Dumb Girl

I'm all up in my head, rethinking your feminism.

Everyone knows girls play dumb. It's a pretty fool-proof manipulation tactic: the hapless damsel requires assistance. I play dumb fairly frequently, or at least I take on a position of weakness in relation to whoever I'm interacting with.

But do I really do this because I'm female? I'm not so sure.

Certainly, it would be an easy out to point to pressure that girls come under to conform to standards of femininity that have been seriously influenced by Victorian mores of silent, subservient women. It would be easy to cop out with some pithy denunciation of society at large that told me for most of my childhood to sit down and shut up.

But it would be false.

Don't get me wrong: I was certainly told to sit down and shut up during my childhood. Repeatedly, in point of fact. In my very early youth, I was a talker, a mover, a smiler. I was a charming toddler, always asking ever-so-slightly intrusive questions of total strangers and winning them over with toothy grins and slightly-above average verbal skills. Not everyone was charmed, as you might imagine, particularly not in institutional settings. Daycare workers both loved and hated me; so did teachers.

So I was told to sit down and shut up. Repeatedly.

But I was also encouraged, with gentle prods. Every time someone answered a question of mine I was emboldened to ask another one. Every time I smiled at a stranger on the street and they smiled back, I was fortified to do it again.

Further, I doubt that the impatience I was up against had as much to do with my gender as it did with a general fatigue at dealing with a willful and noisy child. I'd have faced much the same reaction (I think) if I'd been male.

But then I ponder that sentence, and I'm not so sure. How would I know what would have happened if I'd been a boy? I don't. I certainly don't recall watching boys get treated differently than I for similar behavior, but I was a narcissistic little thing. I may not have noticed anyone else, boy or otherwise. And I certainly find that as I got older, there was a unique sort of pressure I faced as a a person with tits and a snatch.

Then again, people with cocks and balls faced pressures that I didn't have to deal with.

So how do we sort through all the various layers of pressure to determine whether gender has a significant impact on anything in our lives?

I will never go so far as to deny that being female has shaped my psyche, but I have no idea how my gender has affected my perception. Further, I'm uncomfortable apportioning any particular foible to gender, because there are so very many things that go into making someone crazy that it feels like a cop out to point to something so big, obvious, and unchangeable as the naughty bits one was born with.

I do play dumb. I do play weak. But I'm hesitant to say I do it because I'm female. It's effective because I'm female, and if it weren't effective, I would probably stop doing it, but I don't think my gender was the original impetus for trying weakness as a manipulation tactic. I think there are probably other, much more complicated and personal reasons for that particular development.

And, in all seriousness, what does a little weakness hurt? Who is hurt if I let the guy at the pizza place hold the door open for me? Who does it hurt if I let the guy walk me to my car because it's dark and I'm alone? No one. Everyone likes to feel useful, myself included. On an evolutionary level, we've segregated this usefulness in many ways, one of which is by gender: men are providers and women are caretakers. Since my natural inclinations are toward caretaking anyway, why shouldn't I play along with the role social pressure pushes me into?

And then, of course, I wonder if caretaking isn't my natural inclination at all, merely what I've taken on myself because of those pressures. Are the messages I receive really so insidious that they've steeped through my subconscious to my core without my even noticing?

I have no idea. I'd like to think not, and so I will operate as if such a thing has not occured.

But there is always a nagging feeling of doubt, a whisper I can't quite get rid of.

If I lived in a gender-neutral world, would I be the same person? I'm uncomfortable with the question because on the whole I like myself. I like who I am. But to ask this question posits that there may possibly be a better version of myelf out there, one I can't access because of the subtle conditioning I've been subjected to.

I hate this idea, and I'll deny that it has any real validity for a variety of reasons, including my extreme distaste for anything that smacks of predestination or fate.

But I'm intellectually honest enough (occasionally) to wonder in my heart of hearts: What if?

What if, indeed.