I am sexist. Very sexist. Also racist, but only a little, and that's besides the point. I am afraid that my sexism will have a negative effect on My Future Kids. To be clear, I don't think my version of sexism is the standard issue for the most part. It's less about men or women and more about traits which I internally characterize as masculine or feminine. I know, I know I will tell My Future Kids to man up and rub some dirt in it. I'l never tell My Future Daughters that can't do anything (except get that awful tattoo, etc.), but maybe I'll end up telling them that they can't be girls to do their thing.
I never really felt like I "counted" as a girl. I always saw girls as kind of annoying. It's really only a recent development that I've started trying to look more like a girl, but even that is a little half-assed and I have lesbian hair? Whatever. Anyways, I still have difficulty associating women with engineering, despite who I am and all the people I hang out with. I'm okay with it, because I don't really see myself as a girl, female on all accounts, but not a girl. Maybe My Future Daughters would like to be girls though. Maybe they would like to be girls and be engineers/[insert male-dominated profession here]. I think living with me might be a hindrance to that.
The fact of the matter is that I consider a lot of feminine traits to be "bad," or maybe more accurately, a lot of bad traits to be "feminine." I don't know why, but it kind of makes me angry when guys act like such. fucking. women. And I think that's bad. I think that's bad for My Future Kids, regardless of sex or gender. I don't want them to grow up believing that if they want to succeed, they need to reject their femininity.
Sometimes things fall out of my head and into the world, but the world doesn't always understand them. The models in my head I think can be different, and I'm not the best at expressing what the modes say or what my words mean in my head. I'm afraid that as much as I know that My Future Kids can do whatever without sacrificing bits of their so-called "identity," my words and actions won't express that appropriately. That when I tell them not to be such a woman, they won't hear "calm down and stop being so emotionally erratic and irrational." That when I tell them that something is easy they'll hear "you're too stupid to figure this out" and not some combination of "you'll understand it eventually," "it will be easy," "this is a solved problem and all you need to do is learn how to do it."
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