Guys on the radio: A FAGGY FIGURE SKATER! NOT THAT ONE, THAT ONE! NO, THAT ONE! POINT AND LAUGH!
Johnny Weir: I'm here, I'm fabulous, get used to it.
So here we have a situation in which a male figure skater is derided for dressing/seeming too feminine, and two radio hosts take it upon themselves to try and shame Johnny Weir into apologizing for being...let me see if I have this right...a sparkly, flamboyant FIGURE SKATER.
But the best part is the last bit of his response:
I think masculinity is what you believe it to be. To me, masculinity is all my perception. And I think that masculinity and femininity is something that’s very old-fashioned.
Johnny rejects the oppositional model of gender. Here's the thing. Gender roles are positioned as both oppositional and hierarchical. Oppositional means that there is "masculine" stuff and "feminine" stuff, and the stuff doesn't overlap. This reduces the masculine and feminine to a binary, wherein someone can be one or the other, but not neither, and not both. Hierarchical means that one of these things is constructed as superior to the other. Things that are coded masculine are better in this culture (and across every other I can think of) than things coded feminine. Proof?
1) Doing something "like a girl" is an insult.
2) Working outside the home is "real work", but working inside the home isn't.
3) Jobs in cleaning, and caretaking of adults and children, require the same amount of education and experience as jobs in construction or sanitation, but they pay less.
4) The low level jobs in a given field are heavily populated by women (nurses, elementary and middle-school teachers), but the high level jobs in the same field are male-dominated (doctors, college professors).
The hierarchical aspects of the gender construction feed the oppositional forces, and vice versa. The more privileged masculine things are over feminine things, the more different the two seem from one another. Similarly, the more oppositional the genders seem, the less alike masculine and feminine are, the easier it is to position one above the other. Any blending would destroy the justification for the superior/inferior positioning.
Then we add in gender policing. Not only are the genders binary and opposite, not only is masculine better than feminine, but it is also IMPERATIVE that a given person stays in his or her box. To transcend one's gender is to invite criticism, as in Weir's case.
To fail to enforce these gender standards is also, apparently, to fail as a parent. Look at this article about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's daughter, Shiloh. The headline is "Why Is Angelina Turning Shiloh Into a Boy?". The vitriol aimed at Angelina Jolie for her toddler daughter wearing a short haircut and boys' clothes (that actually appear to be her brothers' hand-me-downs) is astounding. This article illustrates the double bind women are in: we're supposed to act like a girl, which means accepting all of the second-place stuff that marks femininity. Even if we personally value qualities in ourselves that are stereotypically feminine, the culture in which we live devalues them. It devalues us for doing them. And then it says we were born to do them.
The gender binary sucks for guys, too. Heterosexual masculinity is culturally defined as bellicose, aggressive, terse, predatory, and solitary. We have the strong, silent type. We have an army of one. We have a cultural understanding of sex that is based around masculine release rather than mutual pleasure. Let's not even make it about the boys who like sparkles but never get to wear them. Let's talk about the boys with a wide emotional range. Where does a boy who is sensitive and empathetic, who gets lonely, or who cries sometimes, fit in? If you're thinking "what a pussy", good. That's my point.
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