welcome to the fest

I was raised under toxic femininity. Love is obedience, you should never think of yourself first, anger and aggression are both shameful in any quantity. (This is why it drives me up a wall when I hear the term ‘ally’. Like the gender wars don’t mess up people with dicks.)

I’m a people pleaser. I feel awful whenever I try to put my needs on the same lvl as others and have no idea how to appropriately express my negative feelings. Toxic masculinity told me never to be silly in public, and that men are total sluts. It’s probably why Grinder is filled with drugs and HIV.

How have gender norms affected you?

Tarod wrote:How have gender norms affected you?

It's hard to imagine what things would be like outside the patriarchy when you've lived your whole life in it. Even the concept of gender and 'norms' exists in this context. So I guess they've effected everything about me in ways I can't measure...

I think that question is too big to be tackled in this forum by people like us. Also I'm pretty sure many intelectual feminist women already wrote essays on that subject that are much more insightful and comprehensive than anything anyone can say here, and I mean anyone.

But, from my personal experience, I think I always viewed gender as something separate from sex and that made patriarchy somewhat easier to fight.

There's "femininity" or patriarchal femininity that I've always found abhorrent and understood to be meant for weak people (men included), and "masculinity" or patriarchal masculinity, that was never meant for women, but we could "borrow" it and maybe not be as weak as we were "pushed" by most media to be.

Of course, all those ideas borrowed from my father, whom I admired as a child and who's fairly sexist himself. That only made me never understand why people would be uneased by an extroverted and curious little girl when I was young, until I realized I was being seen as obnoxious and aggressive. Mostly because I was a girl acting in an assertive and active way.

I guess I've learned to understand my true personality is seen as "off" and "exceptional" because most people think women shouldn't act like that and because I was never taught to trust myself and take a proper hold on my emotions, I was never able to express myself in less... obnoxious ways (at least until I was in my middle teen years).

As for "femininity", it did feel freeing to wear make up and "female-coded" clothes and accessories at first, but that's only because I came from a family that punished vanity on women. Which doesn't mean vanity, especially expressed the way patriarchy sets up for women, is beneficial for us whatsoever, but... it's a typical "the grass is greener on the other side" scenario.

And that's when many people fail to see their conclusions throught on that subject. I believe they think that since society sees "vapid, vain women" as "evil", the problem is seeing "vanity and blandness" as "evil", instead of seeing the enforcement of those labels on every female human being as the "default femininity/part of womanhood" as what's actually evil.

In fact, vanity and dullness ARE flaws, but they are not "women's flaws", as we are lead to believe in most cases, they are flaws anyone can have. Just because they aren't disguised as "pride" or "focus" like when we talk about "masculine" men who are vain and vapid, that doesn't make them any less harmful. Just because they aren't "pink", "frilly", "cute" or "docile" doesn't make them other than flaws in character.

I believe we have a problem today where people think patriarcal femininity is the victim of sexism and misogyny, instead of female human beings. And I believe that's a deliberate backlash that's slowly gaining popular support over actual feminist concerns regarding women's rights.

Anyways, like I said, that's a very complicated question and maybe you should search for feminist intelectuals and what they had to say on the matter.

I just wanna recommend "Delusions of Gender" by Cornelia Fine. It's an interesting view on how interpretation in science might be infused with a grand dose of sexism, even tho the researches criticized were offended and tryied to disprove Cordelia's claims. It's a very throught work and it has links to all of her citations, which are worth reading too.