Stacey May Fowles in the Afterword at the National Post observed last week,
During spring’s endless industry parties and launches I watch male writers navigate rooms with a fearlessness and comfort their female peers do not. It’s actually beautiful to behold; their whisky-drenched casual discourse, their freedom from consequence, their suit jackets, scarves and virile come-ons.
Everything about them — their demeanor, their conversation, the ease which they take up space — suggests they deserve to be both there and on the page.
The female writers I speak to are afraid to pitch to magazines or publishers, afraid to submit their finished work, afraid to promote themselves, afraid to get in the face of someone who might hand them an opportunity. Male writers seem to start in a place of entitlement, while female writers take decades of fighting and proving to earn it.
One female writer I encountered said that she didn’t go looking for attention for a recent piece because she believed that to be selfish, an odd statement in an industry that now relies heavily on an author’s ability to sell both themselves and their work.
How branded into our brains are these laws?
Of course it’s a subset of males who belligerently bravado their way thru a room on a carpet of entitlement that they roll before them, and it’s a subset of women who are embarrassing mouses who have to be continually coaxed that its ok to speak at a whisper. There’s a lot of grey areas and rainbow areas. Different age demographics and personalities overshadow unconscious gender playing but her observations match mine.
That its not true across the board, for every individual and situation doesn’t mean in aggregate it doesn’t ring true.
Gender drives me crazy.
I’ve been doing head counts on busses of who appear to be het couples. The male tells the female where to sit on the bus with a gesture, a nod, a tug. She consents but he chooses. In one case I saw the female protest and lead them to a different seat. Woohoo. He followed but then remarks were made by his male friends and he tugged her out of her seat and they went where his seat choice was. Maybe I’ve not enough random data for patterns to cancel out. Maybe I’ve got confirmation bias going but I’ll keep recording the numbers and see what evolves out of them.
Females are more likely to sit with their belongings piled on them in a bus, knees together, arms tight at sides as if signalling they are taking up as little space as possible, not being selfish thus petitioning to be allowed to stay.
When was the last time I saw a female with legs and arms sprawled over 2 or 3 spaces? When a females takes more seats, it’s likely to be not with her body but her stuff as a privacy wall. It’s not uncommon for each bus to have one or a few males behaving in this body-sprawling way. Or two males sitting in a bench, knees wide so they take up 4 seats between them. Again not all males, but no female using that right to take up space.
Males and females walk down the sidewalk and females are presumed if there’s a narrowing of sidewalk to be the one to step aside. When I don’t my shoulder gets bumped because I’m either invisible or disobeying the unconscious pecking order. Part of that is eye-contact. With a gaze rather than ducked head I signal that I’ll be taking the right of way, rather than signalling deference and be expected to get out of the way. I can hear people say that’s a human communication not a gendered thing but how often is the direction of communication folding into gender patterns?
Maybe writers are more self-aware than average? Maybe some of doing better or worse in this conundrum we’ve built collectively, like Stacey May Fowles considered in The Unbalancing Act in the Walrus.
There isn’t individual choice for individual reason. We have each internalized sets of behaviours and values for them and they go thru us faster than we can process and block and redirect. At least at the start. I came out of the 1800s at birth from a strict religious background where gender divides were more marked and marked forms were more heavily policed. I recall the loggerhead of only be allowed to go to church if I dressed like a proper girl, which would involve short sleeves and showing my legs in a skirt. I wanted to go to worship but felt in danger to expose skin that would not categorize me as a good gendered girl but as meat causing temptation and her own blame. Even at church. The cobbled step of women’s shoes and the constraints of how you can move in a skirt reinforced to me the nature of woman as in shackles. Whenever a bra strap shows I hear mom’s voice call it — whore. That internalization needs to flip on its head for my own sanity. I need to counter with a call of bullshit.
Gender is a pattern but also an excuse. I’ve been slammed against a wall by a male friend by the neck for the audacity of just the way I am, in dress and demeanour, or more accurately at a lower level because he was a bully and thought I would be easy to intimidate but the label he put on it was my gender inappropriacy of wearing pants, of sitting on the corner of a desk, taking male postures. He saw it as his duty to police me for my own good. It wasn’t gender. The excuse could have been anything except the excuse so often is laid at the line of woman and man.
Nonetheless the same pattern of attitude primes flight-fight response, makes on more reactive which reinforces patterns that would be opposed. We putter along not considering what isn’t called out as being broken.
In 1910, Camille Lessard-Bissonnette, a columnist for Le Messager of Maine in speaking for suffrage said
You say, sirs, that it is the woman who lights up your home. You compare her to a ray of sunshine. You exclaim that women must not be dragged into the mud of politics. But sirs, when a ray of sunshine falls on the mud does it dirty itself, or does it dry up and purify the mud?
To sully males as mud and characterize females as light doesn’t forward matters but it being a rebuttal in his terms, it does the job.
When females are born believing they can speak, they just choose not to. Rates of women heading companies, heading political parties show this gap. A women in business organization is distressing: fair for spas, beauticians, flower, chocolate, daycare, y’know the things womenfolk like.
We’ve lost the dross of religious props of female as servant and helpmate and yet rates are off. I can’t abide the explanation of intrinsic equal but different gender by chromosomes. Women can become doctors, they just choose to become nurses. They can become politicians, they just choose for their own reasons to be civil servants or office temps. I was born believing I was relegated to permanent childhood, to be seen not heard thus I feel more of a seed to be heard.
When people are waffling about doing an open mic, it’s often that a male will say no or yes, and keep the no or yes and that no be shrugged as final. He may change his mind but the exchange to encourage him is shorter if it happens.
When a female says no it is more tentative phrased, asking for support, often accompanied by a shrinking back, face covering, coyness or turning shoulders away or curling the back. It is constant if the female is a teen or retired.
When her no is often not abrupt or clear, it is usually respected and people back off. More often it becomes a protracted game of various people encouraging to get her to speak. And she may defer a few sessions and only read, egged on weeks or months later. Why does this happen at all?
Why do publishers more often chase females to hand over manuscripts whereas males cold call and keep sending unfitting poems? Sitting as a reader for Bywords I remember noting the gender skew of males who just keep hammering away sending in poems and the relatively fewer females.
Of course other females of their own volition just say yes, get up, do their bit and sit down again without any of this silly nonsense. But I’ve never seen a male being coaxed. Asked, yes, with tone that expects a brief answer. It is as if we still treats males and females like babies in pink booties or blue booties and impose all this role playing game.
Do we presume the boys in our society to be on their own, self-regulating, self-perpetuating while it takes a whole community to raise a girl?
At the end of the day, writers who are female become accomplished anyway, become published despite self-cancelling attempts. And males become accomplished anyway and become published anyway. Rallies, legislation and essays aren’t the scale of change. (Although stopping funding cuts to women’s group would help.) The construction is made individual by individual, moment by moment and so has to shift in the same way it came if results are to last.