As I was struggling to put into words how the Nigerian kidnapping has affected and haunted the thoughts of women around the world, including this one, the California massacre occurred. It darkened my thoughts all weekend.
Painful Reminders
They say your life flashes before your eyes during a terrifying event. Well, I wasn’t the only one who suddenly remembered every single episode of misogyny, or fear in my life. Something about this story hit the mother lode of emotion this weekend in women around the world. The new twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen was born and revealed an awful lot. That yes, we still have old fashioned sexism in the world, and most men don’t even see it. Women have become so used to it too, that we forget. This event brought it all back in focus and reminded me of my very first letter ever to an editor about a Canadian college student who had massacred a room full of female engineering students. This California story struck home again.
Walls
Last Friday I was setting up to record with my band, when the recording engineer told me his wife saw an article about a study (somebody is always doing a study) that showed the sounds that little boys tune out most are girls voices. Since I am the lead singer, I doubt that it applied to me in that instant, but the thought made me profoundly sad and suddenly I felt an invisible wall go up between me and my bandmates, one that said. “You are in a roomful of men and you are different.” I went home and told my husband about it and teasing me, he said “What did you say?” I felt bad because I have spent my life trying to tear down those walls.
Fences
I even wrote a lyric years ago called Over the Fence. Fences figure prominently in my childhood. Real ones. My parents bought a home on my very first birthday next to a ten acre park filled with woods. A few years later the town decided to build a baseball field there. They built three enormous fields and a huge parking lot. And a fence between the new fields and our backyard. They graded it toward our house and what used to be my playroom in the basement flooded and became a dank unlivable cave ever since – but that is another story. The real insult added to the injury was that the field was only for boys. I lived right next door to beautiful manicured green fields and when I was of age to play softball, my mom had to drive me a mile away to a badly graded field with so many ruts in it, my bad fielding was partly attributed to needing glasses, but the rest to ruts so bad a grounder would hit one and fly over my head missing my outstretched glove completely or hit me full in the face. When we got uniforms for softball, they only included a tee shirt. Only the boys got the full uniforms. Sliding into home would get me a jean leg full of infield clay and ripped denim.
Every day of the summer, the lights from the field next door would shine in my window and I could hear the cheers of people supporting the boys until I fell asleep. It was happy sound, don’t get me wrong. But it was all only for the boys. Girls were not allowed to play on those fields. I contented myself to climbing the fence on days when there was no baseball and the field was quiet and I would fly kites there. Sometimes when the winter came, and the field would flood and freeze over, I would again climb the fence and skate figures eights if there was enough room after the boys had taken most of it for hockey, which again, I was forbidden to play.
The little things, like wanting a skateboard or Lego building blocks or matchbox cars were not allowed. At first. So I asked for the big Barbie dollhouse I had to construct myself and I used my imagination a lot. I contented myself with jigsaw puzzles and word games. I finally I wore down my parents and did get that skateboard. I was so excited during Christmas I didn’t care it was snowing out – I skated it down the hall. I finally got a race car set too, they even had tiny little headlights that really worked. I got to put it together too. I took to the Rubiks cube. Any toy that was not too boyish I could have or one that didn’t look like a building set.
There were many indignities large and small, all throughout childhood. Every girl has to deal with them. And we do it. Because regardless of whether someone thinks we are inferior, we don’t feel that way. We get mad, understand that we have to work twice as hard to be considered half as good. And we succeed anyway if only just to prove them wrong.
Role Models Matter
I was lucky, I had men around me that were wonderful. My own Dad, a navy veteran who, even though he thought women should not be in the workforce because they compete with men for work, recognized something in me and tried to teach me computer programming when I was eleven. My mother had a strong sense of self and still does. I think her confidence comes from being the daughter of a working mom. My grandmother, the matriarch of the family, learned to be a beautician in 1940. She instilled in my mom a sense of self worth and she instilled in her boys a respect for women. My uncles who would sing to me and babysit for me would buy me books about Darwin and get me my first calculator because they saw math and science potential there. I still adore them. My grandfather was proud of us even though years before he had refused to pay for my mother’s college classes because he did not think women should go to college. She had to give up her dream of being a lawyer. But I and my sisters all graduated from college eventually. My mom saw to it. Deprived of her own dream, she was determined that all of her daughters would go to college. She even mentioned this weekend, in her 70’s, that she thought about trying college again.
I also went to the same all-girl academy mom went to in the 1950’s. It was a relief not having boys in the room. Nobody telling me boys were “better at” this or that. We were all equals in the classroom. The only reason we could afford it was because I won a scholarship to pay for it. Thankfully it was a standardized merit test that was just based on the right answer score and not any other criteria, like gender. I still remember the man giving the test was smirking at me after all the other kids had left to go eat donuts and juice in the other room. I rechecked my answers over and over until the time was up. But I won. I went to the best all girl high school around and learned calculus and chemistry. These were still the days though when everything written said HE and HIS. Never SHE and HER. Movies usually all had male protagonists, the girls always fell running away in terror. Sigourney Weaver had yet to make the alien wish he hadn’t picked on her.
Bending Gender
Then, suddenly, I was working on my first job at 16 where I was in a crew of 4 boys and 4 girls. The boys did not appreciate my self confidence. I guess I had a chip on my shoulder at that point. I had been attending an all girls school and didn’t take kindly to their nonsense. But I didn’t understand them either. I realized too late there was still a fence in the way. I had helped build this one. The “girls against boys” one. But now we know, the lines between the genders are much more blurred than we were led to believe. Scientifically, gender is more of a continuum. Everything you can imagine exists in the world. Gender can be bent. There are human beings out there that are literally both at the same time, and devoid of hormones, we all develop female regardless of genetics. Both men and women have hormones in varying amounts that the other is famous for. The fences and walls between the genders are weakening as we learn more about nature and nurture. We now know animals can even naturally change from female to male if necessary and chemicals in the environment influence us all.
Friends
College was where I really learned about men when I decided to go to engineering school. Being outnumbered about seven to one, you go from being unnoticed to sticking out like a sore thumb. But this was different. Many of them had gone to schools with girls already, and seemed to appreciate having at least some women in the room. These boys had grown up with Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda, Maude, Mod Squad and All in the Family, and the civil rights era influenced them. I got to be good friends with my classmates and saw them as kindred spirits. The fences finally seemed to disappear. I had a lot more in common with these boys. We could communicate. We could joke around. They became friends in every sense of the word. I still feel that way toward men I work with. They respect my intelligence and I respect theirs. I stopped seeing men as oppressors who had nothing better to do with their time than make me feel bad. I now see them as unique individuals as I hope they see me. Many of them were struggling at jobs they hated to selflessly support families. Many of them complained little and put up with bosses that didn’t respect them at jobs that sapped their energy and their will, when they would rather be with their kids fishing, or painting, bird watching, or yes, even cooking.
I won’t go into the instances of harassment I endured, like many women do, but they were numerous and sometimes scary. I do remember when I joined a new engineering department as the only female engineer and my boss often tried to embarrass me in front of the other engineers. The most effective weapon I had was humor. While telling a story once my boss proclaimed, “That guy is worse than a woman!” as he looked at me to gauge my reaction. Without skipping a beat I said, “Most men are.” He laughed but he thought twice after that. The other men I surrounded myself with by choice, are wonderful individuals and always restored my faith. They told me that men who disrespect women often have other issues and that they typically have low regard for others in general. That has proven to be true even in the case of the California shooter.
The Flip Side
I realized from these friends that the sexist views that hold women back do put unnecessary pressure on men. I could still chart my own course even as older men around me said “that’s nice honey” and underestimated me. Boys often faced routine physical beatings from other boys after school and the ones who did not want to be carbon copies of their sports-loving Dads, were often forced to do things expected of them that were “manly” but they hated. I met a lot of musicians who really don’t care for sports and would rather play guitar all day. My own father liked sports but he really liked cooking and gardening even more. Growing up left handed in a family of carpenters was a source of pain for him. He was constantly ridiculed for not being “handy”. He had the last laugh, becoming a computer programmer in 1961, though. I also often remember that although the fence on our side yard growing up separated us from the boys playing baseball, the rear fence with slats in it hid the face of the autistic boy who lived behind us. He was always out of sight and he could not speak, but his frustrated grunts and frantic pacing make me cry now, realizing that he wanted nothing better than to be included in our games but there was always that fence in the way.
Lets Stop Building Fences
Fortunately, so many of us live our lives not seeing the walls and fences because we know that men and women get along so much more often than we don’t. We talk of soul mates and peas in a pod and being on the same wavelength and we know that many couples when they lose a partner, lose the joy in living. My husband says the problem is that we all put too much emphasis on the differences between the sexes to begin with. We too often label something manly or feminine with both sexes taking heat for jumping those fences. Recent events make us painfully aware of those walls and fences all over again.
Hope
Whenever I despair at the news lately, with Islamist extremists bent on spreading Sharia law, kidnapping or killing girls who want to be educated, or another story of a lost man-child who tragically bought into the walls and fences and thought that to talk to girls you needed either a translator, or a gun, I think about the fact that marriage equality is spreading. Our traditional ideas of gender are evolving. That would not happen unless the walls and fences were really coming down. Perhaps these horror stories in the news lately are just the last gasp of the fearful wall builders afraid of change who are slowly realizing they are being outnumbered by the bridge builders and the lovers and the dreamers who know the most natural human behavior of all is to tear down walls and reach out for each other.
