Blog Post #3

Looking back on my personal interactions with people, I can certainly recall a few that absolutely apply to the point of this blog post.

These examples were all things that have been said to me. Cynthia Enloe’s quote regarding the concept of the words “tradition,” “natural” and “always” plays a role in these instances because it perfectly lines up with how people have always thought. Things like being told by my male roommate’s mother (yes, that roommate from that one blog post) after telling her that her son doesn’t clean up after himself, she said, “He’s a guy, what do you expect?”

The first example I want to bring up is a collection of four different instances, all about the same thing. One happened in 2013, another was four years ago, the third happened three years ago and the fourth was last year.

In 2013, I was a senior in high school, and I was called “average” by my best guy friend who had just given me my first kiss. He said he had never kissed an “average girl” before, commenting on my weight back then.

Four years ago, a mutual guy friend of a handful of my sorority sisters told me he would consider sleeping with me, but I would have to lose weight if I wanted to date him.

Three years ago, I was dating this guy who convinced me to try out the Ketosis diet where you basically reevaluate how your body metabolizes food and train it to find energy in eating a lot of fat. I’m talking five-pound packs of bacon in the fridge for snacking and adding to every meal. It was a nice sentiment to have him seem to care, but he would become irrationally angry at me if I slipped on the diet or treated myself, even though he wasn’t watching what he ate at the same time.

And, in January 2019, I finally said enough was enough and I started going to the gym. Not only did I decide to do that, I decided to pick up weightlifting. It has been the single most incredible thing I have done for my health physically and mentally. What I wasn’t expecting was certain comments that would be made after about a year and a third into the journey where I’m now, for instance, lifting 120 pounds on leg days.

The most common comment I hear, and I know for a fact that most women in the weight room hear, is that if we don’t stop lifting weights, we’ll start to look like a man. This is a clear violation of what Cynthia Enloe talks about when writing about the concept of tradition. The interaction is typically in the form of an Instagram comment where the person can hide behind their phone screen when saying it.

Traditionally, women have been preferred to be petite and “helpless” looking for their big, strong man to take care of them. It’s “natural” for women to be slim and “feminine” looking. (Don’t even get me started on the advertisement for a certain workout program that utilizes barre techniques. The founder, a woman, clearly states that her program is dedicated to helping women look “feminine and not bulky.”)

Thankfully in 2020, more and more women are tired of being physically weak, so we’re resisting this power held over us and it has opened an amazing world of understanding and acceptance from most men. That’s what I think happens when a norm is broken: Eventually, it becomes the new norm.

I knew power was operating in these instances because what was said to me made me feel pushed into a corner by words that stripped the power of decision-making from my capability and lessened my choices of how to look and how to live my life. The words gave me conditions such as lose weight if you want to date me, they made me feel like I was less like being called “average.”

Specifically, the example of my ex-boyfriend becoming angry at me for eating a cookie, it reminds me of masculinity as protectionism and some sentences in some ways which are outlined in Young’s “The Logic of Masculinist Protection.”

On page 4, Young writes that “central to the logic of masculinist protection is the subordinate relation of those in the protected position.” I was completely under the wing of this person because on one hand, I had thought he actually cared about my health, but only realized he was just obsessed with me losing weight. On the other hand, I was a bit desperate to stay in the relationship because it was my first and it’s nice to have someone. So, I went along with it all despite not losing any weight and pretty much gaining much more than I had after I stopped the Keto diet.

“He is expected to provide for others. Often, a protector tries to get help from and also control the lives of those he protects – in order to “better protect them.”

“It is only fitting that she should minister to his needs and obey his dictates.”

“As a consequence, everyone in this state of nature must live in a state of fear and insecurity, even when not immediately under attack.”

All of those sentences are from Young’s work, all on the fifth page. And they explain that relationship better than I could myself. In trying to “help me,” this person became obsessed with controlling what I ate and to protect me from the dangers of “bad food,” which does not actually exist.

When he became angry, I felt guilty and as if I had truly messed up. I was scared he would leave me or not want to touch me, which actually ended up being the case. So, in order to avoid those things, I developed an incredibly unhealthy relationship with food, basically depriving myself of any carbs, which lead to me almost falling asleep from low energy during the day. All to make him not be angry at me anymore.

The last instance I want to bring up does not have to do with how I looked or weighed back then. I saved it until now because it was one of the moments in my life when I finally broke the gender norm that I was being crushed by, and in doing that, I realized my worth. 

In Sjoberg’s “Gender and International Security,” she speaks heavily on hypermasculinity – the aggressive, violent and irrational state of being a man rises to when under attack of some sort. This is how my relationship ended.

I was home for summer break in 2017. I had just been accepted to transfer to UF (a decision he was not happy about.) I was sitting on the couch at home back in south Florida, texting him about how being five hours away from him really sucked. He was in Tampa and I was in Fort Lauderdale. Before then, we only lived an hour and a half away from each other, so I used to hop on a Greyhound bus to visit him.

The conversation took a turn from being mopey about huge distance and the fact that bus tickets were expensive to him saying, “If you really want to see me, you would find a way.”

He had a car. I did not. He had a job. I did not.

This sentence is what made me crack from the desperate girlfriend who just wanted to keep her man happy. It turned into a very heated fight which mentioned me transferring to UF to pursue national journalism and law. He eventually said:

“You know, I’m just not impressed with you anymore.”

This to me is hypermasculinity. It wasn’t physically violent, but it was verbally violent. It was an irrational thought brought on by him being intimidated by my goals, which had been slightly obvious from the beginning when he tried to get me to consider dropping out of my sorority. My sorority made me confident and helped me become an independent thinker, something he tried to squash by showing me YouTube videos of why Democrats are racist and why I was wrong to believe the things I did.

Sjoberg’s text helps make it easier to understand my situation because it lays out the elements of what hypermasculinity is. Enloe’s quote can be used in this situation to illuminate the thinking that the man in the relationship is the breadwinner, the “head honcho,” and not to be “challenged” by the goals and achievements by the female he lives to protect, to force under his wing, to possess.

The power my ex-boyfriend attempted to hold over me in this instance, much like the other aforementioned instances, made me feel belittled and lesser than him, smaller even. My worth as a human being, as his significant other, was being ignored. When I broke the norm of settling for less (the school I was attending and the major I had there), he lashed out at me and attempted to tear at my dignity, make me feel as if my achievements up to that point weren’t good enough for him: a college dropout who smoked and grew weed in his house and worked a minimum-wage job in the kitchen of a local restaurant.

As an ending to this, I want to make it clear that I do not look down on jobs like that. It is a very important steppingstones to more prominent positions in the culinary field. But to tell somebody who was about to attend one of the most renowned journalism schools in the country that they’re not impressive anymore? That’s jealousy and hypermasculinity.