Objectify This

I went to a dinner party a while ago, and it was really nice. I was camoflaged in adult clothes, and standing around with adults, chatting, and this child ran through. The child hesitated on the edge of our circle of tall obstacles, and then darted into the middle and out the other side. The child had shoulder length brown hair, and a pink headband on, along with an eastern-style side-buttoning satin jacket.

“Make way for the lady,” I said. “The lady?” said the writer in residence. “That’s Catherine Newman‘s oldest kid; it’s the younger one that’s a girl. That’s Ben.” “Oh,” I said, feeling a little strange. I guess I’d just assumed that the pink headband was a gender

signifier; as reliably predicting Ben’s gender as a birth certificate.

It was a weird feeling to think that I had made such a misstep about gender, because as a Peer Advocate of Sexual Respect I am one of my campus’ resident peer rape crisis counselors and I’ve recieved basic combat training in the war against gender normativity.

But gender is such a weird thing; it’s certainly easy to have trouble navigating this boundary. I remember that when I was four I was furious whenever I was mistaken for a boy, even though I had a bowlcut and was always dressed in hand-me-downs from the boy next door, after his sister was through with them. I was sure that my gender was obvious: these people were idiots. At five, I had enough and grew my hair out, to be clearer about it. It was nice; with a headband on, I was definitely a girl to passersby, albeit a girl in a tree.

But now, I am one of those idiots. How did this happen? Well, usually, children’s gender is well indicated by their parent’s strategic placement of baseball cap or hair ribbon, unless their parents are the kind of thoughtful feminist hippies that mine and Ben’s are.

But feminism should not be taken too far. Psychiatry New’s recent article, “Men Shouldn’t Be Overlooked as Victims of Partner Violence,” was recently commented on over at Jezebel, where women admitted to hitting male partners to cheers of “you b*tches are violent. that’s why i heart you so…” and “Yes, that made me laugh really hard too. Very very hard. I have slapped a man down before, quite hard, but I love him so I felt bad because, well, it’s abusive.”

I mean, I am sure that these women would not find it funny if these women were telling stories of being hit by men, instead of doing the hitting. As one (moniker:Warmaiden) notes, “Then again, as a native NYer, I am also of the opinion that if a woman hits a man, he is allowed to hit her back. (I find the southern gentleman thing so CUTE, if ill-advised as a defense tactic.) Fair’s fair, after all…”

And fair is fair. The scales must be even, even if that means women need to rescind one of our gender’s few privileges. As Henry Drummond says in Inherit the Wind, a dramatization of the Scopes trial,

“Gentlemen, progress has never been a bargain. You’ve got to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man behind a counter who says, “All right, you can have a telephone; but you’ll have to give up privacy, the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote; but at a price; you lose the right to retreat behind a powder-puff or a petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline!”"

It would perhaps be more productive to think of feminists as humanists specializing in gender. Which brings us to another topic I’ve been neglecting: the objectification of men.

Amongst the uproar about the ultra-charming gang-rape-of-a-woman that they treated us to in an ad campaign a while back, there’s been a curious silence about Dolce and Gabbana’s portrayal of male-on-male rape. And it wasn’t like it was subtle or anything. Jesus. Of course, since men are both the aggressors and the aggressee in this image, male viewers may doubly identify, while I have yet to see an image of a woman raping anyone used to sell anything.

Here’s a little non-gender normative relief from Koreanish, the man who corrected me about Ben’s gender:

Afterall, there but for a drive-by fruiting go you or I.