“I’m going to teach you to be a feminist.”
Those words were part of the newborn peptalk I gave to my precious Lady Fair in the hospital only hours after her birth. They were her first encounter with patriarchy, at the hands (or rather the lips) of her own mother.
If you’re wondering how that possibly constitutes patriarchy, I’ll tell you: because I’ve never said the same thing to her brother. The second those words came out of my lips I realized that fact. I realized that for two years, while we’ve been modeling our values for our son, I’ve never consciously thought about making him a feminist. And then, almost the very moment my daughter was born, I put the onus on her to fight for the rights she should be entitled to as a human being. Because even while I think I’m fighting it, our society is so steeped in patriarchy that we all imbibe it and we all participate in it.
My son, aside from being male, is also white, able-bodied and middle-class. In other words, heaped with privilege from the day of his birth. That privilege is granted to him by the structural kyriarchy in which our society operates. To partake of that privilege is to perpetuate it. Thus, by not teaching my son to question his own privilege as fully as I teach my daughter to demand her equality, I indoctrinate them both into the selfsame system.
If we want to end patriarchy, then we need male feminists just as much as we need female feminists. We need those who currently possess the structurally-imbued privilege to utilize it on behalf of those who don’t, and by so doing, to reject it. The Famous Five, after all, had to ask the male members of the Supreme Court to grant them the personhood they sought. That fact in no way demeans their work, it just reminds us that equality has to be an equally shared goal.
So, Little Man, consider yourself forewarned: “I’m going to teach you to be a feminist.”
Reblogged this on Thabomophiring's Blog.
Reblogged this on Femina Invicta.
You know how else it’s steeped in the patriarchy? B/c you assumed their gender identities for them, instead of supporting their autonomy to determine their genders for themselves.
So I almost didn’t approve this one because, frankly, I think if you’re going to heckle someone you should at least not do it with a bogus email address. But it’s an important issue so I not only approved it, I’ll even dignify it with a response.
Yes, I work under the assumption that my toddler and infant both identify with their biologically assigned genders. Why? For a lot of reasons, but they boil down to two main points
a) Because the reality is that the overwhelming majority of people do in fact identify with their assigned genders, so it’s really not the worst assumption you could make.
b) Because assuming that my infant and toddler, who have never communicated to me that those assignments don’t fit them, are in fact in the said minority, and walking around calling them my boy-or-maybe-girl-or-perhaps-genderfluid-child is pretentious and ridiculous. Moreover, since my husband and I are both cis-gendered AND hetero, doing so would be about as helpful to the LGBT community as putting our kids in blackface would be to the African American community.
However, just because I have the audacity to refer to my XY child as he and my XX child as she until and unless they ask me to call them something different, does not in any way mean that I’m not “supporting their autonomy to determine their genders for themselves.” It also does not mean I don’t fully support the right of every person to determine and express their own genders. But thanks for making your own jerky assumptions, “Anonymous”.