I meant to post this last week, but fate, or rather nature, intervened. The house we just moved into was in the path of one of the worst bits of wind from this weekend’s storm in New Jersey. A large number of not-so-small trees fell down and cut power lines all over our town, several of them in our street. We had no power from Saturday evening to late Monday night. This we could have endured - after all, one of the perks of living in a town as opposed to a city is that one can easily have a fireplace. Which we huddled around and kept a fire in pretty much nonstop. That part would almost have been fun, like going camping except without having to actually go anywhere.
The problem was that without electricity, the sump pump that keeps our downstairs dry stopped (go figure: it needs something to power it), so there was water all over the entire basement, which contains two rooms of the house, and what’s worse: the furnace. Not that that’s abnormal. But the water covered the part of the furnace that contains its control board (which is electric), which was fried, and without which the furnace can’t function, even after some electricity supply has been found.
I could go on and on about how stupidly I think these furnaces are constructed to have the control board so close to the ground. There were more than four inches of water this time but it would have taken a lot less to ruin the the control board. Which had to be ordered and so our furnace was not repaired until yesterday. Three days without heat may not sound like much but oh. my. lord. was it cold. We also had to get a generator to power the pump to get the water level to not rise in the basement. You can imagine what water had already done at that point to the carpet and some of the walls. We got off lucky: our personal stuff was not on the floor so aside from the bottom of some of the furniture downstairs, nothing of ours was really damaged, or at least nothing of real value. I guess it shows that I’ve lived around here long enough to know that you just don’t leave anything of value on the floor in a New Jersey basement.
Generators are serious business: one has to get up in the middle of the night and put gas into them so that the pump won’t stop working, which would then result in more destruction. Our landlord (or more precisely, his insurance company) foots the bill for repairs but even so, what a waste: all of the carpets downstairs were ripped out and parts of the walls. It’s all going to have to be replaced. What mystifies me, however, is this: there is some minimal backup for the sump pump, but nothing that would hold up in the kinds of storms this area regularly gets. As in: every other year or so. Why do people not have more serious flood management systems? Even with insurance this amount of flooding gets expensive… after all: there’s always a deductible.
But now to the original topic of this post, which I meant to write last week, before all this storm-and-flood-related digression.
There’s a pretty funny video of a Durex ad at Bitch Ph.D., involving a cucumber and a visit by one’s parents. As ads go, it’s very well done: it shocks and causes laughter - or outrage - but gets your attention. At Bitch Ph.D., it’s the occasion for another round of debate in the comment thread about whether Europeans or Americans are more sexist. I’m a European living in America and this probably colors my views - although perhaps I just have a different basis for comparison than someone who is consistently immersed in one or the other culture.
The video itself probably feels satisfying to a lot of European female viewers because in it, the women put one over on the men, who are never the wiser. Sure, there’s the subtext of female sexuality being a bit unhygienic. But the video suggests that as far as the women are concerned, this is known to be a cultural rule only, and as such one that doesn’t always matter: it’s not a problem of actual but of cultural hygiene, and as such it’s a rule that one can outmaneuver without much by way of pangs of conscience. So while the video maintains certain gender dichotomies (female=impure, male=pure) on the surface, there is another subtext that these dichotomies are known to be surface-bound.
The gender dichotomies in Europe are definitely held to be more sacred than in America, at least for the sake of maintaining the appearance of social order. On the one hand, this limits women in ways that American culture does not: women in Europe are much more strongly encouraged to conform to gendered norms of feminine behavior. And while many people are happy to conform to general social norms, there will always be a sizable minority who is not. It remains a huge problem that this minority is, basically, expected to stay out of mainstream European culture.
On the other hand, there is a kind of respect for traditionally feminine behaviors that’s not matched in American culture. In Europe it is okay to be “feminine” in appearance, behavior, and aspirations. Being feminine is, in some European countries (like in Scandinavia), so little looked-down-upon that in some things, like childbearing and childrearing, it’s beginning to be okay for men to be “feminine” in their aspirations too. I am referring to the availability of paternity leave for more than a few weeks at a time, which people actually do take sometimes. Come to think of it I’ve heard of more and more examples of men taking paternity leave in Hungary too, which is where I’m from.
But one thing I’ve never felt in Europe is ashamed of being feminine, or of behaving in stereotypically feminine ways like taking a nurturing attitude in social situations, which I think is simply a better way to exist in communities than stereotypically male competitive behaviors. The U.S., on the other hand, is so deeply against traditionally feminine behaviors that even a question that would affect most Americans like maternity leave is something that’s supposed to disappear from mainstream, professional discourse altogether. From a European point of view there is no such thing as support for childbearing and childrearing in the U.S. - you have to just be rich enough to endure the loss of pay while you’re on leave (unpaid leave) to give birth, and to pay for childcare if you should choose to go back to work.
And yet in other ways the U.S. is light-years ahead of Europe: it is simply pleasanter to exist here, day-to-day, as woman. In practical terms this means things like, it is not okay for men to comment on your appearance and whistle after you when you’re walking down the street minding your own business (I used to hate that with a vengeance in Hungary). And (this is important): if you DON’T want to follow traditionally gender-specific behaviors, in the U.S. it is far more acceptable to do so. And my personal view is that no one should have to be trapped in any one stereotype throughout their lives.
Yet now that I live in America I worry more about American attitudes towards gender - obviously. So for example about the kinds of problems within feminism itself that Feministing’s Jessica writes about in her article over at The Nation. To which article Gloria Feldt’s response reflects (as Jessica also points out) exactly these problems: it has a bit of arguing for argument’s sake, and, despite some language about letting everyone have their say, a clear drive towards a winner-take-all outcome in conflict instead of anything truly inclusive.
In my view, these are some of the worst stereotypes of masculine behavior.
Is this really how women have to become if we are to reach true gender equality? Why is it not possible to be a feminist WHILE also being feminine? For example - why is it bad to not want to bully people into my way of thinking but instead aim for compromises because of which the person I need to achieve consensus with and I myself both change?
I suppose it’s bad to be more traditionally feminine because it makes you look like you’re not distancing yourself from the constraints on your grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ lives. The problem is that distancing oneself from those constraints should not also mean disowning our female forebears’ strength in finding ways to be themselves within social contexts that did not quite acknowledge their experience. If we now completely disown and belittle the traditions (like feminine appearance and behavior, for example) whereby they made sense of their lives, I think we are no better than the social systems that oppressed them. Of course one should not therefore begin to value traditions that destroy women such as genital mutilation. I mean things like taking time out of one’s career to nurture and care for others, or just to have babies.
Because guess what: a society in which even feminists do not seem to get it that societal support for raising children is essential to everyone’s well-being, not just of those selfish mothers who frivolously betray the feminist cause by bowing to the patriarchy and wanting to have and care for children - I’d say that that society’s got problems with gender issues. (Bitch. Ph.D., by way of whom I came across the above two posts, has written eloquently about how children are a part of society and not just appendages of people who have them - something I thoroughly agree with.) I can’t help thinking that we’ll never achieve equality if we women keep putting ourselves down - and this putting-down of traditional forms of femininity is rather more American than European.
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