by Robyn Ryle
GO TO 50.
98
You’re a temporarily able-bodied man. Your body is only temporarily able because at some point in our lives, all of us will be differently abled. You’ll break a bone and go on crutches. You’ll hurt your back and walk slower than you used to. If you grow old enough, your mobility will eventually become limited. As a man, those periods when your body isn’t fully functional in all the ways it’s supposed to be might be especially difficult. After all, able-bodied is really what all men are supposed to be. In fact, you might argue that calling yourself a man already implies that you have a strong and capable body. Without such a body, you might not feel like a man at all. Masculinity, from this perspective, seems deeply tied to bodies.
There’s some question, when it comes to the issue of bodies, as to whether women or men are more connected to their bodies. Traditionally, if you line up the dualities of mind and body with masculine and feminine, women would be viewed as belonging to the body side of that divide. Men are supposed to have all the qualities associated with the mind—they’re rational, logical, and objective. Women get all the messier bodily stuff. Women are seen as more emotional and enslaved to their bodies through menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth.
These associations between men and the mind and women and the body aren’t neutral; they potentially benefit you as a man. Usually, someone who is logical and rational is seen as superior to someone who is ruled by their emotions. This is the argument often used to prevent women from occupying positions of power and leadership—like being president. They’re too emotional and ruled by their bodies—their periods or menopause or hormones in whatever form.
That you line up on the mind side of this duality could benefit you as a man, but it doesn’t mean that your body is completely unimportant. As a man, you need to have the right kind of body—one that’s capable of doing the things a man’s body should do. You’re lucky to have one of those, at least for now. But how do you feel about that able body you’re lucky enough to find yourself in?
You feel good about your body. GO TO 116.
You feel bad about your body. GO TO 117.
99
Your experience of masculinity will be shaped in a wide range of ways by your disability. If you’ve had your disability since birth, it may have shaped the type of gender socialization that you received. Your parents and others may not have expected the same things of you as a boy that they would have expected from a son without a disability. For example, if you have a physical disability that prevents you from playing sports, that part of your socialization as a boy may have been different.
In addition, if you have a disability that affects how well you learn and understand, it might be harder for people to hold you accountable to gender expectations. Gender is a fairly complicated concept for children to master, even without some sort of disability. If you suffer from a severe intellectual disability, punishing and rewarding you for masculine behaviors won’t have the same effect as it would on someone without your condition.
An important role laid out for you as a man is to have a job and be a breadwinner—someone who supports a family though his income. Your disability will make it more difficult to fulfill this aspect of masculinity. Depending on your disability, you may be unable to work. If you do work, you’re likely to be paid much less as a differently abled or disabled man, though you’ll still do better than women in this group.
Your disability may intersect with what it means for you to be a man in a variety of ways. But there’s more to your relationship with your body than just whether you’re able-bodied or not.
You feel good about your body. GO TO 116.
You feel bad about your body. GO TO 117.
100
You believe that gender is okay, but what we need to change is gender inequality. This is what many feminists believe, so feel free to call yourself one.
Can you separate the idea of gender from the idea of inequality? That’s a big question that feminists and other people who study gender argue about. One side of the argument claims that we can have differences without necessarily having a sense of inequality. The two don’t have to go hand in hand. Men and women don’t have to be the same in order for there to be equality. In fact, some people might argue that it’s impossible for women and men to be the same, anyway. From this perspective, gender difference does not automatically lead to gender inequality. So we can keep gender while making the world more equal.
But others argue that as soon as we begin to talk about differences, inequality inevitably follows. When we divide the world into dichotomies, one side is always assumed to be better than the other—black and white aren’t just two different colors. White is also seen as better than black. This is true of all the big dichotomies in our thinking: body/mind, emotional/rational, woman/man, transgender/cisgender, and so on. That’s sort of the point of difference in the first place. You can’t just say that men are more rational and women are more emotional without also assuming that one of those is better than the other. Difference always leads to inequality.
Gender is a category that we made up, and it’s about much more than our anatomy or how we dress or who we desire. The fact is that part of the point of gender as a category is to create inequality. Gender was constructed in order to distribute power in an uneven way. So if we want to truly get rid of inequality, gender itself will have to go.
Pick a different gender ending: GO TO 148.
Or GO TO THE END to check out the conclusion.
101
You’re in luck. Because of heteronormativity, most systems of courtship and dating that have existed over time and across cultures were designed with you in mind. It might not seem easy to you, but in most places, the process of finding someone to love or marry is almost totally geared toward people like you.
You live in a culture where calling is the dominant system of courtship. GO TO 122.
You live in a culture where dating is the dominant system of courtship. GO TO 123.
You live in a culture where hookups are the dominant system of courtship. GO TO 124.
102
You don’t want to pursue a sexual relationship, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t want to hold hands or cuddle on the couch and watch Netflix with someone. As many asexual individuals point out, those two things—wanting to have sex and wanting to have a deep, intimate attachment to another person—don’t have to go together. If you’re asexual and romantic, you might still describe yourself as straight, gay, lesbian, or bisexual, depending on the gender of the people you find romantically attractive. You might be quite happy in a relationship with someone else who’s okay with not having sex. Or you might engage in some sexual behavior for the benefit of the person with whom you’re in a relationship.
How do you go about finding someone to be in a relationship with as an asexual, romantic person?
GO TO 65.
103
You don’t want to have a sexual or a romantic relationship with anyone. Wanting to have sex and wanting to have a deep, intimate attachment to another person don’t necessarily have to go together. But you don’t want either. That doesn’t mean that you might not still think of yourself as bisexual, lesbian, or gay. In fact, many asexual, aromantic people do identify themselves in these ways. They may be in companionate relationships with people of the same gender or a different gender or both. That means that they may spend time with someone and enjoy their company, but they’re not necessarily in love with and don’t want to have sex with that person.
How do you go about finding someone to be in a relationship with as an asexual, aromantic person?
GO TO 65.
104
You might assume that you’re in one of the twenty-five countries (as of this writing) in which same-gender marriage is currently legal. In these countries, you’ll have access to most of the legal protections that come with marriage. You won’t have to worry about whether your spouse will be
allowed into your hospital room when you’re sick or injured. If you have health insurance through your employer, your spouse will be covered too. You can be assured that if one of you dies, the other will inherit. You can, as a married couple, more easily adopt children. You will benefit from all the perks that come from marriage as a social institution.
You might be living in one of those countries in the present day, but you might also be in any one of several historic societies where same-gender marriage was also accepted. Same-gender marriage isn’t a totally new, twenty-first-century thing. Elderly women in some African cultures were allowed to take younger women for their wives; these marriages were not sexual, but legal and social arrangements. They allowed elderly women to have the power and comfort that comes with having a wife. Between 1865 and 1935, women in China’s Pearl River Delta formed intimate sisterhoods among silk workers. Their economic independence allowed them to resist traditional marriage and instead form relationships with other women. Within the sisterhood, the women viewed these relationships as marriages, carrying with them the same family structure and rules of a traditional heterosexual marriage. During the Ming dynasty in China, women would become bound to younger women in elaborate wedding ceremonies. These are just a few examples of historical time periods in which some form of same-gender marriage existed.
Contemporary same-gender marriages have the potential to make marriage a much less gendered space. In general, it seems that same-gender marriages are more egalitarian than heterosexual marriages in terms of sharing housework and childcare responsibilities.
Regardless of the particular type of marriage you’re in or how you decide who takes out the trash, you’ll find that race and ethnicity will overlap with your gender in important ways.
GO TO 78.
105
There are lots of reasons why you might never get married. How your permanently single status is viewed will depend on the culture you find yourself in.
You’re an unmarried person in China. GO TO 118.
You’re an unmarried person in Denmark. GO TO 119.
You’re an unmarried person in the United States. GO TO 120.
106
The stigma against being an unmarried woman in the United States is much higher than that attached to being an unmarried man. That this is true is evident in the language asymmetry that exists around men and women’s marital status. A language asymmetry is when some aspect of language reflects and helps to shape an inequality. The titles given to married women and married men are one example of a language asymmetry. Both married and single men are referred to as “Mr.” in American English. But women’s titles are distinguished on the basis of their marital status, so that a married woman is “Mrs.” while an unmarried woman is “Miss.” The title “Ms.” was suggested as an alternative as early as 1901 and then championed by feminists in the 1970s. “Ms.” is meant to be used as the equivalent of “Mr.”—as a generic title that doesn’t denote a woman’s marital status—but the use of “Ms.” has never become widespread.
LANGUAGE ASYMMETRY
n. /ˈlaŋ-gwij, -wij (ˌ)ā-ˈsi-mə-trē/
An aspect of language that reflects and shapes an inequality.
Language asymmetries reveal important aspects of inequality. In this example, you can see how it’s culturally more important to identify a woman’s marital status than it is to know whether a man is married. In other words, women are defined partly by their relationship to men, while men are not defined in terms of their relationship to women.
Which brings us to the language asymmetry connected to single women. We have words that are specific to an unmarried woman—spinster and old maid. Neither of those words have positive connotations. What do we call an unmarried man? A bachelor, a word that has none of the negative associations of spinster and old maid. In fact, to be a bachelor is usually seen as a good thing. In other words, bachelor and spinster aren’t equivalent words. They tell us very different things about what it means to be an unmarried man compared to what it means to be an unmarried woman. The only way we can get close to a positive word for an unmarried woman is to create a feminine version of bachelor—bachelorette.
GO TO 78.
107
In the United States, there’s much less stigma attached to not being married for you as a guy than there would be if you were a woman. In fact, it might be seen as kind of cool. Think of the fictional character who served as a spokesman for Dos Equis beer: The Most Interesting Man in the World. The man was clearly older and theoretically a bachelor. Those characteristics made him dangerous, sexy, and interesting. It’s hard to imagine a feminine equivalent—a woman in her late fifties or early sixties who’s never been married but is still seen as sexy and glamorous.
The different ways in which being single as a man and being single as a woman are viewed tells us a lot about how masculinity and femininity are defined. Men are supposed to want to be independent and free from the bonds of marriage. To some extent, being single as a man is your natural state. Women, on the other hand, are unlikely to choose to stay single voluntarily. If a woman reaches a certain age and hasn’t been married, she’s a spinster, a word that implies that she’s single not because she wants to be, but because she failed some essential test of femininity.
GO TO 78.
108
You think gender is basically a stupid idea. Or maybe just that it’s harmful. Or that it comes with too many rules. Something about gender makes you believe that it needs to go. What would a world without gender look like?
At first, people assume that in a world without gender, everyone would be the same. That doesn’t have to be the case, though. Gender as a system actually forces us to suppress some of our uniqueness in order to fit into a category. So you could argue that without gender, people would be more different. Here’s how the radical feminist and writer, John Stoltenberg, imagines what a world without gender might look like in his essay, “How Men Have (a) Sex.”
When a baby’s born, no one would ask whether it’s a boy or a girl. Everyone in this world knows that such things don’t exist. There are people with XX chromosomes and people with XY chromosomes and people with XO and XXY and XYY chromosomes. There are a lot of possibilities for what your chromosomes could look like and, in this world, that’s seen as a good thing. When a baby is born with some fairly rare combination of chromosomes, everyone celebrates the infant’s individuality as sign of how unique they all are.
In this world, everyone knows that there is a wide range of genital formations too. They also understand that all those structures and organs exist along a continuum. It’s a complicated gradation from people with a vulva and a clitoris to those with a penis and a scrotal sac. In other words, people’s genitals show that there are many more than just two types of people. There are, in fact, infinite types of people. Those differences are just another sign of everyone’s uniqueness. What’s more, these organs all started out as the same thing—genital tubercles. So in this world, people understand that one person’s genital tubercle might be different from another person’s genital tubercle, but all genital tubercles are capable of giving people some sort of sexual pleasure. All that individuality doesn’t divide people so much as make them feel connected.
In this world, there are no sex hormones. The chemical substances that we, under our current gender system, call sex hormones are instead known as “individuality inducers.” Individuality inducers do the exact same things as sex hormones, but the way in which they’re understood is different. In this world, individuality inducers make everyone uniquely different—they don’t create people who have to fit into one of two groups. Some people in this world can become pregnant and some people can’t, but fertility isn’t determined solely by chromosomes or genitals or hormones. It would be silly to make too big of a deal out of any of these things that make people unique. Why base a whole category around something so silly as what people have between their legs? In this world, the amazing variety that
nature gives everyone is celebrated.
As Stoltenberg points out, everything about the physical reality of this imagined world is true in our own world. There are infinite variations in how biological gender is expressed at the chromosomal, anatomical, and hormonal level. But we make sense of that variation differently. We try to cram all of that diversity into just two categories, instead of celebrating how truly unique we all are.
In this particular, imagined world without gender, we’d all be free to express our individuality without having to force ourselves into categories of masculinity or femininity. There would be no women or men, just completely and totally unique individuals.
Pick a different gender ending: GO TO 148.
Or GO TO THE END to check out the conclusion.
109
Lucky you! You get to choose the person you marry. You get to fall in love and find the person who’s your soul mate. The person who’s your best friend. In a companionate marriage, the expectation is just that—your spouse is also your companion. Maybe this seems normal to you, but in the grand sweep of human history, companionate marriage is pretty weird. Also, you might argue that it doesn’t work very well. Divorce rates in countries with companionate marriages are much higher than those with different types of marriage.
