Beyond Binary: Unpacking the Gender Wars

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Blogs February 15, 2024

The Ebb and Flow of the Sexes War

 

Considering the state of our nation, I think about what used to be called the “War of the Sexes.” By the 1950s, former Rosie the Riveter, needed during WWII, had been relegated back to the kitchen, bedroom, nursery. Then came the 1960s women’s movement, with books like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, imagining a larger place in the world, which kind of happened, until the Roe overturn reminded us it couldn’t be that simple. Before, it was said younger women, lacking direct experience, took for granted, didn’t appreciate, the sacrifices previous generations made, especially around “reproductive rights,” which at present seems like an oxymoron.  Not only were women “of childbearing age” young of course, but they, along with the rest of us, didn’t really “get” that in this country big issues are never settled once and for all.

Billie Jean vs. Bobby: Circus of Gender

In search of shifting generational zeitgeists, I find the circus-like, pop culture, of the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match (1973).  A PhD thesis (Andrew S. Jorgenson. James Thurber’s Little Man and the Battle of the Sexes: The Humor of Gender and Conflict. Brigham Young University. 2006) argued that, rather than hating women, the New Yorker humorist and cartoonist saw what Simone de Beauvoir called “the second sex” as the more powerful half of couples. Really?! And why was the actual divide treated as laughable, when whatever power women possessed back then was unofficial and covert?  Women only got the vote in this country about a hundred years ago. Until the late 1970s, we couldn’t obtain credit cards or bank accounts on our own. 

Historical Constraints on Women

Remember this particular “war” can’t ever be abstract. It invades, takes hostage, very personal, very intimate, women’s bodies and lives. Though “[v]irtually all states…. allow an abortion when necessary to save the life of the pregnant person….the laws don’t explain just how close to death the person must be before the abortion can be performed.” (Most state abortion bans have limited exceptions—but it’s hard to understand what they mean. The Conversation. January 26, 2024).  Turns out some states dusted off old laws, while others drafted new ones, both having little basis in medical realities. And so, we see and hear chilling reports of women forced to carrying to term fetuses with no chance of survival, of attempts to indict women who’ve suffered miscarriages. And compounding these traumas are deep legal, physical/health, emotional and economic wounds to women and their families. And OB/GYN doctors must choose between providing appropriate levels of care and risking legal consequences, losing their licenses, and wrecking of their careers. Many make wrenching decisions to leave their patients and states. The closest equivalent for men is war and resulting PTSD, which also plays out in and across bodies.  Katherine Ann Porter wrote, in Pale Horse Pale Rider, that “old men send young men out to die.” Numerous documentaries show “wounded warriors” who’ve come back emotionally and mentally wrecked, suffering “moral injury” from what they’ve seen and done.

Reproductive Rights Under Fire
Of course, these are complicated and thorny issues, made even more problematic since traditional control of women is much more deeply embedded than recent attempts at equality. In ancient Rome, Ovid’s Metamorphosis described punishment transformations meted out to women rather than to their randy god rapists who felt no need to restrain themselves. And think of Eve in the Garden of Eden with the snake and apple and Pandora’s box. Not that women have always been passive, “taken it lying down.” In ancient Greece, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata portrayed women refusing to have sex till men stopped making war.  Odd that men start and go to wars, but are considered rational, while women are not. In the late the Middle Ages’ Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath says, “If women had written as many histories as these cloistered scholars, they’d have recorded more wickedness on the part of men than all the sons of Adam could ever put right.” Margaret Sanger, who grew up years earlier in the community next to my hometown, watched her mother struggle, health ruined having one child after another. To give women choices, Sanger later founded Planned Parenthood and helped coordinate development of the first birth control pills.  And now, Texas women who’ve endured problem pregnancies, often resulting in dead babies, have joined in a lawsuit to demand greater clarity in interpreting that state’s draconian law.  

Descartes to Stardust: Mind-Body Split

Rene Descartes’ Cogito Ergo Sum (“I think therefore I am”) encapsulates the long history of splitting mind and body, which extrapolated to men (rational) and women (emotional).  Cartesian logic claimed “…control of animal inclination by thought, reason, and the will was what made us human.” Though recently called into question, this idea still exerts huge influence. (Antonio Demasio. Descarte’s Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Penguin. C1994). Thinking somehow became an activity that somehow occurred outside the physical body, though Descartes neither explained nor gave a location (!?). Now, that strikes me as highly irrational, and still doesn’t account for that extra something in humans. As my sister used to say, “We are stardust.”
American Literature and Reproductive Rights
For insight on American character and consciousness, I turn to the poet and physician William Carlos Williams.  In his In the American Grain (New Directions. c1935), he contrasted Thomas Morton, author of the New English Canaan and host of the Maypole of Merry Mount, with his Puritan neighbors, who “….without grounds on which to rest their judgments of this [new] world, fearing to touch its bounties, a fissure takes place….—and everything’s perverse to them.” That included Morton, arrested and transported back to England for consorting with and providing guns to Native Americans. And perhaps having too much fun? And “[t]rustless of humane experience, not knowing what to think, [the Puritans] went mad, lost all direction. Mather defends the [Salem] witchcraft persecutions.” All but a few of the executed were women, accused of “consorting with the devil.” In his play The Crucible, Arthur Miller used the trials as a metaphor for the 1950s Red Scare, another time of communal madness.

Moral Experiments on Reproductive Rights

Not really a surprise then that the country has become an outlier on reproductive rights. We’re prone to “moral experiments.” Think Prohibition, which Americans widely tried to ignore and get around, leading to an erosion of confidence in law and allowing the Mafia to solidify its criminal reach. This initiative again puts us out of step with the rest of the world and even with many of our own citizens. Catholic Ireland voted to legalize choice, while many largely Catholic countries in Latin America are gradually moving in that direction. Given the opportunity, citizens in several US states have voted against extreme bans enacted by their legislatures. Not surprising either, given our truncated history of rights, that women are subject to backlash and backsliding. Patriarchy remains the default, operating on autopilot. Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me (2020) was released prior to striking down of Roe. But even then, she stressed that the basis of the original ruling was women’s right to privacy rather than equal rights, which current events yet again prove women do not have. So, our status as full citizens has always existed on shaky ground.

Unresolved Endings, Fluid Frontiers: Portelli

Alessandro Portelli linked American literature and national character. “Deliberately weak endings…. in many American literary classics…. [allow] alternative possibilities and multiple choices….” (The Text and the Voice: Writing, Speaking, and Democracy in American Literature. Columbia University Press. c1994). “Eventually the telling must come to an end, but the story goes on.  Narrative and geographical openness may be a message of optimism; it is also a safety valve against tensions that do not dissolve when the book is closed…. America is an open country and because its contradictions stay open, its conflicts unresolved.”  So, racism and sexism persist, along with related questions of who “belongs” and who does not. And given cultural traditions, can women yet be said to fully belong outside the home base?

If, as per Portelli, writing is “a way of controlling time,” what can we say of the ephemeral, confrontational, online communities where we’re still getting our bearings? I note sloppiness, frequent typos and/or missed or misspelled words, even malapropisms (wrong but sound like) tapped out in the rush of frenetic, 24/7 “news” cycles. Print journalism and reporting are no longer present to curate, organize, fact check. And once something’s out there….no taking it back, retracting, correcting.  This further amplifies “America’s fluid frontiers, its composite, mobile, egalitarian democracy, the degree to which it seems, more than any other nation, to live in the present…. improvisational, digressive, expansive, fluid…?”  And again, the “…missing endings weave together a sense of emptiness and a sense of expansion, of possibility and chaos—the deeper opposition that lies at the heart of the American dream—the opposition between endless optimism and ultimate desperation.”

Verbal Wars: Lakoff and Johnson

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson posit an ”argument as war” model that feels highly relevant to this moment. (Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press. c1980. Afterword 2003.) “Best minds have tried to develop more effective means, but basic structure remains essentially unchanged. This though “Part of being a rational animal…involves getting what you want without subjecting yourself to the dangers of actual physical conflict.”  Yet we still can’t seem to manage it, as seen at present in the Middle East and Ukraine.  And we choose up sides domestically too. “Using whatever verbal means you have at your disposal—intimidation, threat, invoking authority, insult, belittling, challenging authority, evading issues, bargaining, flattering, even trying to give ‘rational reasons.’ Like taunts from playground bullies? “Because I’m bigger? Because I can make you?”

Trauma on the National Stage

But what if we could step back and view the current standoff as traumatic all around? “Trauma hurts, it can fill us with reflexive fear, anxiety, depression, and shame. It can cause us to fly off the handle; to reflexively retreat and disappear [dissociate?], to harm others or ourselves.”  (Resmaa Menakem. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies.  Central Recovery Press. c2017).  And what of children born from such fraught, coercive, reluctant, ambivalent, circumstances? “…if the fetus’ mom experiences trauma….her baby may begin life outside the womb with less of a sense of safety, resilience and coherence.” 

Hope: Healing and Dialogue 

Menakem continues: “[O]ne of the best things each of us can do, not only for ourselves, but also for our children and grandchildren, [for society, country]—is to….heal our trauma.” Not sure what that might look like at the national level, but we’d surely need to start by getting better at talking to each other. I find encouraging signs, like a conversation with my hairdresser. She identifies as conservative, but she’s a woman too, and believes we need to talk more about these issues, maybe through committees made up solely of women. And on NPR, I heard a presentation among state governors from different parties on finding ways, even when we disagree, to try to listen more and treat each other better.

Good to know that public and private folks are thinking about these difficult issues. Still, I’ll admit I find it even more hopeful remembering this country never permanently resolves major issues.  So, abortion was illegal and then became legal for 50 years and now it’s legal in some places but not in others. And I expect the issue will come back around as the dust begins to settle. We can only hope individuals, families, communities don’t suffer too much damage in the meantime.  
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