Not-so-inherent differences

Last night at a city council meeting I attended, female officer was confirmed in her official appointment as a police officer. I was impressed that all three women on the city council (out of 12 total council members) not only congratulated this officer on her appointment, but said we need more women police officers and expressed their happiness in adding another woman to the ranks of the police force in our city (it was mentioned that a little over half of the police force is now female).

I was surprised, though, that not one male council member congratulated her or expressed a need for women on the police force. Instead, the bulk of the comments made by the male council members were related to the deer population problem within our city limits (a product of living in Montana) and thanking the two older men who spoke to the council about it. I’m not saying these men didn’t need to be thanked, but couldn’t at least one male council member have said something about sex equality in the police force?

I was also struck by the police chief’s description of his new officer and how he found it important to inform the council that in addition to her exemplary test scores at the academy and field training, one of her qualifications was that she had grown up in a household full of boys and was therefore qualified to work in a field consisting of mostly men (it wasn’t until later that someone mentioned that half of the officers are female.).

That comment really bothered me. What if she hadn’t grown up in a household full of boys? Would that somehow negate her other accomplishments and make her less qualified to be an officer?

These types of comments and interview questions, strive to prove that there is something inherently different between men and women, and they also perpetuate the idea that men can do anything and women can do some things, but for other things, they have to be qualified to work with men.

It’s been asked lately, “Where are the women?” Well, probably trying push their way out of this idea that women can’t work with men.

How can women infiltrate occupations such as law enforcement, which are typically dominated by men, when they have to prove their history of working with men?

This idea of male difference is drilled into our heads from an early age, without many of us even noticing it. The literature promoted through the education system from the time students learn how to read through higher education is dominated by works written by men through the male perspective, or written by women through the male perspective. So boys are taught that their perspective is the most important, most valuable, most educational, and probably a lot of other mosts, and girls are taught that they have to understand not only the world through their perspective but also through a man’s perspective.

This creates an adult world where women, have the ability to look at things “in other people’s shoes” whereas men can only appreciate things through their perspective. For example, I wrote a short story a while back, and one of my guy friends read it. He told me he liked it but felt like it was talking about something he couldn’t understand fully because it was written through the female perspective. So then he decided to re-write it in a way that he could understand, but the only thing he changed was the pronouns and a couple of the props into more masculine ones, such as sunflowers to Indian paintbrushes! Then he showed it to me, and was like, see? Isn’t this better?!!!

Because men are only exposed to the male perspective, they immediately conclude that women cannot possibly fit into their world (which is ridiculous because it’s the only world we have ever been taught) and therefore, despite their qualifications a woman has to prove to them that they can work with men. Grrr!!!!

So my unfortunate theory is that we will never have equality in the workforce or the government until schools are required to teach women’s literature not as a separate entity but as an equal part of children’s reading experiences. I want to start seeing children reading Little Women (even if it’s the abridged version) right next to Huckleberry Finn. If we can get an equal amount of female and male perspectives taught through literature, boys will grow into men who have the understanding that fundamentally, people are people regardless of their sex. They will understand that, yes, people are different in many ways, but those differences are on a person-to-person basis. It is vital that boys learn that women’s voices are not so different from their own.

And maybe then in college, we can stop having Women’s Literature courses because women’s literature will be considered just as literary as male literature.