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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsA Woman Can Never Be Likable Enough From an early age, we're taught to please men. What if we got an
A Woman Can Never Be Likable Enough
From an early age, were taught to please men. What if we got angry instead?
By Katha PollittTwitter
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Activist Ana Maria Archila protests outside Senator Jeff Flake's office, September 24, 2018. (AP Photo / Andrew Harnik)
I really thought we had come farther. Even Barbie says it: Girls can do anything. After all, we now hold the majority of bachelors degrees, occupy half the seats in medical schools and law schools, run businesses and universities, and sit in Congress. There are even three of us on the Supreme Court. But if you ask why men still run the world, the answer youll get back isnt sexual harassment, male violence, or discriminationthe mere mention of which is deeply unfair, to men. The explanation instead is still some variation of the one Lisa Belkin gave in The New York Times Magazine in 2003, when she profiled a bunch of Yale alumnae who had given up their big-time jobs to become stay-at-home wives: because we dont want to. Wed rather be moms and have work-life balance and do yoga and make cookies. Remember how outraged people pretended to be when Hillary Clinton said she would rather practice her profession, which was law, than bake cookies? Those damn cookies. Its not the baking that matters, its that you feel you have to do it: to be a good woman, to prove that even if youre a brain surgeon youre still just a mom at heart.
These are the rules of The Patriarchy that the #MeToo movement has exposed: the education, extracurriculars, service projects, credentialsthey were never what being a girl was all about. Being a girl is about pleasing men: What they think of you and want from you and how you negotiate that in a world that does not want to hear about the darker side of what that can mean. You can be a world-class athlete, like those Olympic gymnasts, and still be molested by your doctorand nothing will be done about it for years. You can be fantastically talented and lose your career if you dont play along with Harvey Weinstein or Les Moonves. You can get a unionized factory job with decent pay and still be groped and insulted by both your boss and your fellow workers. You can get straight As and a great job and still feel you have to give your date a blow job because he expects it, and it just seems simpler that wayand maybe safer, too. You wouldnt want him to think you were a tease or a bitch. Because from the moment you were born, you were told in a thousand ways that men liking you was the real measure of your value in the world. And without even realizing you were doing it, you learned to make yourself likable. To attract men, to disarm them, to manage them, to comfort them.
This for me is the meaning of the Senate Judiciary Committee testimony by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Whatever else a woman isa PhD, a mother, a victim of a sex crimethe most important thing is that she be likable: attractive, relatable, unthreatening, nice. And Dr. Ford was so nice! Prettybut not too prettyeducated, upper middle class, white, with glasses and a husband and kids and a house. She was just emotional enoughnot detached, not hystericalto conform to expectations about what a woman should look like when she tells the truth about being assaulted. She tried so hard to put those old reptiles on the committee at ease: joking in a self-deprecating way about her craving for caffeine, explaining the brain science behind her memories, as if they were all in the classroom together trying to figure out why a woman might remember that the two men assaulting her had laughed, but not remember how she got home that day.
Imagine if Dr. Ford were poor or fat or a woman of color. Imagine if she had had a rough divorce followed by numerous boyfriends. Imagine if she had written an article in Elle about her sexual fantasies, or her addiction to prescription meds, or her abortion. Others have said this, but its worth repeating that if Dr. Ford had behaved like Judge Brett Kavanaugh, she would have been dismissed as a liar and a crazy lady. Imagine if she had talked about how much she liked beer some 30 times. Imagine if she had displayed anger, hostility, arrogance, boasted about having gone to Yale, cried self-pitying tears, and thrown questions back in the senators faces, asking them if they ever had blackouts. Imagine if her high-school yearbook page were full of sexual slang and drinking innuendoes obvious to anyone who had ever been a teenager, and she had explained them away with obvious falsehoods. We would have said, well, that is exactly the kind of girl who was asking for it then and is lying now.
. . .
https://www.thenation.com/article/a-woman-can-never-be-likable-enough/
This is SO spot-on! EXCELLENT piece.
Everything here written is true. And I was wondering to myself, after the Kav hearing was over ....... those old goats won't even believe a woman like Dr. Ford, who is white, educated, sincere, and intelligent .... what if she were a woman of color .... or fat ....or liked to drink ..... or had a lot of boyfriends? It's all so true. We're screwed no matter what.
Hopefully this will change if we continue to educate our sons the right way. I have faith in the younger generations coming along.
Johnny2X2X
(19,108 posts)Compare Hillary's testimony to Congress to Kavanaugh's. She was calm, cool, and collected for 10 hours, and when she so much as flashed a little bit of terseness it was analyzed literally for years after. Compare it to Kavanaugh who was yelling, screaming, and accusing people. He was crying and half hysterical while he talked about his love for beer over and over. Hillary didn't flinch as Republican senators implied or flat out called her a murderer. No women would have gotten away with what Kavanaugh did without being literally hauled off. No Senate would have treated a man the way they did Hillary.
Zing Zing Zingbah
(6,496 posts)niyad
(113,533 posts)librechik
(30,676 posts)not much else.
Don't fight anymore. Stuffed that shit. I don't get anywhere, but hey, no bruises! Victory!
Maybe I'm just in process....But I am very very angry. Beyond any hope angry.
hunter
(38,325 posts)It's true.
And if Kavanaugh were an honorable man he'd resign.
niyad
(113,533 posts)would he have subjected his family to the publicity.
Solly Mack
(90,780 posts)where the victim of years of domestic abuse - who finally defended herself - was charged with the murder of her constant abuser, the jury voted to convict.
One juror (a man) said - the feel of the jury was the woman, who was taller & weighed more than her abuser, was simply too big for a man to have abused. This juror commented on the domestic abuse victims looks, saying she wasn't an attractive victim at all. Said that was the thinking of all the jury. Too tall, too ugly to be a victim of domestic abuse. Most on the jury were men, btw.
The years of abuse was documented in hospital records and police reports.
Still - she simply didn't meet the standard of what a victim should look like to the jury.
niyad
(113,533 posts)Solly Mack
(90,780 posts)patriarchy.
Standards intended to keep women down. To oppress them and to control them.
niyad
(113,533 posts)sexism and patriarchal bs of some of the characters reminds me how little progress has actually been made since then.
Solly Mack
(90,780 posts)Members of Congress learned to hide behind one woman to attack another woman.
That was it.
niyad
(113,533 posts)Hekate
(90,779 posts)niyad
(113,533 posts)smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)This is brilliant and so painfully spot on. Thank you for posting this.
niyad
(113,533 posts)struggle4progress
(118,332 posts)niyad
(113,533 posts)ASUnational
Published on Aug 25, 2010
The Combined Unions Choir of Queensland singing "Don't be too polite girls"
Words by Glen Tomasetti