She/He/They/Me

by Robyn Ryle

  On the other hand, if you’re a woman, you have more freedom in a companionate marriage. This is especially true in the contemporary United States. Up until the 1970s, so-called head and master laws still gave men much more power in a marriage. Before these laws were abolished, as a man, you could move your family without your wife’s consent. There was no such thing as marital rape, since the laws assumed that marriage implied consent. There was also no such thing as domestic violence, as a man had the right to treat his wife and children however he wanted. Being able to marry the person you fall in love with might seem like a good thing, but it doesn’t guarantee that everything will work out.

  Even today, companionate marriages can be deeply gendered from the get-go. Take weddings, for example. Although many couples now write their own vows, some still speak traditional versions where brides promise to “honor and obey” their husbands. Most traditional wedding ceremonies are both gendered and heteronormative. There’s a bride and a groom, along with bridesmaids and groomsmen. The father, not the mother, is the one who “gives” the bride away. Many women take their husband’s name when they get married.

  You don’t have to follow all the gender rules laid out for marriage, but because they’re still seen as normal, you might be questioned for breaking them.

  GO TO 78.

  110

  In a culture with traditional marriage, you will most likely get married, but love probably won’t have much to do with it. Getting married to someone you love is seen as foolish and maybe even dangerous. Marriage is about forming alliances or gaining wealth. So your marriage will probably be set up for you, usually by your family. You might meet your spouse beforehand. It’s more likely that you won’t.

  This is the way that marriage worked for long periods of human history. With some variations, it’s still how marriage works in some places. In arranged marriages, the expectation might be that you’ll fall in love with your spouse after you’re married. But falling in love isn’t necessary to a successful marriage.

  If you’re a woman living in a culture like this, you’ll probably have little power to decide who you marry and very little power once you are married. You’re part of the property being exchanged in an economic interaction—a daughter in exchange for a peace treaty or a piece of land. In many of these cultures, women are the goods being exchanged and men are the ones doing the deal-making. The children you might have will be seen as belonging to their father and under his control.

  GO TO 78.

  111

  You have positive feelings about your body, which is a good thing and also a fairly rare thing among women and girls. Maybe you feel good about your body because you participate in sports. Girls and women who play sports report having more positive feelings about their bodies in general. Sports seem to help with body image, because through sports, girls and women are able to see their bodies as an active subject, rather than as a passive object. That means that if you play sports, your body acts on other things—your body hits a ball or runs fast or dives smoothly. Your body has uses that are about much more than just how it looks to other people.

  When your body is an object, it becomes something that’s acted upon. People look at your body or talk about your body. They decide whether your body is desirable or not. They touch your body. When your body is an object, its worth comes from external sources. You may lose weight or wear more makeup or have cosmetic surgery to change your body, but in the end, if your body is an object, other people are the ones who decide whether it’s satisfactory or not. So maybe part of why you feel good about your body is that you’re able to see it as more than an object.

  How you feel about your body will also come into play as you explore your sexuality. The first question to ask about your sexuality is not how you identify sexually, but how sexuality is structured in the society you live in.

  You live in a culture where gender and sexuality are connected. GO TO 50.

  You live in a culture where gender and sexuality are not connected. GO TO 131.

  112

  You don’t feel so great about your body. Welcome to the club. Most women and girls don’t have positive feelings about their bodies. Many girls begin to lose their sense of satisfaction with their bodies at puberty. There are lots of reasons why this happens. Puberty is when many girls whose gender expression may have been less than perfect—girls who were tomboys—are pressured to start conforming more closely to gender expectations. Puberty is also when many girls are cautioned about the world of sexuality and all the dangers that it holds for them. The fear of being assaulted is real, and so is the careful line that women must negotiate between being sexually active and being labeled too promiscuous.

  It’s also at puberty that what some feminists call “the third shift” begins to kick in for girls. If the first shift is paid work outside the home and the second shift is the extra housework and childcare duties that women are expected to do, then the third shift is the beauty work that women are increasingly obligated to do. This third shift, some feminists argue, serves as a tool to subvert women’s increasing power. As women have made significant gains in many areas of social life, the expectations for them be beautiful have increased proportionally. The third shift is part of a backlash intended to derail women’s success by diverting their time, energy, and money away from career advancement and by lowering their self-confidence at the same time. The third shift dictates that girls spend a great deal of time and effort altering their bodies (by applying the right sort of makeup, shaving in the right places, painting their nails, using the correct hair-styling products, and losing weight). As with any ideal, the new beauty standards set for girls are unattainable.

  That girls see their bodies as a full-time job in need of constant alteration and enhancement might not seem like such a big deal. But the poor body image that results from comparing yourself to the beauty ideal is associated with low self-esteem. And many women risk their health and well-being in the constant quest to measure up to this impossible yardstick. Women develop eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia or engage in other harmful dieting behaviors. By pursuing cosmetic surgery or using a range of beauty products that are largely unregulated and unmonitored for their long-term health effects, they risk exposing themselves to a host of dangers. As far as the economic costs go, as a woman, you’ll spend an average of $300,000 on your makeup and other facial beauty products—and that’s just for your face—over the course of your life.

  How you feel about your body will also come into play as you explore your sexuality. The first question to ask about your sexuality is not how you identify sexually, but how sexuality is structured in the society you live in.

  You live in a culture where gender and sexuality are connected. GO TO 50.

  You live in a culture where gender and sexuality are not connected. GO TO 131.

  113

  You’re going to do some kind of work in your life, regardless of your gender. Your gender will determine the kind of work you do, how the work you do is viewed, and whether or not you get paid for it. Your racial and ethnic background, along with your social class, will also shape your experience of work in important ways.

  You’re a woman of color or a white working-class woman. GO TO 125.

  You’re a white middle-class or upper-class woman. GO TO 126.

  You’re a woman who doesn’t work for pay outside the home. GO TO 127.

  You’re a man who doesn’t work for pay outside the home. GO TO 128.

  You’re a man who works for pay outside the home. GO TO 129.

  You’re a trans man who works for pay outside the home. GO TO 130.

  You’re a trans woman who works for pay outside the home. GO TO 142.

  114

  There’s a long history in the United States of poor women of all racial groups falling victim to forced sterilization, and it’s a history that for many women is entirely too recent. Sterilization laws used to be common in the United States—existing
in 32 states—and were motivated by crude theories of human inheritance. The laws purportedly attempted to eliminate criminality, feeble-mindedness, and sexual deviance from the population. As the groups most vulnerable to these medical interventions, poor women and women of color were frequent victims of sterilization programs.

  California led the country in the number of forced sterilizations that took place between 1909 and 1932. During that period, twenty thousand women and men were sterilized in state institutions, often without their consent or knowledge. In the 1960s and ’70s, Mexican American women were sterilized under duress at the Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center. As many as 20 to 25 percent of Native American women in the United States were sterilized between 1970 and 1976, and some of those programs continued into the 1980s. As recently as 2010, California prisons authorized the sterilization of 150 female inmates.

  GO TO 148.

  115

  Your access to birth control will vary a great deal depending on where you are.

  You’re in the United States. GO TO 154.

  You’re outside the United States. GO TO 155.

  116

  You feel good about your body as a boy or a man. That probably means that you conform to the ideals held up for what the perfect man in your particular society or culture should be, many of which have to do with what your body should look like. Here’s a list that sociologist Erving Goffman came up with in 1963 to describe the “perfect” man in the United States. He should be young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, a father, college-educated, and fully employed, and he should have a good complexion, be of the right weight (not fat), be of the right height (tall), and have recently played sports. Maybe you’re lucky enough to have a body that is young, white, acne- and scar-free, fit, tall, and athletic, which is why you feel great about your body.

  As a man, you might still feel good about your body even if you can’t check off all the criteria on the list above. You can feel good about your body even if you don’t feel like it’s perfect. You’re more likely than women and girls to feel good about your body. That’s partly because men are encouraged to think of their bodies as active—as subjects instead of objects.

  You’ve seen these messages about your active body in advertisements and other media depictions since you were a little boy. When girls and women are depicted in advertising, they’re often depicted as passive objects. Only one part of their body—often their breasts or their butt—is shown. In many ads, parts of women’s bodies are transformed into objects—women’s legs become a pair of scissors. When whole women are depicted instead of just parts of their bodies, they’re generally doing passive things—lying on a bed or sitting around. These ads convey the ideas that what matters about women are their bodies, and their bodies are objects—things to which something is done.

  Ads that feature men like you depict masculine bodies doing things. They depict men as subjects instead of objects. Men play a sport or give a presentation in a conference room. They stand with their legs spread wide staring defiantly at the camera. Though this has changed somewhat in advertising, men are still much more likely to be pictured as active subjects.

  When you think of your body as active, it’s easier to feel good about it. Your body is good because it can do useful things like hit a ball or run fast or jump high. You don’t have to depend on external standards to judge how you feel about your body as much as women do. Sure, you might still worry about how you look in that pair of pants and whether people think you’re too short. Men still have standards against which their bodies are judged. But because you’re encouraged to think of your body as more than just an object, it’s a little easier to feel good about it.

  How you feel about your body will also come into play as you explore your sexuality. The first question to ask about your sexuality is not how you identify sexually, but how sexuality is structured in the society you live in.

  You live in a culture where gender and sexuality are connected. GO TO 87.

  You live in a culture where gender and sexuality are not connected. GO TO 88.

  117

  You feel bad about your body. That might be because you don’t live up to the characteristics for the ideal masculine body in your particular time and place. Maybe you feel like you’re too skinny. Or you can’t grow a beard. Or you’re too short.

  In places like the United States, it’s not surprising that you don’t feel good about your body if you’re a short man. Being tall is pretty important for men. Studies show that people tend to equate height in men with things like intelligence and competency. That is, people think you’re smarter and all around better at stuff if you’re taller. And, of course, height is also associated with attractiveness for men.

  The weird thing is that the beliefs people have about tall men can actually become true. So if you’re taller, you actually are likely to be smarter and more competent. That’s not because the traits for intelligence and height are genetically linked. It’s because if you believe what other people believe about you, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—a belief or prediction that comes true solely because it’s been predicted. Because people believe that tall men are smarter and more competent, they treat them as if they are smarter and more competent. As a tall man, you see those qualities reflected back at you all the time, like a really amazing mirror being held up to you. And if everyone is always telling you how smart and competent you are, you begin to believe it. You act as if you are smart and competent, which is half the battle of actually becoming smart and competent.

  If you’re not tall though, you probably won’t feel as great about your body, and your self-confidence in general might be lower. You’ll move through the world differently as a man with a body that doesn’t conform to masculine ideals.

  How you feel about your body will also come into play as you explore your sexuality. The first question to ask about your sexuality is not how you identify sexually, but how sexuality is structured in the society you live in.

  You live in a culture where gender and sexuality are connected. GO TO 87.

  You live in a culture where gender and sexuality are not connected. GO TO 88.

  118

  In some cultures, the penalties for being unmarried are fairly high. That’s usually because marriage is seen as necessary to completing some important steps in your life cycle. For example, in China it’s important to have children so that they can take care of you in your old age. Taking care of your parents traditionally was an obligation that was much more institutionalized in Chinese culture than it was in places like the United States. In China, the stigma against leaving your parents to fend for themselves as they grew older was much higher.

  But there’s also a very large stigma in Chinese society against having children out of wedlock. So if you want to have children to take care of you in your old age, you need to get married first. That makes marriage almost compulsory for people in Chinese society—it’s something they have to do.

  If you’re unmarried in contemporary China, you’re very likely to be a man. That’s because there’s a huge marriage squeeze for men in China. A marriage squeeze happens when some sort of population shift reduces the number of available marriage partners. The marriage squeeze in China means that there are many more men of marrying age than there are women available to marry them. This imbalance is the combined result of the country’s former one-child policy and the cultural preference for sons. The one-child policy, a government program that was in place from 1980 through 2015, limited many Chinese families to having only one child. Under this policy, many parents elected to abort female fetuses so they could have sons instead. Newborn daughters were often abandoned or placed for foreign adoption. Over time, these patterns of behavior resulted in a population with 33.59 million more women than men in 2016. In China, 48.55 percent of the population is female compared to a global average of 49.55. By 2020, thirty million men will reach adulthood in China without any
women available to marry them.

  Those who study changes in population both inside and outside China are concerned about the effects of this marriage squeeze on Chinese society as a whole. Millions of young men with no marriage prospects can be a dangerous situation. Experts predict effects on crime rates, drug use, and violence as these young men face life with no prospect of marriage.

  GO TO 78.

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  If you’re not married in a place like Denmark, it’s probably no big deal. That’s especially true if, instead of being married, you’re in a cohabiting relationship. It’s fairly common in Denmark for couples to live together and have children without ever getting married. Among those over the age of twenty, 14 percent lived in a consensual union in Denmark in 2011. This is higher than the average for the entire European Union, at 8.8 percent of the population. Some of these couples may get married eventually, but it’s not a big deal if they don’t. Many of the laws in Denmark and other Scandinavian countries have changed to reflect this emerging reality, granting cohabiting spouses some of the same considerations usually given to married couples.

  If you live in a place like Denmark where fewer people are getting married, it might be a sign of a larger transition in marriage as an institution. Perhaps people don’t see marriage as particularly important or necessary anymore.

  GO TO 78.

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  In the United States, most people eventually get married, even with the high rates of divorce. Even people who divorce mostly end up marrying again. Still, if you never get married, you probably won’t be viewed as a complete freak. When you’re younger, it won’t be seen as that unusual that you’re not married. The average age at first marriage in the United States has been creeping steadily upward for years now. Currently, the average age is twenty-seven for women and twenty-nine for men. That’s up from twenty and twenty-two, respectively, in 1960.