I am not the messiah

A preacher shouts to the gathered crowd: “you are all individuals!” and the crowd obligingly responds “yes, we are all individuals!”
The harmonious coherence is interrupted by a lone, wavering voice: “I’m not!”
Played for the laughs, this famous scene from The Life of Brian is of course a fine example of Monty Python’s craft, highlighting life’s ironies and absurdities.
But it’s actually even more “on the nose” than that man with a tape recorder up his (that’s another Monty Python reference, I can’t help myself).
See, the preacher isn’t a false messiah, or a very naughty boy for that matter, but rather feminism itself, come to liberate us from harmful and unfounded stereotypes.
“You are all individuals” — it’s a line we eagerly lap up and repeat ad nauseum.
And we keep on chanting it until we realise we don’t want to just be an individual like everyone else. We want to be an individual unlike everyone else. We want to be the lone voice in a crowd of perfect cacophony.
So we pipe up, on twitter, in magazine op-eds, on reddit, at the dinner table.
“I’m not like other girls.”
Then, of course, being creatures of pure reason (not like “other girls”), we need to support our status as the exception with some evidence and arguments.
Luckily for us, there’s loads of totally individual men doing that work already. One of them charitably wrote a memo this week, which conclusively argues that women are by their hormonal biological genetic evolutionary nature more directed to feelings and aesthetics than to ideas, more interested in people rather than things, better at artistic pursuits than systemizing, more agreeable than assertive, all relative to men who as individuals all have exactly the opposite tendencies.
[Breaking the third wall here but I really have to say how much I wish I was making this up rather than directly paraphrasing Google bro’s words.]
Women are also more neurotic, experiencing higher anxiety and lower stress tolerance than men.
All happy men are alike but each neurotic woman is neurotic in her own way. So said Tolstoy, who was a very emotionally stable man, presumably.
As I said, the Google manifesto was actually a blessing for us exceptional women, even though it did seem rather sweepingly damning of our whole gender on first read.
But I am very logical and thorough and systematic, unlike most women, so I read it again, and I noticed a very important qualification: on average. So there are exceptions.
Phew, looks like I can use this after all.
I compose a tweet: “I, an unusually sciencey woman, who by virtue of being surrounded by male nerds her whole life all the while being undermined and underestimated, have been incredibly motivated to dismantle tiresome stereotypes all on her own, AGREE WITH THIS MAN. I AM THE ONLY EXCEPTION. STEREOTYPES EXIST FOR A REASON. WOMEN ARE NATURALLY STUPID. I AM THE ONLY SMART ONE. THE FACT I’M THE ONLY WOMAN TO AGREE WITH THIS GUY ONLY PROVES MY POINT.”
Actually that took a whole tweet storm, and I couldn’t even fit in the #UnpopularOpinions hashtag.
That’s the thing with stereotypes; we internalise them. And then we perpetuate them. The stereotype threat is a very real phenomenon. The evidence is there for us to see, or rather the glaring lack of evidence. There are no women on my physics degree, my coding course, and the toilets at the tech conference are unsettlingly empty.
Though we, the exceptions, are more often than not extremely committed to feminism and gender equality, the risks are even higher for those of us who have made it through physics degrees, coding courses, tech conferences.
The stakes are higher when your existence is itself an argument, a counterexample. Somewhere along the line many of us build an identity around being an anomaly, if only because we were told we needed an extra special something if we were going to thrive in a man’s world.
Maybe that’s why I saw so many techie women on social media today expressing their extremely unique position in support of Google bro’s anti-diversity manifesto.
Accepting diversity, and the natural grounds for it, threatens our exceptional status. But the irony is that it’s that very anti-diversity argument telling us that our status as the exceptional woman, unlike all other women, is all we’ve got.
So we stand with the men and we bastardise Tolstoy another way, saying:
All women are like, but all exceptional women are exceptional in their own ways
Goddamn the patriarchy for pitting the exceptional women against each other so they can compete to be less like each other. All women are exceptional.
Goddamn the patriarchy for undermining our self-celebration for overcoming the social pressure trying to keep us down, for making us think that this success in itself isn’t enough to be proud of, that only being unusually brilliant for a woman justifies our achievements.
I’m not like other girls. But neither is anyone else. And I’m certainly not the messiah.
We are all individuals.
And I’m not.
