Learning to feel unsafe

Kirstyn McDermott has an interesting post-- Girls and Consequences-- delving into her childhood revulsion for femininity and one of the possible sources of that revulsion. The post was inspired two other posts, one by Stina Leicht on why boys court risks more than girls and by and the other by Kate Elliott, on how, at the age of twelve, she completed a sentence beginning "I wish..." as "I wish I was a boy." The expression of this wish didn't come from a sense of gender dysphoria. "What it meant to me," Elliott writes, "was that it wasn't worth being a girl." How many of us could find that feeling in our own emotional history? I know that I certainly could. The bit from Leicht's post that McDermott quotes resonates powerfully:

It’s because girls run head-long into consequences much, much sooner than boys do. They are barraged with the knowledge that the world is a dangerous place for them specifically at an early age. I have memories of such information filtering down to me at age eight through ten. So much so, that I went through a phase of denial. I took on male behaviors, thinking that would make me safe. (I was a tomboy.) I also went through a phase of not wanting to be female — not because I thought I was mistakenly born a girl, but because I was beginning to understand what was ahead and that the world did not like females. In fact, society at large might even hate females.

As it has probably done for any woman reading the post, this sent my thoughts back to my pre- and early-teens. I never told anyone I wanted to be a boy. But I did want, oh so much, to be Beethoven, and everyone around me let me know that it wasn't possible to be Beethoven unless you were male. And though I wasn't a tomboy, I did things like cut my hair short (shorter than I ever wear it now-- something not much more than a buzz cut) at a time most of the girls in my high school wore their hair long and ironed it, making myself the Complete Freak, got myself a boy's cap (never worn by girls back then), and often passed as a prepubescent boy when I was wearing a jacket or coat, and wore pants whenever I could (though girls were never allowed to wear pants to school back then, not even in sub-zero weather). McDermott writes

Thankfully, I have a wonderful mother who I can’t ever remember saying that I couldn’t/shouldn’t do something or like something or be something just because I was a girl. (Once or twice, when I was being particularly gross, she might have expressed an exasperated admonishment that I wasn’t being very ladylike. Huh? Who cared about being a lady!) I do remember being told such things by lots of other people, though — including some male relatives. And the consequences stuff? Although I didn’t think I ever consciously took that on board when I was a kid . . . I reckon it did manage to seep in. And I reckon I reacted to it just the way Stina Leicht did, by rebelling against everything girlish.

These days I’m constantly unpacking my thoughts about the colour pink, and my newly rekindled love of cooking, and whether or not to keep shaving my legs, and so many other things. Trying to work out how much of what I love and/or hate comes from a genuine personal response rather than a habitual reaction to/against The Feminine. (A process which, of course, is complicated by the recognition that those anti-feminine reactions are really just as “genuine” or otherwise as anything else I feel.)

McDermott then goes on to pose disturbing questions thinking about what all of this raises for her anent her preferences in footwear. And she arrives at this gut-wrenching conclusion:

Because, in my head, wearing spiked stiletto heels isn’t safe. Because being a girl isn’t safe. And that’s precisely the sort of unconscious internalisation I’m talking about. Now, it’s not as though I go about my days with ears pricked and eyes darting about like a gazelle en route to the watering hole, but this is a genuine psychological underpinning that has helped define my choice of footwear as much as it has influenced my decision never to accept an invitation to an otherwise all male NFL drunken victory party.
Because being a girl isn’t safe.

Reading this suddenly made me remember not just some of the occasions when I definitely didn't feel safe "being a girl" (particularly in my teens), but also how I was taught to believe that. You see, I flashed on something that I'd totally forgotten-- something that sort of shocks me now, because in a way it's a strange and jarring memory that I don't think I've ever before consciously recalled. The memory I flashed on was of one of the black and white short films my (small) eighth-grade class were specially shown. Very occasionally the whole school (small, parochial) would be shown moves in the gym-- movies that were in some way instructional-- about, say, missionaries in faraway lands, fire safety, how to give first aid, and so on. On one such occasion, all the students were sent out except for those in the eighth grade. There were about 30 of us. We were shown at least two additional films that the rest of the school didn't see that day. One was on the dangers of smoking pot and taking drugs (yeah, something like Reefer Madness-- it could, actually, even have been Reefer Madness), the other on the dangers of sex. Only, though they didn't say so, it was really on the risks of getting raped and getting pregnant. (I.e., the dangers were for girls only.) Mind you, we hadn't had any sex education in my school. It was a fundamentalist Lutheran school, after all... In high school we had sex education, which was at least partly about the dangers of pregnancy, and partly about venereal diseases, which not only girls, but also boys were at risk for. This film was basically about what terrible things kissing boys could lead to. (Just as pot was the first step to becoming a "dope addict," so kissing was the first step to getting raped or pregnant.)

I obviously don't have a really distinct recollection of all that was shown (though I do, oddly enough, remember the girl who got raped wearing bobby socks for godsake-- though I suppose, given that this was the 1963-64 school year, the film could have been made as much as ten years earlier). But I remember being really upset by the violence of it-- because it showed the girl in a situation, basically, of date rape (though it didn't show the rape itself-- only showed her afterwards, with her clothes ripped, crying, and then the consequence of pregnancy supposedly following her rash behavior in kissing this boy in the first place. What strikes me half a century later is that this little "instructional" film had an effect on me that rippled through the next five years of my life-- even though the showing of the film was never framed by discussion or reinforced through mention at any time afterwards by my teachers or peers (any more than other such "instructional" films ever were). With all that silence surrounding it, I'm sort of shocked to realize that it nevertheless lurked in deep memory, with just a few images burned into my brain. In hindsight, I'm sure it heightened my fear of a scary boy in my neighborhood a year or two later, a boy with whom I had several really scary encounters and who was notorious because it was "known" about him that his father constantly beat him, his parents sometimes made him sleep in the garage, and finally, because he was a runaway who had a juvie officer checking up on him. (Now that I think of it, I recall that that juvie officer was the father of one of my brother's friends (a boy who, himself, was something of a delinquent creep.)

The cues telling them they're not "safe" are always there for girls, regardless of whether they are explicitly warned. (And of course now, any child who grows up with 21st-century television can't possibly escape the din of the constant subtext about violence against children, girls, women.) I'm sure if I began looking for more traces of this education (socialization), I'd find them.
Interestingly, this remembering-- the process McDermott plunged into with her boots-- reminds me of a marvelous book that Verso published in 1987, in translation from the German, Female Sexualization, ed. by Frigga Haug, recording the work of German feminist collective doing what they called "memory-work." Here's Haug:

The book records a collective's attempts to analyse women's socialization by writing stories out of their own personal memories: stories within which socialization comes to appear as a process of sexualization of the female body. In the first chapter on what is called 'memory-work' (Erinnerungsarbeit), the reader is introduced to the method of collective work undertaken by the group. Described as a method for the unravelling of gender socialization, this involves choosing a theme connected with the body--legs, hair, stomach, height--and calling on members of the group to write down their memories of past events that focus on this physical area.

In the second chapter, we pursue the process whereby the stories are circulated amongst the group, discussed, reassessed and rewritten. The group searches for absences in the text, for its internal contradictions, for cliched formulations covering knots of emotion or painful detail.(13)

Theirs is a complicated process (and fully theorized). But the key, as Haug says, is that "we looked everywhere for traces of situations in which we had either voluntarily submitted to our own subordination, or, conversely, in which we had developed early forms of lived resistance."(50) Perhaps most interestingly, this collective saw writing (rather than speaking) as key to their process, because of what happens when we write down memories as personal history (as opposed to informally telling them as anecdotes). I think also, as someone who writes fiction, that this difference also shows up when delving into a memory by using it as a moment in a fiction-- it gets separated from the ego (to use both general and Freud's parlance) in a way that frees it for a less-emotionally fraught consideration. Anyway, thank you, Kirstyn McDermott, for such a provocative post. You've left me with much to think about.