The Expectations Of Gender

As some of you know, Gentle Reader, I have attended a number of Anglican churches over the years.  In the penultimate parish there was this rather horrid old British woman with crazy poufy hair (probably she has worn it in this style for the last fifty years or longer).  She one day confided to me that she knew of only one hairdresser in New Westminster who still did hair in this style.  She was likely one of their most faithful patrons.  This church lady from hell was prone to angry outbursts, almost all of them directed at me.  Generally it would have something to do with my gender with her snorting derisively, "Typical man!" or something equally absurd like "Men!"   I particularly remember one day during the coffee hour downstairs following the 11 am Eucharist.  Wanting to be helpful, toward the end I was stripping the tables of their tablecloths.  I thought they were going into the laundry to be washed right away so I didn't bother to fold them.  This was when the RHOBW (Rather Horrid Old British Woman) weighed in to spit out how useless men were about folding things.  I tossed the tablecloth in her wrinkled old face and told her to do it herself.

I spent the better part of four years of my life living with a couple of older women.  We were in an intentional Christian community and were consequently in each other's faces a lot.  I was in my mid to late thirties.  They were respectively twelve years my senior and twenty-eight years my senior (one was the same age as my father)  Despite their liberated feminist pretentions these gals were actually pretty conventional about gender.  They often tried to get on my good side by cooking and baking, but then I became a vegetarian and besides which I was already a better cook than either of them.  I was subtly expected to play the man in our operation.  To be the leader (although they really wanted to run the show themselves), the protector, the handyman, when really I sucked at all of those things and they didn't want to forgive me for this.  I was often the target of the wrath they would have hurled at their former husbands .  I was a unique variety of the male of the species they had never before reckoned with, an androgynous male.

Even though one of the women is dead and the other is off in another corner of the cosmos somewhere (I haven't seen her in almost fourteen years) I still feel targeted by other people's conventional and unimaginative assumptions about gender.  Among straight men I feel expected to like sports and to be subtly homophobic and perhaps a wee bit misogynistic.  With some women I feel like a stand in for the enemy male, the archetypal hater and destroyer of women.

Friendship is very important to me but it can also be quite difficult navigating these waters of traditional sexism especially given that they spring from some very deep places of the collective unconscious.  My best and most lasting friendships are with those who don't seem to see gender when they see me.  We respond to one another as persons, as human beings precious in the eyes of God.  We have not only learned to tread water but we've also found dry land.