double standards

Within the past couple of years I think I have become somewhat of a feminist. Or maybe not so much, but at any rate I have lately been noticing a lot of things that suck about the way we think about women and men. Here are two things that have recently annoyed me.

1. The notion that in order for a woman to be a singer she must have a good voice. There are plenty of men who sing who have very average or very bad voices. Yet a woman feels that her voise must be "pretty" in order for her to use it. I discussed this with Sarah and she suggested that part of this might come from the fact that when girls are in band, they often sing and do nothing else. So in that case it would make slightly more sense that we expect her to have a good voice, but is still not totally fair in my opinion. If a person wants to play music and sing, they should do it, and if it's socially acceptable for a man to get up there and belt out complete crap, it should be for a woman as well.

2. The notion that any book with a woman as the main character is necessarily a girl book. Or even that any book written by a woman must be a girl book. So not fair! Women read books about men ALL THE TIME. Yet a man can't pick up Jane Eyre without being gay. Just because a character is a woman, just because the story may have something to do with love or marriage, doesn't make it sappy or stupid or girly. Obviously what brought this to mind was all the thinking I've been doing about Jane Austen lately. Her novels are notoriously known as chick books, love stories, etc. But anyone who's actually read one of them knows that this is entirely not the case. Her novels are actually about the economics of marriage, marriage without love, marriage because it's your only choice. They are about choosing the lesser of two evils. They are about the marginalized position that women of a certain time period and social class found themselves in, and the limited choices they had to make within those confines. There are no romantic love scenes, Darcy proposes to Elizabeth casually during a walk through the park, and Wentworth finally tells Anne of his true feelings throuhg a slightly anticlimactic letter. I could go on. But more importantly, they are well written, full of irony and double meanings and the subtle sarcasm that makes them so enjoyable. I think that Oscar Wilde said something like there is no such thing as a good book or a bad book, a book is either well written or badly written. And I think the same goes for this; there is no such thing as a girls book or a boys book. If it's a good book, everyone should be able to read it without some social stigma attached to it.

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girl power!