bones

Dear World,

I've got a couple bones to pick with you. I'm going to preface this post by saying that I almost always regret decisions I make in the middle of the night, and deciding to create this post might end up as one of them, but maybe the ideas I want to get out have less sting than I estimate in my insomnia.

Hope I can stay lucid long enough to get these out.

Here are my issues. On the surface they seem to be pretty disparate, but at the end I'm going to try to link them all together, thus preserving The World of My Mind as a place where at least some logic happens.

(1) Gender.

That's pretty broad. And I don't have an issue with the concept of the existence of gender. Rather, I have been thinking a lot about what it means for me to be A (short-haired, strong-willed, sometimes caustic) Woman and even more what it means to be A Woman in respect to what it means to be A Man, and what it means to be A Human.

I'm part of a group that meets once a week to talk about gender issues, especially in Mormon culture, and we've come to some interesting conclusions about ideas like what it means to be "equally-yoked" in a marriage relationship and some even more open-ended speculations about things like why women don't have the priesthood.

But this week, my friend Will made a couple comments that are reshaping the way I look at gender issues. Will's point is basically that beyond being men and women with a distinct gender, we are all people. It can be easy (and fun!) to generalize about gender traits: women are more nurturing and likable, men seek risk and leave the toilet seat up, etc. But even if those are the statistical tendencies, there are so many exceptions to the "rule" that I don't know if I want to keep calling it one. Why not just say, "Some people are nurturing" and "Some people are averse to risks, while some people thrive on them"?

Why do we care so much about gender differences?

This question is really pertinent to another concept I'm trying to work out: human relationships. For this week's meeting of the infamous Feminist Support Group (though we probably shouldn't call it that - we'll be black-listed on BYU campus), we read this talk by Roy Baumeister, a psychology professor at Florida State. He's got a really provocative and really pertinent argument that I'm going to unjustly sum up thus: for biological reasons, men are more competitive, risk-seeking, and tend towards extremes, while women are more are more risk-averse and tend towards the statistical middle of society. That, says Baumeister, is why while you see men "on top" of society - as CEOs, major literary figures, politicians - you also see them "on the bottom" - in prison, homeless, repairing your septic tank. He also claims this explains why men "specialize in" ephemeral, shallower relationships and women "specialize in" intimate ones.

But do we? That's the gender stereotype: men struggle to express their feelings and so have more superficial relationships, while women crave a soul sister with whom they can share their every hope and dream and fear.

But wait! Don't all humans want and need both kinds of relationships? I guess I can stomach Baumeister's argument with language like "specializes in," but my basic point is this: human beings - men and women - need close, intimate friendships as well as a shallower network of acquaintances. How can you split that on gender lines?

My friend Adam suggested to me that perhaps rather than "preferring" shallow relationships, some guys (and I would say people in general) just don't know how to go about forming intimate ones. But that's just a basic human need, right? And I know several of men who express their emotions better than I do, who are better at forming intimate friendships.

Maybe I'm overstating my point, and I probably shouldn't tackle Baumeister on this issue, but there is a part of me that wants to simply talk about the way human beings are. Yeah, men and women are different chemically and biologically - just as Louann Brizendine, author of The Female Brain and The Male Brain. But there is so much that is just essential to human nature that I sometimes wonder if we don't perpetuate gender inequality and stereotypes when we talk so much about gender differences.

Tell me if I'm wrong.

Moving on, though.

(2) The Future and Talking.

What? I'm graduating? You mean, I have to plan my life? I don't know what I'm doing. I can't give you any more information, because frankly, I don't have it. All I know is that I want to keep going with my education. I am finding again and again that I thrive on discussion, conversation, on an exchange of ideas. Though I have loved my time at BYU, I want to add new voices to the dialogue I participate in. At BYU, I share the same foundational beliefs with the vast majority of people I talk with, but I'd like to mix it up a little.

Here's another bone to pick: frankly, the gay-bashing, the reluctance to thrust religious culture under an academic microscope, and the speeches borrowed from Glenn Beck (which are mercifully few - I screen my friends' media consumption) are exhausting. I'd like to switch it up.

(I also realize that when I "screen my friends' media consumption" I'm expressing the very kind of bias I'm trying to escape, just in the opposite direction - wanting to disregard a voice one disagrees with. But seriously, Glenn Beck? Starting your own "university" to program masses of doctrinaires like yourself?)

I would like to hear new opinions, new perspectives. What does that mean for my future? Applying to grad schools outside Utah. Seattle? Madison? New York? Chicago? Philly? New conversations with new people.

(3) Provocation.

I am discovering something perhaps a bit distasteful about myself. I like to provoke a reaction in people. For example, in my office, I have already earned the reputation of being feminist, whatever that means. A brief anecdote: my friend Camille works with the wife of one of my coworkers. In the process of figuring out who I was, the wife said, "Ohhh Grace the feminist!"

I absolutely relish that, and I try to push it as much as I can, evidenced by the questions I pose and the comments I make, my frequent references to castration and my increasingly boyish hair. I walked across campus holding my friend Jourdan (she's a girl)'s hand just to get a reaction. I want to get under people's skin, I want to ruffle their feathers, I almost want them to dislike me for putting my (slightly subversive) ideas out there.

My feelings on this are mixed. The adult in me says, "Now, Grace. You don't need to please everyone, but trying to push their buttons is more than a little disrespectful." The angry adolescent in me says, "Haha! You can't stop me! And these conservative suckers really need to be pinched, prodded, and if worse comes to worse sucker-punched (metaphorically speaking, of course) into seeing that the world still exists outside of Provo and it's a lot more complex and nuanced than they think!" I leave it to you and the future to decide where my ultimate sympathies lie.

ALRIGHT, enough already. If you've made it to here in this post, I applaud you. I'll probably even bake a cake for you because you probably burned all the calories in three and a half slices in this marathon of a rant.

But I did promise I'd tie this all together, which I'll do in just one sentence:
I want to talk (bone #2) about gender issues (bone #1), but careful, I might scare you off just for the fun of it (bone #3, which I'm actually picking with myself and not with The World).

À la prochaine, cher lecteur.