aka how patriarchy and needless gendering of innocuous things harms everyone.
50/50, what gender should pursue the other?, performative men, “I’m just a girl”, “Who’s gonna be the boys?”, “Boy turn off that clairo and grab you a beer”, “Men should take care of women, and women should let men lead”, “Would you let your partner be best friends with someone of the opposite gender?”, “If they follow too many guys/girls that’s a red flag”, etc etc etc. As someone who is queer and does not subscribe to the gender binary, I often view the state of how fragile and quite frankly unfulfilling cishetero dating conventions have evolved into for all parties involved, and has started to pervade the cultural zeitgeist with bitter heteropessimism, with a quiet sense of disturbed wonder, sickeningly intrigued but unable to look away. Make no mistake, we should not aspire to the conventions of dating that the past was filled with, and queer dating has its own set of problems as any human relationship will. However, as much as we think we’ve grown from the Eurocentric patriarchal ideas of dating in the past, dating today and the general view of each other from men, women, and everyone in between or outside of that, is rife with bioessentialism, and it's quite disturbing to watch.
I watch these debates thinking, “you guys know that men and women aren’t a different species, right?” as well as “You can’t make sweeping generalizations of an entire gender since quite literally none of us are the same.” Don’t get me wrong, men and women are socialized in different ways in order for them to conform to the societal expectations that have been set for us in order to further uplift capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, but frequently we see that people cannot fall into these categories so easily. When we make strict definitions of what constitutes certain social identities, we neglect to realize how you cannot pin down an entire social construct into their own neat little boxes. As I mentioned earlier, when we try to categorize people like this when no human is the same, it promotes a certain type of exclusion and societal isolation for any of those who do not follow such strict limitations. This is why we see a lot of the revulsion of certain groups by others when in actuality they have a common enemy, one that has far more power than any of these groups individually.
For example, in the queer community you often see a lot of infighting online and discourse that promotes division rather than understanding of people who are different than yourself. A lot of this comes from trying to decide which person gets the right to fall under whatever vague umbrella terms that could never even begin to account for or encompass the nuances of the human experience, mistaking groups who you should be thinking of as your community as the enemy that’s standing in the way of progress, as well as thinking that respectability politics will get you anywhere with the people actively oppressing you. All of this is neither here nor there, and I could delve into the intricacies of queer oppression and how that effects how we decide to interact with each other, but i’m here to discuss how this affects our cishetero friends, because despite having relative (emphasis on relative because intersectionality under these identities highly affects this and must be evaluated with certain lenses of thinking) privilege of being straight and cis in a world that was made for you, we neglect to realize how patriarchy affects everyone in society, not just cishetero women.
Earlier I used those examples that I observed from the queer community because despite the issues being packaged differently and having subtle nuance, the base issue is the same: when you don’t align with the arbitrary things society has set out for you, it causes a cognitive dissonance in your ways of thinking and interacting with our world. Let’s take the beauty standard for example and how we value “attractiveness” in our society. Of course these beauty standards affect women disproportionately more than men, but everyone who engages with those ideas is harmed when they don’t align with what our Eurocentric capitalist society deems “beautiful.” This is why you see incels or lonely men thinking that no one will ever love them because they are not attractive in society’s eyes and that women are to blame for that problem. This line of thinking often devolves into eugenics and the devaluing of people who don’t fit this narrow standard. What these people don’t understand is that attractiveness is relative and varies from person to person and is not solely based on physical looks alone. Of course people who are not considered attractive by societies standards get treated way worse than people considered conventionally attractive, but when we try to narrow down ‘attractiveness’ into this end-all be-all when it’s an abstract concept that can not be generalized in any way, we fall victim to the commodification of our fears, insecurities, and bodies.
Let’s take a look at how this affects women, since women are told that they need to look a certain way i.e., be skinny, be of a lighter complexion, always look like what’s deemed ‘presentable’, be hairless, and be what society deems as ‘feminine,’ etc. This creates not only an environment of ridicule for people who don’t adhere to that narrow definition of beauty, and, subsequently, the devaluing of women’s bodies as only something worthy of respect if they fit this standard, but also deep seated insecurity that allows people to profit off of your dislike of yourself. This is why we see women who refuse to be seen without makeup, feel the need to get plastic surgery, and have all the million dollar industries catered to making you “more beautiful.” All of this promotes a distortion of reality that is now considered normal, and you are wrong if you don’t adhere to it’s conventions. Another example of how women are made to feel ashamed of their bodies in their natural state is the whole shaving discourse I’ve seen online. The notion that if you don’t shave you’re considered ‘unhygienic’ and ‘dirty,’ but no such thing is brought up in regard to men, shows that women have been made to feel like their bodies are inherently unclean and must be cultivated into something perfect and made for consumption. And what’s most disappointing, yet not surprising, is I saw a lot of women perpetuating this arbitrary standard, and that goes to show how even if you suffer from the oppression that comes from patriarchy, you can still be a proponent of those ideas.
Of course this stems from different things when it comes to men and women: men from the standpoint that they are to be catered to and things that are associated with women and femininity are not to be valued in any capacity and that women are inherently less important, and women from the internalized misogyny that has been engrained in them since childhood that they now see as normal and inherent to womanhood. This is why you see women spewing TERF rhetoric that they use to demean trans women but fail to see how that flips the bioessentialist ideas of what a woman is ‘supposed’ to be back onto them or how men will feel like they can’t express themselves emotionally or enjoy anything remotely feminine in fear of ridicule as well as an ingrained belief that femininity is not something to be valued or engaged in as a man but will be homophobic towards men that don’t align with what society says a man should be.
All of this causes a lot of debate and infighting amongst ourselves, distracting us from how the patriarchy is meant to subjugate everyone regardless of gender. No human can be fit into these categories society has outlined for us so neatly, and that’s precisely why you see a lot of the tension between social identities in our culture. We see how pretty much no one is satisfied with gender roles and the cishet conventions of society, and rather than ascribing that to be a problem with our system, we turn on each other and make sweeping generalizations of different groups and perpetuate the same ideals we do not want placed onto us. “Women always do this, and that’s why we can't X, Y, Z,“ and “Because men do this, we have to do this,”— all of these statements paint the picture that these issues are inherent to sex and not beliefs society told us to have. Regardless of sex or gender or identity, and all of our subtle nuances, at our base level we are all the same and all human, and every person has to unpack the beliefs they were socialized to regard as fact that cannot be strayed from.
In other words, “YOU ARE UNDER SPELLS, PEOPLE.”
Society tells us who we’re supposed to be based on phenotypical and sexual traits, that WE as humans ascribe to certain identities, none of which are based in scientific reality and are not nearly as cut and dry as people would like you to believe, but everyone holds the key to release themselves from these ideas and live their life authentically despite the possibility of ridicule or perceived otherness.
By Kaia Watson
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