I’m continuing my countdown to the official launch of A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans. (I know; I’m like a kid at Christmas. I’ve been looking forward to this book ever since I first read about it.) Since I can’t offer a full review (having yet to finish the book), I will sustain you with other topics related to womanhood (Biblical or otherwise) until then. Today: Our obsession with gender roles.
Have you ever experienced that awkward moment when someone asks, “So, are you the girl in your relationship”? Yeah, me neither. See, that’s because for most of us heterosexual cis-women, that question doesn’t even make sense. Well, okay, I think I’d rather be thought of as a woman than as a girl, since I’m an adult. But otherwise, I can’t think of a single time when I’ve been asked such a stupid question.
On the other hand, I can think of plenty of times when people have thought it was appropriate to ask me that question about my friends.
I’m not kidding. I have a disproportionate number of non-het and non-cis friends for someone of my religious background. For whatever reason, on more than one occasion and regarding more than one friend or family member, I have been asked which of my friends represented “the girl” in their relationships. This usually happens after I’ve introduced them to someone, say, at a party.
What the heck is the obsession with figuring out what presumed gender roles a couple takes on? I mean, when I’m with my friends and family, I don’t waste my precious minutes with them contemplating a) what their “roles” are in their relationship or b) whether or not they even have them. I’m actually not sure why I should care. Even back in my pre-ally days I never considered that sort of thing.
What surprises me even more is that it’s often people who don’t seem themselves to conform to strict gender-based societal norms who ask such nosy/inappropriate questions. One of my less Hollywood-style-feminine friends suggested that her lesbian friend’s preferences for dresses must mean that she’s the “girl” in her relationship with her partner. Resisting the temptation to ask whether this friend’s husband is the “girl” in their relationship, I politely suggested that I didn’t think that was the way it worked—both of them are women, not girls, and they are not role-playing at 1950s husband and wife.
It occurs to me that this is part of what bothers so many people about anything that isn’t heterosexual or cis. I think it might be at the root of why so many strong women are often referred to as “bitchy,” “shrill,” or “emotional.” Those are all things that challenge our long-established notions about what it means to be women. Sometimes, we feel we have to know who’s the girl because we want to revert to something we can understand, something familiar.
How about we make some effort to become more comfortable with the unfamiliar? I appreciate my friends who fail to conform to anyone else’s idea of what they ought to be or do. It makes me feel far less of a failure at being a “real” woman when I see that non-conforming women are successful, happy, and fulfilled in who they are. One day, we can let go of the notion that there are only two ways of being—”boy” or “girl”—and accept that there’s a whole lot more variety than that, even among those of us who consider ourselves entirely straight and cis.
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