Overcoming the Status Quo

 

 

Double standards have always been a bone of contention for me. I’ve argued against boys being allowed to do things for no better reason than that they’re boys; likewise, I’ve walked away from any group that takes a “girls are better” stance. I’m not looking for # 1. I’m looking for equality.

No, I’m not saying guys should be participating in the Miss America pageant, or that women should be playing in the NFL, but if men want their own pageant, go for it. There is no gender limit on beauty. And if women want to play football, let’s organize teams. Some things, of necessity, need to be “separate but equal” rather than inclusive for the sake of safety.

Someone once called me a misogynist because I expressed a distaste for something that was uber-feminine, and I didn't care to participate. I am not. I have no issues with women and girls. I simply don’t wish to participate in some of the things I consider prissy.

When someone starts a sentence with, “Men are such…” and proceeds to a derogatory word, I have been known to snap, “Sorry, I can’t accept that from anyone who propagates the myth of PMS.”

That shocks some people. I’m not negating some people’s true pain. However, I have worked in all-women departments, and every time someone was in the mood for a candy bar or a pretzel (or both), the comment came back, “Oh, you must be PMSing.” How about, no, I was just hungry, and a candy bar appealed to me at the moment?

In that same department, the women seemed to enjoy announcing their periods to the room, as if they expected a prize. I once asked someone who did that, “Tell me, do you come out of the bathroom and announce which bodily function you just performed, too? That’s the same thing!” Personally, I don’t want to know. I don’t care to think about those things. At least when we had a guy in the department, that nonsense stopped. I was sad to see him go.

By the same token, I hate hearing guys refer to women and girls as “bitches,” or worse, the C word. It makes me wonder what barn they were brought up in that they were never taught that is unacceptable. Yes, occasionally an individual can act like a bitch, but the generalization is what I find repulsive.

I once went to see a comedian I wasn’t much interested in at a club. My friends thought he was fabulous. Once he opened his mouth, I thought otherwise. He couldn’t say more than two words without dropping an F-bomb. I’m no prude; I’ve been known to use the word quite liberally at times. But really, someone buy this guy a thesaurus. To add insult to injury, his jokes were entirely about women. If you were just learning English, you’d never know that. He never once used the word woman or girl. They were all bitches and c*&^s.

I can’t imagine that this guy ever had more than one date with anyone. I was so tempted to shout out, “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” but I didn’t. With his attitude, I couldn't imagine he had a wife to kiss.

The problem was, he wasn’t funny. Even if you substituted the word woman where he used other words, his “jokes” fell flat. I think shock value – which faded after the first five seconds – was all he had. My husband was with me at the time, and even he was offended by this guy.

I’m not miss prim and proper. The occasional vulgarity doesn’t bother me, as long as we’re not standing in a classroom full of children.

I find that people like that comedian tend to be the same ones who want to limit me because I have a second X chromosome.

It was enough that I had to struggle through my childhood trying to be allowed to do things without having outsiders trying to limit me as an adult.

My parents were definitely the chauvinists typical of their generation. That’s just who they were. While I was allowed to do some things with my brothers, I was prohibited from doing other things, even if other girls were allowed to do them.

When my brothers were between 5 and 7, there was a free gymnastics class for that age range, an attempt to get local children interested in gymnastics, I would assume. I couldn’t wait to be old enough to do that. It looked like so much fun. And of the three of us, I was the uncoordinated one. If anyone needed something like gymnastics, I was it.

When I turned 5 they had raised the age to 7. By the time I turned 7, they had discontinued the program. My parents made no attempt to find something similar for me, even though my brothers had organizations they belonged to, like Scouts.( And they’d participated in the now defunct gymnastics program.)

I was told there was no gymnastics around for kids my age. So, I turned to the next best thing: dance. My best friend was taking ballet, and she was younger than I was. I didn’t actually want ballet. I wanted to learn tap. No.

The first excuse I was given was that my mother didn’t drive, so I had no way of getting there (Let’s just ignore the fact that my best friend’s mother did drive and lived across the street). The dance studio was less than a mile away. It involved crossing the main street in our town, which I was allowed to do to go to the post office, and taking two back streets to come out on the road alongside the tiny shopping center it was in. I could have walked or even ridden my bike. No.

My brothers would have been allowed to do that much, which I pointed out. I was even allowed to ride my bike to my piano teacher's house in summer for lessons with my brother, and she lived farther away. Out came excuse number two: we can’t afford it. That was the excuse for anything my mother didn’t want me to do.

Scouts was the next thing. I knew lots of people who were in scouts. Both of my brothers were in scouts. I couldn’t imagine a reason my mother wouldn’t say yes.

She found one. No, I couldn’t join scouts. What do you want to do that for? (Oh, I don’t know, socialization? Learning to do interesting crafts? Camping?)

She wouldn’t allow me to join scouts because the only troop I could join that didn’t involve her driving was, according to her,  run by a group of women who sat around gossiping while the girls ran wild.  She didn’t want to get involved with that sort. To this day, I can’t imagine that’s the truth of it. What girls would stay? It sounded like some exaggerated tale she heard from a friend because someone they didn’t like was running the troop, and my mother ran with it. The irony was, after my mother learned to drive, and after I was in high school, she actually took over a scout troop when her best friend moved up to the next scouting level to be her daughter’s troop leader.

Then there was Civil Air Patrol. I could join that at 13. My brothers were in that. I was excited at the idea of finally being in something.

When the time came, I was excited to finally be a member of something. Yes, the older kids who were in charge of the various groups I was in had been in my position under my brothers, and used the situation to take their frustrations out on me. Yes, we had actual classes (after being in school all day) on airplanes, and flying, and things that didn’t really interest me, but I was waiting for their version of camping, SAR caps, which was training for going on search and rescue missions. Civil Air Patrol goes out on search and rescue missions, especially things involving plane crashes where planes and people are missing.

At the time, girls weren’t allowed to go out on Red Caps, which were the actual search and rescue missions, but they were allowed to go on the practice ones. This never made sense to me, but you do what you can.

For a year and a half, I attended my once a week meetings, the marching, trying unsuccessfully to learn left from right, the boring classes, just for a chance to go on a SAR cap that never seemed to happen. When one finally happened that wasn’t cancelled, it was the weekend I had to take my placement test for high school. Kids in public school don’t have things like that, but Catholic high school put people in tracks according to their academic level. So, I missed the SAR cap, since I couldn’t reschedule the test.

But that was okay. There would be others. 

There was a trip to Cape Kennedy scheduled. We would get to tour the facility, see the space ships and Mission Control, and everything else involved with space flight.

There were two weekends that they were sending people there, in the summer, so it wouldn’t interfere with school. I was set to go the second weekend.

The first weekend, something went wrong. I think it was either a hurricane or some serious storm, and the first trip was cancelled. Oh, how sad! I was glad I was in the second group, but I did feel bad for the first group.

I could have saved my empathy. When they told us about it, they also told us that they rearranged who could go on the second weekend. Only those who had been on the SAR cap were eligible, and this included people from the cancelled first weekend. They had a list of people schedule to go, and alternates for anyone who didn’t show up in time. Since I hadn’t been at the SAR cap, I was immediately eliminated. I was crushed. I tried explaining to the squadron commander that I had only missed the SAR cap because I had to take a high school placement test. Sorry, rules are rules. I, who never got to go anywhere, once again didn’t get to go.

The meeting after the second trip, the squadron commander came in to where everyone was assembled at the beginning of the evening. He was extremely angry. As it turned out, not everyone who was supposed to go showed up. And none of the alternates had shown up, so there were empty spaces. It turned out that if I’d gone to the airport they were leaving from, bags packed, I could’ve gone to Cape Kennedy. But there was no reason to suspect that would be the case, so I wasn’t there.

I was probably angrier than the squadron commander. He was the one who told me I couldn’t go. I had been eliminated even though I would have shown up no matter what, had I only known.

That was pretty much the last straw for me. I quit. I wasn’t going to put up with all of the slights and meanness of the older cadets for nothing. And when they asked me why I was quitting, I told them. I was kicked off the trip the weekend I signed up for, for no reason. I was tired of being the also-ran. My brothers got to do things. I did not.

At least when I went to high school, I was allowed to join some of the clubs I was interested in.  Because I was in Glee Club, I got to sing at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia at 15, long gown, opera gloves and all.

My mother still wouldn’t let me join the outreach club that worked in the poor neighborhoods near the school, since she didn’t want me “rubbing elbows” with “those people.” (What was it you taught me about not judging people?) I wasn’t allowed to join any peace marches, although she remained silent about the school having a peace moratorium over the Vietnam War, which was basically an assembly that took place by the flag pole in front of the school for about 45 minutes. That was a whole school event on the school grounds.

The one thing I did get to do that she wasn’t pleased about was when the glee club went to a school in, I think it was West Philadelphia, to join with their glee club and get to know each other, and teach each other songs that we performed. Our glee club took a school bus to the other school, in the middle of our school day – we were excused from class – and when we arrived we were welcomed. The school was in a black section of Philadelphia, and we were, while not segregated, a school from a white suburb. I think at the time one student at our school was black, and she wasn’t in the glee club.

It made no difference to any of us. The two glee clubs mixed together. We learned several new songs, and taught them a few that we were performing. Once everyone knew all of the songs, we had a performance, and had the best time. That afternoon was one of the highlights of my high school career, and one my parents almost didn’t let me participate in. Only the fact that our entire glee club was going allowed me to go.

Those of us who were in high school in the early 1970s were a tenacious bunch. We were determined not to let our parents’ prejudices stand in our way. Some of us, at least, didn’t want the efforts of people like Ruby Bridges to be in vain. We were outraged by the events at Kent State. We believed in the possibility of a better world, where color, ethnicity and gender wouldn’t be a barrier to anything. I just hope it wasn’t a dream to be shattered forever.