I could easily have trod the path of the Men's Rights Movement. From a very early age, I did not feel it a privilege to be male but the opposite. Even before puberty, as I became more and more conscious of the way that the world treated me on the basis of my sex, I became convinced that girls and women had it much better than boys and men. My developing awareness of issues related to sex, gender and sexism coincided with the renaissance of the women's movement back in the late 1960s, or what was then known as the "women's liberation movement" and what is now known as second-wave feminism. Because of my early exposure to feminism, much of my own perception that I had been relegated to a status inferior to that of females arose in direct response to the feminist critiques of society that were then gaining popularity but had not yet become firmly established in the popular consciousness. In many of the specific ways that feminists contended females were disadvantaged relative to males, I perceived a reality that suggested the very opposite. Examples seemed to abound.
One of the most salient was the contention that advertising routinely denigrated women with sexist stereotyping and imagery that reinforced traditional gender roles. In advertisements on television (and, of course, in other media), women were invariably represented as housewives whose main role in life was to clean the house, do the laundry, do the grocery shopping, do the cooking and take care of their children and their husbands. It is self-evident that such representations of women functioned to reinforce their traditional consignment to the domestic sphere while serving to limit women's opportunities for personal and professional fulfillment (and the attainment of social and financial independence). But these advertisements were often just as denigrating to men and just as reinforcing of the traditional male role as breadwinner. Insofar as anything related to the home or childcare was concerned, the husbands in these advertisements typically were portrayed as incompetent, lazy and clueless if well-meaning dolts. By invoking and promoting the trope of the useless husband, these advertisements tended to relegate men to the same level of dependency on the woman as her children. Thus, these advertisements not only demeaned men but infantalized them. Viewing these representations of men through youthful male eyes, I did not perceive them as confirming my status as superior to women, nor did I find them "empowering." I was offended by them.
Another example would be the criticism that women were treated in the popular culture as what was then known as "sex objects." Beauty and sexual desirability, especially in advertising, were strictly represented as female attributes. Viewed through innocent male eyes, however, the sexual objectification of women and of women's bodies seemed to me to represent society's dictum that to be beautiful and sexually desirable was a privilege reserved for women only. I didn't pity women for that; I envied them for it. A common retort by men back then to the criticism that women were treated as sex objects was something along the lines of "What's so bad about that? I'd love to be treated like a sex object!" I do not ever recall wanting to be female, as though I identified, as a matter of gender, as female. But I have often wanted to be female when I imagine what it must be like to be viewed as a sex object. The standard objection - not just from feminists and often reinforced in popular culture - to the sexual "objectification" of women's bodies is that it is demeaning to desire someone only for her body but noble to desire someone only on account of her mind. Yet if the mind and the body are both aspects of the self, I wondered, why is it complimentary to be appreciated for one's mind but not equally complimentary to be desired for one's body? I would have loved to be lusted after by women in my youth in the way that I lusted after women.
Whether the sexual objectification of women's bodies is a conscious act, an unconscious, sexist, patriarchal social construct, or merely something that heterosexual males are hardwired to do because to do so is a trait that has been selected for by our evolutionary history, the sexual objectification of women's bodies is the classic double-edged sword. It is as impossible to make the case that this does not make being female a liability as it is to make the case that it does not simultaneously confer on females certain benefits that males simply do not enjoy. I have yet to meet a woman who has not been propositioned and pursued sexually to a degree that men even in their wildest fantasies never experience. I can only imagine how much sex I might have had in my youth had I been born female (or gay, for that matter) or, at the very least, how much greater my self-esteem might have been had I perceived myself as being sexually desirable which, being male, I was not socialized to do. When I was young, the notion that the male body could be viewed as something sexually desirable to the opposite sex was a concept that was still decades away. I confess that one of the reasons I enjoyed the company of gay men when I was young (most of my friends were gay) is that I found it reassuring to know that I was at least attractive to someone. And yet, I am also thankful that I can walk down a street without getting grabbed, ogled, told to "smile, Honey," have someone say "Nice tits" to me, follow me, stalk me, harass me, or make me seriously concerned that I might get raped. Nor have I, in fact, been raped (although I was sexually abused when I was in summer camp).
The point of these examples is to illustrate the principle that a sexist cultural belief or norm that is regarded, axiomatically, as damaging to girls' and women's self-esteem is often, in fact, also damaging to boys' and men's. Perhaps this was never more true than in the case of a phenomenon that is discussed in an essay that appeared in the Times this past fall, entitled, "Women Poop. Sometimes At Work. Get Over It." In this essay, the authors Jessica Bennett and Amanda McCall argue that
Poop shame is real - and it disproportionately affects women, who suffer from higher rates of irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease. In other words, the patriarchy has seeped into women's intestinal tracts. Let's call it the pootriarchy.
Girls aren't born with poo shame - it's something they're taught.It is not at all clear to me how Bennett and McCall arrive at the conclusion that "poop shame . . . disproportionately affects women." It seems to me that a study intended either to confirm or disprove this hypothesis ought to contrast or compare the prevalence of "poop shame" among women with its prevalence among men. Yet one of the sources that the authors cite is a Canadian study on bowel health and bathroom anxiety that surveyed exclusively women (1,000 of them). And when attempting to conduct their own survey about "fecal habits at work," the authors pre-selected their pool of potential respondents by soliciting the participation of "mostly women." Men are simply assumed, evidently, not to experience feelings of shame about their bodily functions, so why ask? As it happens, one of the three people who did respond to the authors' survey was a man who, it turns out, expressed precisely the same sort of shame about defecating at work as women and described resorting to precisely the same sort of elaborate subterfuges as women do in order to avoid detection when he did.
That all people, to one degree or another and irrespective of sex, experience feelings of embarrassment about their bodies and their bodily functions should surprise no one. Feelings of bodily shame and self-loathing are deeply embedded in most of us. These feelings certainly pertain to our sexuality but they are particularly acute with respect to the functions of excretion and, especially, defecation. (Personally, I attribute this to the incompatibility of intelligence with corporeality. As homo sapiens sapiens, we simply cannot reconcile the transcendent superiority of our minds with the fact that our bodies belong to the kingdom Animalia.) Moreover, these feelings of shame about excretion and defecation are intricately bound up with our concepts of sex and gender. As Nicholas Haslam (a psychologist and author of "Psychology in the Bathroom") notes in Bennett and McCall's article, "The bathroom is saturated with gender in fascinating ways." Why, to question a sacrosanct convention, should bathrooms even be segregated according to sex? Surely it is at least, in part, to maintain the illusion that neither sex actually performs bathroom functions by concealing what men do there from women and by concealing what women do there from men.
Yet this collective illusion that we like to maintain about ourselves is not equally applied nor enforced. It is almost certainly true that men are permitted, much more than women are, to acknowledge without shame the need to defecate. And that women do experience their own particular shame about defecating must be related to one of our culture's most cherished myths about female physiology, namely, that women do not defecate at all, ever.
This fantasy of idealized femininity was drilled into me by own father who routinely insisted that women did not do such things (for how could they be such perfect, sublime creatures if they did?). Despite the fact that I grew up with a twin sister with whom I regularly shared bathroom time when we were children, and so knew otherwise, this fantasy that women do not defecate nonetheless shaped my concept of women. Yet it also shaped my concept of myself. Even though, intellectually, I understood this myth about women to be a fiction, on a deep, emotional level I interpreted this as evidence not just of female "purity" but of female superiority. This left an indelible mark upon my male psyche and male self-esteem. After all, if women do not defecate, the corollary of this is that only men do. The concepts, then, of female and male that were instilled in me - not just by my father but by society - were that women are essentially spiritual, sublime creatures unpolluted by base biological functions in contrast to men, who are essentially bestial creatures whose bodies perform the most disgusting function imaginable - a function that no female's body ever would. As a result, from my earliest childhood, I felt that my body was disgusting because it was male. And I always felt inferior to women, in the sense of being less human, as a result.
This notion - that males are less human and much closer to barnyard animals, either because they defecate or because, like animals, they are assumed not to experience shame about it when they do, in contrast to females who are much closer to angels or goddesses, either because they do not defecate or because, if they do, they at least have the refinement to be ashamed about it - was reinforced at the elementary school that I attended. In this public school (P.S. 193), the toilet stalls in the girls' bathrooms had doors for privacy whereas the stalls in the boys' bathrooms did not. I still remember the intense feelings of shock, outrage and envy as well as experiencing a profound sense of being diminished as a male when I discovered this. The point was driven home to me in no uncertain terms that privacy and dignity were privileges that I did not merit because I was male. Being so much farther down the phylogenetic tree than girls, what right did boys have to expect privacy when defecating?
The standard feminist interpretation of this double standard in bathroom accommodations is that, in patriarchal societies, girls' modesty must be protected and their idealized purity preserved at all costs. Boys, being stronger, more worldly, less preoccupied with frivolity and propriety, have no need of such things as privacy when defecating. This all makes perfect sense to a social scientist or ivory-tower-ensconced academic. Yet I do not think that this is how most of the boys in my elementary school perceived this double standard. It certainly isn't how I perceived it.
Of course the notion that women don't defecate is sexist and downright Victorian in that it places women on a pedestal. Of course it reinforces the notion that women's bodies must be "pure" and unpolluted by base biological functions. As Haslam (again, quoted in Bennett and McCall's essay) puts it,
At one level, it's an association of women with purity. . . . At another it's a double standard applied to hygiene and civility, where the weight falls disproportionately on women to be clean, odorless and groomed.
It's easy to see how such a double standard adversely affects women. It is dehumanizing, in its own peculiar way, not to be regarded as an actual human being, since defecation is an essential physiological part of being human. But if the myth that females do not defecate is harmful to girls and women, how is its corollary - that only males do defecate - any less harmful to boys and men? As I see it, the gendered mythology about defecation is a paradigm of the principle that sexist gender roles harm both sexes. Sexist myths and gender constructs are surely toxic in different ways and in different degrees but they are, notwithstanding, opposite sides of the same coin. Social critics are right to condemn gender roles, sexist myths and idealized standards that harm girls and women but they err when they fail, as many so often do, to take account of the ways that these things also harm boys and men. Bennett and McCall's Times essay is a case in point.
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