societal-norms

I make my way through my fraternity’s main floor and soon meet the gaze of one of my brothers. We share a smile of no particular origin, and our lips meet. We withdraw from the kiss, and he introduces me to the woman next to him who he then tells me he recently started dating. Her initial stunned appearance prompts me to consider some explanation—“he’s loyal; I promise!”—but before I can speak, her face compensates in acceptance, reading, “he’s just European.” She leans forward to imitate her significant other. But I’m not European, and I withdraw before contact.

There was no indication that the sexual encounter I participated in last Saturday would quite possibly be the worst one of my life until the last five minutes of it.

A little while ago, I woke up to a text message from a close friend of mine who still lives in Georgia. It was a screenshot of a wedding announcement on Facebook accompanied by 10 question marks. An old mutual friend of ours had gotten married the previous month and was just now announcing it on Facebook with a changed last name and pictures of her wedding. The following week in my friend group was loose chaos. We all were taking various opportunities to ask questions like: How? What? When? To whom? We all, as Southern women, were also dealing with a new twinge of the pressure that our families and society constantly remind us of: the pressure to get married.

In her outstanding book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, Courtney Martin, BC '02, writes that "We are the daughters of feminists who said ‘You can be anything,' and we heard ‘You have to be everything.'" Men hear it too—we all do—from our elders, from the media, from ourselves and from each other.

Whenever I walk into a room—whether for class, a club, a meeting, or anything, really—I can usually count on feeling a certain level of anxiety. I'm usually worried, consciously and unconsciously, about having to interact with straight men. Suddenly, my demeanor changes, my tone deepens, my mannerisms become more "masculine," and I generally feel vulnerable. When I am dealing with a straight male authority figure—from an academic adviser to a rabbi—something about me feels more self-conscious, more careful, and less sure of myself. Where I might engage a woman or a gay person, I hold back and distance myself from a straight man. Out of all my friends from high school and college, I can count almost no straight men, and though this is certainly not the case for everyone, I know many people who express similar feelings.