The Feminine

This past week I've had some success teaching my freshmen excerpts from Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own."

The most insightful encounter with this text came from one of my SLCC classes, where one girl confessed to feeling like every time she wrote something "feminine," that it was "just" something "frilly" that no one would care about. (Her first paper was on ballerinas, for instance). I stopped her right there and asked someone with a smartphone to google the definition of "frilly"--sure enough, "frilly" is defined as "decorative." And decorative, by definition, is something extra, something insubstantial. So, I drew on the board the following chart of this girl's comment:

feminine=frilly=decorative=unnecessary

Without fully realizing it, this girl had internalized that to be feminine was to somehow be unnecessary, insubstantial, irrelevant. And of course they're not; for crying out loud, without women, without the feminine, we literally cannot reproduce the human race. Women are not the frills, they are the base. Yet they've still internalized this marginalization.

Now, to seasoned feminists and critics, this is of course nothing new; but it still bears repetition, because of how easy it is to not recognize your own internalizations. I, with all my critical training, still fall into this trap. For example, a girl in another classroom, one who doesn't comment much, ventured to tell me how she was nervous about her last paper, since it was about shopping. That struck me, because I do remember grading her paper, and I remember silently groaning at the topic; because I'm a guy, and derive zero pleasure from shopping, considering it a frilly, frivilous activity.

Now, is that because I consider shopping to be a wanton indulgence of crass commercialism, gross materialism, and conspicuous consumption symptomatic of America's wasteful and unsustainable consumerist culture (as I like to think)...or, is it because I subconsciously consider shopping to be feminine...and therefore...frivilous? I wonder.