Alex is working this summer at Hollaback.  By collecting women and LGBTQ folks’ stories and pictures in a safe and share-able way with its mobile phone applications, Hollaback! is creating a crowd-sourced initiative to end street harassment.

This week we asked students to reflect on their own “gender socialization” growing up; how did they learn what it meant to be a girl or a boy?  And how did that connect to the ideas they read about in Jessica Taft’s book Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas.  Taft argues that while many programs focus on girls’ “empowerment,” which she suggests mostly prepares them to fit in to the way the world is today, she supports a focus on girls’ “activism,” which helps them find ways to make a real difference in the world.

One distinct memory I have of my father during my childhood was his constant desire to berate me with what it meant to be a “man.” Usually he was using it to accuse me of not being responsible, or timely, or focused, or honest or anything that he wanted me to be, that, of course, didn’t really have anything to do with being a man.  There are plenty of irresponsible, impolite, dishonest, and simply unpleasant men in the world; it seems most of them have been elected to our federal government but I digress.  “When you become a man, you’ll understand.” If he only knew.

I’ve always thought of socialization around gender to be very implicit, but the fact is, it wasn’t.  It was rarely audibly articulated, but it was, on the other hand, quite explicit.  In my case, much of what I learned about gender roles growing up was a product of my parents’ attempts to bring my siblings and me up in the Christian faith. I can definitely see, now, that implicit in their moral and religious agendas were very defined and limited gender roles.  My mother was never loud, rarely argued with my father or even disagreed, always cooked and cleaned the house, did most of the childcare, and later on dealt with most of our issues surrounding school.  My father on the other hand, always gave his critiques of dinner though he never made any effort to make it himself, ordered my siblings and me around as far as yard and school work, taught us to read and write and play instruments, while always managing to keep us fearfully obedient with his booming voice among other things.  All in all, I might as well had been sent to a deep south “gender school.” The interactions between my parents, much more so than anything they ever said to me, were responsible for socialization around gender.

As it pertains to the empowerement vs activism debate, the ideas I got about what a woman should be from my parents were strictly limited to the empowerment model.  A woman should be confident, articulate, intelligent, and so on.  If, for some reason, she could not succeed at something in life, it was because she was not doing something right.  Activism, on the other hand, was beyond the scope of proper for a woman.  After all, if there were no institutional inequalities, then there was no cause to be an activist about.  I’m still curious to this day if either of my parents is even aware of the advantages/disadvantages their respective genders have faced them with in life.  And considering that fact, I can’t really blame them for giving me a dynamic view of gender roles in society that they didn’t even have themselves.

By the grace of God, (oh the irony) and perhaps because of my natural hostility to authority, I never really took well to a lot of the things my parents told me, including the way my father and my mother proceeded to socialize me around gender.  In some ways, where I am today is because much of it has backfired. This story probably sums it up well; on one occasion I recall my father discussing with me how Adam and Eve were once only Adam, neither male nor female having the control over the other.  “In a perfect world man was not over woman,” he earnestly explained, “they were equals.”  But of course we all know what happened when Eve ate the forbidden fruit, and quite predictably, my dad never seemed too upset about that.