start of what may be a recurring discussion

I want to go a lot of different directions with this thing. I mean, I know the internet (teh internets? intertron? I'm not cool enough to know exactly what the proper slang would be) is public, but I honestly feel no obligation to write about one thing or another *for* somebody; it makes me happy to know people read, and occasionally enjoy, the blog, but it doesn't have the sort of pedagogical focus of a friend's blog or the keep-you-posted angle it did when I was abroad. There's no mission statement in that sidebar, and I'd like to think that I fulfill that mission rather admirably: some serious stuff that makes me angry, some funny stuff that I noticed and wanted to share, rarely some introspection or condemnation or calling-out of someone I know (i.e. whining)(worrisome both because I don't like doing it and because god only knows, any trash you talk on the internet will come back to haunt you). Anyway, I've been meaning to start writing about how I feel impacted by Serious Identity Issues (which some of you may know pejoratively as the -isms) for some time, and I think tonight is as good a time to begin as any--I have a bunch of writing for classes due tomorrow, and writing here makes me feel useful even as I put off completing assignments.

I'd like to start with a little post about gender (remember: socially constructed) and me, call it "performing masculinity". I hope that I've come a long way in the past couple years, and I hope to do justice to whatever sort of nuanced perspective I've managed to develop. So, since I like little feature-story lead-ins:

A couple years ago, near the beginning of college, I decided I was probably a feminist. I liked the ideas of "men can/should be feminists, too" and "patriarchy hurts men as well as women" (a paraphrase of bell hooks, if I recall correctly?), and figured that a fundamental belief in ending wage gaps/inequality was all it took to call myself a feminist. Yeah. Since then, I've had a chance to see all the ways in which gender roles play into my life, and, frankly, how I benefit most of the time from various aspects of male privilege. I have a couple sort of favorite examples (ask me about the garage owner in Jersey last summer, or about the lack of correllation between college GPA and post-college earnings when comparing men to women), but it's the little things that made me rethink everything. The enjoyment I get out of knowing about cars and how they work, the satisfaction of having the briefcase full of tools tucked under my bed, getting listened to when afterwards I realize I just totally interrupted a woman without even consciously picking up on it, the protection afforded to sports-related excuses, the universalism of sports-related smalltalk among men as a sort of base line of friendship, feeling safe walking around by myself on campus or on the street outside the downtown LA welfare office. I will be the first to admit that it would be really really hard to disavow this privilege, to disown this enormous inheritance of benefits I will be given by everyone I meet, even without asking, because I have a male name and a male voice and am pretty damn tall. In fact, I'm not even going to deny that some of these, like sense of direction or fascination with how mechanical things work, have been traced to concrete physiological gender differences independent of social whatever. Stopping people every time to challenge/attack/educate them about expressions of gender inequality like these, though, is tiring, and I don't think I can say in good faith that I do it--that's why I don't call myself a feminist anymore.

The problem I have, though, goes deeper than a whiny "It's toooooo hard to do." I'm pretty sure I genuinely enjoy some of these things. Social conditioning or no, I really do like knowing how car engines work, I really do enjoy the minutiae required of a conscientous fantasy basketball GM, and I will happily answer the random stranger who strikes up a conversation with me about the BCS because I'm wearing my Michigan hoodie. Maybe it's because these spaces are gendered and thus privileged (unequal) that they're comfortable. I'm not going to deny that there's a little bit of guilt every so often when I step back and look at all the things I did [today/this week/recently] that drew on the security, familiarity, camraderie of masculinity as it is popularly understood. Recognizing the social expectation that I make the first move with a romantic relationship and the power it gives me doesn't mean I don't fall into that role. It just means that I'm delineating the grades of in-between in the ever-important gulf between knowledge and action.

This post isn't a "feminists, tell me how to be an ally" cry for help. I've asked friends of mine already, and they've had some constructive suggestions: be the stenographer at a meeting, consciously affirm that you're listening, play Frisbee not like an ass, sympathize with and defend to others friends who are feminists. It's a start. Recognizing privilege is a start, too. The place where I get stuck (and still am stuck) is when I'm pretty sure there's stuff I'd be good at anyway, would like even without it being part of a current of privilege that has been flowing much longer than any of us have been around. I can't deny that car-knowledge and violent-movie-appreciation, and do-it-yourself repairs are ridiculously gendered, but I also can't deny that they're all *fun*, independent of how society chooses to spin them. I don't know that we, as in society, can deconstruct a set of norms that most people like at least some part of. Giving something up, something everyone takes for granted and uses frequently, is not going to be more popular than the status quo. On the other hand, it breaks my heart to know that I have friends who get the raw end of the social construction of gender deal every day. On a de-personalized, abstract level, gender values seem like a reasonable target, but when I look at my own life, I don't know what living without gender roles would look like--even when I'm personally acting "against type" (somehow subverting the construction of masculinity, which incidentally *does* cause people to ask me if I'm surprisingly often), that shared knowledge of what social norms actually are plays a role. It's tricky, I guess, is all I'm saying.