funny. But a situation like this happened to my friend today, and I need to rant.

My friend has short hair, exists mostly wearing jeans and tshirts and is often covered, to a greater or lesser extent, in paint. In fact the paint is often the most memorable feature - I asked at a local cafe is they remembered my friend coming in for coffee and it was when I said "covered in paint" that their eyes lit with recognition and they said 'strong latte no sugar!' or some such. Because unsurprisingly the lovely staff at the cafe are more interested in what someone's regular coffee order is than what genitals they have.

Back to hairdresser. My friend is a woman. She doesn't like labels for herself, but the labels other people ascribe to her might include woman, girl, lesbian, queer, genderqueer, gay, gender non-binary, dyke butch, possibly boi and definitely the one she really hates, shorty (I think she is over five foot tall, but not by a whole lot). She occasionally gets mistaken for a young man. She has pretty short hair. Today she walked into a hairdresser that advertised $12 haircuts for men with very little money in her pocket and asked for a boys haircut. The hairdresser gave her a haircut but charged her for a 'ladies' haircut. She didn't have the money, was told to use her credit card, and to add insult to injury was told the business charged a $2 fee for credit card payment.

In whose world is this OK? In whose world is it OK to charge my brother with his handsome, long, curly, difficult hair (and penis) one price but my friend with her handsome, short, straight, neat  hair (and vagina) a higher price? It's not OK in my world!

The anti-discrimination board clearly states that:

Sex discrimination is against the law... ...when you get or try to get most types of goods or services – for example, from shops, banks, lawyers, government departments, the police, public transport, local councils, doctors, hospitals and other medical services, hotels, sporting venues and entertainment venues; 

from the Anti-discrimination Board of NSW sex-discrimination fact sheet 

So this behavior is not OK in NSW law, either.

(Here endeth my rant, but if this, or something like this, has happened to you and you want to make a complaint but need some not-a-lawyer support, let me know and I'll be so happy to help you out)