Mystique-ing the Feminine [Will Brehm, Week 8, Substantive]

I love using the feminist analytical lens. A lens, I believe, that always needs to be own. Just as Meredith pointed out, it’s a lens that usually stays covered and unused by many IR thinkers. Feminism to me is equality between the genders. Who wouldn’t support that? The real problem, though, stems from the constructed understanding we have between the genders. Understanding our own construction sometimes challenges our belief system. Suggesting that men have treated women poorly often results in attacks on the messenger (a logical fallacy). People do not like to think they live inside a system that supports the silencing of women—that we all (both men and women) may be part of the problem through our perpetual silence.

Look: specific ideas of “femininity” and “masculinity” abound in American culture. One way to analyze gender roles is to take a community and see trends within the genders. Take Lehigh. Imagine walking around Lehigh for the first time. Would you see a diversity of clothing? Nope. Men, consciously or unconsciously, conform to a similar style of clothing. Women do too. We wear similar clothes either implicitly or explicitly, but, in essence, we have created a specific image of what a “woman” and a “man” look like. Is this a wrong thing? Maybe not. But if we construct gender roles down to our clothing, imagine what we do in other aspects of our lives. Think parties: who has been to a "CEOs and Office Hoes" party? In this context, men hold positions of power (CEOs) while women are relegated to (literally) sexual workers. A woman becomes defined through sexual promiscuity. Yes, it's only a party, but these parties cut deep to the underlying problem. (A more detailed analysis of Lehigh’s gender issues would take more space and time available for this post.)

If you want to see gender issues in media, look no further than an Alfred Hitchcock film. [OK, lets be real here: just turn on FOXNEWS to see its understanding of what a female host looks like. Hint: they’re all blond.] He plays with the ideas of femininity and masculinity in most of his films, often challenging our conventional constructions. (He has been known to be rather nihilistic, not leaving any space for the “true”—both sexual and knowledgeable—women to occupy.) Gender roles are real; feminism uncovers these roles and questions their validity.

The interesting point, which I usually miss when considering gender roles, from Enloe’s interview is that different cultures and nations construct unique gender roles specific to local events, attitudes, morals, histories. But before analyzing feminism on the international level, I think a firm understand on a more tangible level needs to exist.