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So I am still learning to navigate this Serendip business so I do apologize for being so late.
I am a junior at Haverford majoring in English with a concentration in Gender and Sexuality Studies. I work at the Women's Center and spend this past summer interning for Women Against Abuse and Choice - two non-profit organizations, the names of which are more or less self-explanatory.
I'm not entirely sure when it is that I decided that I identify as a feminist or at what point I became interested in questions of gender and sexuality but I do remember being afraid of opening pinning myself to the infamous F-word in high school. I also think that, much like the woman in phase 2, I spent a good portion of high school trying to prove to myself (and maybe those around me) that feminists can be "pretty" and "social" too. A silly endeavor, I realize now, but at the time I think I strongly believed that the only way I could be taken seriously in my proto-feminist tendencies was if I also happened to look and act and be thought of in a certain ("desirable") way. Freshman year I took a course on contemporary women writers and had that charming phase 3 moment of awakening and fury when I realized that I'd been forced by my then-adored high school curriculum to read only the literature of dead white men. No wonder I hated "Catcher in the Rye," I thought. More than that, Ani DiFranco now made perfect sense - I'd grown up "gagged and blindfolded, a man's world in [my] little girl's head." Something to that effect.
However, in all of my new-found self-righteousness, it took me quite a while to see the other side of that bitter coin. Today in class we'd talked about what it is that we need to make the study of gender and sexuality appealing to both sexes, engaging for various pools of people. That's something I'd thought about many times and I think a number of months ago I finally got my answer.
I asked a close male friend of mine what it was like to be a man in this world. By that point I'd listened to many women's narratives and many men's narratives, but the men's narratives seemed to come from the infamous "neutral" point - since in a phallocentric society the neutral experience is predominantly male and the female experience is invariably made into that of the outcast, the minority. He said it was tiring. That it was like constantly having to live through pre-written narratives with little to no room for the creation of one's own.
I was shocked, but in a good way. I think that in order to have a successful gender and sexuality curriculum we need to focus on the traps of traditional masculinity and masculine narratives in their relation to the non-dominant narratives. We tend to forget that the dominant culture, as male-oriented as it is, is rightly called out on hindering the progress of BOTH sexes (that is, if we're still sticking to the gender binary, which is a whole other issue) and we need to acknowledge that.