I spent my Easter Sunday afternoon walking a purple African daisy plant from my house in the Whiteaker neighborhood over to my friend’s place near campus. As I walked the river bike path, past all the family holiday picnics, all the children playing on the playground and the bicyclists zooming by, I felt like quite the odd bird — alone, dressed in all black and holding this purple plant. I’m not used to being a pedestrian around these parts.
See, I didn’t want to risk ruining such beautiful flowers. This is why I decided to walk them all the way to their destination. So I ended up spending a large portion of my day on foot. I now know that the trip takes 50 minutes both ways if you take the scenic route. But this was an afterthought. After a while, I stopped thinking about my individual steps, where I was going or where I was coming from. I was just walking, flowing, finding a kind of meditation in the everyday.
But as I passed Mac Court, something finally did stop me. It was the blue box of the Register-Guard, the newspaper inside reading: “Submit or die, Marines tell holdouts.”
I take a deep breath.
“Submit or die.” This is rape culture. This is death culture, repackaged and represented in an easy-to-digest form, available for withdrawal from a blue box. Or whatever color box — They’re all the same shades of gray.
And that beautiful spring day had worked so well to abstract me from that reality. To distract me. I can just walk on, you see. I can hold my little flower, listen to the birds, imagine myself a poet and pretend the rest doesn’t affect me.
There’s this scene in the animated film “Waking Life” where a man drives a car around the city shouting out his diatribe over the loudspeaker system. “We have got to realize we are being conditioned on a mass scale,” he says. It’s one of my favorite scenes. (Another friend of mine always likes to point out that there’s no one around in that city to hear what the man has to say.)
It’s hard to point to the mechanisms of socialization because they are often invisible. Unfortunately, this invisibility creates wicked dualisms, starting with our relationship with our bodies. Gender is a good starting point. Sociologist Margaret L. Anderson writes, “Gender is created, not just within families or interpersonal relationships, but also within the structure of all major social institutions, including schools, religion, economy and the state.”
In other words, gender — whether one identifies him or herself as a “woman” or a “man” is something externally imposed, internalized within and taken as unquestionable truth. Without any critical examination, we never discover that these behaviors are actually learned. Women learn to be women and men learn to be men, Ani DiFranco once said.
This says nothing about biological sex. While there are certain biological facts that distinguish human beings from one another, these facts do not conform to a dichotomous system either. Feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has noted that the idea of there being only two sexes is yet another gendered social construction — if we consider hermaphrodites, there should be five sexes: Males, females, those with biological sex characteristics of both males and females and two variations of hermaphrodites with either more female or male characteristics.
There is no “us versus them.” It doesn’t exist. Yet, we rely upon it and we learn to conform to it. Deviation from the status quo, or the culturally imposed set of norms, while often not specifically illegal, is discouraged in a variety of ways. Our parents keep us in check. Our friends keep us in check. The media keep us in check. We keep ourselves in check. Ad nauseam.
And few wish to deal with the stigma of dissent. Nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to how we express ourselves with our bodies. Any androgyny causes confusion. We get uncomfortable when we can’t tell whether someone is a girl or a guy. This is because androgyny contradicts our learned dualistic relationships to the world.
As I walked home later in the day, I found the following words spray-painted on the concrete: “Their laws are our demise.” It should be said that the “they” exists within us as much as it does outside of us.
The first place to fight this conformity is with our bodies. Stop subscribing to this culturally imposed gendered social control. Our bodies are the site of direct action — it’s time to begin. It’s time to sing these songs of dissent.
To be continued.