So I'm taking a class this summer called Women and Sexuality, and it's made me realize many things about gender and sexuality in my own life that I find a bit disturbing. Of course, gender is performative- not something you have, but something you do. For most of my life, I didn't notice my own gender because I thought of gender and sex as the same thing. The way I chose to do my own gender was something I completely overlooked, or something I didn't think I had any control over. The truth is, I had been subject to harsh gender policing my entire life, and never realized how detrimental it was nor how much it changed me.
For starters, the gender norms in my family are rather strict. My parents always tell me they treat all their children the same, but you don't even have to look very far into our family dynamics to know this isn't true. My brother, Daniel, and I are only a year apart, yet I couldn't help but notice that he was given much more privileges and freedom that I was. He was given much more leeway to misbehave and speak his mind without much consequence. But when I misbehaved as a child, I was harshly sanctioned because "That's not ladylike." When I spoke my mind about something that bothered me, it was, "Oh God, there she goes again. Being all emotional and dramatic." Daniel was also allowed to go pretty much anywhere he wanted, whenever he wanted, and with whoever he wanted, yet I remember not being allowed to walk to my neighbor's house next door. I remember not being allowed to hang out with friends, or much less sleep over at their houses.
I thought to myself that maybe my parents were just being cautious and a bit overprotective. They had grown up in Lima at a time when street violence and crime was rampant. But other examples further convinced me this had more to do with my gender than overprotectiveness. While women in my family have always worked out of financial necessity and to help out the family, it is clear that their primary role has always been seen to be the stay-at-home mom, cooking and cleaning and serving her husband. My father never serves his own food. He's never done any cleaning. (okay, he has, maybe once or twice in my life when my mother wasn't around, and it was incredibly jarring to see.) When my boyfriend comes over and my family catches sight of him serving his own food or washing his own plate, they get pissed at me for being lazy or a shitty girlfriend, instead of realizing that maybe he's more than capable of operating a microwave on his own. When he helps me clean, they look at me like I'm less of a woman.
My parents have also taken to policing what I wear, especially throughout my adolescence, with my mother being quick to tell me what makes me look ugly, and my father policing what he deems to be too slutty.
This is what my family has taught me I am, and what I must be. I have to be submissive, quiet, and docile. Always well put together and pretty, but god forbid I show too much skin. I am incapable of handling anything on my own (like for example, driving a car), of living on my own, or protecting myself. It's not personal. It's just who I am as a woman.
My family has also taught me that my ultimate goal and destiny in life is to get married [TO A MAN] and have children. It's something that's been repeated to me probably since I've been a baby. I've never been taught any other alternative, as they don't think anything else is acceptable. My family says they're very welcoming to the LGBT community- they're okay with it. Yet, they've never taught me of its existence or prepared for the fact that any of their children may be anything but heterosexual and cisgender. I have gay, lesbian, and trans family members. My own godfather, who I am very close to, is gay. But my family kept this information from me and my siblings, as some little secret that we just had to find out for ourselves. And even when I discovered the existence of the LGBT community, my parents never discussed it with me. Instead, they showed me exactly how they really felt when they'd continually talk shit about my trans uncle when he came out, and by openly showing their disgust when they see a same-sex couple in a TV show or movie.
As I grew older and realized that there WERE alternatives for me then just living the straight, get-married-to-some-man-and-have-his-babies lifestyle my parents were grooming me for, I came to the realization that I am bisexual. It's not something that I've ever felt comfortable talking about with my family (although my brother probably has some idea by now), because I've seen the way they've reacted to family members when they came out or even members of the LGBT community in public.
My parents never even taught me about sex. Like, they never sat me down and had the sex talk with me. It was just another thing I had to learn by myself, and even then it still wasn't talked about. Even at 19 my parents grimace at the thought of me even kissing someone. Essentially, they taught me that I was incapable and helpless and very much useless, then threw me out into the world to learn about all the things they were too uncomfortable to tell me about, but STILL have this expectation of me to be this demure, straight, pure little girl whose dream is to pop out as many babies with a man as possible.
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My parents aren't the only people who have shaped my gender, though. A lot of it has come from my peers, and this overwhelming desire to "fit in" or something. I had the shittiest self-esteem throughout my entire childhood, adolescence, and into high school, especially when it came to how I looked. I wore the wrong things, I hated my body, I hated my hair, I hated my face, and pretty much every other possible part of myself. Around 8th grade, I set out on some obsessive journey to "be pretty." I starved myself for years. I did everything possible to tame my frizzy hair (there was a time when I'd straighten it every day), and I started to wear clothes that were more trendy and more flattering. I started to get attention from boys. As my body shrank and I started to wear clothes that were a bit more revealing than my usual T-shirts and jean capris, I started feeling a little my comfortable about my body. I started dating (a little later than a lot of the girls in my class- and you have to remember that this is middle school. The typical relationships lasted a few weeks, at most a month).
I changed a lot of myself to try and feel more confident, to try and like myself a little more. And I was punished for it almost immediately. I was branded as a slut. I'm still not exactly sure why or how it started, but classmates started to tease me and I had no idea what to do about it. A teacher even decided that I was a slut, too. When I started dating my first "boyfriend," she publicly shamed me saying she couldn't trust me alone with boys, because god knows what I'd do. (I think the most I did with this boy was hug- I wasn't even comfortable enough yet to start holding hands.) My reputation was consolidated when I dated another boy later in the school year. I remember a classmate telling me, "Wow, are you going to date every boy in the school? You're hopping around like Taylor Swift." My teacher even put a five-foot minimum between me and the boys in my class. She would taunt me, "So who's you're next target, Wanda?"
The kids in my class would hop from relationship to relationship every few weeks, yet I was pegged as the girl trying to "corrupt" every boy. I was not yet sexually active. I barely knew anything about sex, much like many of my peers. I was simply trying to explore myself and my sexuality, just like every other teen.
The "slut" reputation followed me into high school. Until the end of my junior year, I had an on-and-off relationship with a boy who was extremely abusive and manipulative, pretty much the epitome of a toxic, gaslighting asshole. He told all his friends about our sexual conquests he had made up, like that I gave him head and let him fuck whenever he wanted. And of course, most people believed him without question. I remember how much it tormented me that my peers had negative beliefs about me that weren't true, that they never bothered to get to know me before deciding for themselves that I was, in fact, a slut. Even then, I wasn't sexually active. The closest I had ever gotten to having sex with that boy was when he tried to rape me at the end of my junior year after he had heard no too many times and decided to take matters into his own hands.
I transferred to another school my senior year, and even THEN there were people who decided that I was a slut because they decided what I wore was too revealing. I remember a girl I was friends with teasing me because she knew how much I "sleep around." At another point, I got into a disagreement with another friend, so she told me that clearly I had made up the fact that I was sexually assaulted for attention, and that everyone knows I sleep with everyone. When I told her she was wrong, she proceeded to post on her social media that I had had a pregnancy scare and all I do is spread diseases.
So why this huge unnecessary rant? I guess, when I look at the big picture, I don't know who I am. I know who others think that I am. And I knew that for the longest time, that's what I didn't want to be. What does it even mean to be a slut? Its definition is so arbitrary and seems to vary with each new environment I enter into. It's such a shitty, harmful thing to call someone, it's dehumanizing and sets you apart as something "corrupted." Over the years I've come to understand it to basically mean to be disgusting. It means there's something wrong about you. It means you're not doing gender the way you're supposed to.
When I was writing my assignment for Women and Sexuality, I told myself that I am comfortable with my gender now. I wear what I wear and look how I look and act how I act because that's what I'm most comfortable with. But then I looked deeper. Why am I comfortable wearing feminine clothing? Wearing makeup and heels and acting effeminate? Why am I comfortable wearing clothes that are slightly revealing, yet not too "whorish"? It's not a decision that I've made on my own. It is because of years and years of harsh gender policing. It is from years of being rewarded (by compliments, positive attention, etc.) for wearing and doing the "right" thing, and of being sanctioned (through public shaming, bullying, etc.) for the "wrong" thing. I am who I am because the useless, impossible gender norms of today's society shaped me to be this way. I'm comfortable in my gender only because I work so carefully (yet without even noticing) to avoid being continuously policed.
Who would I be if my parents had taught me that to be woman means to be smart, strong, and capable, instead of the opposite? Who would I be if I learned about sex and sexuality in the comfort of my own home instead of out in the world where I had so much more to lose? Who would I be if I hadn't spent all of high school trying to avoid the reputation of "the slut"? Who would I be if, for once, I didn't care about how other people would react to me, if I stopped constantly managing the way I present myself to people for their own comfort? Who would I be if I let go all preconceived notions of what I'm meant to be, all the engrained core beliefs of what I can't do, and just... did whatever the fuck I wanted to, for once in my life?
{here is an article about slut-shaming: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabethe-c-payne/slut-gender-policing-as-bullying-ritual_b_1952205.html }
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