Female traits

In relation to my last post, I was trying to dig up a study done on psychiatrists and psychologists. Unfortunately, I can’t find which book it’s in, and googling “gender” and “psychologists” is an effort in futility or internet-mind-suck. I’ll keep looking.

The general gist of the study is this: psychiatric professionals were given identical case studies. Some of the case studies indicated a gender of the patient. Some did not. The professionals were asked to diagnose and create a treatment plan for the patient based on the case studies. When the patient was gender neutral, professionals tended to create a diagnosis that indicated an outside stressor at work, and emphasized the patient’s obvious strengths, such as assertiveness and rationality, as being a major part of the treatment plan. When the patient’s gender was male, the professionals’ diagnoses and treatment plans were identical. When the patient’s gender was female, the professionals diagnosed the patient with several major personality disorders, and the treatment plan disparaged the obvious qualities of aggressiveness and hysterical tendencies, with a treatment goal at elimination of these unsettling traits. Often the plans included the indication that it was these traits themselves that were the origin of unhappiness.

My point being, I hope, obvious, but just in case: Behaviors are not gender-specific. They are perception-specific. A behavior that is considered healthy for a genderless adult human being is considered unhealthy for women. These are traits that are not only “considered healthy,” but are necessary for mature functioning. The ability to control one’s environment and self and to state needs and boundaries are traits that we value because they are necessary to happy, healthy living. People who are unable to behave this way are unable to maintain adult lives. And those very traits are considered inappropriate for women to have, considered even psychotic, and the root of their unhappiness. Somehow, elimination of the ability to cope effectively with the world is considered the healthiest treatment plan, but only if you have tits attached to your front. So women can behave like our model of healthy adult functioning and be diagnosed as hysterical, or they can go fucking crazy because they are not allowed to function like healthy adults, and then they are diagnosed as hysterical.

Whoa, sorry, all that estrogen was sort of making my monkey brain go wild. I’m wrong here. Obviously, it’s just that double XX chromosones cause unlikeable personality traits. Right, guys? Couldn’t be that nobody behaves charmingly when they’re called crazy and stupid no matter what they do.

To sum up: there are no behavior traits that are essentially male or female. Like the romance languages, all we are doing is applying gender to totally unrelated objects (French computer batteries are female… French books are obviously male). The traits we disparage are traits that are considered female, and yet they have little to no relation to the women we know in our lives, because real individual people that we know all want to be healthy and functioning adults.

When we say we don’t like or understand how women behave, we are referring to some nameless faceless aspect of “woman,” because doubtless we have women in our lives who “aren’t like that,” but they’re the exception, of course. All the other women we have never met on the planet will obviously conform to the standard the women we personally know never have. When we disparage beliefs that one should be dependent, hypersensitive, overemotional, hysterical, conniving, and miserable, we think we are disparaging women, but in fact we are disparaging things no healthy human being should aspire to. What we ought to disparage, and examine critically, is the origin of our belief that these things are somehow obviously “female,” (la neuroses, la hysteria) instead of being gender-neutral indicators of ill health.

When we say “women are boring,” what we’re actually saying is that the vision of women sexism requires us to have is boring. When we say “women aren’t interesting,” we’re saying the traits and behaviors women are supposed to learn and exhibit are uninteresting. And yes, yes they are. Welcome to feminism.

Anyway, I couldn’t find the article, but I found something else. This is from an article titled “Feminist Therapy: Redefining Power for the Powerless,” by Adrienne J. Smith and Ruth F. Siegel.

“Increasing evidence indicates that the differences between women and men in their expression of power are due to status rather than sex. According to Frieze, Parsons, Johnson, Ruble, and Zellman (1978, p. 304) status is ‘a hierarchy of inferiority and superiority on some dimension or set of dimensions.’  Because ‘male in itself means higher status’ (p. 305) the two variables of gender and status are almost completely confounded. Unger (1979) in an extensive review of the literature on status, gender, and power, shows that ‘male-female relationships are essentially similar to relationships between high and low status individuals and thsu status is a more parsimonious explanation than gender.’ (p. 6)

“Women ‘get what they want’ through indirect, covert influencing techniques, often using the assigned sex-role-appropriate behaviors of helplessness, dependency, coyness, and appeal to emotions. Under the oppressive constraints of patriarchy, women, who are low-status people, use second-class power tactics that usually are not acknowledged as power (McClelland, 1975). Even when women achieve their objectives, therefore, both sexes continue to see a woman as powerless. The frequent attribution of women’s successes to luck and men’s successes to skill is evidence that neither sex believes women have sufficient abilities to control their own lives.

“The indirect forms of interpersonal power — what we call ‘underground power’ — are used to resist or refuse when overt refusal would invite retaliation. Retaliation can range from physical violence to financial deprivation, shaming, and/or capitalizing on the woman’s own internalized belief that she is bad, unnatural, an unloving mother, or a ‘castrating bitch.’

“…The woman who finds herself in this situation may be aware that she gets results, but, more than likely, she attributes this to ‘feminine wiles’, not to power. Relying on tactics that emphasize her dependence and subservience to [men] reinforces her lack of self-esteem. Further, since all definitions in a culture dominated by men are filtered through what Roberts (1976) calls the ‘masculist screen,’ women accept men’s definition of them as ‘inferior’ and ‘other.’ ‘To coexist as unequals within circumstances of the greatest intimacy women must come to believe the physical, economic, and political inequities are just and justifiable… Intellectual life, as insitutionally organized, must transmit patterns of inequality so that people will believe that the subordiinate position of women is only “natural,” that their shrunken time and space are not only proper but even protective’ (Roberts, 1976, p. 16).

“…Awareness of the conflict between our needs and that which we have been taught is appropriate behavior often brings women to therapy. Traditional therapy has attempted to reduce this conflict by ‘adjust’ women to their correct roles… Since subordination to what is dominant is seen as woman’s proper place, her distress is reduced by ‘helping her accept’ and enjoy her subordinate position… The source of conflict, rather than being acknowledged as existing between the woman and societal demands, is referred back to the woman herself. ‘Blaming the victim’ leads to further internalization of what is, in actuality, an external conflict.”