My friend Becky successfully made over a long-term boyfriend by using positive reinforcement. “He was a great guy — I loved his heart and soul but not his style,” she tells me. “He had a cheesy perm and used to wear cardigans tied over his shoulders with pink polo shirts.”
So she changed his style, made him over into something else. But it backfired. She “made him too cool and attractive to other women” and he ended up sleeping with someone else. That’s what happens when you try to change someone, I guess.
I just don’t understand this idea of people wanting to change their significant others. If a man was telling his girlfriend that she should dress more sexily or to not wear specific items in her wardrobe, it’s being controlling, but when a woman hides a man’s t-shirt in the bottom of his hamper so he doesn’t wear it, it’s totally fine and cool. It’s not like The Frisky, the part of CNN I read this blog on, is a good reference for someone to read, but putting this out there just makes people feel like it’s appropriate.
I know we’ve all read about Caster Semenya’s gender testing because of allegations she’s not truly a woman. Read the article if you have more questions about that. It just brings some issues up with me about gender and sex that really bother me.
It seems that events like that that are segregated for men and women are done so because women cannot compete on the same level as men physically. While I agree this is usually true, there are plenty of women who can. I’m not advocating changing events or trying to prove that women and men are physically equal because we’re not (and btw, in my view as a feminist, when I express that women and men are equal, I mean rights-wise because we sure as fuck aren’t emotionally, mentally, or physically) and I am completely accepting that breaking genders up into groups is akin to breaking up wrestlers into weight classes. But the problem is that gender is not binary. I know, I know, old news, right? But where do we draw the line? Let’s say that Semenya has the body of a woman but for some reason has an XY chromosome. She is born as a woman, identifies as a woman, and is a woman. I feel like, and this is speaking from my opinion, not hers obviously, that trying to prove she is not a “real” woman is taking away from her identity.
As we know now more than ever, the way your external genitalia expresses itself is not always what is going on internally, genetically, or mentally. I also feel like it’s always women who come under this pressure, not men. Feminine men are not usually put under suspicion of possibly having too much estrogen.
Forgive any ignorance in this blog entry. Just trying to express myself in some way about how much it irritates me but I know I still don’t know enough to give an educated opinion.
