I loved doing dot-to-dots as a child. There was something grand about linking all the tiny dots together to reveal a bigger picture. As an adult, I still love dot-to-dot, but now I attempt to link various \u201cdots\u201d into larger pictures that reveal cultural trends and ideologies.<\/p>\n
This week, a number of \u201cdots\u201d sat scattered across my computer screen, in the form of various posts and podcasts, waiting for me to have time to more thoroughly connect them \u2013 the wonderful \u201cLetter to Bella<\/a>\u201d post from Ms. Blog, Are Boys Natural Born Killers?<\/a>, a podcast about war and gender, the \u201cBorn to Breed<\/a>\u201d interview with author Vyckie Garrison, news about JC Penney\u2019s t-shirt<\/a> \u201cToo pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me\u201d t-shirt, and, as I am about to head off to Forks, Washington to speak at Stephenie Meyer Day<\/a>, a number of Twilight related posts.<\/p>\n When the metaphorical dots between all these pieces are connected, the picture I am left with is one of a world that has definitely not gone \u201cbeyond pink and blue\u201d (to borrow the title of another Girl with Pen column).<\/p>\n As Melissa Wardy<\/a> points out in one \u201cdot\u201d, her post to the young Bella, \u201cgrown ups try to fit kids into little boxes that are labeled \u2018Boy\u2019 or \u2018Girl\u2019, and then they only let certain colors or ideas into each box.\u201d As Wardy further points out, four year olds are sadly more likely to \u201cknow that girls can like or do anything boys can\u201d than their grown up counterparts.<\/p>\n This claim was confirmed by heated comments in my War Literature class last evening. I had students listen to one of the dots coloring my desktop, the podcast Are Boys Natural Born Killers?<\/a>, which includes Professor Joshua Goldstein, author of War and Gender<\/em>, talking about the fact that boys are not \u201cnatural warriors\u201d and that the only biological claim that seems to hold up this widely held cultural view is their propensity for more upper body strength. Though the entire podcast emphasized that gender is constructed and downplayed biological essentialism, the one comment made by Goldstein about upper body strength was latched onto. One student, for example, insisted men are built to fight whereas women are not. In this \u201cMe Strong, You Weak\u201d debate, I found myself thinking back to yet another dot, to the \u201cBorn to Breed\u201d<\/a> piece I had read earlier in the week.<\/p>\n In the piece, Vyckie Garrison, a former member of the Quiverfull movement, talks about the growing religious movement and its grounding in the belief that \u201cthe husband is the head of the household and the wife is the submissive \u2018helpmeet.\u2019\u201d As Garrison documents, \u201c<\/strong>A Quiverfull daughter is taught from a young age that her purpose in life is to serve the man whom God has placed in authority over her,\u201d as well as to have as many children as possible. As such, \u201cHer education is geared toward developing domestic skills–college is generally considered unnecessary and even dangerous for her spiritual well-being.\u201d<\/p>\n And this brings me to Twilight<\/em>, that oh-so-popular saga that has the heroine Bella (who shares no resemblance to the blue-shoe-wearing four year old feminist Bella above), giving up college to marry Edward and bear his vampire\/human baby.<\/p>\n As I argued in my piece Wed, Bed and Bruised but Certainly Not Equal<\/a>, the romanticization of sexual violence that texts like Twilight<\/em> entail is part and parcel of the continuing inequality of our society. But, as lamented in \u201cIn Defense of Twilight,\u201d<\/a> this type of criticism is, like, a major bummer. The author writes: \u201cHave you noticed Twilight gets attacked a lot? It gets attacked by men & feminists all the time & also by other fandoms. The latest thing I’ve heard is how Twilight romanticizes “domestic violence” & supports “inequality.” What a downer!\u201d What a downer indeed. Far better to take the view enthusiastically supported by the author of the post that \u201cIt\u2019s a love story and nothing more.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Supportive of this enthusiastic love of love is the tendency to frame females and males as entirely opposite species, as in the post \u201cJulia Jones Calls ‘Twilight’ Wolf Pack a Boys’ Club<\/a>.\u201d Author Brooke Tarnoff starts her gender essentialist piece with the following: \u201cYou might think you understand the plight of a woman in traditionally male-dominated fields — but none of them have anything on Julia Jones<\/a>.\u201d Suggesting that being an actress playing the lone female werewolf in an otherwise all male pack is far more heinous, say, than being the only female soldier in your regiment or than a lifetime of butting your head against the glass ceiling, Tarnoff\u2019s piece not only brushes off male domination as something to joke about, but is also grounded in the \u201copposites attract\u201d type of mentality that keeps heterosexism firmly in place.<\/p>\n The actress Jones, discussing her time working with the \u201c wolf boys club\u201d notes \u201cI kind of got to a place where I felt like I… know how to think like a guy,\u201d which, Tarnoff suggests, entails learning \u201chow gross<\/em> they really are.\u201d While admittedly this is a light piece joking about having to deal with \u201cmale talk\u201d when one is the only female on the job, it nevertheless reflects a deeper issue \u2013 the still widely held belief that men and women naturally <\/em>think, talk, and act differently \u2013 a belief that belies the social construction of gender and acts as if other markers of difference \u2013 race, class, sexuality, and so on, don\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n This belief is echoed in the last weekly news story in my dot-to-dot puzzle \u2013 the JC Penny t-shirt that reads \u201cToo pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me.\u201d<\/p>\n Like four-year-old Bella who is told blue shoes are not for her, like the Quiverfull movement that claims men are meant to lead and women to breed, like the male student that suggested women are weak, like the Twilight<\/em> texts and the surrounding fan culture that tends to frame males as \u201cwolfish boys\u201d and females as selfless romantics, this t-shirt echoes our continuing entrenchment in the gender binary.<\/p>\n Strung together, all these dots show one big, ugly patriarchal picture.<\/p>\n