Friendship, Gender & Feminisim

Before I dive in here, I want to set the stage by sharing some things that have happened over about a month now. As a result of being cooped up at home, I’ve started reaching out to people that I haven’t talked to in a while - some old colleagues, college friends, and even one of my high school friends. Woot! For the most part, this has been great. It’s nice to reconnect, even if it is only for a moment in time.

However one of these experiences with a college friend has been more interesting and challenging. Initially things seemed great. Our first conversation almost felt like a journey back in time. It was light-hearted and fun, mostly small talk and catch up. Afterwards I was optimistic there were some common threads to connect on and a renewed friendship would blossom.

We’ve since had several more conversations, but they have been quite a bit more mixed. He’s definitely an eccentric character, and has always been somewhat indifferent to or oblivious to societal norms for behavior. In my 20’s that was somewhat endearing and liberating, at least to a point, however for someone in their 40’s it has definitely lost much of its charm. He has frequently crossed the line between reasonable eccentricity and ignorance, to just plain being rude, overly self-centered, and sexist.

In our catching up, the topic of marriage and kids came up. Somewhere along the way it was assumed that it was my husband’s choice not to have kids, and that as a woman, I would clearly want them. The first time it came up I tried to be polite and explain that it wasn’t a priority for me, and at some point I just decided that I wasn’t interested. He still pushed on that a bit, but I finally got the conversation on to other things. If only that had ended it…

Our next conversation then consisted of him mansplaining how male and female bodies work and how babies are concieved - not sex part (thank god), the actual cell biology stuff. I assumed that he was bringing this up again to talk about some decisions he made or was considering in his life. However, as this ventured back into how it isn’t too late for me to have children, it started to feel more like a sales pitch for me to birth his babies. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so dehumanized in my life.

Note that I say mansplaining not just because he was a guy. A guy explaining something to a woman does not automatically equal mansplaining. That requires a certain style of explanation that is both overly detailed and particularly condescending.

You might guess this was not the end of our uncomfortable conversations. More recently we were talking about our experiences working in tech. It seems an innocent enough start, but he wasn’t really interested in where I’ve worked or what I did. The part he wanted to dig into was my experience as a woman in tech. Specifically, how did it feel to work in a male-dominated industry.

For the record, I hate this topic. If you have worked in tech, you must have some perspective on this. Even those who haven’t should have some sense of what that is like. Afterall, there have been plenty of headline news events around the issue, as well as the harassment, threats and doxing that has often resulted from women speaking out about their experiences. I initially assumed, he just wanted me to validate that yes, this shit really does happen. Yet as I repeatedly told him I didn’t want to talk about it and suggested to him other ways he could learn about the issues and satisfy his curiousity. Still, he kept pushing the topic and I started to get mad. Rehashing this stuff just makes me angry, but I was also getting angry at him. I couldn’t help but feel that he simply felt entitled to my story.

With all that’s happened, I find myself weighing the pros & cons of continuing this friendship at all. Worse though, I find myself inclined to associate his behavior to the broader group, and say men and women just can’t be friends. It’s an easy out, but clearly a lie. However, I do have many men in my circles of friendship, and they all generally treat me as just a friend, not a woman friend. By that I mean that our friendship is based first on our common interests and shared experiences, not on my status as a woman and their need for a woman’s perspective. I expect to be seen as a person first, a unique and valued individual.

For the record, I’m also fine with giving that woman’s perspective, but I don’t want that to be the sole purpose of a friendship.

Hoping to salvage something from this effort, I’ve been pushing back on my college friend for some of his poor behavior and wording choices, particularly around his comments on women and relationships. He retaliated the other day by calling me a feminist. I must admit that I quite instinctively recoiled from that, and he certainly didn’t seem it to be a compliment. I’ve since thought a bit more rationally about it though, and I struggle to find a problem in supporting feminism.

Feminism - the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes. ~Merriam-Webster

So tell me, what exactly is wrong with that?

I discovered a TED Talk today that I particularly like around this idea that I want to share. The speaker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a Nigerian author. (I plan to read her book Purple Hibiscus.) She is an exceptional speaker, addressing this and issue wonderfully with a combination of pointed and humorous remarks. She also paints a picture that I relate to so very well, despite speaking of her own experience in Nigeria. Gender inequity is clearly a very global issue.

Looking back to my youth, I’ve been very clearly taught by both the men and women in my world that a feminist is not something that I should aspire to be. I think this results from a stereo-type of strong, independent women that don’t need men. This pushes it beyond aiming for equality, and instead aims to undermine the value of others. I don’t think that finding value for one group of people should come from devaluing another.

I’ve spent a lot of my life wishing that I wasn’t a woman. Things just seem like they would be so much simpler if I were a guy. And by this I’m not trying to say that I identify as a man or really want that. It’s just the recognition that I would have been so much more acceptable to others packaged up as a man. I would not have been judged so harshly for my interestes and aspirations. I might have been more able to find friends that shared my interests in giant space robots over dolls. Maybe I wouldn’t have been discouraged from careers in science in favor of having a perfectly acceptable career as a bank teller.

Yet, I will also aknowledge that it can also suck to be a man in this world. We have some equally crazy ideas about masculinity and manhood. There are clearly also socially acceptable and unacceptable roles that men are expected to play as well, and men do suffer for it. They are under a lot of stress and pressure, don’t live as long, and are also more likely to commit suicide. I suspect that at it’s core these societal ideals on masculinity and value was probably the main contributing factor in the end of my marriage, in both obvious as well as more subtle ways.

Bottom line is we all have our own crosses to bear. There are hardships for all of us in this life, and they don’t all stem from differences between male and female. We haven’t even touched on issues of race, politics, or economics. While that feels like a whole different beast, I’m not really so sure… If all we do is focus on the differences, I’m not sure that we can ever really come together.

I’m still not sure that I can feel good about being a called feminist, but I do believe deeply in the equality it stands for. I feel like this echoes the sentiments you hear from some around the slogan “Black lives matter”. Maybe there is a point in time where it is important to focus on a single group to help balance out inequality, but over time I think that we need to shift that focus back toward humanity as a whole. There should be happiness for all of us in this world.