the pink politic

She's Just Not That Equal to You

In the 1960s, college women followed the lead of feminists like Gloria Steinem and burned their bras to express freedom from male oppression. In the 1970s, college women wore baggy pants because masculinity equaled equality.

Today, we college women are padding our bras and wearing short shorts and painfully high heels because we’ve supposedly come full circle: We’re now so comfortable with femininity, the new thinking goes, it must mean we’re finally equal to men.

Well, we’re not.

According to the Census Bureau, women still earn 77 cents for every dollar that men make, and men with professional degrees earn almost $2 million more over the course of their careers than similarly credentialed women do. Further, women are more likely to be secretaries than CEOs, only seven percent of major motion pictures are directed by women and, as we all know, this country has yet to elect a female president.

Clearly, Maureen Dowd, New York Times columnist and author of the gender commentary “Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide,” had it right when she wrote, “…the feminist revolution [of the ’60s and ’70s] would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century.”

Or to put it plainly, something is seriously wrong – especially, in my experience, on college campuses, where woman are torn between the determination to be equal and the desire to be feminine. We want it all: a challenging education and career opportunities, the perfect man and unconditional equality. So we spend our days proving ourselves in the classrooms and our nights proving ourselves to male peers. According to a 2002 Penn State University study, women between the ages of 18 and 25 talk about sex more frequently than their male counterparts. Additionally, a University of Florida study from 2001 found that college women on average tended to learn, academically, only 67 percent of what men learn between freshman and senior year.

In other words, we talk more about sex and learn less in school than college men do.

No wonder we’re still behind.

What’s more, the dreams college women have for themselves seem to have gotten so much smaller than the feminists of the ’60s dreamed they might be for us.

A recent front-page article in the New York Times, for example, told the story of several female undergraduates at Harvard and other high-brow institutions who announced they would become stay-at-home moms once their degrees were complete. Not a single future Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey or Sandra Day O’Connor in the bunch. Just women educated at the most prestigious universities in the world who yearned to be head of the household, not head of Harvard.

Don’t get me wrong, the decision to be a full-time mom is admirable. But how can these women expect their classmates and instructors to take them seriously? Imagine admitting to your Harvard Law professor that the only judge you’ll ever be standing in front of is your mother-in-law.

It doesn’t help that the books college women read haven’t changed in the last half-century. They’ve merely changed titles. In the 1950s, the Bible for young women on the prowl was a guide called “How to Catch and Hold a Man.” It imparted on young women the Do’s and Don’ts of finding and keeping a man: archaic hints describing men’s fascination with curls, bows, ribbons and ruffles. Forty years and the feminism waves of the 1960s and ’70s passed and in 1995, bookstores everywhere released “The Rules.” The book’s writers describe the guide as “a simple way of acting around men that can help any woman win the heart of the man of her dreams.”

It appeared the lifeboat that would save college women from this endless cadre of mindless man manuals arrived last year in the form of “He’s Just Not That into You.” But we’re still sinking, because the New York Times bestseller was just a newer, hipper version of “The Rules.”. The guide tries to convince women that men who don’t call them, date them, have sex with them and so on simply aren’t worthy of their time.

But again, the emphasis is on change by the woman. “He’s just not that into you because he’s not calling you,” is just a pseudo-feminist way of saying, “Stop calling him and maybe he’ll start calling you!” The authors of this book tried to empower women, but it’s just a facade. And when’s the last time a book to teach men how to win the woman of their dreams topped the New York Times best seller list? When’s the last time anyone ever read a book like that? Does such a book even exist?

Despite its misogynistic undertones, “He’s Just” was the most talked-about book on my campus last year. Women were so anxious to get their hands on a copy. It was as if the eternal male puzzle had finally been solved and the answer was wrapped up in a cute pink cover. The book was everywhere – on the shelf in the campus bookstore, reviewed in the school newspaper, on the desk of the girl next to me in class. It was more available than any other single book on my campus, even more than any work by Freud or Plato. When college women are more inspired by a how-to-get-a-man book than Shakespeare, we know we’re heading into dangerous territory. Maybe I’m just being idealistic, but isn’t the purpose of attending college to study the classics and hone your skills for a career? Why then, were campus coffee shops last year filled with women having deep discussions about “He’s Just” instead of deep discussions about feminist theory?

Let me pause now to acknowledge the lengthy strides women have made since the dawn of time. Less than a century ago, women did not have the right to vote. Now we have women in Congress, the boardroom and the cinema. Less than two decades ago, a show like “Sex and the City” would have been unheard of, because women’s sexuality just wasn’t acknowledged to exist. And on college campuses, the male to female ratio is now 43 to 57, a reversal of ratios in the 1960s.

Even the military has come a long way since the days when women had to disguise themselves as men to join the ranks, given that women now make up 15 percent of U.S. forces.

Still, a recent anecdote from my 22-year-old friend Frank, who’s in the Air force, puts that statistic against a frustrating backdrop. In his experience, he says, “Women get away with a lot more.” Of the 60 people in his workplace, five are women.

“Those five females get special privileges,” he said. “If it’s really cold out, [our bosses] make someone else go out and work instead of the women.” This special treatment does nothing for the cause of equality. Maybe these women would like to assert their equality by working outside in the cold, but aren’t allowed to because their male superiors consider it against all that is chivalrous to allow women do such grunt work.

So yes, times have changed. But this kind of thinking is keeping the times from changing fast enough.

Another case in point: My boyfriend’s first two years of undergraduate work were completed at Asbury College in Kentucky. There, his freshman year resident assistant, Brian, was engaged to a beautiful, intelligent woman who was attending medical school. Brian was studying to be a counselor and he told his fiancé that she could no longer attend med school because he didn’t want his wife to be smarter or make more money than him. So she dropped out, moved to Kentucky and began work as a grocery bagger at the local Giant supermarket.

It’s disturbing to think that in the 21st century, a man in his twenties still holds onto this type of narrow-minded view – and a even more upsetting that a woman would succumb to it. If the assumption begins at the college level that men and women aren’t equal, we college women won’t stand a chance once we graduate and enter the workforce. College is exactly the place this attitude about inequality should change, and so it is college men and women who need to do something about it.

Change begins with the smallest of gestures. So I think I’ll start my own little revolution by asking my friends to burn their copies of “He’s Just Not That into You.”

posted by Tina @ 8:21 PM