Rejecting The Battle of the Sexes

I first learned about the Great War upon coming to the United States. Before that, my ignorance was stupefying. I had no idea that there was a Vast Male-Wing Conspiracy to Keep Women Down. Then again, what did I know?

I grew up watching my parents working very hard and doing what parents usually do: keeping up a household, occasionally fighting, making up, and moving on with their lives. I saw the same thing in other households. I saw children, male and female, going to school, and being encouraged by their parents to go to school and do as well as they could. I grew up listening to my grandmother's stories about her youth, and everything she told me seemed perfectly natural. Her mother was illiterate, but my grandmother went into a university, graduated with honors and early. She had no choice. Honors students got extra rations, and she had to feed her family: her mother, herself, her younger sister, and a baby brother, whom she raised as if he were her son. That's what you did back then. You did what you could to support your family, whether you were male, female, or anything in between.

After she got married she stayed home with chilren, and my grandfather worked from day to night. But when the children grew a little older, she went back to work, acquiring a new profession. The women in my family were married to the sciences. My grandmother graduated as a veterinarian and later became an accountant. She always loved math, and accounting came naturally to her. My aunt went into physics and mathematics, and later, programming, and my mother majored in biology and chemistry. Both graduated with honors, and worked until they left for the United States. My cousin started out majoring in engineering, and later went into programming. I knew a number of women engineers. I didn't see anything surprising about it, though I found the description of the profession extremely boring.

The state needed as many people in the sciences as possible, to compete with the United States, to develop its industries. Women, men, what's the differences. They all do work. The state couldn't afford to cherry pick, and so women did the same thing as men, including many tough blue-collar jobs. The state practiced discrimination to be sure, but on the ethnic basis, rather than sexual. People I knew couldn't work in certain professions, not because they were women, but because they were Jewish. I knew the same thing would happen to me. My parents always taught me to be aware of my Jewish identity, to worker harder than everyone else around me so I could be equal in whatever way I could. And that, too, became natural. I saw young men and women dating, getting married, having children, and working. Together or apart. Some women stayed at home, but most worked. That's just the way it was.

So when I came to the United States, I was shocked by the eminent role gender identity seemed to be playing in politics, in households, everywhere I went. When I told my parents about the classes in Women's Studies they offered in many universities, including my own, they stared, goggle-eyed. When they learned about abortion being elevated to the rank of a national issue, they just shook their heads. They told me, doesn't this country have enough problems - the war on terror, the war in Iraq, economic issues, various scientific questions, illegal immigration - without this thing taking precedence over everything else? More so they were shocked when they found out how many women here stay at home instead of working. "And yet they complain!" - exclaimed my mother, who couldn't remember a day she hadn't worked.

Although I understood how the course of history led the attitudes here where they are, I was initially shocked just as much as my parents. I couldn't understand why people could just LIVE, why they had to turn every aspect of their lives into yet another day at court. Why turn personal relationships into adversarial positions. Why turn family life into issues of control and politics. I found the grand demonstration over various gender-related rights an excellent illustration of what to look for in a functioning democracy, but also personally distateful. I couldn't understand how one could use one's own body as an object for negotiations, lawsuits, loud articles in tabloids, catfights. I couldn't understand how one could turn such private matters into dirty laundry for everyone to see and discuss. If abortions are about privacy, they should be a private matter. They shouldn't be shouted about and bragged about. I was shocked at the lack of discretion and modesty when it came to the matters of pregnancy and "that time of the month", birth control and intercourse.

I loved the individual rights we were being afforded, loved all the opportunities I was being offered - but was disgusted with the way everthing was being turned inside out and covered with mud. I hated being made to feel that if I'm an activist for this or that issue many activists for "women's rights" deemed important, I was "betraying the female sex". The idea of "loyalty" to my sex was one of the dumbest things I've heard of. Being a woman is just something that I am... why should I consign that position of mine a special role? It's something I viewed as just a biological factor, like having brown hair or any other physical characteristics. I am a woman. OK. So I'll have to deal with some things women have to deal with... and do what everyone does. Finish my education and move on. I form my friendships based on character, not loyalty to some fictional principle. Raising one's biology to the level of something honorable or special seemed perverse to me. I learned away from the women who whined about their hard fate in life. They got on my nerves and didn't seem to accomplish half as much as all the people who just worked and achieved whatever their goals were.

Worst of all was having to see every part of my private life turn into just another opportunity for politicking. I didn't want to be politicized against my will. It felt... so dirty. So dirty to be expected to fulfill a certain role just because I'm a woman - by other women. So dirty, having to view half the world's population as my enemy, just because they are something I'm not. So dirty with all the in-fighting and the labeling and the clique mentality. I just wanted to be left alone and live my life as I saw fit, not the way so many well-intentioned "comrades" of the same sex thought I should be doing. I felt emancipated enough, thank you very much. And I didn't want people to lobby in my behalf, to take steps I disagreed with *in my name*. By making certain demands in behalf of "all women", by viewing their demands as expectations of "all women", they, the activists, I felt, were dragging me into something I didn't want any part in. Their demands are not necessarily every single woman's demands! I felt angry, because their behavior was only perpetuating certain types of stereotyping about women's behavior in general - and making a laughingstock out of us.

By turning gender into politics, I felt, the women who participated in these things and supported them were giving up the secret power of femininity, the covert power that I preferred to keep. Moreover, by going to the extremes, quite often, they were humiliating themselves. I was sick of politics, and I couldn't understand why on earth these concerns played such a powerful role in a country where women can wear whatever they want, can be professors, lawyers, doctors, Secretaries of State, CEOs, and anything else they wish. Where women can teach, while they are pregnant. Where women can be as "feminine" or not as they like. Where women are protected by law from domestic violence and sexual abuse (given their willingness to give up their roles as victims).

I preferred my ethnic identity to take the precedence over my gender identity. I preferred to exclude myself into the general category of the Jews, rather than exclude half the population and differentiate myself as the opposite of something else. I preferred to see myself as equally responsible for making the world a better place, instead of as responsible for waging a fruitless battle, with no beginning and no apparent end in sight. I preferred cooperation to adversarial stand. I preferred calm, energetic competition on equal footing to fights over trivial details. I preferred the choice of behavior towards individual members of the opposite threat to the a priori mistrust and aggression. Never mind that I *choose* to be mistrustful and aggressive most of the time anyway! But at least it is of my own accord.

So now I find myself in a very strange position, being forced to choose one of two identities, Jew over woman, though in reality there's no real necessity to choose anything. We have multiple identities and we balance them out every day. But it appears than whenever I see crowds of self-generating politicians, something pushes me to reject what they are promoting and to make a preference anyway. What does such choice entail? It entails making my national priorities more important than what would have been my priorities as a woman had I made a different choice. It entails not view men and women as enemies and friends but as equal allies, as fellow Jews. It entails being part of a group with common problems and interests. It entails thinking of building a family, perhaps a fairly large family even, as a mitzvah and not a limitation on my individual rights as a woman.

It entails exploring how male and female roles play themselves out within my culture instead of shouting "la la la I can't hear you, there are specific rights I'm entitled to, and damn it, I want them all and I want them NOW!" It means... It means I'm not obliged to stick to any stereotype, because Jews are all as different as they can be, and even if our mentalities can be so different and even hostile towards each other, in the end all the little prejudices balance each other out, and mercifully, I can be anything I want, without feeling any guild, except for the regular Jewish guilt. But that comes with the package, and is kind of fun, anyway. And my mom agrees! ; )

So here I am, a Jew and a woman, and many, many other things besides.

Content,
Irina