Holding things

Recently Biffle and I were walking through a department store. He was carrying some towels, and I offered to carry them for a while. He said, "No--I kind of like holding them. It's comforting. I never got to hold things like this growing up."

I hadn't really paid attention up until that point, but he was sort of clutching them to his chest, with his arms wrapped around them. He said, "This is how girls held things. If you were a boy and you held your books this way, you got called a fag."

"How were you supposed to hold things?"

"Like this." He dropped his arm so that it was hanging straight down to his side. "Even if it was incredibly inconvenient and uncomfortable, you had to hold your books this way."

And then I remembered being in tenth grade health class, with a teacher whose qualifications for teaching were that he was the assistant football coach. He told us that guys naturally hold their books "like clubs," because that's how their bodies evolved from the "caveman days," and that girls cradle their books because their bodies are made for holding babies.

I don't remember how I reacted. When I was in tenth grade, I'd stopped wearing make-up, but I don't know that I'd started questioning biological determinism, so I probably thought, "Hmm. Clubs vs. babies, biologically programmed into our bodies. I guess that explains things." Meanwhile, the boys in the class were being trained in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to perform the version of masculinity that would keep them from being "fags." They were being trained down to the level of how to hold their books. And then the performance was so pervasive that the teacher could tell us that this was "natural," not culturally constructed.

Barbara Ehrenreich has an essay where she talks about how ridiculous it is to look at the way men and women perform their genders and presume that this is in any way "natural." She says, "It's like studying giraffes in a zoo and concluding that giraffes can't run."

These days, of course, I'm totally sold on the idea that gender is culturally constructed. "Natural" is one of those red flag words that always gets my attention and makes me skeptical. I think that almost every way in which men and women act differently from each other is based on training rather than something inherent in our physical make-up. And yet the subtleties of our gendered construction continue to surprise me--the small ways in which Biffle has been trained to exist in his body differently than the ways I've been trained, and the ways homophobia was used casually, pervasively, throughout his childhood and young adulthood as a tool for keeping him in line.