Where to Draw the Line_How to Set Healthy Boundaries Every Day

by Anne Katherine

  In my family, the boys were more important than the girls. They were given all the opportunities, and as a result, today they all live in big houses and drive big cars and belong to the country club. They think they have a God-given right to tell me how to run my life, even now. They have the gall to criticize my house, when the reason I’m stuck in that little house is due to their guidance when I was a young adult.

  It’s taken me a long time to get over being bitter about it and to learn how to handle them when they still try to treat me like Cinderella, fit only to serve the men.

  The fact is, the course of my life was set and limited for one reason only—I was born female.

  Luisa’s father had no interest in her because she was a girl. Brad’s family treated him like a cinderfella. Selma’s family nurtured the sons like hothouse flowers at great cost to themselves, and restricted the lives of the daughters so that the girls didn’t even realize they had choices until late in life.

  When a person is dismissed, rejected, denied opportunities, discriminated against, or undervalued because of their gender, it’s a gender boundary violation.

  FEMALE BOUNDARY VIOLATIONS

  Sunny’s story:

  I come from generations of women who worshiped maleness. When my brother and I would visit my grandmother, she’d talk to him and give him treats. But she hardly noticed I was there.

  “Buddy!” she’d say to my brother, “I just baked cookies. Come to the kitchen with me.” And she didn’t even say hello to me.

  I’d trail after the two of them to the kitchen, ’cause I didn’t know where else to go. She’d fix a plate of cookies and put it in front of him and pour him a glass of milk, and then catch sight of me, as if she was surprised I was there—even though I came through the door with him just ten minutes earlier.

  “Oh, Sunny, you have a cookie, too.” Then she’d get me milk and a cookie, but it was an afterthought, the skeleton of courtesy, not a sacrament of love, as it was for Buddy.

  As we grew up, the same thing kept happening. Gathered at Christmas with the aunts and Gram, Buddy got a million questions about college and sports and, eventually, his job or his interests. All the boys in the family had their way paid to college. I worked hard to get scholarships and had jobs the whole time I was in college. None of the other girls in the family even tried.

  No one cared that I was summa cum laude or that I got a grant to study vector populations in the desert. I was chosen out of thousands of applicants. I could have gotten nominated for a Nobel Prize and they’d have uttered an unenthusiastic, “That’s nice, dear; now Buddy, what were you saying?”

  I have heard countless stories of little girls set aside because they weren’t male. The little boys in their families were valued, attended to, given opportunities, encouraged, and the little girls ignored or treated like cinderellas raised to serve the boys.

  Today, in certain Middle Eastern and Asian countries, girl children are given away, sold, or abandoned, in order to save the family’s or nation’s resources for the boy children. When American parents, desperate for a child, can’t find a baby to adopt in the United States, they can, at great expense, go through a broker in Asia who will obtain for them a female child. It is the females who are expendable.

  What happens to little boys raised in such a culture or household? They grow up having been fortified with advantages, yes, but is there any other consequence? When a family favors the male children, they grow into men who have a sense of entitlement, and an unconscious belief in their superiority to women.

  And what about the little girls? Believe me, they notice if they are excluded from attention, conversation, opportunities, affection, and activities in favor of the boys. Without words or articulation, such discrimination registers at a subliminal level, and many little girls then automatically close the door to a wide range of options and possibilities. Without conscious awareness, they accept profound limitations.

  Preferential treatment of either male or female children produces adults who will have some difficulty in their relationships with the opposite sex. Men and women can’t possibly enter into marriage as equals if their programming has instilled attitudes of superiority or inferiority.

  Marrie and Rashid were good people. Rashid was clever, ethical, and funny. Marrie was warm, loving, and generous. In every way they exemplified a modern, well-adjusted couple. Rashid was a feminist. Marrie loved men. There was no trace of gender prejudice in the speech or actions of either person. They came to me because of Marrie’s problem. She was depressed.

  I quickly saw that Marrie’s self-esteem was in the basement. I asked her to do a task, a small one, and she apologized before she even started, telling me not to expect much from her. The challenge caused her so much anxiety that she started to shove it away, afraid to even try. Yet she did it perfectly, and when I pointed that out, she said it was a fluke that she did it well. I began to point out other areas in her life where she had demonstrated competence. In every case, she minimized it.

  In sessions, she would often build Rashid up, complimenting him, describing an achievement of his. He would soak it up like a sponge. His spirit would grow larger. He loved and needed her appreciation. But I never saw him compliment her or build her up. I did see him watch coldly, and with an air of impatience, as she fumbled in her purse to find the keys or checkbook.

  As I autopsied the course of their marriage, I uncovered a pattern of long, slow erosion in Marrie’s self-regard. She had entered the marriage competent, strong, and with big dreams of her own. She put those dreams aside as children came, and by the time they had the resources for her to get the education to fulfill her dream, she had lost her ability to risk.

  As a child, Rashid had been subtly treated like a crown prince. In adulthood, he was not aware that he held deep beliefs that his perspective, decisions, and thoughts were superior to Marrie’s.

  Rashid soon lost interest in therapy, continuing to see Marrie as the one having the problem. Marrie, too, left therapy after only a few months, saying that she was needed at home and didn’t like to use so much of the family’s financial resources just for her little problem.

  An attitude, like water, leaks out to dampen one’s actions and responses. It comes through. It has an effect, in countless invisible ways.

  MALE GENDER VIOLATIONS

  Anthes’s story:

  I was shut out as a boy. My mother and sisters belonged to some female club that excluded me from its warmth and color.

  They weren’t obvious about it—they loved me and looked out for me at school and all—but they would get into a flurry of conversation about clothes or boyfriends or how they were going to compete at the county fair, and I’d be on the sidelines, waiting to be interesting to them.

  I began to create my own life out of books and studying. Gradually I created my own separate niche that fascinated me. They teased me, and it was a kind of loving attention, though it spotlighted me as eccentric. I began to get some identity from being eccentric, and I seemed to continue to be different from others everywhere I was.

  In high school, I was odd because I studied and cared about doing well. In college I was odd because I had liberal views and wouldn’t cheat. I’ve been the odd man out in business, too, because I keep accurate expense logs. I don’t pad my budget, I won’t cheat a client or the company, and I work the full amount of hours expected of me.

  I don’t comment on any of this to my fellow workers or do anything to stand out, but I’m not included as a member of the Ol’ Boys’ Club. I’m not invited for drinks after work. I’m not told dirty jokes, which is okay because I find them distasteful anyway. I’m not invited to the ball games or impromptu parties.

  I’ve found an internal satisfaction from living cleanly, but it seems like, as far back as I can remember, I’ve been lonesome.

  Anthes was a victim of a subtle gender violation. He was excluded, not because he was male, but because he wasn’t female. In a predominantly female
household, he wasn’t discriminated against, but he was left out. The women and girls banded together around their female interests, while he dangled as a family appendage—loved, but not drawn into the action.

  Children need to belong, to be made a part of their family’s interests and activities. Leaving out children because of gender influences them in important and lasting ways—for the course of their entire lives.

  Crosby’s story:

  When I was a kid, I couldn’t do anything right. I ate too fast. I ran around too much. I fidgeted. I was too messy. I tracked up the floor. I got my clothes too dirty. I got into too many scrapes.

  My sister was perfect. She was neat. She kept her room tidy. She never spilled anything. She got good grades.

  She could come into the living room in her pajamas while Mom and Dad were watching television and cuddle into my mom’s lap, and my mom would stroke her hair or rub her back. I tried to cuddle with Mom once and she pushed me away. I didn’t try that again.

  I have an exceptional male relative who, when he was a boy, said, “How come my sister gets held and I don’t?” He woke us all up, and we realized we’d made the unconscious error of thinking that we should keep more of a physical distance with him because he was a boy. From then on, we gave in to our own natural instinct to hold and cuddle him. He lapped it up all the way through high school. When I saw this dear child, at 250 pounds and with linebacker shoulders, curled up on the couch with his head in his grandmother’s lap, having his head stroked, I realized how much he jarred us loose from unconscious, counterproductive cultural attitudes.

  ADULT GENDER VIOLATIONS

  Biological Boundaries

  Let’s take a simple example of a biological gender difference. Estrogen makes one feel colder. A woman’s basal body temperature drops in the estrus phase of her menstrual cycle and she will chill more easily. Men have a higher metabolism. They burn fat more readily and they are generally warmer.

  Throughout my lifetime I’ve heard women disparaged by men for being cold. But a man who mocks his wife for feeling chilly is mocking the very process that makes her womanly, that allows her to conceive, that gives her a womanly shape. In short, he is ridiculing her for a biological process over which she has no control, and because of which he receives gifts he could never get from a man.

  Hot flashes are also culturally mocked, even by women. A hot and sweaty man is usually considered sexy, but a hot, sweaty woman, no. A hot woman, a cold woman—both made sport of? Not okay.

  “Hey, baldy, the glare from your dome is blinding me.” Men have no control over hair loss. This is a genetically mediated process.

  “She’s too tall.” “He’s too short.” How could a woman be too tall or a man too short? A person has no control over how long their bones will grow. Neither men nor women can choose their body type, their height, or their metabolism.

  “Sex is all he cares about.” “We were fighting and he started touching me! What a jerk.” “Every time we hug, he starts feeling me up. He’s completely insensitive.” When women are with other women, it’s not uncommon for them to belittle the sexuality of their husbands. Both parties lose when women relate to a man’s sexuality in a largely negative way. Many lack understanding that a man’s physicality is hormonally induced, a normal part of the male system.

  All such disparaging remarks and putdowns are boundary violations. Indeed, whenever a person is mocked or ridiculed for their biology or gender, it’s a boundary violation.

  CULTURAL VIOLATIONS

  For the rest of this chapter I’m going to depart from the general tone of this book to talk about a problem that, because of its near invisibility, could continue to sneak up on us and limit our own choices and those of coming generations.

  In nearly every corner of the world, there exists a gap between two groups. As group A gathers benefits and gains access to its rights, it does so at the expense of group B.6 Men gain advantages at the expense of women. Throughout history and in many parts of the globe, this gap causes uncounted boundary violations toward females based solely on gender. Women and men have been fighting to close this gap for at least three hundred years in various countries. Being educated about this problem is one way to help close the rift.

  When an entire culture collaborates in its view of a gender, the children will absorb this perspective and carry the consequential limitations, privileges, and attitudes into adulthood.

  If Mary, as a baby, is pulled from her mother’s breast because her older brother wants a sip, both children will learn their place in the scheme of things and not question it. A toy taken from the girl child and presented to the boy child, girls taught to serve their brothers dinner before they can sit and eat as well, children watching the mother work nonstop while the father rests and is served, grow up not setting their own boundaries but buying the culture’s pattern.

  For millennia females in nearly every country in the world have been born into a second-class existence, into a template that has sanctioned female gender violation, violation that has extended even as far as culturally approved sexual abuse and exploitation.

  “12% of the females born worldwide are missing, uncounted, uncountable, many of them victims of female infanticide. . . . Women presently work twice as many hours as men for one-tenth the income.”7

  In Britain, until 1882, when a woman married, all that had been hers became the property of her husband. If she owned jewels, land, or a mansion, at marriage, he was now the owner. He owned their children. Married women in America still did not have property rights as of 1890.8

  In a few parts of the world, some females became conscious enough not only to question the traditional order, but to defy it. When this movement began—almost two centuries ago—these few couragous women were vilified even by other women. The idea of suffrage for women gained slow momentum.

  Guess how many years it took, from the first introduction of the topic, for the first country to grant women the right to vote?

  1. 20

  2. 50

  3. 70

  4. 100

  The first nation to grant women the vote did so in 1893. The first book on the subject was published in 1792.

  Can you guess in which order the following countries or provinces allowed women to vote? Britain, Switzerland, United States, Kuwait, New Zealand, France, USSR, Quebec, Saskatchewan, India, Nigeria, Brazil, Japan, Wyoming.

  Here is the order in which the vote was granted:

  1. Wyoming (1869)

  2. New Zealand (1893)

  3. Saskatchewan (1916)

  4. USSR (1917)

  5. Great Britain (1918—women had to be over the age of 30)

  6. United States (1920)

  7. Brazil (1932)

  8. India (1935)

  9. Quebec (1940)

  10. France (1944)

  11. Japan (1945)

  12. Nigeria (1960)

  13. Switzerland (1971)

  14. Kuwait (Not yet)

  If you are surprised that French women waited seventy years after the women in Wyoming to have a political voice, or that Indian and Brazilian women had a ballot nearly forty years before Swiss women, it only shows how little you were taught about women’s history.

  At least once a week I go to my encyclopedias for a fact that relates more to women than men, and I’m astounded at how often the reference I seek isn’t in print in books or in widely used computer reference programs. Ignorance of women’s history and difficult access to information about women are other ways women are violated culturally, another subtle way the culture truncates female experience.

  It isn’t that men are limiting the references chosen for computer encyclopedias or that male professors who write the texts for print encyclopedias are deliberately withholding information about women. It’s that they themselves haven’t been educated about women. Women’s achievements are a blank in their own minds. Not having been exposed to information about female ingenuity, courage, or heroism, they don’
t know these exist.

  Cultural violations are hard to see. The culture we live in is like the sea to a fish. Although it surrounds us, it is so much the fabric of our lives that it is invisible to us. The more aware we can be and the further we can expand our perspective, the better our chances for noticing when we are being treated by a man or woman with an attitude—that females are less than males.

  Paying attention to what happens to women all over the world—educating ourselves about the history of women—opens our eyes and minds to the subtle attitudes that are still influencing the treatment of women.

  We are but one generation removed from the movement in which women liberated themselves from traditional roles, and women still bump their heads on the glass ceiling, still don’t receive equal pay and promotion, still aren’t proportionally represented in Congress, local government, or management, and still are patronized by employers, doctors, and other professionals.

  Studies show that women entering the emergency room with heart attacks are more likely to be viewed as exaggerating their symptoms, with consequential delays in receiving appropriate treatment. “Women [are] less likely to receive a kidney transplant, less likely to have their lung cancer diagnosed, and less likely to have cardiac catheterization ordered when symptoms indicate it. Medical research has historically been structured around males, and resulting diagnostic and treatment models are often inappropriate for women.”9 As of 1990, only 13.5 percent of the $6 billion budget of the National Institutes of Health was spent on studies devoted to women’s health issues exclusively.10

  Girls only eight or ten years old have already absorbed the culture’s message that they should be thin and believe they should be on a diet, even if their size is objectively healthy and average. Anorexia and bulimia among teenage girls are rampant. These female children are acting out the culture’s emphasis on female beauty as the primary source of feminine power—a message reinforced subliminally in nearly every movie. Even in cartoons, the female worth rescuing is attractive and feminine while the witch has features that are somehow distorted and aggressive.