Inquiry

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Cathy

I joned the US Army when I was 18. My mother had my bags in the street, she had called the Army recruiter. I went, I did not feel powerless.

I met my husband in the service. We are still together 32 years later. We have lived and loved and have had 3 children. I  am a lucky woman to have such a loving and committed relationship.

I have never felt more powerless  than at the end of each pregnancy. My physical condition (8 or 9 months pregnant) left me totally reliant upon others. Could I have even run if someone had yelled fire?! My brain checked out as well. The white noise started in my head with conception and got louder and louder. Previously, I could read an 800 page novel in a day and at the end I could not read at all. This condition was clearly based solely upon my gender. My husband, as supportive and committed as he was, would never know what it was like to have his body so totally possessed, yet this very fact left him powerless as well. While I was able to make many choices leading up to the birth process itself ( I chose no drugs each time) the degree of submission required was an amazing thing and humbles me to this day.

And yet, this surrender to powerlessness, is one of the greatest triumphs of my life and the source of some of the greatest joy I have ever known. So, once again, paradox, reveals itself to me and I am left wondering.

Thanks for letting me tell some of my story.

This question is unclear to me because it appears to reify "gender". Perhaps the word should be "sex", as "gender" is cultural/relational. Just sayin'.

I have rarely felt powerless because of my gender, but have frequently felt powerless because of my sex category and the presumption of heterosexual interest. In other words, I feel powerless when people see the shape of my body and assume that I am 'feminine,' even though I have no control over what 'feminine' supposedly means. I have felt powerless when as a child I was excluded from sleepovers with my friends because it wouldn't be 'appropriate' for me to sleep next to a bunch of boys. I still feel powerless when I think about how I'm about to finally get my undergrad, but once I'm done with school there will be even more pressure to 'prove my maturity' by exaggerating my sex category and falsifying my gender.

I had to inquire with myself whether I was in denial of my life’s experience since it seems to be categorically accepted that women especially suffer from gender repression/victimization/limitation in some way.  I feel I have never felt powerless due to my gender, only due to my Self.  

In my younger years, I was annoyed with other girls submitting to seemingly characteristic feminine weaknesses and therefore had few female friends.  I simply could not relate to what appeared to motivate choices and behavior even in those that seemed “smarter” than others.  This continued as I aged, noting regardless of education, socioeconomic background, or “independence”, there were common distractions of vanity, feeling severe lack or even failure if not dating or married regardless of where they were in their personal growth as an individual, allowing certain males to abuse them at a variety of levels, or just having the belief that they had to prove themselves in a “male dominated society” creating the Fabulous-Multitasking-CareerWoman-UltraFit-Sexy-SuperMom persona.  Having opened my heart and mind to the overall human condition in the past decade, I now understand where these patterns originate and how they are perpetuated.

Have I been subject to undesired gender specific behavior from others?  Absolutely.  Was I powerless in those scenarios?  No.  Consequently, I feel the experiences made me a wiser human like any other life challenge.  

I know I felt really powerless in junior high school.  Something about the harassment from the opposite sex which prior to that had been just kind of squirrely and not very threatening.  Then hormones rage, and roles begin to get defined.  Of coarse, this was in the 60's when Homemaking was a required coarse for all females or you would not be able to go on to a higher grade.  I actually love homemaking, but somewhere along the way became rebellious against it. 

I loved books too, maybe as an escape from the day to day.  But where were the women?.(as far as class assignments).  Just off the top of my head I didnt see any women I could relate to in Hemingway,;Poe lamented his dead Lenore, and  Hardy had poor poor Tess.  I actually did emphasize with Tess.  She really got burned.  And then of coarse, we read about the Salem witch trials, and if you were just a bit different and had experienced any kind of lemming lynch mentality,  you would shudder with that feeling that these poor women had no defense whatsoever against plain ignorance. and  that could have just as easily have been you.  And it is a creepy feeling, that no one was there to hurl a lightening bolt, or part a sea, or just do something to save these innocent women..