Attention
Here’s a mini revelation I had today about how attention is gendered.
I think basically everybody who cares about this stuff has by now seen the endless studies on how much more men talk than women do in meetings and classroom settings, and how there’s a huge discrepancy between how much women actually talk vs. how much they’re perceived by men to be talking. This tallies with anecdotal experience, I think: men demand a lot of attention and they receive it, and women are punished for asking for less than half as much attention.
It occurred to me today that part of the problem here might be that men think women are already getting attention, because they perceive their policing and harassment of women as attention.
When I think about the kinds of attention I don’t get, and which I want, none of it has to do with my physical appearance or with sexual activity. The kinds of attention I don’t get, but do want, are things like: recognition for my accomplishments. Respect when I speak on topics in which I am an expert. Solicitation of my opinion, whether fannish or professional.
But the attention I generally get instead in public spaces and workspaces is: comments on my appearance. Harassment for sexual favors. Requests for work favors. And most of all, all the fucking time, demands that I listen to men talking, which I’m increasingly sure is an activity that those men count under the heading of Paying Attention to a Woman. Because, y’know, they’re interacting at me, so that counts as paying attention to me. Right?
It’s the only thing I can think of that explains why women are seen as demanding attention all the time, when in fact I’ve seen numerous men literally shout women down just because their opinionboner is so fucking important to them. Men think that women are already getting attention, because to them, women getting attention means men evaluating women, talking at women, and asking women to do work or have sex with them, whereas men getting attention means… men evaluating women, talking at women, and asking women to do work or have sex with them. GOSH.
tl;dr: Not paying attention to men for ten seconds is a feminist act tbh
No, this is good and important and it really explains the idea of the “attention whore”, the idea that a woman could want “more” attention than just the male gaze we can’t opt-out from. Even just appearing at all is seen as an appeal to men, just existing in many spaces is met with the weird delusion that you’re faking your authentic presence and are just there “to get men’s attention.” So when women first appear in these spaces at all, and then correct the improper ‘attentions’ (read: objectification and patronization) of men we’re seen as “babe I’m already paying attention to you what more do you want?”
like that’s the paradox of hypervisibility yet erasure able to exist in the same world. “fake geek girl” yet “oh my god we get it shut up about being a girl who plays video games”. On one hand, the girl being there at all has to be ‘fake’ and have an ulterior motive of appealing to men. But when she asserts that she’s not there for men, suddenly she’s demanding “twice” what men think is her natural share of attention– they won’t STOP objectifying her, so they think she wants their original objectifying attention PLUS real respect.
The video games thing is a simple example. Women at work get another version of this– to be there at all and to be talked to at all seems exceptional, so being positively aggressive (asking for a raise, not being passive) is seen as “too much.” Meanwhile the aggression of men (positive or otherwise) is taken for granted.
We want constructive attention swapped for the other destructive kind. Not added to it or “more.” We want men to stop doing these dismissive, minimizing things, not for them to 'work harder’ to 'attend’ to us.
(via betterbemeta)