When we talk about stereotypes about women, sometimes we make them sound much more complicated than they are.Many are painfully ordinary.Wom
When we talk about stereotypes about women, sometimes we make them sound much more complicated than they are.
Many are painfully ordinary.
- Women should be nice.
- Women should share.
- Women should accommodate.
- Women shouldn’t embarrass anybody.
- Women shouldn’t exclude.
- Women should put people’s feelings before their own discomfort.
- Women should make everybody feel welcome.
- Women shouldn’t make a scene.
- Women’s sports aren’t really that important.
- Women shouldn’t care so much about winning.
- A good woman sacrifices.
- A good woman understands.
- A good woman adjusts.
These ideas did not begin with today’s arguments about sex and gender identity. Women have been negotiating them for generations. They appear in families, churches, schools, workplaces, relationships, medicine, politics, and responses to sexual violence.
That is why I think we should examine what happens when policies affecting women appear to reproduce some very old expectations.
Not because every policymaker consciously believes these things. Motive is a separate question requiring evidence. The more useful question is what expectation the policy places upon women and whether we have seen that expectation before.
Women’s sports
The old stereotype: Women’s sports aren’t as important as men’s sports. Women shouldn’t care so much about competition. Winning shouldn’t matter that much to girls. Be gracious. Be inclusive.
Women fought for generations to have female athletic ability taken seriously.
Girls needed opportunities to train. Women needed teams, scholarships, coaches, facilities, competitions, records and championships that treated their athletic achievements as worthy of investment.
Then comes the familiar social instruction: Can’t you just be nice?
But sport is one of the few places where we openly agree that physical differences matter. Categories exist precisely because fair competition sometimes requires distinguishing between bodies.
When women object to a policy affecting a female sporting category, the answer cannot simply be another lesson in kindness.
A female athlete can be compassionate and still care deeply about competition.
She is allowed to want the medal.
She is allowed to want the scholarship.
She is allowed to want the starting position.
She is allowed to care about the record she trained years to break.
Women do not become cruel because winning matters to us.
Women’s changing rooms, showers and intimate spaces
The old stereotype: Women’s privacy isn’t important enough to hurt somebody else’s feelings. A kind woman makes room. A good woman doesn’t embarrass people. Women should stop making such a fuss about their bodies.
Women have heard versions of this instruction in countless settings.
- Don’t make him feel bad.
- Don’t embarrass him.
- Don’t be difficult.
- Don’t overreact.
But privacy is not an insult.
A woman can believe completely in another person’s humanity while maintaining a boundary concerning her own body.
Some women will not care about mixed-sex intimate spaces. Others will care profoundly. Survivors of sexual violence may have additional reasons for caring. Religious women may have others. Disabled women receiving intimate assistance may have others.
Women should not have to produce an extraordinary justification before bodily privacy becomes respectable.
Sometimes a woman simply does not want to undress around a male person.
Her boundary does not become hateful because somebody dislikes it.
Female Survivor services
The old stereotype: Women are natural caregivers. Even when a woman is hurting, she should still make room for somebody else’s needs.
This one is ancient.
Women are expected to nurse everybody.
Understand everybody.
Forgive everybody.
Make everybody comfortable.
And somehow perform all of this emotional labor while bleeding ourselves.
A woman arriving at a rape-crisis service, domestic-violence shelter or trauma group should not automatically inherit responsibility for resolving every larger social conflict surrounding that service.
She came because she needs help.
For some Survivors, the sex of the people around them will be irrelevant. For others it may be deeply connected to trauma, sleeping arrangements, undressing, bathing, therapy or the ability to remain in the program.
A trauma service should be able to hear that distinction without turning the Survivor into the problem.
Women seeking safety should not immediately be handed another person to accommodate.
Intimate medical and personal care
The old stereotype: A good woman doesn’t make people uncomfortable. She should swallow her own discomfort before causing embarrassment to somebody else.
Women know this lesson.
We have been trained to endure awkwardness quietly.
- Don’t offend the doctor.
- Don’t question the professional.
- Don’t make things difficult.
- Don’t ask for somebody else.
But a woman receiving a pelvic examination, bathing assistance, catheterization, breast examination or other intimate care is not hosting a dinner party.
She is allowed to have boundaries.
Her reasons may involve trauma, religion, culture, modesty, previous abuse, or simply personal preference.
We should be extremely cautious about any system that teaches women that another person’s emotional comfort automatically outranks their own bodily boundary.
Women’s prisons and intimate searches
The old stereotype: Some women simply have to tolerate discomfort because there are more important institutional needs. Don’t be difficult. Somebody has to compromise.
Women in custody possess little power already.
They cannot simply leave.
They cannot choose where they sleep.
They may have limited control over who supervises them, searches them, watches them dress or handles their bodies.
That makes the state’s responsibility greater, not smaller.
Policies concerning searches, showers, cells and intimate observation should therefore begin with bodily privacy, safety, trauma and actual institutional evidence.
Women deprived of liberty have not surrendered their humanity.
And incarcerated women should not become society’s easiest population upon whom to test how much female privacy can be negotiated away.
Women’s political representation
The old stereotype: Women don’t really need power of our own. What matters is that somebody represents women’s interests.
Women have heard this one before too.
Why does it matter who sits at the table?
Surely a good man can understand women’s concerns.
Surely representation is symbolic anyway.
But programs designed to increase women’s political representation arose because women themselves were excluded from decision-making.
Representation was not simply about finding people who appreciated femininity or sympathized with women.
It was about women gaining access to institutions that governed women’s lives while frequently excluding women from power.
If government changes who counts toward female representation, it should be able to explain how that change relates to the historical purpose of the program.
Women’s scholarships and opportunities
The old stereotype: Women have enough now. Surely they can share. Insisting that something remain specifically for women is selfish.
Women’s opportunities were not created because women needed special treats.
They were responses to exclusion.
Scholarships, professional programs, political initiatives, sporting opportunities and educational programs were developed because women had been denied opportunities available to men.
That history should remain visible when eligibility rules change.
Before changing the population served by a corrective program, government should ask what inequality the program was created to correct and whether that inequality still exists.
Fairness requires remembering why the door was built before deciding who receives the key.
Sex-based statistics
The old stereotype: Details about women’s bodies aren’t that important. We can approximate. We know enough.
Women’s health has already paid dearly for poor data.
Women’s symptoms have been misunderstood. Female bodies have historically been underrepresented in portions of medical research. Conditions affecting women have sometimes received inadequate attention.
Accurate sex data therefore isn’t an insult to anybody.
It is information.
If government needs information about gender identity, collect it.
If government needs information about sex, collect that too.
If researchers need both, preserve both.
Women should not become statistically harder to see in the name of making data more inclusive.
Good data can recognize more people without losing women.
Female health
The old stereotype: Women’s bodies are embarrassing, inconvenient and better discussed indirectly.
- Menstruation.
- Pregnancy.
- Miscarriage.
- Menopause.
- Endometriosis.
- Breast cancer.
- Cervical cancer.
- Female genital mutilation.
- Maternal mortality.
Women spent generations dragging these subjects into public conversation because silence was hurting us.
Language should help medicine become more precise, not make female bodies harder to name.
Inclusive health care should be capable of treating every patient respectfully while still allowing clinicians and researchers to speak accurately about sex when sex is medically relevant.
Women should not have to disappear linguistically before everybody else can receive compassionate care.
Women’s boundaries
And underneath many of these conflicts sits perhaps the oldest stereotype of all:
A good woman accommodates.
- She moves over.
- She makes room.
- She understands.
- She shares.
- She forgives.
- She doesn’t complain.
- She accepts discomfort.
- She worries about whether everybody else feels welcome before asking whether she herself feels safe.
Women know this script.
Many of us were handed it as girls.
That is precisely why governments and institutions should be careful about reproducing it.
Equality cannot mean finding progressively more sophisticated reasons why women should be the people who adjust.
There are ways to protect people from discrimination based upon gender identity without teaching women that boundaries are cruelty.
There are ways to provide services without pretending sex never matters.
There are ways to treat transgender people with dignity without requiring women to surrender dignity of our own.
And there are ways to resolve difficult conflicts without automatically reaching for the oldest female assignment in the book:
You move.
Because when we strip away all the contemporary terminology, sometimes the social expectation underneath is remarkably familiar.
- Be nice.
- Don’t make anybody uncomfortable.
- Share.
- Stop being difficult.
- Their feelings are more important.
- Your privacy isn’t that serious.
- Your sport isn’t that serious.
- Your boundary isn’t that serious.
- Your fear isn’t that serious.
- Your no isn’t that serious.
Women have heard these instructions before.
That is precisely why we should recognize them when they come back wearing new clothes.
A stereotype does not become progressive simply because the language surrounding it changes.
Women can be kind without becoming unprotected.
We can recognize another person’s humanity without surrendering our boundaries.
We can support protection from discrimination without agreeing that every distinction based upon sex is meaningless.
And we can insist that laws affecting women and children be built from evidence about their actual lives rather than instructions about the kind of women society would prefer us to be.
Because women are not here to perform goodness for government.
Government is here to govern us fairly.