"BENEVOLENT SEXISM"

I know that I’m going to offend someone with my musings today. It’s not deliberate, honestly, although it could be argued (with some justification) that knowing in advance that I am going to offend someone makes it precisely a deliberate act, but apparently it is “hard-wired” into me so I can’t really help it. Perhaps it’s just my simple rural way of looking at the world that is at fault here, although it’s really hard for me to tell being, as I am, rather stuck inside my simple rural self and looking out at the rest of you. Sometimes I think I must just be hopelessly naïve about the ways of the world and still have a slight air of the wide-eyed innocent about me, and I’m sure that would be true if it weren’t for the mile wide streak of cynicism running through me.

I’m just a bit confused today.

Perhaps I should explain why. I was driving to Tesco’s the other evening, to get some shopping for my mother. Although other supermarkets are available, that one just happens to be the most convenient for that purpose, and I can accumulate “points” for the beloved’s Dad whilst I’m at it so that they have some beer in the house come Christmas. Where I was heading is actually irrelevant, of course, but it, becomes slightly significant, so bear with me.

On the radio there came a report into the more subtle forms of sexism that still exist in our culture which is still apparently designed from a masculine viewpoint. The researchers in some academic institution or other had asked participants in their study to monitor examples of sexism they came across in their daily lives and keep a “diary” for research purposes.

So far so good.

However it turns out that there are three kinds of sexism, two of which are the wicked sort that cause all sorts of trouble, but there  is also the insidious “benevolent sexism” committed by well-meaning but misguided men, which includes such terrible thought crimes as holding a door open for someone, helping to carry your partner’s shopping bags or giving up your seat on the bus.

All these years I’ve apparently been a benevolent sexist and didn’t even know it, and there was I just thinking I was being polite, and it doesn’t seem to matter that I’m just as unlikely to let a door slam in the face of anyone behind me, male or female, it could still be misinterpreted as being patronising. I guess that it’s not the act itself that is at fault here, but the assumptions being made about the thinking behind it. However, sometimes just trying to be nice to people is nothing more than that, and we do sometimes over-analyse everything in our culture.

Mind you I’ve always struggled with gender stereotyping anyway. Boys should be able to play with dolls if they choose to, just as girls should get Meccano sets if they wish, and yet we currently live in a society that encourages young girls to reach for the stars and accept no limitations, whilst simultaneously choosing to dress them only in pink and aspire to be princesses.

To be fair, the spokesperson on the radio did qualify her statements by saying that it’s perfectly all right to continue to do such things so as long as you would do it regardless of the sex of the person you are offering to help, although given the specific circumstances, how on Earth (Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Learn to live with it.) you would prove that you would have done exactly the same thing if it had been a man coming through the door behind you as you are being publicly berated and humiliated by your alleged “victim” is beyond me.

I’ve never had this happen to me, but friends of mine have been embarrassed in the past to be torn off a strip for holding open a door or offering to give up a seat on public transport when they have chosen the wrong person to benefit from their own offering of what they themselves just considered to be a random act of kindness. Now I’m wondering how many people have smiled at me as I have held a door for them as they struggled along with all their bags, and then muttered a silent stream (or scream) of frustrated oaths under their breath as they went away.

As ever, you can control what you do, but you can’t control how what you do is interpreted. But then again this is also true of the “slut walk” movement. Whilst it is fully justifiable to say that you should be able to wear what you want and it is the offenders that are at fault when it comes to such matters (I really don’t have any argument with that), it cannot be denied that you can control how you look, but you can’t control how you are looked at.

People should be able to wear what they want, and if they are attacked by a maniac, the perpetrator should go to prison for it, but, personally, I’d rather not put myself in potential harm’s way in the first place. A maniac simply doesn’t care about all that. He looks, he sees and he pounces. He’s not worried about the subtleties. If he does do that, then you can’t “undo” these things once they happen, so why take the risk? Just because you are undeniably in the right doesn’t necessarily stop the other person from doing wrong.

That said there are a heck of a lot of “crimes against fashion” committed on the streets nowadays which make you wonder whether the person wearing those clothes has ever seen a mirror… That’s just me trying to lighten the mood because we’ve gone into some very murky waters, but does not diminish the seriousness of that issue. Just when I’m trying to put a reasoned debate together, I slide into a world of inappropriate flippancy. I do this a lot. Sorry. It’s mostly because I’m feeling nervous.

So it was with all this in mind that I headed into Tesco, ruthlessly determined not to be polite to anyone just in case they misinterpreted it as a random act of condescension. But in the end, I’m just me, and I can’t do that, even if I try. The first aisle that I exited, I nearly had a blind-exit head-on trolley collision with another trolley, one that happened to be being pushed along by a woman (I’m sorry, but I did notice that… I try so hard to be “gender blind” too…), so I backed up and let her pass, not because she was a woman (I may have mentioned that I noticed that… Sorry again…) but because we were in each other’s way, and a mutual refusal to back down could have ended up being a long drawn out and ugly affair… No I didn’t mean “affair”, at least not in that sense… I’m just not the philanderer type. I should have said “incident”. Merely using the word “affair” in that context probably just obviously proves my latent benevolent sexism. So, anyway, off we went on our separate ways, with me probably feeling more confused than ever, and she presumably mentally cursing me to the rafters for daring to be so presumptive. Or maybe, neither of us were bothered about it at all, and just got on with our shopping without giving it another thought, just happy that the other person hadn’t turned out to be some kind of maniac. Obviously that’s not true (not the maniac part...), because I, at least, have quite blatantly been giving it much in the way of further thought.

No wonder society seems to be getting more surly and impolite by the day. Sometimes it’s all getting far too complicated, and you can understand why people just don’t bother any more.

Anyway, now that I’ve offended everyone, I think I’ll drift off again and think about something else to fret about. Normally I’d point out that the only person I’m harming here is myself, but when it comes to the bigger picture, now I’m not so sure, as I try to write these things in a friendly way, but who knows what people think when they read them?