Identifying with the Oppressor

There's a really interesting post by Wemblee that I stumbled across on the latest Feminist Science Fiction carnival, about something I once had a running argument about with an editor from the Women's Review of Books. Her post is in response to another about the necessity of female characters and the call and response goes like this:

A lot of the people I know, online and off, identify a lot more easily with male characters than with female characters, which I suspect is one of the major stumbling blocks when we all try to discuss this stuff from equally well-meaning but very different positions. Because I don't identify more easily with men than with women. I don't know why that is. It wasn't, when I was a little girl, a political choice I made. It's just part of who I am, and it influenced the way I grew up and the beliefs I hold as an adult.

I'm reposting what I wrote there as a comment (and I feel a little silly for the comment, since it's kind of off-topic; I probably should've just brought it here). I've edited it slightly, because I'm anal-retentive.

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I think that's the stumbling place, as you say, in the debate, at least for me. I identify as a feminist, I love gender studies, women's rights is extremely important to me, and yet, I've always identified with male characters more. I understand that part of this is because I grew up in a patriarchal culture; I understand that part of it must be misogyny.

But when debates about misogyny in fandom, or in source texts, roll around, as much as I enjoy those debates for the most part, I often leave feeling like I'm a bad feminist since I always identified with those male characters reflexively.

Now the argument I had, which occurred when I was reviewing books that were both feminist studies of science fiction and science fiction by women (which is not necessarily feminist), was all about ideology. Like Wemblee, I too had identified with the male characters in the books I'd read, and I too enjoy the debates about misogyny (and why can't I spell that word?). The editor wanted me to change what I'd written about identifying with male characters to read as though that had somehow stifled me as a girl. But it hadn't. Like Wemblee, I left the argument feeling like a bad feminist, and I wasn't yet sure enough of my own feminist convictions or personal experience to tell the editor she had no business interpreting  my opinions or experience for me.

Is my identification with male characters due to growing up in a patriarchal culture?  In part, yes. Guys often had (and still have) the juiciest roles in fiction and movies, because they can. But that's a very different thing than saying that personal identification with male characters makes one a misogynist. One needs to aspire to something, and if the only roles one admires are filled by men, then that's what one identifies with, whether you're male or female. Otherwise, it's like saying that a guy who becomes a chef because his mother was a great cook is a misanthrope. Sounds silly, doesn't it? So why are we hobbling ourselves with this outmoded ideology? A better response would be a variation on "hate the sin, not the sinner": identify with the role, not the gender.

Now, I realize that I'm saying this from the perspective of a fairly privileged, middle class white woman. As a woman, I've faced a fair amount of misogyny and discrimination, but nothing like working class people of color have dealt with. But it seems to me that there is no other way to rise above where you are now than to imagine yourself elsewhere first. Do we need role models for our imagination? Isn't that limiting the imagination? Somebody's gotta be first, after all. Why not you?

Intellectually, I understand that the preponderance of male characters and the dearth of female ones, was/is soul-sucking for many women and girls, especially in science fiction circles. I'm not sure how I managed to have enough sense of myself for that not to be the case for me. Even after I absorbed a great deal of feminist theory, I was more annoyed at the ignoring of women and their physical silencing in the real world than by their lack of presence as strong characters in books. Maybe it was because I was an only child in a pretty matriarchal household that I grew up thinking I could pretty much do anything I wanted, and that just because a male character was the protagonist with special abilities and powers didn't mean I couldn't fill the same role myself. Identifying with a male character, for me, did not mean I wanted to be male; it meant I wanted to do those things that the male hero was able to do—and didn't see why I couldn't. It's not the penis we envy, Dr. Freud, it's the power.

I think one of the ideas that has gotten lost in the feminist waves of the 20th century is that, male or female, we are human. If gender is a construct, so is the idea that there is nothing that men and women share, or can share. We've been so intent on delineating where we differ and why that matters that we've given our similarities short shrift. Our physical differences are so trivial and are rightly denigrated as a basis for discrimination, but our imaginations are not different at all. We can imagine that we can do anything at all, regardless of who we see doing it first. That seems to be the premise that I started with in life, and it took a lot of very subtle social conditioning to beat it out of me. I usually had to be told I couldn't do something because I was a girl before the thought occurred to me, and the only time I seemed to believe it was when my female friends said it. If a boy or my dad said it, God help him!  All it did was make me mad, and more determined than ever that I'd do it, whether it was chemistry, taking a class on small engines, or rewiring a lamp.

Science fiction was particularly forgiving in this way, for me. Its worlds are so unlike our own, or twisted just enough to open the door to other possibilities in a world that's just like ours, that the limitations and general assumptions in ordinary fictional settings are not as restrictive. In science fiction, anything can happen. Because it's the future and because there are already aliens as a given, the crew of a spaceship from earth can include Russians (our former enemies from the Cold War), women, and people of color. Science fiction is not just the refuge of the Other. It's where the Other becomes the norm, where we are all Other.

Like Wemblee, I'm going out on a limb here with my "bad" feminism and calling for women to get over the idea that they must have female mentors, female role models to succeed in life, because this is the flip side of gender stereotyping. If you need a woman to validate your choices in life, then you are limiting yourself as much as men, for centuries, have limited themselves by requiring that women validate male roles by "staying in their places."

Here's an example from my own experience. I started off my college career as a biology major at a strongly feminist women's college. Science being the male bastion it was (and still is in many fields), all but one of my profs were male, as my high school science teachers had been too. I only took one course with the lone female prof and she and I didn't like each other much, a fact that matters in the small classes of a tiny liberal arts college. But my male profs were all, without exception, encouraging, demanding, and understanding. This is probably a function of being at women's college, where you would not last long as an instructor if you were a misogynist asshole. My point, though, is that there are men out there who get it, just as there are women out there who don't.

It's dangerous to limit yourself to identifying only with your own gender. For one thing, you're limiting yourself to only one point of view, one way of looking at the world, one way of doing things. This works better for men than for women because they've made the rules for so long. For women, it can be crippling. The playing field is not level yet, and we are not yet in a position to do much more than negotiate the shots men call, which means we have to learn to think a little like men to beat them at the game. Like learning any new skill, we have to learn to use the rules—no matter how unjust or how little we may like them—before we can break or change them.

Here's an example of what I mean. In the Times about Catherine Orenstein's workshops teaching women to write op-ed essays, and why that's important. (And can I just add that the headline is just another bit of Times condescension to women? "Stop the Presses, Boys! Women Claim Space on Op-Ed Pages"?) There's a dearth of women on the op-ed pages, in part because not many women submit essays (and in part because not many men want to hear what women have to say). In a workshop, Orenstein points out that there are more reasons to write than changing the world, shaping public debate, offering a new perspective, or influencing public policy. There is also money, fame, and power.

“What I want to suggest to you,” she [Orenstein] continued, is that the personal and the public interests are not at odds, and “the belief that they are mutually exclusive has kept women out of power.” Don’t you want money, credibility, access to aid in your cause? she asked.

Cristina Page, a spokeswoman for Birth Control Watch in Washington, leaned forward. “I’ve never heard anyone say that before,” she said. “What you’ve just said is so important. It’s liberating.”

Orenstein learned this herself the hard way, as a professional. She's a journalist, author, and occasional op-ed contributor herself, i.e., she writes for money. But why should it be shocking and new to other women that access to public media can not only push your agenda but pay your bills? Have all the successive waves of feminism been for nothing?  Have we not learned to own our own power, our own knowledge, our own abilities? This is definitely a page we could take from the guys. Even when they're talking complete bullshit, they sound as if they are confident experts. We're still mumbling about how we don't really know anything after we've gotten that Ph.D.

Don't wait for someone to mentor you. Don't use the lack of female mentors as an excuse not to keep going or to limit your own vision. Instead, find someone, anyone, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., who supports and validates you, the person, wholeheartedly and enthusiastically. If there isn't anyone to do that, be your own mentor. Drag yourself up by your bootstraps. Fight the power! All too often, women bind each other's feet and insisting that you wait for someone else of your own gender to have done it first is one of those ways. If there is a man in a role you want, imagine yourself there. That doesn't mean you want to be them. It means you know what you want. Now go get it.