Gender Roles Have Already Stolen Our Freedom
The threat is already here.
When Danusha Laméris wrote a poem about feeling limited in your own body, she chose to write about a woman. I was young when I first heard that poem, listening to a podcast, staring at air as a man’s voice read “Bonfire Opera” into my headphones.
When he said, “I wanted to be that free inside the body,” I felt something in me burn with helpless recognition.
I wanted to be free. But I didn’t think I could be.
If you tell a story enough times it becomes true, and the story of feminine powerlessness is an old one.
We have a history of raising women on stories of motherhood, of softness. A history of pointing at their bodies as they walk down streets. A history of expecting, expecting, expecting.
Our world molds women in our stores, our hair salons, our houses, our schools. Our world beats women into mush with “too young,” “too old,” “too skinny,” “too fat,” before pressing them harshly into a different sort of shape.
And women become quieter, or maybe louder. Endlessly frustrated, or endlessly hopeless. In some way or another, they are controlled.
Eating disorders, though they can affect anyone, are uniquely feminine.
Researchers studied a group of 496 girls from ages 8 to 20. 13.2% of them had suffered from a DSM-5 eating disorder by the age of 20.
13.2%.
That’s too many.
Others are at risk of clinical eating disorders too, but women are disproportionately at risk.
Maybe it will be our daughters. Maybe it will be our sisters, or our lovers. Maybe they’ll be the next to suffer from the most deadly mental illness we know of.
It’s no coincidence that eating disorders often revolve around weight loss and control. It’s no coincidence that weight loss and control are arguably the two societal ideals which are forced most harshly onto women.
I was fifteen when I stopped eating. Or at least, stopped eating much.
I had so little energy that I had to motivate myself into walking down hallways. I screamed during nights from muscle cramps. And I wasn’t doing it for weight loss, really. I was doing it for control.
I wanted to be that free inside the body…
I relished in my good grades and ran my hands over my poking-out bones and in them I saw a million expectations I was finally meeting. I was in control.
But I wasn’t in control, even then. Especially then.
I just wanted a sandwich.
To meet societal ideals, we give up ourselves, our control. But if we don’t meet societal ideals, we are constantly told that we aren’t in control. No matter what, we aren’t free.
If you tell a story enough times it becomes true, and the story of masculine invulnerability is an old one.
In a world borne of patriarchy, men are pushed into perfect power. The careers and the rationality and the muscles and the women, those are for them. Men aren’t weak. They’re powerful.
And any slight contradiction of this ideal is considered a transgression of masculinity. Don’t talk too high. Don’t order your coffee with too much milk or sugar. Don’t act like a girl.
Don’t cry.
Depictions of men in media don’t handle imperfection very well.
As YouTuber schnee points out, traits and tendencies of men are often depicted as causes of incredible societal success or, conversely, denounced as flaws which cause utter failure. A strict binary with no grey space.
We read books which depict men like this. We watch movies and television shows. And we internalize them.
After all, what sort of man isn’t powerful?
We’ve been criticizing others for their masculinity being fragile. But masculinity as a concept in our society is inherently fragile. Our society sees masculinity as a grip on power with an unreasonable set of rules.
After all, what sort of man isn’t powerful?
Masculinity is beautiful. But not when it’s like this.
If you tell a story enough times it becomes true, and the story of a gender binary is an old one.
Men. Women. They have societal roles. They have sex. They have children.
That’s it.
Transgender people aren’t real. Lesbians aren’t real. Neopronouns aren’t real. They’re something contemporary, something made up. They’re as pretend as unicorns are.
Many people point to a history which is devoid of queer individuals. They use it as evidence that queer people aren’t real enough to be respected.
They point to a history which is a blatant lie.
Both queer and gender non-conforming individuals existed in indigenous communities prior to European colonization.
Many queer people served during World War II. Thousands of them were victims of the Holocaust.
“[Q]ueer cultures flourished in Roxanne, Virginia in the late 1960s and 1970s,” states historian Gregory Rosenthal, “only to be displaced by a combination of police repression, urban planning, and gentrification.”
No matter what, we aren’t free.
But a history devoid of queer individuals is convenient.
If we wipe queer people from history either in our minds or in reality, through violence or neglect or intimidation, it’s easier to pretend that they don’t exist. That they never existed to begin with. That they aren’t real.
We pretend. And our gender roles are protected.
Gender roles strangle our society. They cause pain. They cause deaths. They control us. They’re detrimental to all of us.
But not all of us are willing to acknowledge that.
Soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade in yet another ruling which took autonomy away from women, a Supreme Court Justice denounced decisions which provided rights to queer people as “demonstrably erroneous.”
And I watched with horror as people stood in support of him.
So many people around us stand in favor of gender roles. Escaping them can seem impossible.
But the reality of gender roles will continue to exist. Gender roles will continue to cause pain, cause deaths, control us.
One way or another, we will confront gender roles.
We will fight them. We’ve already started to fight them.
And maybe, one day, we’ll be free from them.
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