Femininity (27 page)

On a more disturbing level, how can a female athlete not wonder what femaleness means
when a male tennis player undergoes surgery, hormone treatments, electrolysis and
a change of name and hair style and is permitted to play on the women’s circuit? How
can she not be suspicious of a remarkable new record when some Olympic champions,
a beefy Russian shot-putter and a couple of Polish sprinters, were found to possess
congenital chromosomal abnormalities, an irregular mix of male and female characteristics
that gave them a surpassing advantage of strength and speed in competition with true
genetic women? What does a young gymnast think when she hears the Romanian national
coach put his tiny fourteen-year-old star on a diet of salad, apples and “brake” drugs
in an attempt to retard her bodily changes? How can a runner, a swimmer or ballerina
not worry when through hard training, a reduction in body fat and the effects of stress,
her menstrual cycle may temporarily cease to function? Biology confronts the woman
athlete at every step, for little that is female and nothing that is feminine aids
the performance of someone who wants to win, except in those events where style and
grace are judged subjectively on points.

Despite anatomical flexibility, women are generally less relaxed than men in their
body postures, according to the studies of Albert Mehrabian, who proposes that attitudes
of submissiveness are conveyed through postures of tension. In Mehrabian’s analysis
of body language among high- and low-status males, high-ranking men are more relaxed
in their gestures in the presence of subordinates. Not surprisingly, men of all ranks
generally assume more relaxed postures and gestures when communicating with women.

Mehrabian’s studies correlate with the work of zoologist Thelma Rowell, who studied
relationships of dominance and subordination in monkeys and baboons. Rowell postulated
that a dominant primate might be defined as “one who did not think before it acted”
in encounters with others. A dominant animal walked down a path or sat on a log where
it pleased, without acknowledging a subordinate’s presence. Subordinate animals cringed
or scattered at the other’s approach. “Thus,” she wrote, “it was the subordinate animals
that cautiously observed and maintained the hierarchy.” Rowell suggested that “the
subordinate’s behavior elicits dominating behavior rather than the reverse” in many
situations. “Cringing, fleeing and fear-grinning,” she wrote, “are extremely potent
stimuli eliciting attack behavior in primates, and this has rarely been taken into
account in discussing hierarchical relationships.” But perhaps the nervous subordinates
had good reason to cringe and grin, having sustained a couple of bad bites on prior
occasions.

Women are not supposed to stand up and fight when they hear the bell. Women smile,
they retreat into a smaller physical space, and they symbolically “offer the neck”
in appeasement, to use a favorite image of Konrad Lorenz, and from their small, curled
space, they look out at the world around them in a state of alert and watchful tension.
“Women’s intuition,” that sentimentally valued characteristic, may be nothing more
than defensive watchfulness, a picking up and putting together of verbal and nonverbal
cues as a strategy of survival, as the subordinate animal is sensitive to the sounds
and movements of the dominant animal, which does not need to think before it acts.

Subservience in movement and gesture was the hallmark of
feminine modesty in books of deportment that were written for the new bourgeoisie
of the Middle Ages. Unseemly mirth, a darting eye, a babbling tongue and a wanton
gait were related prohibitions.
The Good Wife
instructed her daughter, “Go thou not too fast. Brandish not with thy head, nor with
thy shoulders cast.” In another volume on manners a husband advises his wife, “Go
with your head turned straight forward, your eyelids low and fixed, and your gaze
before you down to the ground … Turn not your eyes on man or woman, or staring upward,
or laughing or stopping to talk to anyone in the streets.” When seated, a maiden kept
her hands folded quietly in her lap or busily engaged with needlework.

Inhibition was artfully encouraged by restrictive feminine clothing in the centuries
that followed. Unable to stretch freely in the confines of her corset, and weighted
down by yards of cloth which hampered her step and usurped the use of a hand to guide
and arrange the sweeping grandeur, a woman of the upper and middle classes was schooled
in restraint by the social demands of fashion. For street wear a fanciful hat adorned
with ribbons, plumes and veiling served to curtail the motions of her head. Dependence
on gentlemen and servants was an understandable consequence of feminine dress.

A sturdily woven mesh of local ordinances and municipal codes dictated some further
rules of good conduct. Writes American historian Geoffrey Perrett, “Before the First
World War women were arrested for smoking cigarettes in public, for using profanity,
for appearing on beaches without stockings, for driving automobiles without a man
beside them, for wearing outlandish attire (for example, shorts, slacks, men’s hats),
and for not wearing their corsets.” Public-decency regulations received their strongest
support from the Sunday sermons in local churches.

Romantically the feminine ideal is often pictured with something pretty and fragile
to occupy the hands: a nosegay of violets, the bridal bouquet of white stephanotis
and orange blossoms, a sheaf of long-stemmed roses presented to the prima ballerina
as she takes her curtain call amidst applause. With the passing from the social scene
of certain dainty props—a fan, a parasol, a wrist corsage for the prom queen—today’s
customary
restraints on bodily comportment are indicated by fingertips and heels, a pocketbook
on the shoulder, and a schooled inhibition against spreading the knees. In addition,
as the French feminist Colette Guillaumin has noted, women are physically burdened
by what she calls “diverse loads,” the habitual signs of chief responsibility for
the domestic role—children on the arm, their food and toys in hand, and a bag of groceries
or shirts from the dry cleaners hugged to the chest. Rarely does a woman experience
the liberty of taking a walk with empty hands and arms swinging free at her sides.
So rare is this, in fact, that many women find it physically unnerving when they do.
Unaccustomed to the freedom, they are beset by worries that some needed belonging,
some familiar presence (a purse, a shopping bag?) has been forgotten.

Small, fluttery gestures that betray nervousness or a practiced overanimation are
considered girlishly feminine and cute. Toying with a strand of hair, bobbing the
head, giggling when introduced, pulling the elbows in close to the body and crossing
the legs in a knee-and-ankle double twist are mannerisms that men studiously avoid.
Self-contained and nonaggressive, they might almost be the equivalent of cringing,
fleeing and fear-grinning among the lower primates.

Jewelry plays a subtle role in delineating masculine and feminine gestures. To drum
one’s fingers on the table is an aggressive expression of annoyance and conspicuously
unfeminine, but to fidget with a necklace or twist a ring is a nonthreatening way
of dissipating agitation. Clutching protectively at the throat is not restricted to
females, but corresponding masculine gestures are to loosen the collar and adjust
the necktie, actions which indicate some modicum of control.

Quaint postures that throw the body off balance, such as standing on one leg as if
poised for flight, or leading from the hips in a debutante slouch, or that suggest
a child’s behavior (the stereotypic sexy secretary taking dictation while perched
on the boss’s knee), fall within the repertoire of femininity that is alien, awkward
and generally unthinkable as a mode of behavior for men. Reclining odalisque-style,
a shocker thirty-five years ago when Truman Capote posed in this manner for a book
jacket, is
a classic feminine tableau of eroticized passivity with an established tradition in
art. Caricatured by Mae West, the standing odalisque—hand on hip, hand on hairdo—invites
attention: “Come up and see me sometime.”

Of course, feminine movement was never intended for solo performance. Vine-clinging,
cuddling and birdlike perching require a strong external support. It is in order to
appeal to men that the yielded autonomy and contrived manifestations of helplessness
become second nature as expressions of good manners and sexual good will. For smooth
interaction between the sexes, the prevailing code of masculine action demands a yielding
partner to gracefully complete the dance.

Nancy Henley, psychologist and author of
Body Politics,
has written, “In a way so accepted and so subtle as to be unnoticed even by its practitioners
and recipients, males in couples will often literally push a woman everywhere she
is to go—the arm from behind, steering around corners, through doorways, into elevators,
onto escalators … crossing the street. It is not necessarily heavy and pushy or physical
in an ugly way; it is light and gentle but firm, in the way of the most confident
equestrians with the best-trained horses.”

In this familiar
pas de deux,
a woman must either consent to be led with a gracious display of good manners or
else she must buck and bristle at the touch of the reins. Femininity encourages the
romance of compliance, a willing exchange of motor autonomy and physical balance for
the protocols of masculine protection. Steering and leading are prerogatives of those
in command. Observational studies of who touches whom in a given situation show that
superiors feel free to lay an intimate, guiding hand on those with inferior status,
but not the reverse. “The politics of touch,” a concept of Henley’s, operates instructively
in masculine-feminine relations.

Henley was the first psychologist to connect the masculine custom of shepherding an
able-bodied woman through situations that do not require physical guidance with other
forms of manhandling along a continuum from petty humiliation (the sly pinch, the
playful slap on the fanny) to the assaultive abuses of wife beating and rape. This
is not to say that the husband who
steers his wife to a restaurant table with a paternal shove is no different from the
rapist, but rather to suggest that women who customarily expect to have their physical
movements directed by others are poorly prepared by their feminine training to resist
unwanted interference or violent assault. Fear of being judged impolite has more immediate
reality for many women than the terror of physical violation.

The lessons of femininity instruct in polite compliance, and the rules of etiquette
demand that the female relinquish her initiative in social encounters. Indeed, the
delicate tissue of formalized male-female relations is constructed on artful expressions
of feminine dependence. To be helped with one’s coat, to let the man do the driving,
to sit mute and unmoving while the man does the ordering and picks up the check—such
trained behavioral inactivity may be ladylike, gracious, romantic and flirty, and
soothing to easily ruffled masculine feathers, but it is ultimately destructive to
the sense of the functioning, productive self. The charge that feminists have no manners
is true, for the history of manners, unfortunately for those who wish to change the
world, is an index of courtly graces addressed toward those of the middle classes
who aspire to the refinements of their betters, embodied in the static vision of the
cared for, catered-to lady of privilege who existed on a rarefied plane above the
mundane reality of strenuous labor. When a feminist insists on opening a door for
herself, a simple act of physical autonomy that was never an issue for servants, field
and factory workers and women not under the protection of men, her gesture rudely
collides with chivalrous expectations, for manly action requires manifest evidence
of a helpless lady in order to demonstrate courtly respect. Feminine psychology adjusts
to the required denial of routine initiative by claiming that “feeling ladylike and
protected” is a preferred state of being, by incorporating a fair amount of induced
passivity into one’s behavioral mode, and by denying that self-assertion is an important
value.

Animal behavior studies report exhaustively on the effects of testosterone in fostering
aggression. Research into the hormonal influence on human behavior is notably inconclusive,
but too intriguing to dismiss. Aggression is an imprecise concept—as
one researcher wrote in good humor, “Trying to define aggression makes people aggressive”—but
the rubric generally covers a cluster of behavioral patterns that are usually more
pronounced in the male: expenditure of physical energy, rough-house play, irritability,
threatening activity in response to fear, inter- and intra-sex fighting, and the infliction
of physical damage. Most students of aggression stretch the definition to embrace
territorial defense and the competitive drive for power and dominance within the social
hierarchy (the hierarchical order itself is claimed as a product of behavioral aggression)
while they shy away from the implications of violence. Few find room in their theories
for the phenomenon of maternal aggression, in which a mother utilizes all means at
her disposal to protect her young.

Despite the vagueness of the aggression concept, the possibility of a hormonal basis
for aggressive behavior in human conduct undeniably exists, even with the overriding
roles played by heredity, environment and learning in mediating the complex circuitry
of the human brain. It would be foolhardy to attempt to gauge the precise extent of
that hormonal influence, or to claim it as a biological determinant that will continue
to affect the destiny of the human race. The testosterone level in human males is
ten times higher than in human females, but the male is not ten times as hairy, ten
times as muscular or ten times as tall. Within a gender, testosterone levels do not
correspond to comparative hairiness, muscularity or height. Yet it is obvious that
the endocrine difference between the sexes gave the male a historic advantage in terms
of the sheer, brute force of physical aggression that propelled human endeavor to
its present place. War, slavery, the earliest known legal concepts and the building
of monoliths were products of dimorphic masculine strength more than they were the
noble achievements of verbal intelligence, sensitive yearnings or tactical skills.
Only in the last century, and only in those parts of the world where industrial development
has rendered brute force somewhat irrelevant, if not thoroughly obsolete, can the
question of competitive drive be considered without reference to muscularity, and
then only partially with some occupational exceptions.