Three things in the news have grabbed my attention in the
past two days, and though I have no time to post and blogspot has just erased
the post I did write, I’ll try it this way, via Word. Who knows what will happen?
Anyway, the first thing doesn’t require a lot of
work—everyone knows about it and anyone reasonable is glad for it. But I always do like my 2 cents…
Anderson cooper must have known when he allowed posting of
his utterly dignified, moving and beautiful official coming out statement that
he was offering his substantial voice to the gay community, including perhaps
most importantly those bullied high school kids. He also must have known what awaits him from the right. He will pay for his courage. Mr. Limbaugh must be frenziedly
composing and reworking his attack, and it will be a doozy. God knows what crimes cooper will be
accused of, but I expect it will be revealed that none of his reporting has
ever been objective because it’s all part of his gay agenda, and that he wants
to destroy all heterosexuals.
The
privacy cooper so clearly cherishes is shot.
I can only hope that his supporters will use his pronouncement in tasteful
ways that can be helpful to the truth that cooper has chosen over his
privacy. And now that everybody
knows what everybody probably already knew if they cared, I hope that soon he
will be able to get back to his work without having to explain his private life
any more. It’s funny, I my
writing class last term I started to use the wonderful ‘6 word story’—a great
exercise. Today in the midst of
his piece, Anderson wrote his six-word story. “I love and I am loved.’’ That’s the story of his private life,
and what a dear and honorable story it is!
The other two stories are not that well known. They are from
a website that I get on facebook, ‘’care to causes.’ But they too matter. The first is about the rise of
‘spinsters and middle-aged mothers’’ in our country, or at least in new york
city. As much as I loved the
content, I really love the title.
When I was about 12, I first saw the word ‘spinster’ in Louisa may
alcott’s Little Women. Alcott used the word positively
and proudly, and for the first time I realized that there actually was a word
for women who were like I wanted to be.
I embraced it then, and have ever since. Needless to say, the world has been less impressed than
i. according to the story,
42percent of nyc women have never married. It’s clearly an inflated number, since the age of the women surveyed is 15 and
above. I think you’d find a large population
of unmarried 15 and 16 year olds in any place at any time. Still it’s a hearty
and cheering figure, and along with the later-life mothers, suggests we’re beginning
to understand there are numerous possibilities available to all of us.
The third story is really a compilation of small ones. It starts with a teenage boy in Alabama
who walked into his classroom happily sporting brand-new earring. He was then told to take out the earring
or leave; it was inappropriate for a boy to wear an earring. His parent took the school to court and
won. The other stories were nearly
identical, occurring in different schools and different states. Each involves a
boy coming to class in shorts on a sweltering summer day. Nope, you can’t wear shorts to school. But, argued the boy and his friends, girls wear short skirts
when they want to; why can’t boys wear short pants? No way. So the kid and his
male buddies discussed it and the next day a bunch of them showed up in
skirts. There was, after all, no
rule on the books about not wearing skirts—the girls did it all the time. In both cases, the boys won and got to
wear their shorts.
What matters in the larger context about these stories is
that, though it was boys suffering for their clothing choices, the underlying
reason was sexism—and not against men, but against women. Boys are expected to be ‘manly,’ girls
‘womanly.’ And all those rules are
ultimately about male supremacy.
Masculinity is about learning to dominate women; femininity is about
learning to submit to men. That
till holds true for all the real and the cosmetic changes over the years. Look at the words ‘tomboy’ and ‘sissy.’ The tomboy, though she must eventually change, is often
lovable, cute, going through a phase. The sissy is dangerous and has to be
stopped at all costs. She is
imitating her betters; he is imitating his inferiors. There are of course
limits to the condescending tolerance the tomboy may get: masculine seeming women can get beaten
and killed for their appearance, as can gay, transvestite, or transsexual
men. Challenging roles, even the
roles that presumably empower you, is always dangerous. I doubt that any of the boys in skirts
were thinking of this, but I hope some of it still got through to them. With luck, this is the beginning of
their challenging constricting gender rules and roles.
