Day Thirteen

Oh, no! It’s the thirteenth! Run! Hide! Oh, wait, so what? I am not the superstitious type. I love the number thirteen (which is odd, because I usually don’t like odd numbers). All kidding aside, I have an essay for you tonight, an essay generated by my decision to ask Google what it thinks about women.

WHAT CAN I SAY ABOUT WOMEN?

I decided to Google the question in the title. Sometimes I get interesting things…usually I get interesting things. I get strange things. Nearly always I see certain statements made boldly and without qualification. Women are empathetic. Women are good communicators. Women easily connect with others. Women have warm and loving personalities. If this is what women are, I have to say I have never known any women. Most women I know can empathize…but only with things they have felt, because like everyone else, they can’t feel what they don’t know. Women may be good communicators, or they may not. Some women easily connect with others, I suppose, but a lot of them have to work at it.

Warm and loving personalities? If that’s part of being a woman, I am not one, nor was any woman in my family. Seriously. Women have personalities. These personalities vary. Some of them are warm and loving, some of them are cold and prickly, most of them are in between. We have the capacity to be loving to those we love, to tolerate those we maybe don’t much like, and many of us have the capacity to hate strongly when someone is not…whatever it is we want them to be. Many women put on a warm, loving face because it is expected, or it is needed for their job. Can you imagine what it’s like to be a day care worker, and you feel like screaming at everyone you see? It happens. But like men who have helping jobs, they have to hide the feelings they really feel and pretend. So here the best you can say is what I said above…women have personalities.

One site told me women are the most maternal people. Well, duh. Maternal refers to mothers. This is, at best, a tautology. Ultimately it says that women are more likely to be women. Seriously? Men are paternal…that can include some of the same characteristics as maternal – love, warmth, kindness, being a role model, helping bring up the kid, getting irritable when you’re tired and want the kid to leave you alone…wait, I think that last one just sort of snuck in there. But as a mother, I do associate that particular feeling with being maternal, just as much as the other feelings. Face it, mothers…and fathers…are human.

I also saw one place saying that women are born to be multitaskers. That is one hell of an enormous statement. Born? To multitask? No, really. We are born to work more than one job at a time. In short, women are born to be the caregivers, the housekeepers, the child rearers, the cooks, the dishwashers…because all of those jobs will, sooner or later, involve high levels of multitasking. These are also jobs that are learned. I have not yet met anyone, male, female, or Martian, who was born to do any of these things. They had to be taught. They had to learn. And multitasking doesn’t come naturally; you gain it with practice, over years of chores and duties. Men can do it, too. Ever watch a professional chef in action? Male or female, they multitask. And that’s just one example. Anyone who learns to drive must learn to multitask, because they must be watching everywhere, keeping their feet ready to change pedals, staying in their own lane, driving the right direction, keeping an eye on the gas gauge…I don’t need to name all of this. Most of us know it.

To be honest, there is a lot of debate and controversy over how much of our personality or other characteristics are part of our genetic makeup and how many are learned. You might point to the fact that women in many cultures are able to multitask. Yes, of course. Women in many cultures have been taught to multitask. It is part of the cultures we live in, and at the moment, it isn’t really possible to sort out with any finality what is born and what is made. Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise; they are extrapolating beyond the data. Funny how those extrapolations usually tend to be in the direction of what we already believe.

I do notice a lot of these characteristics, when enumerated in some sort of list, are accompanied by the words ‘according to science’ or may just have (science) in parentheses after the statement. Just because there has been a study doesn’t mean something is supported by science; it just means there has been a study. Has the study been done well? (Spoiler: most of them aren’t.) Do the data show what is claimed? (When I first started studying science, I was shocked to find a number of printed articles where the data, listed in the article, did not actually say what the written prose claimed it did; you have to read carefully.) Has it been repeated? (Most haven’t; a single study, even one that is well done, random, representative, and controls for other possible interpretations, needs to be repeated. Humans are variable, and you can get a positive – or negative – result simply by chance.)

I have never seen any characteristic of a woman, short of the strictly physical, that fits what I see when I talk to women, work with women, listen to women. Some women, usually a few, will incorporate that characteristic in full or in part as a portion of their personality. Most won’t. I also find men who incorporate those characteristics, some of them with more so-called feminine characteristics than most of the women I know. We are not a monolithic sex, and trying to say we are loving, caring, empathetic, multitaskers is mistaken.

I know, it sounds so good, right? Being loving? Caring? Empathetic? Who can find fault? The problem is, so many of us don’t fit that description, we are dismissed as ‘unfeminine’. We are required to put on a face that fits the feminine ideal. Women are supposed to smile, to speak softly, to not get angry, to cede the floor to the male colleague, to rush out of the room to use a breast pump or rescue the child from a bully. That severely limits women’s choices. It even limits the choices of women who don’t do those things, because people (employers, colleagues, teachers) expect she will at any moment…and if she doesn’t, she has to juggle constant demands to know what’s wrong with her. Why don’t you have children? Why do you leave your children at daycare? Why does your husband have to do the dishes after dinner? It is ENDLESS.

There is no way to be a woman that will satisfy people. Not just some people; it seems all, or nearly all, people have expectations of what a woman should be, and are uncomfortable to the point of distress when a woman fails to live up…or down…to what they expect. For many of us, those expectations may be so hidden we are unaware of them, until we sense the disapproving frown on our face as someone steps out of the expected boundaries. I sometimes find I do it, and I am shocked that I could be harboring such a sexist thought. I’m glad, though. It gives me an opportunity to visit with my expectations and perhaps figure out why I feel that way, and to question what right I have to judge another woman’s choices. If those choices affect me, sure, I could have that right. Otherwise? I may be overstepping my feminist boundaries.

So if you are tempted to write a description of women that include any personality traits at all, roll your chair away from the keyboard, go get a big glass of ice water, take several deep breaths, and look at yourself in the mirror. Give yourself a great big glare, just for good measure. Then sit down and think about the women you know. Unless that trait is present in all or nearly all of them, don’t write it. Even if it is, make sure it is real, and not the playacting women do to avoid having to explain that, yes, a woman can be unloving, unsympathetic, uncaring, unemotional, or whatever other shit has been laid on her head. Then, if you determine it is present in all of them, tell your fingers to get off the keyboard, turn off the computer, and forget about it.

It is not yours, mine, or Google’s job to say what traits make up a woman. Each woman brings different things to the problem, and we are not all alike. We are humans, and we are a huge mass of contradictory characteristics, individually or as a group. Whatever you think a woman is going to think, do, or say, you will soon meet one who refuses to cooperate with your expectations. She may have no makeup, be wearing flats, have short hair, be wearing jeans and a t-shirt with no jewelry. She may not be smiling. She may be calculating something mathematical. She may be prickly and unapproachable. Fine. She can do that. Don’t tell her to smile. Don’t tell her how pretty she would look if she wore makeup or did her hair differently.

So how should you approach her? Don’t. If she is not a member of the family, a friend, a colleague, or someone else you have a reason to approach, leave her alone. She has a right to ignore you. Let her.