This was originally posted on the PostCalvin Blog, but since their site is having a little trouble as of late and I wanted to reference this particular post in another, I felt a repost here would not go amiss.
When
I think about feminism I often remember Sarah, a girl I played soccer with at
Calvin. We were a tough team, known in the league (a friend from Albion once
told me) for hard knocks. On picture days, girls who wore their hair down for a
prettier photo were mocked. It’s soccer, we said. We’re here to win not look
pretty. As if that was a self-evident dichotomy.
Sarah
did both. Some days I would meet her on the pathway down to the lower practice
fields. My ankles were taped up and I was banishing poetry class from my
thoughts, trying to focus on drills and sweat and the upcoming game. Sarah
found a dandelion and stuck it in her hair. She had wide blue eyes and her hair
was always flying out of any ponytail she put it in. I’m not sure she ever
pointed out the shapes of clouds to me as we walked together, but it feels true
when I remember her.
Back
in my first year at Calvin I was introduced to feminism by Simona Goi, my
political science professor. I adored that class—the readings, the lectures—but
the only moment from it I actually remember is the day Professor Goi gave us
her policy on pronouns. No more “their” or generic “his;” use “his or hers” or
switch between them.
We
protested. It sounds awkward. “His” means the same thing; we know it stands for
both. When Professor Goi, visibly disgusted and frustrated, asked the women in
the class we were being left out. I remember not caring, thinking she was
blowing the importance of pronouns out of proportion. My shoulders shrugged
with others’: exiled from the text, a small sacrifice for the sake of fluid
prose.
I
don’t remember who changed that for me. Maybe it was the Bechdel test. Maybe it
was Joss Whedon. Maybe it was how ridiculous people sounded talking about
Hilary Clinton’s hair instead of her politics. It might have been my
self-defense instructor, her short, silver hair a curly halo as she led us in
meditation one minute and then explained every way to gouge out an attacker’s
eyes the next. It might also have been Pastor Mary, whose relatable and eloquent
sermons reminded me—I don’t confess this lightly—of the disdain a younger me
felt when I attended a wedding presided over by a female pastor.
In
perhaps sophomore year Professor Vander Lie challenged my linguistics class to
observe in our classes the number of times a female student spoke versus the
number of times a male student spoke. Most viscerally I remember men, who were
physically outnumbered in my theology class, volunteering information twice as
much as the women in the class. Five years after that little experiment I’m
still horrified by the ratios I see in my own classroom.
Somehow,
years before, I’d put myself in a box. I could either be pretty or a bad-ass soccer player, not both,
and it was obvious which the superior choice was. I began to recognize that my
submission and silence for greater societal good—clean pronouns in prose, for
instance; less contention in class—was harmful for myself (lacking in
confidence) and others (lacking diversity). We are never one thing nor should
we be. My teammate Sarah probably still comes to mind because I try to emulate
the freedom she had. She was, like we all are, vulnerable, intelligent,
whimsical, hard-working, clever—a million different things all at once.
Wonderful.
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