The Testosteronic Female

Tejaswi Sudhakar

Writing the Essay

Deepening: The Testosteronic Female

Revision

Imagine being trapped inside after the rains and winds. You open the window and watch the world, separated from it by one centimeter of mesh; a mesh meant for bugs but keeping you locked in just the same, just on the supposedly safe inside. You yearn to splash against it, to melt into water that would sift through with utmost ease, fall to the ground, and eventually resume solidity. Shape, Form, Being--all really water. Expectations have been passed down from generation to generation keeping us in a "gender straightjacket", much like the impeding mesh meant for keeping out the bugs. The "supposed safe side" is the familiar side where each person is brought up on the ideals that the generation before was brought up on: an interminable cycle of reinforcing "gender straightjacket" thinking. Both women and men must act in an acceptable and predetermined demeanor determined by the individuals that live around us. Thus, perhaps we as a people have created an unfair natural selection for women that have essentially diminished qualities necessary to feel or even express and consequently progress higher on the work and social ladder. However, it is most upsetting that in order for a woman to succeed she is expected to possess the qualities of a man.

"I am not good enough. I am not of satisfactory caliber. My waist is not curved enough; my figure is not lithe enough--and most of all, my mind will never be agile enough for mazes created by our surrounding mainstream culture." These are the notions that go through an archetypal woman's mind in our contemporary, mainstream culture today. Each child is born with a tabula rasa, completely unaware of our conventional and ultimately "gender straightjacket" demand and pull on his/her existence. Environmental pull stemming from each individual that ultimately form a consensus on how to act demands an ultimatum from each person: a woman to be submissive and subservient and a man to be the hefty hero. And here becomes the issue: the disparity between how to act and further oneself in both the social and working communities based on gender. The ideals that men have to be masculine and women beauteous have been bolstered through the reinforcement of time. Susan Sontag starts her essay "A Woman's Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?" by explaining the linguistic differences between the expression of an attractive man and attractive woman: "A beautiful woman, we say in English but a handsome man. "Handsome" is the masculine equivalent of--and refusal of--a compliment which has accumulated certain demeaning overtones, by being reserved for women only." (Sontag, 245) The diction used above bolsters the notions that women and men cannot have the same connotations. Handsome is the "refusal of" (Sontag, 245) beauty and therefore a continuation of the subservient woman. From the onset of her essay, she explains how women are automatically differentiated from linguistics to other areas.

Susan Sontag's essay ultimately encompasses this idea that women are pressured to be fixated with their appearance. As she explains, "it is 'everybody,' a whole society, that has identified being feminine with caring about how one looks." (Sontag, 246) Pop culture, collegiate culture, and culture that ultimately deals with anything really has inadvertently bolstered this notion of obsession with appearance, especially regarding to women. Sontag's theory is proven correct as we look into our everyday life activities: television, movies, advertisements, novels, magazines, and much more are suffused with images of how a woman must act or look. Sontag also explains how the contemporary world lives in a in a time of inconsistencies; inner and outer beauty has been fundamentally split. We see the beauty of intellect and the beauty of appearance as different. In fact, she explains how, in contrast to today, the Greeks saw beauty as a whole and "[i]f it did occur to the Greeks to distinguish between a person's "inside " and "outside", they still expected that inner beauty would be matched by beauty of the other kind." (Sontag, 245) She states that the contemporary world accepts, and in fact allows for discrepancies between inner and outer beauty.

The idea of only women suppression is overturned when we look at Paul Theroux's essay, "Being A Man". Theroux explains the values and ideals of being a man. As Sontag writes about the repression of just women, Theroux explains how men are as well: each gender, both men and women are inhibited in their thinking and modus operandi. Every man must possess the inescapable ideals of being "masculine". Being a man is to "be stupid, unfeeling, obedient, soldierly, and stop thinking." (Theroux, 772) However, Theroux constantly presses on the idea that men are suppressed just as much as women are. Much like the female gender, he asserts that children are shaped into becoming what we as a mainstream culture expect them to be. Theroux explains that masculinity is more independent and therefore more "grotesque". Become feminine "implies needing a man as witness and seducer" and therefore has the "natural friendship" of man. (Theroux, 772) Here, Sontag's idea that women are always put into relation with men is proved correct through Theroux's argument. In contrast, "there is not manliness without inadequacy" because men cannot truly have a friendship with their inferior counterpart. (Theroux, 773) The standard belief that through family and age old examples, children are invariably shaped into becoming what our culture expects them to be. In fact, Theroux explains, to which Sontag would whole heartedly concur, "The nine-year-old coquette proceeds to become womanish in a subtle power game in which she learns to be sexually indispensable, socially decorative and always alert to a man's sense of inadequacy." (Theroux, 773) Though Theroux's argument of men also being quelled is true, through the combination of both Theroux and Sontag's claims, it is irrefutable to know that because women are taught to obsess over appearance, it inadvertently places women in a position of lesser stature when compared to men. In her essay, Sontag clearly argues that women have been attributed the idea of beauty. She explains the exclusive association of beauty with women, the subtle demeaning nature of such an association, and the paradoxical expectations women face from a society that requires submitting to particular standards of beauty while