It was early in my college career when I first encountered the condescending tone of surprise in a male classmate's voice when he told me that I was smart. I'll never forget how knee-jerk offended I was by his comment and the time it took me to understand what was going on behind it. But more notably it's been something of a hallmark as I continue to receive that same backhanded compliment in different forms throughout my (more) adult life. One of my favorite sayings suggests that feminism is a journey, but I progressively find that feminism is mistakenly considered something that is just for women.
Being a teenager of the early 00's I was faced with a lot of 'media feminism,' basically a mashup of
thin women who are airbrushed to perfection while simultaneously being aggressive and empowered. The secret to this, ladies, is that it's an impossible recipe for failure. Armed with this horrible paradox I grew up trying to achieve being a thin infantalized version of a human woman who is so cute and datable and also a fiercely independent warrior a la any member of TLC who doesn't need a man anyway and probably wears a lot of Tommy Hilfiger tube tops because the 2000s. Obviously if you aren't the only superhuman woman on earth (Beyoncé) this formula doesn't really work, which is why a lot of girls my age became caught in a trap of having false confidence to compensate a severely weak sense of who they actually are, and not just who they are supposed to imitate, due to the emphasis of the success of the physical self over the intellectual self. It was a time when young womens' feminism was being represented by sassy songs about not needing to be paid for but the stereotypes that were supposedly being broken hadn't budged.
Flashing forward to the present, in my mid 20s I've come to finally understand that although I do believe that feminism is a journey that should include both men and women, it's often men that have been socialized to be unable to find a way to deal with this confusing standard. Women are given a lot of social cues, and with awareness at least have the hope of understanding what persona suits our individual characters as well as how we choose to represent ourselves as females . That's the dream at least, and I have found that with age comes the stability and perceptiveness to know what we want and shake off some of those extraordinarily oppressive messages about what we are supposed to be. But men haven't been taught which messages they are meant to disregard, and most of the failed communication and frustration my friends and I have experienced doesn't come from what we're doing wrong, it's from our male peers entering adulthood without having received any guidance about how to interact with the same unclear messages we have been trying to translate since we were children.
Now enter the failure of a generation. I'm not the first girl to experience the novelty of their own intelligence or personality in the eyes of male peers. I once had an ex-boyfriend tell me that I was the first genuinely intelligent girl he had ever dated. As college seniors it's possible that nobody he was partying with in undergrad had revealed an intelligent side, but I consider that a matter of context and the reality that he probably wasn't searching that hard for an intellectual conversation. Interestingly, this same person told me two years later during our subsequent breakup that some of his friends has suggested to him that I was 'domineering' and that he was now taking that into consideration through the course of the breakdown of our relationship. In this incredibly vulnerable time I found myself wondering if I had been too domineering, which I resented. Calling a woman domineering is the same as calling her crazy - it's a way to invalidate her power as a person and her entitlement to her own feelings. The reality is there were 2 years of a successful partnership and any other suggestion is an excuse to feel better about something that is very difficult to process. I came back to the very sad and progressively outdated theme that strength in women means weakness in men and more often than not this insecurity channels itself into blaming the girl for being 'too' or 'not enough' of something. There are many more examples of times when it has been completely legitimate and equal in the ways relationships have ended, but in this absurdly stereotypical case it was a significant shock to experience a level of gender bias that I was naive enough to believe would never effect me so directly.
The biggest perpetrator of this incredibly damaging dynamic is women's classification as either 'cool' or 'clingy' - a word for which there are not enough sarcastic parentheses in the world - and when faced with the prospect of a person who is autonomous and self-sufficient men may succumb to insecurity in their own masculinity, which media and society has taught them is in large part relative to how much women defer to them. There is an epidemic where words like crazy and clingy exist to make women feel insecure about how much they're allowed to feel about a person they are dating or involved with. It's terms like these that automatically decide that the XY in the pair is the one in charge of what happens next and that the XX is fated to wait until judgement has been passed in her favor because any move made of their own self-determination is aggressive or worse, needy. Which is, of course, complete insanity and a massive waste of time for people who could just be enjoying each other's company instead of transferring their manufactured insecurities back and forth.
Which brings me back to the beginning - I'm tired of being the most interesting girl in the room. I want my and other women's ability to appreciate our autonomy to be something that is a given, and not a shocking revelation and later an excuse to find someone too intimidating by default of a painfully outdated social contract. I am hopeful that future situations will allow men to be able to appreciate partnership without it making them feel as though they're having to sacrifice their confidence in their masculinity. There's plenty of discussion about how society has directly oppressed women and it's very worth understanding, but it's also worth focusing on how society has failed men. There are no guidelines for how to collaborate with strong women, only how to fear them and that's where all of us have been failed.
Ultimately, though what I've discussed is acutely relative to the 20-something millenial, all aspects of these confusing biases are worth deconstructing. To begin we need to understand this issue as something that is effecting everybody as part of the human condition, and that despite a lot of misinformation to the contrary feminism is a movement that encompasses both genders.
