On being a defective woman

Okay, I need you to be honest with me here. Dig deep if you have to. Have you ever done something, said something, felt something that made you feel like you were somehow transgressing on your gender? As if somehow, whatever you did made you that you were *less* of a woman or *less* of a man?

A couple of months ago one of my male friends jokingly asked me if I’d do some ironing for him. I laughed at him, and my amusement was twofold: first of all, it’s laughable that he’d ask me to do this for him. (Guess he hadn’t seen me: sporting my awesome, bright green “Please pass the Gender Equity” t-shirt? Sitting on the UNL Chancellor’s Commission for the Status of Women for two years? Critically analyzing gender messages in every effing commercial, ever, because I can’t/won’t turn “feminist brain” off?) Second, I’m terrible at ironing. I use the “wrinkle release” setting on my clothes dryer rather than iron my stuff.

So I laugh at this friend, but what do I say to him? Well, first I chide him for asking and tell him to do his own damn ironing. I ask why he didn’t ask one of the other boys to do his bidding. The next thing out of my mouth: “Anyway, I can’t iron. I guess I’m a defective woman.” And we all laughed and it was all sunshine and rainbows over cocktails, and it was a joke, but in hindsight…was it a bonafide anxiety slipping out of my mouth, albeit couched in sarcasm?

You see, bias (which would include racism and sexism, among other things) has a funny way of being implicit, which is cognitive psychology jargon for “so deeply ingrained into our minds that we don’t even have control over it.” Explicitly, I most definitely strive for equality and attempt to battle oppression across multiple domains. However, those firmly implanted nasty little implicit prejudices come tumbling out of my psyche sometimes, unwelcome as they might be. (Think you’re above racism, sexism, religious bias? I encourage you to go to https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/takeatest.html , try some of the tests, and see how they come out. Very few of us are immune to implicit -isms.)

Gender-wise, this implicit stuff really bites me in the ass sometimes. As in when I feel that the disorganization of our home reflects that I am some kind of organic snafu of a woman, some aberration of nature. (This is demoralizing to admit. I cringe as I write this.) As in when I internally feel like an utter failure when I think about all of the domestic stuff that my mom and my grandma were able to do that I really suck at. As in how awful I sometimes feel in acknowledging that I have little aspiration to be a stay-at-home mom because I love my work and enjoy having a professional identity. Explicitly, I can self-soothe by reminding myself that there’s no right or wrong way to be a woman, that I’m not defective, and that I can be whatever kind of woman that I want to be and she will be great. Implicitly…shades of self-loathing and guilt rage on. Damn you, generations of societal brainwashing.

I think I’m on the winning end of this, though. I’m well aware of some of those ugly, embarrassing implicit beliefs that run so counter to the beliefs that I explicitly hold dear, and knowing is half of the battle (thanks for the wisdom, GI Joe). And I’m not going to stand for them. I’m going to continue to stand up to them, to make conscious and concerted efforts to transcend them. So take that, brain. And by the way, screw you, social convention. This woman is too awesome to be defective.