My Feminist Christmas

I had a very unusual Christmas Eve last year. Most families in the neighborhood were spending quality time together or were busy wrapping last-minute presents, but not my family. No, the Antaya family was engrossed in a tense feminist debate starting around six o’clock in the evening, when my aunt boldly declared, “it’s all men’s fault!”, until about nine o’clock, when I could be found apologizing to the four women in my house, my dad having taken the opportunity to escape long before. The debate was heated and rather circular, but a topic came up that I find relevant to our current discussion: namely gender as a self-generating cycle.

My aunt’s accusatory, and I would argue rather unfair, statement was made while she was flipping through the channels and came upon Mariah Carey performing in an outfit (if you can even call it that) which was quite revealing. Surprised and a bit offended, I asked my aunt to explain what she meant by that sweeping generalization. She told me that Mariah only dressed that way because the male dominated society made it so that she could not be a pop star if she dressed otherwise. In response, I pointed out, as most men would, that the vast majority of people in the audience were women, as were most of the consumers who bought her albums. In a business that often attracts fans more through visual displays than through original or quality music, it seemed to me that Mariah must have had her female fans in mind when she choose her outfit. Indeed, I asked, there are millions upon millions of women who aspire to “Hollywood” bodies and praise those who have achieved them, so how can this ideal be blamed entirely on men?

At the time, that seemed like full-proof reasoning. After reading Butler’s argument for gender as a self-perpetuating form of psychological oppression, however, I have come to realize that there really is no clear-cut answer to my aunt’s challenge. I think that my aunt’s claim was an oversimplification of a complex issue, but so was my response. I was right to argue that women do play a part in the continuation of the “Hollywood” body ideal, but I was wrong to not see that this perpetuation exists because our society tells each young woman that the body she is born with is less “feminine”, indeed less natural, than the airbrushed one she sees in magazines. When you believe, as our society continually indoctrinates, that having the gender “woman” is a natural classification and that a body like most female pop stars have is the most feminine, how can you avoid feeling that your body is somehow unnatural?