Walking the Walk as a Woman

Walking the Walk as a Woman

(Or, Existing and Doing as a Gendered Human Form)

(Or, The Manslamming Debate: Is it Really an Issue of Voice?)

Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality,” for a discussion based on the human body, is philosophical, cerebral, maybe even a little existential… thinking about how you think about your body (and how you think about using your body and whether or not you apply those thoughts in your actions) can get a little overwhelming.

Young ponders women’s relationships with their bodies, in an attempt to understand more about why the manner in which we move and use our physical forms have come to be understood as so distinctly gendered. Young some verbs that make it onto the list of having particular characteristics described as feminine when a woman does them, including but not limited to run, throw, and hit (143).

While I found some of the questions Young posed intriguing, at many times I found her approach to answering them a bit too heady for me to be able to confidently understand or apply. My biggest source of confusion was perhaps the lack of attention to the structures that act on women in their life (I’m thinking sexist institutions.. etc). I couldn’t get a feel for if Young assumed that we as readers are already aware of how structurally engrained sexisms impacts women physically, or if maybe these structures are a result of some of the bigger philosophies about bodies she poses.. but wouldn’t aforementioned structures influence how we conceptualize our bodies whether or not we realize it??? These spiraling questions occurred a frequently during my reading process, so I found myself continually picking out a concept I believed I understood, and thinking more pragmatically about it, in ways that I could more easily comprehend and relate to. I took Young’s big philosophical ideas, and funneled down until I came to manageable concepts that I could myself mull over more thoroughly and expand on.

Young emphasizes that women position, move, use, and think about their bodies differently than men, but doesn’t say much about physical interactions between men and women that may indicate some type of gender dynamic playing out in the physical world. There is little mention of the role deeply embedded sexism and notions of patriarchy play in everyday life. For example, Young points out how women lack confidence in their physical capabilities, creating self-fulfilling prophecies of limited physical possibilities, while at the same time being afraid of getting hurt (144). These ideas of self-imposed restraints brought to mind Bartky’s discussion of women self-policing and “disciplining” their bodies to maintain adherence to expectations of femininity for fear of some type of punishment. Applying these theories helped me better grasp the practical consequences of what Young discusses, because her focus is on the body, yet I have a hard time talking about body in terms of gender without discussing the structural ideologies that influence our understandings and interactions with the world around us…

…This leads me to the “Manslamming” debate. The concept of physical existence and action got me thinking about space, and carrying our bodies through space, and interacting with other people carrying their bodies through space, and triggered a memory of a tweet I’d seen ages ago about men and women interacting while carrying themselves through said space. A Google search brought me the exact social media tidbit I remembered, and much more…I found numerous articles explaining a type of social experiment a woman conducted after noticing men not moving for others, seemingly using space for their bodies without regard to the people around them. According to New YorkMagazine’s The Cut, Beth Breslaw decided to adopt this “men’s” style of entitled walking for about a month, not moving when others approached on the sidewalks of New York City, and found she ran into men far more often than she ran into women, thus the term “manslamming” was born.

Things got interesting when I looked at other articles though. More than one refuted Breslaw’s assertions, saying both her results couldn’t be true, and that she was trying to hard to make public space interactions an issue of gender. I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting to find anything challenging Breslaw and her motives and genuine concern for feminist causes when I looked into this story, and will admit again a feeling of surprise, and perhaps some disturbance when I read things like “I’m not saying sexism doesn’t exist. Of course it does — and that’s why it’s so important not to discredit the idea by making issues about gender when they’re not.” My main issue with this assertion from an article in the National Review, is that attacking women when they talk about personal experiences of sexism is dangerous as it has the potential to silence women for fear that their complaint is not valid, or worth the trouble of questioning it and challenging it by legitimizing it through communication of some sort. I’m equally thrown off by the authority this article gives itself in taking away Breslaw’s authority over her own experience; if they can claim Breslaw was biased and therefor most certainly wrong, aren’t we all bringing our own biases to everything we do? If so, how could this piece so immediately and decisively decide Breslaw is not only Wrong with a capital W, but bad for feminism? 

Another article I found on TheGuardian’s Women’s Blog does nearly the identical thing, saying Breslaw is guilty of “manstraining; the act of having to squint your eyes really hard to find an affront to your daily experience as a woman, despite so many bigger ones to battle.”  I found this particular article to be problematic too, for it dismisses and trivializes women’s lived physical experiences, claiming the woman who conducted the experiment (to be fair, the point that this is tough to scientifically call an experiment is valid, but the attack gets more aggressive..) was simply wanting attention, and would get it by finding trouble whether or not it existed. In some round about way, I think these arguments can be related to the topic they’re about.. manslamming is an issue of taking up space in the physical public, and isn’t publishing articles that make arguments an issue of voice taking up physical and virtually space in the public discourse? I think the right to space needs to be honored for women, for it seems in more than one aspect of life they are feeling told to move off the metaphorical sidewalk, shrink, and silence themselves…