Jiggle

That woman looks so happy
Walking down the street eating her chocolate bar.
Chocolate isn't something I would just eat
Without thinking about it,
Like it was food. Chocolate
Is to be doled out to myself in
Tiny pieces, after I have earned it through
Hard work and a nutritious meal and
Vigorous physical exercise. That's when
I can eat my small square of chocolate.
And this is because my body
Is supposed to be spartan, is not
Supposed to look like it's made
For building babies inside it.
My body is supposed to be
Lean, like a monk, like a captive,
Like a prisoner of war,
Like someone who is not interested
In chocolate, in eating chocolate while
Walking down the street, like that lady
In the long skirt, the loose t-shirt,
The flip-flops, that lady with the body that
Jiggles in the same way mine jiggles
Even though mine is not supposed to.
Mine should be neat like barracks, like
A monastery, like brown rice and steamed
Broccoli, but it's not. Because I have
These hips, this round soft belly,
And most incriminating of all, this ass,
This giant ass, bouncing over plump
Thighs, as if to announce to every gawking passerby:
This is a woman!

The Duty

I know a woman who had it for six weeks.
Six weeks! It could happen
To anyone, ripped as if by cancer and broken bones
From life and normal things. We pretend to be immune but,
Like cancer and broken bones, it calls us all in time.

Each day she rode the train from Livermore
To Oakland, my home. For her, it was going somewhere
She would not normally go. Quarantined in the county seat, she
And eleven of her peers called a man a murderer
Then went for beers. So it turns out

Their shared trial formed a bond, and they remain
Best friends to this day. Talk about
A positive attitude. "It could happen
To you," she says. But we all know,
Just like there's no such thing as true love

Or true justice or learning from suffering,
It wouldn't happen to you.

Like reasonable people, I live in terror
Of my summons. I always defer
To the twenty-third of December, which is not
A holiday. If you must come for me,
O Judge, come then. I'll be waiting, limbs
Stretched, bones ready for breaking.

Not Sleeping

“He hates wasting time—a category that includes, for him, sleeping.”

–Sam Anderson writing about James Franco

I once heard an interview with an Israeli artist who had just won an international award for her art and activism. She was also the mother of two young children.

“How do you find time to do everything?” the interviewer asked.

The woman laughed carelessly. “Oh, I don’t sleep very much,” she said, as though this fact were amusing. “Four hours a night or so.”

This glib treatment of sleep is part of the mythology of the superheroic, those people who seem to achieve more in a day than is humanly possible. It makes sense. If you want to sleep for eight hours, then you must fit your job, your hobbies and passions, your family and friends and love life, your exercising and cooking and eating and house cleaning and showering and brushing your teeth all into sixteen hours per day.

I am always overcome by guilt when I hear these superheroes boasting about their inhuman feats of wakefulness. That is why you can’t seem to balance work, writing, kickboxing, seeing your friends and family and cleaning your apartment, I scold myself. I’m sleeping too much.

Look at actor James Franco. He did four years of college in two years, attended four graduate programs at once while filming about five movies and publishing a book of short stories—none of this is an exaggeration. He thinks sleep is a waste of time. Just think of all the awesome things I could get done if wasn’t wasting all that time being unconscious.

For most of my life, I too considered sleep to be a waste of time, some need my body was trying to impose upon my mind, as though it didn’t realize that my mind had more important things to be doing. I pulled regular all-nighters starting in middle school, drinking endless cups of microwaved instant coffee, blasting cassette tapes to keep from getting too sleepy or too depressed as I lay awake studying on top of my unmade bedcovers.

In college, I used to haunt the recreation room of my co-op into the early hours of the morning with my textbooks and my electric word processor, writing the endless string of essays that were my lot as an English major. At 3 a.m. I would take a coffee break with the speed freaks and architecture students, the only people who stayed up later than me.

I knew it wasn’t good for me. I had a friend in college who somehow got eight hours of sleep every night, until he started hanging around with me and some other night-owls.

“I feel horrible,” he told me one day. We had stayed up until four studying for our morning classes. “I’ve never felt this depressed. I feel like the whole world is horrible and disgusting.”

“Oh, that’s just because you didn’t sleep enough,” I told him cheerfully. “I always feel like that.”

I remember how my professors never seemed able to comprehend how sleep deprived most of us were, especially in graduate school. After a night seminar, one professor asked us if we were going home to watch the same TV show that she was planning to watch.

Our jaws dropped in disbelief. She thinks we have time to watch TV?

“No, we have to study,” one of us said.

“What, now?” she asked in horror. “It’s nine-thirty!”

Another, crankier professor chastised us for our distraction during the last week of the semester, the week when we all had four twenty-page term papers due.

“What’s wrong with you people? It’s like you’re all on speed,” she said, in a stern voice, not a joking one. From the way she said it, it was clear she did not think this was an actual possibility.

Now I am the clueless professor, relatively well-slept and herding a flock of exhausted students of my own. Lots of the time they can barely keep their eyes open. They lay their heads down on the desk, lifting them only to send frantic text-messages and enjoy their breakfasts of candy and energy drinks.

If you ask them to make a time-management schedule of their week, you’ll see why they’re so tired. Their schedules are packed from morning to night each day. Lots of them work two jobs. These jobs might only total twenty or thirty hours a week—that seems to be a typical amount—but that’s enough to suck up every available hour that they could be studying. They go to school from nine to three, start work at four, get home at ten-thirty at night.

“When will you do your homework?” I ask them.

“At eleven,” they say.

“Do you think that’s actually going to happen?”

They smile grimly. “Probably not.”

Often it doesn’t, and they come to class with their work half-done. But for something important like an essay, they do stay up and work, and they come to my class angry, disgruntled, hating the world like I once did.

It’s my job to cheer these students up and get them to do things. I use my perkiest voice, trying to buoy the room with the helium of my enthusiasm.

Come on, wake up! It’s ten o’clock! That’s not even early!

This semester, though, I signed up to teach too many units. I have classes and meetings all day long. There seems to be enough time in a week to prepare for my classes or grade my papers but not both. I am back to the old student way of life, where there are twelve time-consuming things to do before Thursday and perhaps enough time to do three of them. I’ve been sleeping five or six hours on weeknights. In college, this would have been a good amount of sleep, above average. But now I have much lower tolerance for feeling horrible and hating the world, so it seems like pitifully little, especially as it adds up over the course of the week.

Now I remember what it feels like to be sleep deprived from too much work. It explains the flashes of resentment I see cross my students’ faces when I hand out their writing assignment, as though by giving them what they’re paying for—writing instruction—I am subjecting them to some horrifying injustice. They can’t help it. When someone asks you do to something impossible, it’s hard not to resent them just for a moment, even if you are ninety-five percent sure that you will eventually buck up and do the impossible thing.

These days I am just as resentful as they are. I hand their graded assignments back grudgingly and begin to ramble my way through the lesson I have been up planning since four in the morning. So what if I’m not explaining it very well; I only slept four hours. You can have me coherent and unprepared or prepared and incoherent—your choice. Okay, so I spelled a word wrong on your handout. I’m tired. I’m really, really tired. Screw you guys.

Part of my job is to uphold a system that causes our students to feel this way, not for just one bad semester but every semester. I feel guilty about this all the time.

“How can we expect them to sacrifice sleep and health when we’re not even willing to do it?” I ask one of my colleagues.

“They’re in college, we’re not,” she said. “We paid our dues when we were in college and now we have earned the right to get a full night’s sleep.”

It sounds like the simple logic of hazing, but it’s more than that. We really don’t think they’ll learn everything they need to know unless they have more work than is humanly possible to complete. That’s the logic of education: you need to cram in as much as possible, as much as can be done in eighteen or twenty hours of wakefulness. The future success of America rests on your shoulders, and every hour you sleep is time you could have spent working.

Lost Potential

When I told my graduate advisor I was hoping to teach at a community college, he asked me why I wanted to throw my career away.

“I want to teach someplace where everyone can go to school and where people are a little more equal with each other,” I said. “I don’t like all the hierarchy at the university.”

He gave me a pained look, like he had had this conversation before. “Everyone comes to a point in life when we must let go of our youthful ideals,” he said. “We need to make certain sacrifices in order to live a comfortable life.”

I’m embarrassed to say, these might have been somebody's youthful ideals, but not mine. In my youth, I loved the hierarchy of the university. Everyone has their rank and everyone knows their place. Tenured professors are at the top, then untenured ones, lecturers, graduate students, then undergraduates. And under them are all those who serve the academics: the poor janitors and cooks and security guards and secretaries who don't even know just how lowly they are, on the fringes of the real business of generating knowledge.

When I was an undergraduate, professors were nothing less than rock stars, amazing lucky bastards who had defeated insurmountable odds to achieve my dream job. I longed for the day when I would become one, when I would write the great, barely-comprehensible works of esoterica that would revolutionize literary studies for its rarified cadre of devotees and make me a household name in a very small, elite number of households.

As this dream became closer to a reality, it began to lose some of its luster. During graduate school, I worked as a cashier in a grocery store on weekends, and I found myself more comfortable with my coworkers than my graduate student colleagues. Many of my closest friends never finished high school. It didn’t matter. In the store, they were judged by how well they worked, how reliable they were, and how kind, how funny and clever. By the standards of the university, these workers would be off-the-charts low. If they enrolled in college in their mid-twenties, they would be “re-entry” students, the most marginalized sorts of undergraduates. They would never be the kind of people who really mattered at a university, the rock stars, recognized experts in their fields, people who demanded awe and respect.

A lot of my grocery store friends attended school at the local community college. There they paid affordable tuition to take classes with other students who were as varied as the workers at the store: young, old, parents, retirees, people starting over after layoffs or divorces, people from other countries. No one judged them because they hadn’t taken the traditional route straight from high school to college. All of them were untraditional in some way, and they all treated each other with respect. It sounded like a utopia to me: you mean you could take college classes without all that hierarchy? You could just pay your tuition, go to a class, study, all without being above somebody and below somebody else?

But once I started teaching at a community college, I saw that the students do have a sense of hierarchy, a hierarchy of institutions of higher learning, and they are at the bottom. My school is called Las Positas, but the students call it College Behind Costco, Thirteenth Grade, Lost Potential.

Having experienced both prestigious universities and community colleges, and having taught at both, I think the students get as good, or better, educations at the community college, where undergraduates are at the center of the institution instead of at the bottom.

When I taught at the university as a graduate student instructor, I was told repeatedly: don’t focus on your teaching. There were cautionary tales about young associate professors denied tenure because they had succumbed to the temptation of prioritizing their classes. There were the lessons we received in our single pedagogy course: don’t get too involved with your students. Don’t let them talk to you about their problems. They will try to suck your energy; don’t let them.

Talk to anyone trained to be a professor, and this ideology is evident. People in Ph.D. programs considering community college employment often say to me, “So, to get tenure in a community college, you don’t really need to publish that much.”

“You don’t need to publish at all,” I say. “All they care about is your teaching.”

“So, like, publications would look nice but that’s not their priority,” they say.

“No,” I say. “They don’t care at all about publishing. They would think of it as okay as long as it didn’t interfere with your teaching.”

They nod in understanding, but I can see that they are still perplexed, maybe even skeptical. How could they not care about publishing, I imagine them thinking? What else is there?

Community colleges are like bizarro universities. When I tell my colleagues that working at a community college was seen as throwing away my career, they are incredulous. But you’re still in academia, they say, baffled.

“They don’t consider community colleges to be academia,” I say. “They consider them to be teaching.”

For an academic researcher, our students would be the worst kind of distraction, teeming with the needs and demands that my pedagogy teacher warned me about. There are students with learning disabilities who flourish with some extra time and attention from their teachers, and there are students with such severe disabilities that some of their teachers question whether they should be in college. A high percentage of the students have lived through horrible trauma: medical crises, the death of siblings and parents, acute poverty and homelessness. Students come to my office hours with complaints ranging from family quarrels to mental health issues to car troubles to domestic abuse.

I remember similar students in the university. I would deflect their complaints, create distance, give them some canned speech about how everyone has personal troubles and we can’t allow them to interfere with our education. Now I can’t avoid these students and try not to get involved. Getting involved is part of my job description.

The worst part about teaching at a school that accepts everybody is that we have a large proportion of students who don’t care about their studies. Their parents are making them go, or they need to go to stay on their parents’ insurance plans, or they don’t know what else to do with themselves. They treat their studies as a chore and their teachers as bossy parents. They tell you that the reading assignments aren’t interesting, and when you ask them what topics would interest them, they say, “None, I guess.”

I always considered these students to be the major downside to teaching at a community college. But lately, many of my well-educated friends have confessed to having been these students in the past.

“Oh, that was me,” said a friend who is now working on a Ph.D. “When I was eighteen, I didn’t care about my community college classes at all. But later, when I was a little older and ready to go back, I knew where to go.”

That’s why I love community college. It is the opposite of the university, where everything rides on our performance for four years, where there’s no time for confusion and illness and insanity and waffling, where we will waste thousands of dollars if we mess this up. It’s not rock-star college; it’s garage-band college. It’s college for whoever wants it, whenever they want it, and if they need to leave for a while, it will still be here when they get back.

By the time I finished graduate school, I had even convinced my advisor of how great community colleges are, and he supported me in my new career. For me and for my students, it’s exactly the right place to be.

The illustration depicts a cover story from Las Positas College's Naked Magazine.

Pink

I love pink. It looks like health, spring, rosebuds and the cheeks of babies. Of all the decorative items in my apartment, I would approximate that forty percent are pink. Pink tapestry on the wall, pink glass votive holders, dusty pink velvet upholstering my dining chairs, pink stripes and spots on the leaves of my houseplants.

I have enough pink clothing to assemble an entire fuchsia outfit, hat-to-shoes. I did it one time in order to try to get excused from a jury. It didn’t work, so I sat at the day-long trial dressed like punk Barbie. The defendant, accused of assault with a deadly weapon, gave me a big smile as he entered the courtroom.

If he wanted his own pink outfit, he was out of luck, because in America, men don’t wear pink. That’s the only rule we have for colors. Everyone else can wear any color they please, but for half the population, sorry, no pink.

You might argue that there are other rules for wearing colors. You can’t wear a white dress to a wedding if you’re not the bride, and if you live in a neighborhood with gangs, your high school won’t permit you to come to class in red or blue. You can’t dress your baby girl in blue—unless it is a blue flowered dress with ruffles, in which case you can. A few limited rules…but when the guest leaves the wedding, or the student leaves the neighborhood, or the girl gets past the age of about two years old, then they are all free to wear any color without earning any concerned glances or snide comments.

Baby boys, on the other hand, are never dressed in pink clothes. There are plenty of flowery blue baby dresses, but there are no rugged boyish pink baseball jerseys covered in pink dinosaurs or pink fire trucks, because boys just don’t wear pink, period.

We all know the rule is arbitrary. At the beginning of the century, pink was the color for boys, a variation of aggressive red, while tranquil blue was appropriate for girls.

Still, like all our bizarre cultural mores, it seems only natural that pink is not for boys. A recent study tried to demonstrate the naturalness of this association, claiming that women have a greater innate preference for pink than men do, all the better for performing primitive women’s duties like finding ripe berries and determining if a child has a fever.

The methodology of this study was widely considered unsound, but it’s easy to see where they got their hypothesis. Little girls seem to love pink as soon as they love anything, just like all my friends’ sons have been obsessed with trains and garbage trucks since they were old enough to point and squeal. Pink was one of my favorite colors (second to red) when I was little, until mid-elementary school, when I decided that green better represented the non-frivolous person I wanted to be. But pink worked itself back into heavy rotation in my clothing during graduate school, when I didn’t care whether I was frivolous anymore.

For the first two years that I studied martial arts, I avoided wearing anything pink to class. I was often offered pink gear: We have pink boxing gloves made especially for women!

I didn’t want any part of it. I had seen women who wore pink boxing gloves, and there were two types of them. The first type were martial arts newbies who wanted to show that they were still cute and feminine, even thought they were learning to fight. That type made up approximately ninety-five percent of the pink-gloved girls. The other five percent—meaning maybe two women I knew of—were straight up badasses who could easily take out a man twice their size. They wore pink as war paint, a challenge to anyone who dared to view them as cute.

I knew I wasn’t that second type of woman, and I didn’t want to be the first type, so I avoided all pink. Not just in my equipment, but also in any clothing I wore to my martial arts schools, including my training clothes and my street clothes. I didn’t want my male training partners to think of me as female, so like a baby boy, I wore blue, grey, orange, red, anything but pink.

Eventually I got so used to avoiding the pink shoes and t-shirts that make up a good percentage of my wardrobe that I forgot I was doing it. One day, a male classmate made a comment about pink being my favorite color. How did he know, I wondered?

“It’s a joke,” he explained. “You’re not the kind of girl who wears pink.”

“I’m not?” I asked, surprised. Why would he think that? Then I remembered: because I never wore it to class. Like the self-monitoring prisoners in Foucault’s panopticon, I had enforced the masculine no-pink rule upon myself.

After that, I started wearing pink all the time. I would wear my pink motorcycle boots to and from class, and pink t-shirts when I trained. I wasn’t scary enough to become a type-two pink-gloves girl, but I was secure enough to stop pretending I was a boy.

Lately, though, the boys at one of my kickboxing schools have taken to wearing pink. It started with some bright pink kickboxing shorts that the school was selling. They only came in sizes so tiny that none of the women could fit our curvy hips into them. They sat unpurchased in the display case until the very small, but decidedly male, Thai teacher started wearing a pair.

Of course, being a non-American, he probably didn’t believe that pink was a girls’ color. In Thailand, pink is traditionally associated with Tuesday and recently has been worn to show support for ailing king Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Whatever his own associations with the color were, leading class in his pink shorts, he was like the type-two pink-gloves girls, a tiny badass fighter daring you to look askance at his shorts so he’d have a reason to kick your head off. Soon he began adding more pink to his outfit: pink t-shirt, pink hand wraps, pink ankle supports.

Then all the boys at the school started wearing pink. The school purchased multiple shipments of pink handwraps to keep up with the demand. I suppose they are using the color to show that they are type-two scary men like their teacher. Or maybe they just think it's pretty.

Coke Chunhawat

Christmas

Generally speaking, I’m a pretty privileged American. I am white, I’m able-bodied, I have a good education, a professional career, all the things that get me an invitation to participate in mainstream American culture.

But then, once a year, that culture engages in a month-long ritual that I have absolutely no part in. It starts in late November, as the decorations appear, and the stores launch their special sales and promotions, and every commercial on TV tries to convince some other viewer that something not normally thought of as a gift (a power tool, gold coins, a lottery ticket, a donation to a charity) would in fact be just the right gift to bring a glow to his loved one’s heart.

This cultural phenomenon starts out subtle and easy to ignore. By mid-December, though, it is all anyone can talk about. It is on everyone’s mind: “Are you ready for it? Have you finished your shopping?” People bring desserts to their workplaces and have parties to celebrate its impending arrival.

And then this fervor builds to a climax, and the day arrives. Everything goes abruptly quiet. Streets are empty, stores are closed, an eerie silence reminiscent of Superbowl Sunday overtakes the city centers and shopping districts.

Then it’s all over, gone as enigmatically as it arrived, and I reacquaint myself with this culture that has seemed so alien and bizarre for the last month, my culture, once again.

Christmas isn’t even a religious holiday anymore, numerous snotty high school acquaintances of mine used to inform me. Why don’t you Jews just give it up and celebrate it already? It’s the same question that gets asked of every minority whose minority status is based on a behavior: Why can’t lesbians just suck it up and marry a man? Why can’t left-handed people just use their right hand? Why can’t those Muslim women stop wearing that crazy veil?

From the outside, the question makes sense: why not celebrate Christmas? It’s fun, it’s festive, there are presents; what’s the downside? But people don’t just start celebrating holidays they have never celebrated before. Who would be the first member of my family to declare, This year, we’re getting a tree and buying a bunch of ornaments for it! This year we’re going to sing Christmas carols and putting up tinsel! This year, Santa’s coming for the first time!

My family has never done these things, and they don’t hold any meaning for me. The Jews I know who celebrate Christmas do so because they have Christians or former Christians in their families. I do know a few Jewish people whose families just love holidays and so decided to put up a tree or some decorations, but they’re a rarity. Religious Jewish people abstain from holidays celebrating Jesus on principle, but the rest of us view Christmas about like Kwanza or Ramadan, just with a lot more publicity: just fine, but not something that belongs to us.

When I was in high school, I worked at a Jewish gift and book store. When customers would ask us if we were open on Christmas, my boss would arch her eyebrows and say, “We call that day December 25th.” This was meant to answer their question: that day is not a holiday around here.

The message wasn’t always received: “So, are you open on December 25th?” people would ask.

“Unless it’s the Sabbath,” she would reply.

Although I worked at the Jewish bookstore, my family was not very religious. We didn’t go to synagogue when I was growing up. My parents sent my sister and me to a secular Jewish Sunday school at the Jewish Community Center, meant to enhance our sense of Jewish identity. There we learned about Jewish history, holidays, and ceremonies, but not about what we should believe or what God—or G-d, as my teachers called him—wanted us to do.

Before Sunday school, I didn’t always know what it meant to be Jewish, but I learned early what it meant to not be Christian. When I came home from preschool one day excited for Easter, which we had been informed was taking place that weekend, my parents had the grim duty of telling me that we did not celebrate that holiday.

“Why not?” I asked, disappointed at the thought of the candy and Easter eggs I would not be receiving as predicted by my teachers.

“Because we don’t believe in Jesus,” my father said.

Jesus. I had heard that word before. I was pretty sure it referred to something important.

“What if I do?” I asked.

“You don’t,” said my mother.

Not only did Jews inherently not believe in Jesus, but all the other characters associated with Christian holidays. I had to learn to remember that some kids were pretty sensitive about their delusions. In second grade, I got kicked hard in the leg by a third-grade boy because I said that Santa Claus didn’t exist. But he’s eight, I thought to myself, baffled that someone could be so naïve at such an advanced age.

Now that I’m old enough not to miss the presents and desserts, I still feel like I miss out on something because of Christmas. My teaching semester ends about two days before Christmas Eve. This has usually been a dreaded time of year for me. I have all the free time in the world, but all my friends are out of town or occupied with visiting family. I’m too tired to do something useful like clean my apartment or write the syllabi for my spring courses. It would be a great time to go shopping for some clothes…but no, it’s two days before Christmas, a horrible time to try to shop for anything. It’s dark, usually raining, horrible weather to go for a run or a hike. Whenever I get my annual jury duty summons, I defer it to December 23rd. If they want to hold a trial that day, I’m there; it’s the most useless time of the year.

This year, I had several invitations to Christmas parties. They were all with people I like a lot, and would have been fun enough, so I wondered why I didn’t feel like going. Then I realized: I have started to look forward to not doing anything on Christmas. Just like the Superbowl, it’s a rare chance to withdraw from the stream of our cultural calendar, to enjoy the meditative pleasure of disconnection and focus on ourselves. So maybe I do celebrate Christmas after all.

It's a Girl

As I sat on the couch holding Samantha’s newborn baby, her mother came through the front door carrying a small package wrapped in plastic.

“From Vivian,” her mother said, handing Samantha one of those ornate little envelopes that I had only seen on Chinese New Year.

“How much?” Samantha’s mother asked her.

Samantha opened the envelope and showed me the contents: a crisp new hundred dollar bill.

“Very good,” said Samantha’s mother.

She turned to me. “This is a Chinese tradition,” she told me. “When you have a boy baby, is traditional to bring money and meat.” She pointed at the package she was holding. I couldn’t see through the opaque white plastic wrapper to figure out what sort of meat it contained, whether it was chicken or beef, raw or cooked.

“For boy, you give money and meat,” she repeated.

“What if it’s a girl?” I asked. Samantha’s mother didn’t seem to understand my question. Samantha repeated it: “Ma. What do they give you if the baby is a girl?”

“Oh, if a girl,” said Samantha’s mother, nodding her head. “You still bring meat, but less money. Maybe twenty dollars.”

Samantha and I looked at each other and burst into hysterical laughter. Her mom joined us laughing, too. It was a sinister moment of female bonding as we laughed in shared acknowledgment of our lesser worth.

For two women raised in America like Samantha and myself, this laughter is partly directed at the quaint misogyny of less enlightened nations. A daughter is to be celebrated with one-fifth the enthusiasm of a son, we are thinking. How cute!

In America, at the moment of birth, a daughter is worth as much as a son. Nowadays, she could grow up to be anything—almost. As long as she doesn’t want to pilot a submarine or become a philosophy professor, the sky is the limit. Hell, if she’s white and Christian, we now have documented evidence that she could grow up to almost become president of the United States.

This is how I was raised—to believe I could be anything I wanted to be. My father imbued my sister and I with all the high expectations he would have had for a son, buying us erector sets and electrical engineering kits, staying up late doing mathematical proofs with us while we were still in elementary school, expecting us to magically know how to throw a baseball properly because it came naturally to him.

School confirmed this impression of equality for me. The honors math and science classes I took were equally populated by boys and girls, and the girls were often the strongest students. Many of those girls went on to become scientists and engineers. While I have not talked to most of them about their experiences, I don’t get the impression that they had to crack any significant glass ceilings on their way to these positions. The main obstacle they felt was loneliness, as the numbers of their fellow women scientists and engineers dwindled, as women like me and my sister tossed aside our technical aptitudes in favor of more traditionally feminine careers.

The ideology of equality in high schools like mine is why I’m never surprised when my students believe sexism no longer exists.

“Men and women are equal now,” a girl in hot pants and a halter top will say, and her male classmate will nod serenely in his baggy sweats and oversized tee.

If you ask them if men and women are treated the same in our culture, though, their narrative is strikingly different.

“My friend has a twin brother, and he’s allowed to go out whenever he wants and do whatever he wants, but she has a curfew. They’re the same exact age.”

“How do her parents explain the difference?” I asked.

“They say, You’re a girl and he’s a boy.”

I ask the students why parents would treat their children differently based on their genders.

“They don’t want their daughters to get pregnant,” the students say.

What if their sons get their girlfriends pregnant? Is that as bad?

Noooo, they all shake their heads. Definitely not as bad.

My friend who teaches health told me today that during a discussion of types of contraception, one of these same students volunteered a chastity belt as an option.

“I’m not writing that one on the board,” she said.

“I’m serious,” the student said. “If I have a daughter, she’s never going to be allowed to have sex.”

This is the logic that explains the articles opposing abortion that my students often bring in as part of a debate assignment. Young people need to take responsibility for their actions, the articles say. A young woman needs to learn that if she wants to be sexually active, there are consequences to that decision.

I’ve scanned so many of these articles, and found nary a mention of boys. Articles praising abstinence-only education will laud the positive outcome of far fewer high school girls having sex (or admitting that they do), without ever explaining if this same result was seen in boys; evidently the main goal was to stop the girls from having sex.

These little inequalities and indignities are well-known and obvious, tiresome and uncouth to talk about, so we don’t. No one needs to hear that we still live in a society where women are largely judged on how they look, while men are largely judged on what they can do. If you go out to a bar where men and women are looking for mates, it’s not worth the breath it would take to point out that the men are off-handedly mentioning how they can shoot a gun and they’re working on their pilot’s license and they are an ace at poker, while the women are flashing their cleavage and batting their heavily-mascara’d eyelashes and making the perfect cute face whenever someone points a camera in their direction. If he’s marginally handsome, so much the better, and if she’s really good at playing pool, well, that’s a small enough transgression to be sexy, as long as she’s really pretty.

Only stupid people play out these tired gender roles, you’ll say, and you’ll be right, mostly. I know plenty of women who are considered quite attractive, and whose attractiveness lies in their intelligence and skill—as long as they are also pretty and thin. However, I don’t know any women who aren’t conventionally attractive but who are largely courted for their intelligence, sense of humor, athleticism, or power. There are a million billion trillion men like this, who are funny-looking, with protruding bellies or bad clothing or pockmarked faces or the wrinkles that give them character, who are still considered models of attractiveness, sex symbols, because they are amazing actors or athletes or singers or businessmen.

You’ll say this has less to do with social roles and more to do with whom we are trying to attract. Men are fundamentally visual in their attraction, you’ll say, and women are less so, which explains why gay men are more likely than lesbians are to feel pressure to be good-looking. And you’ll be right, maybe. Maybe if we stopped feeling the need to be so damned attractive all the time, we could accomplish a lot more.

I think this hypothesis could explain the decided lack of femininity in the two recently appointed Supreme Court justices, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Perhaps they needed to renounce the distraction of feminine self-presentation in order to focus on the achievements that got them to the Supreme Court. Or maybe that's what we need to believe about them. It almost seems that, to be seen as credible in one of the most powerful jobs in the country, women have to present themselves as men. The female mannerisms, the politeness, coyness, flirtiness that characterize femininity all suggest lack of credibility, a lack of focus on what's really important. Women can be judged by what we can do, but only if we are willing to renounce our femininity.

Maybe that’s why my friend and her mother and I laugh so bitterly at the greater promise that the Chinese see in their sons. It is not because the girl can’t grow up to do everything that the boy can; it’s because society won’t find her attractive if she does, and, we are horribly afraid, neither will we.

Lesbian Envy

Staring out the window of the coffee shop on Piedmont avenue in Oakland, I can’t help but notice the prevalence of what seems to me to be the predominant cultural group in a town known for its diversity: lesbians. They flood the sidewalks, walking purposefully or browsing casually, carrying book bags and wheeling baby carriages, drinking coffee, laughing, hugging and holding hands.

The lesbians are easy to spot, because they are the most stylish women on the street. Their clothes fit well, move comfortably over their bodies as they walk. Their haircuts are jaunty and well-kept-up and purposely asymmetrical. Their sneakers are ironic. Everyone admires their good looks as they pass by.

Or maybe it’s just me. I’m always jealous of the lesbians, especially the couples, in a way that I am not jealous of the many equivalent heterosexual couples passing by. When I see a man and a woman pushing a stroller down the street, I think, He’s restless, she’s bored, they love the baby but are also stressed out by him. I know logically that the lesbian couples must face the same realities and challenges of couplehood and parenthood. But somehow I imagine that, because these relationships do not represent the societal norm, that they aren’t subject to the same monotonies and ruts that typify heterosexual relationships. You don’t just wake up one day and find that you’ve fallen into a lesbian relationship: This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! No, a lesbian relationship is a conscious choice, and therefore it must always be well-thought-out and worthwhile.

I’ve always been jealous of lesbians. From my perspective, their sexuality seems so straightforward, because they are constantly in the position of having to assert it. If they want women to know they are available as partners, they must dress or behave in ways that communicate their sexual preference. If they want their coworkers to stop trying to set them up with annoying guys from the office, they can say, “Thanks, but I’m a lesbian.” If men want to date them, they can confidently say, “Sorry, I’m a lesbian.” I can only imagine how simple and satisfying that must be.

In contrast, while I’ve only dated men, I have a very hard time identifying myself as a heterosexual. I suppose I probably am one, mostly, but I don’t think I’m a very good one. I don’t find myself attracted to men very often, perhaps once a year or so. It takes me a lot of effort to get interested in men or decide I’d like to be in a relationship with one of them.

I imagine that if I were a lesbian, I would never be ambivalent about who I was attracted to, because it would be part of my declared identity: I am attracted to women, damn it! And I imagine that, since their sexuality is so central to their identity, lesbians get to exist in a permanent state of adolescent-style girl-craziness. Which many of them do, at least amongst my friends. But of course I’m only noticing the ones who are like that, because they are vocal about their lustiness, whereas I don’t tend to notice the ones who, like me, barely date, though I know one or two of those types of lesbians as well. But when I am sitting in the coffee shop envying the cute dykey women in their funky sneakers, I imagine that they are all accomplished daters, female Casanovas, confident ladies’ ladies.

If just the fact of being a lesbian isn’t affirming enough, there is a wide palate of lesbian subcategories to choose from. One young friend of mine used to fret over this decision for hours: “What kind of butch am I?” she would agonize, thumbing through a book about radical gender identity that was ten years older than she was. “Am I a stone butch? Or am I more of a soft butch?”

“I think I’m more like a stone butch,” she would speculate, “because everyone thinks I'm a boy. But the book says that stone butches don’t take their clothes off or let anyone do anything sexual to them. That’s definitely not me.” Finally, she read about a type of butch who was highly masculine but didn’t mind taking her clothes off or receiving sexual pleasure, and she happily took that on as her identity.

My friend Charlotte also describes herself as a butch (I presume her love of girly hobbies such as fashioning arm warmers out of tube socks or making clever little zines to entertain her friends would characterize her as a soft butch). She styles herself like a 1950s sitcom husband, with button-up shirts and sweater vests and a trim haircut that emphasizes her square jaw line. Charlotte’s girlfriend calls herself a femme. She likes to wear low-cut dresses, stiletto heels, and fancy lingerie.

The two of them often talk about butch/femme dynamics. They have one story where a carful of seemingly heterosexual young women gawk in envy as Charlotte walks around the car to open the door for her lady. Presumably, they have never experienced such an act of chivalry from the men that they have dated. In fact, those women might not even want their boyfriends to open the door for them, because it would suggest that, as women, they are helpless. But when both partners are women, then the traditional masculine and feminine courtship behaviors are a matter of choice, voluntary and arbitrary roles in a game of gender that everyone can agree is socially constructed. The roles that seem so limiting and obtrusive when they are imposed by nature, or tradition masquerading as nature, are suddenly creative and inspiring.

My friend Luke has a similar jealousy of gay men. He is an unwavering heterosexual, but he credits the development of his sexual persona to inspiration he found from gay men, especially the fictional characters on the television show Queer as Folk.

“The men on that show are so confident about their sexuality,” he would tell me. He was particularly inspired by the central character, a promiscuous playboy. “He has no reservations about going after whoever he wants. He’s completely self-assured and entitled. I used to watch that show and think to myself, that’s how I want to be.”

Functioning in a heterosexual world, Luke had always felt conflicted about pursuing women. He felt crass and objectifying for his tendency to want to have commitment-free sex with most of the women he encountered.

In contrast, the men on Queer as Folk never needed to worry about belittling or demeaning another gender. Since they were all men, they were all socially and biologically equals. There was no reason for remorse or ambivalence for objectifying someone who had an equal capacity for objectifying you right back.

Luke asked his gay roommate whether being a gay man was really the wild smorgasbord of anonymous sex that the TV show depicted.

The roommate nodded sagely. “It’s crazier than that,” he said. “It’s crazier than you could imagine. Think about it. We’re talking about sex that only involves two guys. Of course it is.”

When Luke told me the story years later, his eyes became wistful. “Can you imagine?” he asked. “Two people who could both appreciate the pleasure of anonymous sex, without it having to mean something?”

While our aims are different, ultimately Luke and I fantasize about the same thing: a sexual identity that is clear-cut, unproblematic, well-defined. Heterosexuals don’t get to define themselves by their sexuality; or at least, it is seen as uncouth to do so after the age of about nineteen. Our sexuality is the assumed norm, and we never feel the need to say, “As I heterosexual, I feel…” or “Perhaps it’s my heterosexuality that makes me perceive the world in this way.” And so we muck around in a hazy swamp of what is supposed to be normal, and therefore does not need to be examined, discussed, or defined.

Our envy is born of privilege. Just as Anglo-Saxon Americans avoid the stigma of being ethnic, but also the benefits and pleasures of having a recognized ethnicity—so heterosexuals, whose sexuality is supported by every American institution from marriage to taxation to health insurance to death, miss out on the pleasure of having to construct an identity around a renegade sexuality. What we give up in self-knowledge, we gain in the blissful pleasure of never really having to think about it.

Bachelors

When I showed up at my friend Nelson’s house, his sofa was gone.

“It was really torn up,” he said. “I’m going to get a new one.”

He paused for a moment, hesitating to explain further.

“I’m thinking of getting a leather couch,” he said, a wary tone in his voice, as though he was testing my reaction.

Our other friend, Prospero, looked at me expectantly.

“I have a leather couch,” I said. “I like it.”

“What color is it?” Prospero quizzed me, his voice conveying that my answer would carry some significance.

“Black,” I said.

Prospero furrowed his brow. It seemed that I had given the wrong answer. “Hmm,” said Prospero.

“Why?” I asked.

“Prospero thinks that getting a leather couch means you’re a confirmed bachelor,” said Nelson. “Especially if it’s black.” His tone seemed to indicate that I had invalidated this theory.

Nelson and Prospero are both single, childless men in their forties. I’ve been noticing that virtually all of my older male role models seem to be destined for permanent bachelorhood. They travel a lot by themselves, for work and fun. They have set routines that would make it difficult for them to share their lives with someone else. I gather from comments they make that they sometimes date, but they don’t ever talk about who they are dating or bring the people they are dating around to any social events that I am at.

This is the key element defining bachelorhood: the lack of interest in finding a partner who will be integrated into one’s life in a meaningful way. Wikipedia says that one usage of the term refers to “men who do not have and are not actively seeking a spouse or other personal partner” (my emphasis). In other words, the term suggests not only unmarried status, but a commitment to an ongoing life of singlehood.

Many of my older female role models are single as well. But their attitudes about relationships seem to be different than those of my male friends. So far, my female role models all express the goal of finding someone to be in love with, to spend the rest of their lives with, even when this goal is contradicted by their tendency to date men who do not share it. My friend Loretta is very similar to Nelson and Propero: she is in her forties, independent, owns a house, has an active social life, and is usually dating somebody whom most of her friends don’t know very well or at all. She doesn’t get to be a bachelor, though her gender is one of the only things keeping her from being one. The only other difference is that, unlike my male bachelor friends, she claims to be looking for a permanent partner, though I don’t believe it’s a priority for her.

The distinction between bachelors and unmarried women is that the men are seen as mysterious and independent, while the women are a confusing aberration. Men are given permission for their relationships to not invade the core of their identities. People assume that a bachelor is dating somebody, and that it doesn’t really matter who that person is. But a woman who does not integrate her lover into her social life is seen as sexless (she must not have a lover) or as predatory and masculine (think of Samantha on Sex and the City), a loose woman who, as she enters middle age, will have her own gender-specific term applied to her: cougar, a word that gets applied to women who date younger men, even when the age difference is as small as five years, a gap that is not considered noteworthy if the genders are reversed. As a society, we don’t have a ready-made concept for a mature woman who is single, independent, and sexual.

Women don’t get to be bachelors. We have words like “spinster,” “old maid,” “maiden aunt.” Our decision to remain perpetually single is not glamorous but rather pathetic, a sign of our lack of desirability or sexuality. When entertainment magazines call an older male celebrity like George Clooney a “bachelor,” it adds to his mystique, precisely because of the sense of individualism and even selfishness that it suggests. When they refer to an unmarried woman, like Cheryl Crow, she has simply failed in her attempts to stay with the men who she has been publically connected with.

Why did Prospero associate leather couches with bachelors? Presumably because they have many of the qualities favored by bachelors: they are durable, practical, easy to clean, not fussy, not warm or excessively comfortable. Those are, incidentally, all of the reasons that I enjoy my leather couch.

“I guess I am sort of a bachelor,” I said to Prospero.

Or at least I hope to be one. I’m still at an age—my mid-thirties—where unmarried people are still considered to be not yet married, where we have not entered into the post-childbearing era of confirmed bachelorhood yet. I figure I have until forty or so before I am officially an unmarried lady. I’m hoping by then that the meanings of words will have shifted, and I will get to be a bachelor instead of a spinster.

Swinging the Other Way

“Your lifestyle is evil,” says the brown-robed monk to the medieval layman. “You must change your ways.”

“But I’ve always been like this,” says the man.

“It is unacceptable to the church,” says the monk.

The punch line of this comic strip, which hangs on the door of the office next to mine, is that the layman is not, as the narrative hints, gay. Rather, he is left-handed. The implied commentary is that Christianity’s condemnation of homosexuality is equally ridiculous as its earlier condemnation of left-handedness.

While the comic strip is set in what appears to be medieval times, the situation it depicts is much less antiquated than that. Both of my grandmothers were naturally left-handed. Both were converted in grade school to writing with their right hands, and they spent the rest of their lives passing as right-handed. My father’s mother wanted me to be similarly converted; I remember her exhorting me to color with my right hand when she would babysit me, until my right-handed parents told her to cut it out.

I really like the comic strip because I have always felt that the gay and the left-handed were natural compatriots. We are a similar sort of minority, a minority based on an unusual behavior or preference rather than something visual like race or cultural like religion. We are aberrations that pop up within a family, whereas most other minorities are raised in a family of others like themselves.

For those whose gayness or left-handedness revealed itself at an early age, both conditions have been attributed variously to genetics, hormone exposure in the womb, and early childhood influences, though none of these connections can be proven absolutely. And just as homosexuality can, for many people, be a conscious choice made in adulthood, so left-handedness can be learned by those not naturally inclined towards it, generally because someone lost the use of his or her right hand.

This issue of innate characteristic versus choice is a high-stakes debate where homosexuality is concerned. George Lakoff points out that liberals tend to see homosexuality as a genetic fact, while conservatives tend to see it as a choice. I ask my students why this would be, and they always figure it out right away:

If something is a choice, then it can be a wrong choice.

I always think the entire premise of the debate is odd, because I have met many gay people who have known they were gay since their earliest memories, and many others who made conscious decisions to become gay in their twenties and thirties because they felt logically that they would have better relationships with people of their same gender (though yes, predictably, these were all women).

Ultimately, whether it is an innate behavior or a conscious choice doesn’t really matter; what matters is that everyone should have the right to do what is most comfortable or desirable for them, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else.

I first discovered being left-handed was an identity category, and an abnormal one, when I joined my first-grade class, a week after school had started (I had been moved from a different class).

“Are you right-handed or left-handed?” the teacher asked me in front of all of my new classmates, immediately after introducing me.

I must have looked confused, because she clarified: “Which hand do you write with?”

I thought about it for a moment and then raised my left hand.

“Great,” she sighed, her voice annoyed. “You’re the only one. Now we’re going to have to order you some scissors.”

Throughout grade school, I faced similar minor persecutions. I was chastised constantly for my poor handwriting, my inadequate scissor-handling skills, my difficulty mirroring moves in gym class that were modeled by a right-handed teacher. In sixth grade, we were required to write in-class essays in erasable pen, which is impossible for left-handed people such as myself, who, due to the enforcement of right-slanting letters in our remedial cursive classes, write with our hands curled above the pen, thereby smearing the runny ink all over the pages and our hands. In what I still think was a really masterful stroke of smart-assed passive aggressiveness, I learned to write upside-down for these in-class essays, a skill I still have to this day.

These inconveniences were small, the same kinds of little indignities that all kids face, but they reinforced the idea that being in the minority was something to minimize, to work around, to avoid inconveniencing others with. As an adult, I have seen so many left-handed people try to learn to kickbox right-handed because they did not want to keep asking for special explanations of how to do things. It seemed easier to just do what everyone else was doing. Some of those people, like me, had teachers who caught their deception and forced them to train left-handed; others trained for years in a less-comfortable stance before attempting to retrain themselves as southpaws.

These kickboxers make me think of my grandmothers spending their entire lives writing with their less-coordinated hand. I think of all the gay people forced to pass as straight through the ages, those who got married and carried on affairs on the side, or perhaps just dreamed of it. I think of all the left-handed people writing and working and doing sports with their non-dominant hands, and how many never reached their full potential as athletes and artisans and even writers because they could not use their more-skilled hand.

The needs of minorities are always seen by the majority as frivolous and inconvenient, whether they are needs for political representation, needs to read about people like ourselves in school, needs to be able to marry our life partner of choice, or even just needs for scissors that have the left blade rather than the right blade on top. We need to stand up for people’s rights to have these needs met, especially when we find ourselves in the majority, when it would be easy enough not to care.

Woman as Sexual Dictator

So few women recognize the power that they hold over men. If women only realized how badly men wanted them, they would use their sexuality to get whatever they want.

A particular country-inflected pop star has been in the news as often for the fluctuations in her weight as for her musical successes. She was the darling of the entertainment magazines when she lost about ten pounds off of her already slim figure in order to have the tightest possible buttocks for a role in a movie that required her to wear tiny shorts. She was then chastised heartily by the same magazines when, several years later, she gained over ten pounds, bringing her five-foot three-inch frame from a svelte 110 pounds to a “chubby” 124 pounds.

She eventually lost that weight, but then recently made the cover of virtually every major entertainment magazine because, at a recent performance, she looked to have gained about twenty pounds. All of the photographs on the magazines were from the same single performance, as though she had only gained the weight for that one day. Now she has lost much of that weight, although one magazine recently noted that she was so distraught of the unexpected death of her dog that she had “stopped losing weight.”

Of course, by regular-people standards, this woman has never been close to overweight. Her low weight of 110 pounds, according to the body mass index (which is just a fancy name for a height/weight ratio), was at the low end of the “normal” range, while her gained-twenty-pounds weight of 135 puts her at 23, near the top of that normal range.

And BMI aside (it’s a poor judge of healthy weight at any rate), in the normal world, a 135-pound, five-foot-three-inch woman is what we would consider average.

I think of this woman, of her rise to hotness glory and her fall from hotness grace, whenever I hear people say that women have a deep, untapped source of power stemming from the fact that men want to have sex with them.

I’ve heard tell of this mystical power for as long as I can remember. I raged over it in my teenaged journals: this power that isn’t power at all, the power not to do something but of somebody wanting to do something to you, power that can turn on you at any moment and leave you ugly, undesirable and humiliated.

Now with more perspective, I’m still skeptical about my potential ability to lord despotically over men based on my chromosomes and anatomy.

As power goes, it’s a backwards sort of power, in the sense that it is conferred by the person who is supposed to be the subject of that power. When a dictator takes power over a nation, he does not need the approval of the people that he will lord over. If a Mafioso has the power to kill you and your family if you don’t seat him at the table he wants at your restaurant, your decision that this power is not real or valid will not change the reality of the situation.

So I suppose that sexual power is more like a democracy, where power is given willingly and can be taken away at will also. In a democracy, a leader must cater to the wishes and whims of his constituents, and that changes the kind of power that he has, which is why we more often call it service than power.

Likewise, the woman who wants to use her sexuality as power must cater to the whims of the men she seeks to dominate, in this case, maintaining her sexual desirability, which often lies in inverse proportion to her domineering nature. So for example, if a girlfriend wants to use her sexual power to make her boyfriend clean the apartment once in a while, he may just decide to cast his vote for a new challenger in place of the incumbent.

If a woman wants to wield her sexuality as power, and you decide that you don’t want to have sex with her to start with, her power is gone, instantly, and she is disgraced. Take the example of the famous pop star. As long as she weighs 110 pounds and wears tiny shorts, she is at the pinnacle of feminine power. But when she weighs 135 pounds and wears an unfortunate pair of unflattering jeans, she is humiliated, a laughing stock, she has let herself go, despite the fact that she is considerably slimmer than the average American woman.

When people talk about women’s sexual power, they are fantasizing that women could have dictator-like power over men, when in fact, at the very best, she is more like a civil servant.

This myth of woman as sexual dictator comes from the fantasy that male desire could be bottled and put to some use. I imagine the thought process, at least for men, goes something like this:

I am soooo attracted to Woman X and Woman Y and Woman Z. I don’t think those women could have any idea how much I desire them. But if they knew, they could use it against me in some way. And I wouldn’t even mind, because it would be erotically thrilling to have my desire used against me.

But of course, the power of Woman X, Woman Y, and Woman Z only comes from the fact that this fellow, Man XY, cannot be with them. The moment Woman X became the lover of Man XY, Woman Y and Woman Z’s power would skyrocket.

Not to mention Woman Q, who has been admiring man XY for years, but is not his type. She has no power over Man XY at all. Which is too bad, because she’s the only one who really wants it.

It reminds me of a scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Before Paul D. has sex with Sethe, he finds the web of scars on her back to be irresistibly compelling—a living, breathing tree growing on her back, calling to him with its powerful life force. But as soon as he has sex with her, it devolves into a grotesque, seething injury.

So as compelled as we are by the myth of the all-powerful pussy, this power is as ephemeral and undefined as the power of the British royalty, as unwieldy a weapon as those F-22 stealth jets whose production was halted because they couldn’t fly well in the rain. It is cotton-candy power, sweet and tempting until you put it in your mouth, at which point it disappears.

Short Skirts

It is summer, and the women at Las Pecinas College have donned their teeny skirts in celebration. They shuffle across the library in strappy sandals, tugging at their hemlines with every fifth step, hugging themselves and shivering in the chill of the air conditioning. They lean against their boyfriends, who wear long, baggy shorts that hang past their knees, oversized hooded sweatshirts, and basketball shoes. The backs of female thighs are suddenly visible everywhere, like blossoms emerging all at once from their winter slumbers—plump and dimpled, or bony and skinny, flattened across the back from sitting, sometimes marked with the faintly visible imprints of fabric chairs or slatted benches.

Why are they wearing these skirts, which seem to make them so chilly and uncomfortable? To look stylish? That’s not so bad. To show off their bodies? That seems okay.

Because they don’t feel sexy unless they look like they are wearing lingerie? That’s what I find a little disturbing.

As I understand it, the purpose of lingerie is to make its wearer as sexually appetizing as possible. It’s like the grill marks on a steak or the pumpkin sauce drizzled sparingly over ravioli; it stirs our appetite and increases our desire.

It seems appropriate to decorate your lover like you would decorate food during the moment of consumption—when you are about to have sex. But for women to feel that they must be maximally appetizing at all times, as they study in the library or attend a college class, seems perverse and tragic.

Notably, there is no lingerie for men—at least not for straight men. Their “sexy” underwear is all about status, Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfiger logos on waistbands that extend up over the tops of their pants.

My students, who are mostly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, often believe that the genders are equal now. I thought that, too, when I was their age. It’s an easy thing to think when you’ve been brought up in a modern school system where girls are increasingly more successful in school than boys and where advanced math and science classes are now taken by equal numbers of boys and girls.

Sometimes I and the other over-thirty-year-olds in the room try to enlighten our young compatriots about the gender inequity that has shaped our experience of work, relationships, families, and politics. When you explain to an eighteen-year-old woman the difficulties of getting adequate maternity leave or child care, her eyes become wide with respectful awe, as though you are recounting your experiences of the Great Depression. She nods politely, maybe utters a little “wow” under her breath, and you have suddenly attained the grandmotherly rank of historical relic, even though you’re talking about the present.

This is, after all, the same generation who says things like, “Well, this article about white privilege was written back in 1987, and there was probably a lot of racism back in those days.”

One area where gender inequity certainly touches their lives is the double standard concerning sexual behavior for men and women. They recognize this unfairness, and joke about it: a guy who sleeps around is a playa, a girl who sleeps around is a ho. Talking about this doesn’t really help them understand inequality, though, because even though they recognize this double standard, ultimately they subscribe to it themselves. The idea that men and women should have the same rights to have sex with whomever they please is like the idea that their parents were once young people just like themselves; they know it’s true in theory, but in practice they don’t really buy it.

If men and women are equal, then why aren’t all the men walking around campus in tiny shorts on the first slightly warm day of the year? Finally, I see nods of real recognition. “When our society is equal,” I say, “then when the weather turns warm, all the boys will be out with fake tans and hot pants and cropped tank tops.” Some girls laugh and nod, while others make disturbed faces. All the boys look disturbed.

“No one wants to see that,” one guy says.

He means he doesn’t want to see it. As a heterosexual male, what he wants to see is what everyone wants to see, and what he doesn’t want to see is what no one wants to see. That’s the meaning of hegemony.

“No, I mean, most of the guys I know wouldn’t look too good in skimpy clothes.” He points at his own stomach. “We’re really hairy and pale and out of shape.”

Well, men, if you want to be equal with women, I suggest you get to the tanning booth, or buy that convenient spray-on body tanner. All unsightly body hair should be waxed off. Then instead of eating breakfast, go for a run, and make sure to do lunges and crunches every day.

As with so many social inequities, there has been some progress on this front. Men are developing eating disorders now—manorexics, they are called, to distinguish their disease from the normal, female anorexia. Like nurses, models, and whores, anorexia is still necessarily feminine unless otherwise specified. But we can expect that in a few decades, young men will be rushing out to buy this season’s new short shorts, before all their football buddies do, and when the air turns a bit warm, their ass cheeks will be peeking tantalizingly out from under their clothing alongside those of their female equals.

Thanks to Adam Caldwell for the illustration. Check out his work at http://adamhuntercaldwell.com/