When Girls Just Aint Good Enough

When I was a kid, I had to listen to a lot of crap. Not just from boastful boys, but also from well meaning adults. Things I remember being told as a child include:

Boys are just _________________ (smarter/faster/better) than girls.
I can't believe your father lets you ________________________ (play baseball/go fishing).
A man needs a son to carry on the family name and daughters to care for him in his old age.
Girls should play with dolls. Boys should play with trucks.
Girls would be hurt badly if they were hit by a baseball (as if boys wouldn't be).

I used to be shooed out of garages and off back stoops were boys and men congregated. I was told that my mother had called to ask me to come home when she hadn't. You can imagine how these things went over for the tomboy that I was as a kid. It didn't help that all the kids in my neighborhood were boys (with the exception of Sheila Arrington, who didn't like to play outdoors at all). I recall being singled out by other parents from within a group of neighborhood boys and asked, "Does your mother know you are out here?" I used to reply, "My mother wants me out of the house", and that usually satisfied them. But there was a spirit-crushing moment when all my friends were off to sign up for Little League and I couldn't join them. It was worse when they showed up with their brand new baseball gloves and bright white uniforms and colored socks and team baseball hats. I just had to make do with my hand-me-down baseball glove and no cap at all. I can't tell you how lonely it was to come out after Saturday morning cartoons and have the entire block be void of children to play with. I couldn't do much about not being allowed to register for Little League, so I signed up to play slow-pitch softball. Only softball didn't have uniforms or hats. We didn't have team sponsors to pay for all that. I had to go down to the sporting goods store and have my own shirt made. We had a rag-tag league, and worst of all, we had softball gloves that were useless for playing baseball on the block. In all the years I played softball, I don't think I ever broke that glove in. Something else I just remembered. My softball coach was black. In all my years hanging around baseball games with my brothers, I never recall seeing a black Little League coach. I am pretty sure that never happened. I liked our coach. He was waaaaaaaay better than having one of the mothers coach. He knew something about playing ball.

A chum of mine from grade school located me on Facebook yesterday and we got to reminiscing about the old days at good ol' Charles Russell Elementary. In particular, we remembered the school year that girls were required to stay on a 2500 sf asphalt pad that had nothing but hopscotch games and "balance beams" painted on it, while the boys had the run of the playground including all of the playground equipment (swings, teeter totters, monkey bars, baseball diamond, and basically any area containing dirt). The female teachers who supervised children outdoors following lunch militantly enforced these rules. So not only was there institutional discrimination, but there was also segregation. Girls had no balls or any other playground equipment with which to play. I have no idea why this rule was established suddenly and why it was applied only to girls. But I do recall that after about a month of this, we took matters into our own hands and began to protest. We organized. We got our 12" rulers out of our desks. Attached paper with protest slogans on them, taped up our protest signs and began to chant and march around the perimeter of our imprisonment. We had our own little women's movement. I can't recall now if we were successful. I do recall that we garnered the ire of the teachers and principal. We were told by the teachers to "stop being silly". Our protest signs were confiscated. All the evidence, including our names, were given to the principal. The male principal. Mr. Wheeler. The man was a troll. I remember something else. I remember that as the worst year of my young life.

Is this sinking in now? When I was a kid, denying girls equal opportunity was not just some sports issue solved by Title IX. Denying girls equal opportunity was a way of life. An accepted way of life. An enforced way of life. By everyone. Television showed women thrilled to be in subservient positions. I never understood why those damn girls on Little House on the Prairie always seemed to happy to be reading constantly and playing in a 20' perimeter around the cabin. They only hung on the fence and never went inside to ride ponies or poke cows or examine cow shit. They just hung on the fence and had meaningful conversations with Pa.

That was total bullshit. I hated that show.

Memories are funny things. I expected the sting to lesson with age. It hasn't. I recall a serious justification being made by grown men for excluding girls from Little League baseball surrounded the requirement that all ball players wear a "cup". And vaguely suggestive comments about girls needing bras and what would happen if a ball hit a girl in the chest. Hee hee. Funny, huh? Not.

My parents weren't ground breakers. They weren't stereotype busters. They were average parents who never questioned the rules. Oh, they told me things like "you can be anything you want to be" and didn't seem to mind that I wanted to be things that included the word "first". As in "the first woman president" or "the first woman astronaut" or "the world's first female architect". I think this is why I developed this sense that I was going to be notable or celebrated in some way as an adult. After all, I was going to be "the first". It seemed like everything I wanted to do just to be a well rounded person seemed to include the word "first".

When I went to college the very very first time, I trained to become a draftsman because, you know, girls couldn't actually be architects. And I tried to get out and get a job in the construction field. And no one would hire me. No one. In all that time, I had one interview in which I was informed that I wasn't going to be able to wear dresses to work because I'd have to go out to job sites and there would be mud. I tried for months to get a job and finally had to accept a job as a clerk at a pharmacy. I also had to go back to school. I had wasted 'the first" attempt at a college education.

I encountered similar discrimination in the workplace. If there wasn't overt discrimination against women in supervisory positions, there was the added bonus of the fear of competition wherein female supervisors passed over competent women who might compete with them. Let's face it, I just don't have a personality type that is compatible with second-tier status. I think this is a prime motivation why I am seeking a doctorate. I'm tired of being at the mercy of anyone. Good will and staff development my ass. I am so f'ing done with that. What's next?

Being a girl should be good enough. Someone needs to alert China.

Why "I Do" are the most Dangerous Words in the English Language

I'm not a big fan of marriage. I think I've made that abundantly clear. When people ask me what problem I have with marriage, I reply, "You get married in a church, but divorced in court." People tease me with "oh, you'll get married again, you just wait."

I won't. I will never be married again. Not when hell freezes over. Not when pigs fly. Not when it means the difference between letting someone else make medical decisions for someone I love. Not when it denies me the ability to inherit property. The answer is no.

That is not to say that I don't hope one day to have a long-term monogamous co-habitating type relationship. I would like that very much. But it will not involve walking down the aisle and saying "I do." The first reason is purely selifsh. I want someone to choose every single day to be with me. Not to be there out of obligation or because it is too expensive to think about getting out. Trust me, I know the toll such conditions can take. My blood pressure toward the end of my marriage was 160/91, I drank Pepto Bismol for breakfast, I had a constant headache, my teeth hurt, and the skin on my head was taught from the never-ending aggravation. I recall thinking that death wold be preferable to spending one more day in that house with him. The second reason is that I firmly believe that my personal life is none of the state's damn business. End of discussion.

The real reason I've come upon this topic is that I have been thinking about the Equal Rights Amendment lately. Many of you have probably never heard of it, but in the mid-1970s, the Equal Rights Amendment was the culmination of the women's movement. It proposed, quite simply, that equality of rights would not be denied based on sex. The Amendment was hard-fought in Congress, but never ratified. What I didn't know until I started poking around on this topic, was that the ERA has been proposed in every congress since, and STILL it isn't taken seriously. But, I'll get back to that later.

Marriage has entered the political arena over the past decade or so as the gay community has pressed to have same-sex unions recognized as marriages. They maintain, and I have to agree, that marriage comes with rights and privileges that they are denied. Currently, marriage between men and women is permitted, albeit regulated, by every state in the union. Marriage between same-sex couples is permitted by only two states: California and Massachusetts. What do I mean by regulated? I mean that the state gets to decide whether a marriage is legal and has the right to prohibit illegal marriages.

Call me a libertarian, but my ultimate question is, why the hell is the government involved in my social, sexual, economic, and familial relationships? Interesting question that, so I set out to do some research.

Turns out, the government got interested in regulating marriage about the time some black and white folks wanted to tie the knot, jump over the broomstick, or take a spin around the altar. Since we all know what sorts of mayhem can result when big black bucks weave a spell of romance over our lily-white daughters, the state got involved by requiring a marriage license. Efforts to outlaw miscegenation is how the states got involved in your love life. IMO, the marriage license is the state's silent but subtle support of white morality--more specifically, white male superiority--over the other dirty races. It's like asking the KKK if it's ok for you to get married. I believe that marriage licenses were the way for white men to prevent themselves from becoming obsolete and to maintain white privilege and white power. I'll leave it at that.

The marriage license is an insidious little instrument that basically says that marriage is a privilege, not a right. So you have a marriage license, a driver's license, but a death certificate. I guess everyone has a right to die.

So, my original flippant remark about marriage isn't exactly right. The states are involved up front. Any marriage conducted without a marriage license isn't valid. Common law marriages are the only exceptions. Not all states recognize common law marriages. And this is where is gets muddy. States with common-law statutes don't say a damn thing about the gender of the participants. Only that they are husband and wife. Since husband and wife are not, to the best of my understanding, legally defined, it stands to reason in my head anyway that same-sex partners need only identify themselves as husband and wife, not husband and husband or wife and wife. Shrugs. I'm sure there's a loophole in there somewhere.

The Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 defines marriage as that between a man and a woman, and offers a specific exception to the Full Faith and Credit Provision of the Constitution. So a same-sex marriage in California or Massachusetts need not be recognized in Kentucky or Colorado. Furthermore, the DOMA specifically prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex unions as marriages, even if the states do. This is pretty heady stuff. For instance, the Full Faith and Credit Provision is what prevents deadbeat parents from fleeing to other states to escape support orders. It is what accounts for our liberal extradition laws. I'm not sure, but I would imagine that the Full Faith and Credit Provision prevents other states from disenfranchising felons, when the state in which they were incarcerated enacts laws re-establishing their suffrage. (I bring up the right to vote because it is holds special significance in our republic. Four of our 27 Constitutional amendments deal directly with the voting rights of the people.) The second provision (that prevents the federal government from recognizing the state marriages as marriages) seems inherently unconstitutional. Why? Because any right not specifically given to the federal government is given to the states or the people. If the states are the ones with the right to determine what is a legal marriage, then that seems to prevent the federal government from abridging those rights. Without a Constitutional amendment establishing marriage as that between a man and a woman, the DOMA (at least as it pertains to the federal government), seems to be unconstitutional.

But I'm no constitutional scholar.

So why the hell have I just researched and written all this on a subject that I'd rather die than enter again? It's the issue of rights. As I understand it, the Equal Rights Amendment has been proposed in every Congress since 1923. In 1970, it managed to get to the floor but it was not ratified before it expired. It has been proposed in every Congress since.

The state maintains that marriage is a privilege. In fact, the issuance of a license (and not a certificate) reinforces the precedent that it is a privilege, not a right. However, it seems to me that there are certain rights afforded married persons that are denied unmarried persons. For instance? Well, husband and wife are considered to be "blood family". They have rights of inheritance, rights to make medical decisions on behalf of their spouses and children, and so forth. Family rights are most definitely seen as off limits by the states. Therefore, these "family rights" should appropriately be considered civil rights, not privileges. If they are civil rights, they can't be denied or abridged by the state. So while marriage itself may be a privilege, the rights assigned to married persons are specifically denied to unmarried persons. Therefore, certain civil rights are provisional and are being infringed by denying same-sex couples from marrying.

The Equal Rights Amendment as proposed in the 70s said that no rights may be denied or abridged based on sex.

Do you see where I'm going here?

We could kill two birds with one stone. If the gay community and the feminist community managed to get the ERA ratified, it would be a de facto ratification of gay marriage. All it would take is one successful court case that argues that rights afforded to married persons but denied to single ones is based on sex.

The reasons that the ERA failed to be ratified in the 1970s are many. It had to do a bit with the cultural climate--women had only begun to enter the workforce in numbers. Remember, Title Nine was enacted in 1972 and think of the stink it causes still.

In the end, I have no idea why gay people would want to marry. I don't see any use in the institution at all. But if they are determined, no reason they shouldn't have the right to suffer high blood pressure and chronic headaches, too. I hope they like Pepto Bismol. It's the breakfast of married people. And I wouldn't scream if it did something--anything--to address income, opportunity, and other inequalities of women in America.