By Freya
Hello dear Koornbeursers, and also Raphael
I’ve been wanting to write this for a while. The problem is that this is a topic that could be discussed forever and should be treated with some nuance, and I am not a very subtle person. So I have decided that nuance is something for people who are boring, and I’m just going to throw my thoughts into this document like I’m throwing myself into ur mom.
Also, since this is about feminism, it might be a bit gender binary-ish. Nonbinary and gender non-conforming people can take from this what they want, but generally, in terms of feminist themes, I usually put them in the ‘also getting fucked over by the patriarchy’ category. However, I will be talking a lot about ‘women’, mostly because this reflects my own experiences. If I accidentally say something insensitive, please message me and I will take it out or change it.
When I was in high school, most of my friends were women. I was very used to being in feminine spaces and didn’t really realise how much that was the norm for me until it wasn’t anymore. The first time I went to an open day for aerospace I remember them proudly proclaiming that they ‘now had 13% women, which is much better than the 3% they had ten years ago’. At the time this was mostly funny to me, and it still is, but it was the first time that I really realised that I was going to be in a minority next year.
People who’ve known me for a while will have heard the story of my first-year weekend before, but it really solidified that feeling of ‘otherness’ you get as a non-man studying aerospace for me. At some point, the organization announced that there was going to be a ‘girl moment’ and all the girls were herded to a separate area to get to know each other. This is in itself not a bad idea, but the problem arose once we got there and they had brought rose wine and chocolate for everyone. They then proceeded to tell us that we were going to sing an ‘anthem of girl power to all the boys and handed us the lyrics to Breaking Free from High School Musical. We, all 25-ish of us, had to sing this on a stage to the over 200 guys, who then made a bunch of choreographed monkey noises and got down on one knee to serenade us with a love song medley.
I cannot make this shit up.
But I guess that is the best word for it, ‘otherness’. No one is telling me to go back to the kitchen, but they do say things like ‘I guess my male brain just prefers clarity’ when they want to write our entire fucking report in bullet points. This is where I think there is a lot of overlap between queer and female experiences. Both have the feeling of walking into a room and seeing you are the only person who looks like this. Both can be in a space and immediately notice that they are the outlier.
On one hand, it can feel very empowering, feeling out there and unique. A lot of my friends have said that since they started studying aerospace they have actually gotten a lot more feminine, as a kind of averse reaction to the idea that you’re not supposed to. We’ve started painting our nails more, wearing perfume, wearing frilly shirts, and just generally saying ‘fuck you’ to the notion that you’re ‘basically a man’ if you study a STEM subject.
On the other hand, it is still very alienating, the fundamental feeling that you don’t belong here. I’ve heard people say that anyone can apply to study anywhere, so if there aren’t any women in aerospace, it’s just because they don’t want to, or maybe because they are really worse at it. Completely missing that women get put off studying certain things because of phrases like that. Saying these phrases while forgetting that I am right in front of them.
It’s weird because you want to not feel so strange all the time, but you also don’t want to compromise yourself to ‘fit in’. It would be easier if I didn’t start discussions every time someone said something slightly sexist and instead would just laugh along, but it wouldn’t feel right. I want to wear pretty dresses, but I also want to be respected in my field, and it feels like this should not be that hard. Somehow it is though, and I have to deal with it for the rest of my life probably.
I’ve had discussions about this with people before, and they tend to think I’m being a bit dramatic, maybe even hysterical, like a real woman. There is some sort of general idea that a lot of men seem to have, namely that sexism got fixed when we gained the right to vote, and what is left now is just SJW wokeness. People also tend to get very defensive, they tend to think that when I say ’the patriarchy’ I mean ‘you specifically’, and since obviously there is no way they can be sexist, I must be exaggerating. It’s easier to think of me as a typical feminist stereotype than to examine what that thinking pattern says about them.
I don’t really have a solution to any of this, I’m not sure I even really have a point. The problem with discussing these issues is that usually the people willing to listen to you already agree anyway and the people who really need to hear it don’t want to. I just wanted to share some things I’ve been thinking about.
I would like to end with a quote that means a lot to me:
“Isn’t aerospace really hard? It’s more of a guy thing right?” – Everyone.