I never really knew any of my grandparents. All passed from this mortal coil when I was quite young. My images of them consist of grainy mental pictures and family anecdotes, both of varying quality. However, there is one thing I have always remembered quite vividly. At some point my maternal grandmother said to me, “one day you will have a moment when your true self will awaken from its sleep.” I have no idea what the context was for this remark or what she truly meant by it. Nevertheless it always stuck with me.
For most of my younger years this phrase in my memory lay dormant and unexplored. And then one day it happened. My epiphany moment hit me like a sledgehammer and I have never been the same since. But first, a bit about me and my background……
Presently I am a professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at a local university. Gender equality and social policy are my areas of specialization. I am a middle-aged white single father of five children. Life is busy to say the least but manageable. We are somewhat economically stable and comfortably middle-class. In my limited free time I devote my efforts to progressive causes and social justice issues with fervor. However my life is now, my family history tells a different story….a contradiction of most of what is my present reality.
My father’s family history is that of the quintessential Reagan Democrat variety, long before that term was coined. My great-grandfather was a Welsh coalminer who fought for the British Army in the trenches on the Western Front in the Great War. He later immigrated to the United States, married a local woman of rural stock, and spent the rest of his days laboring in a factory in quiet contentment. My grandfather followed a similar path, working various jobs as a tradesman and assembly line worker and fighting as an infantryman in North Africa and Italy during World War Two. Not to be outdone, my father volunteered for Vietnam but never saw action. Instead, he spent his military life working in procurement, much to his consternation. He later married a country girl of Eastern European descent with a strict Catholic upbringing.
As for my maternal side, they were Ukrainian farmers who immigrated in the early 20th century looking for a better life than one Czarist Russia could provide. They continued farming in the United States and were very conservative in both politics and lifestyle. The men tilled the fields and the womenfolk tended the home. Very beholden to the Catholic Church, they spent their Sundays in the pews of their local rural church and went to confession regularly. This was their reality until my mother and her siblings decided to move to the cities, looking for more opportunity than the family farm could provide. My mother found odd jobs as a laundry folder and clerical work until she met my father. Once the two married she spent the rest of her life as a homemaker, tending to my sister and I until she succumbed to ovarian cancer at the turn of the century.
Growing up, my sister and I were socialized into presuming that the traditional family model was not only normal but superior to the alternatives. After all, it appeared to work for our family for generations so how could it not be preferred? My childhood was a “normal” and relatively happy one. Our family structure, dad the breadwinner and mom the homemaker, seemed to be efficient enough. Sure dad made all the family decisions and took the lead in almost everything family related but that just seemed normal to us. However, these presumptions were to be severely challenged in the next phase of my life.
When I was 18 I did what most working and middle class teens did: I went to further my education in university. As an undergrad I never really understood why women had their own groups demanding “equality” and “opportunity.” To me it seemed that everyone had those things if they just worked hard enough to attain them. Why should women demand “special treatment?” I majored in History and ascribed to the Great Man theory of understanding historical events. Surely history was just a series of great men and their deeds…..just look at Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Washington, and Churchill.
It was not until I went to graduate school where I had my “moment of awakening,” just as my grandmother described all those years before. I graduated with B.A.’s in both History and Political Science with Honours and finished my M.A. in Political Science in a single year, largely by devoting myself to the single goal of getting a Ph.D. as soon as possible. I then entered my Ph.D. program satisfied in my life and world view. Things appeared to be going smoothly……and then my world changed dramatically.
Knowing that I was in desperate need of funding, my Ph.D. supervisor suggested I help a young female professor conduct a study on gendered depictions of sexuality in pornography and their influence on modern society. She had received a large grant to conduct the study but due to its controversial nature, no one in the department wanted to help her with it so she appealed for help to my supervisor, who was head of the department. Personally I had no interest in the subject matter and even disagreed with its premise. But money was money so I signed on. Over the course of a few months I did my due diligence, conducting interviews and doing the research. My colleague provided the analysis and when completed, I simply moved on, content in the fact I made some extra cash to help pay for a semester or two.
Much to my surprise, the study appeared to be an immediate hit with our faculty who then distributed copies of it to other universities and colleges. Not long after, I received a visit from the same young female professor who again requested my help. Since the study was so popular, several institutions requested she give a lecture on the findings. As my name was on the study as well, she thought it would be a good idea we both give lectures on it. I reluctantly agreed even though it was not my specialization and I did not necessarily concur with her analysis. We conducted a plan in which we would alternate lectures, seven in all. She would do four and I three. After a few weeks of organization we were off for our mini lecture tour. However, despite all the planning, nothing could have prepared me for what was to happen……
To streamline the lectures we made a single power point show in which we both used. There was no variation. The only difference was in who would be presenting it. My colleague was an excellent speaker: confident, articulate and smooth in delivery. In truth, much better than I was or ever would be in public speaking. Our first stop was nerve-wracking. The audience was mostly faculty with a smattering of graduate students. Apparently the topic to our study was controversial enough to generate sufficient interest. In truth, I was happy she would be the first to present!
And present she did. She was perfect and on point. One of the best presentations of a lecture I had ever seen up to that point. And when she finished……silence!! One could hear a pin drop. It was more than a bit disarming. She then asked “any questions?” and that is where the worm turned so to speak. Hands went up, people shouted…it was pure chaos. Finally after a few minutes of mayhem things calmed to the point where a senior professor stood up and directed one comment that forever changed my life. He looked directly at my colleague with a steely gaze and said, “you know you just can’t say these things.”
My colleague and I looked at each other with confusion on our faces. She then turned to the aged professor and asked, “I am not sure what you mean.” His retort was brief and to the point: “you are a woman. You are inherently incapable of objectively analyzing sexuality and gender and the mere fact you chose pornography for your soapbox only proves this. Your whole study is a sham.” As he finished the whole room once again erupted, this time with applause and cheers for the aged professor’s assessment of our work. It was bedlam. After a few minutes of disbelief, we just walked off the stage.
After this debacle, we took stock of the situation and came to the conclusion that it was a onetime negative experience and soldiered on to the next lecture a few days later. Once again my female colleague took the lead and had a wonderful lecture and once again she was lambasted with negative questions and general vitriol. And then a few days later at our third stop, more of the same. We then realized the first time was not an isolated incident. Her confidence took a hit and she simply stated to me right before our fourth lecture, “you might as well take the rest, I can’t do this anymore.” I was a bit surprised by this considering this was essentially her life’s work up to that point. Nevertheless I agreed. If I didn’t it would never happen.
So, at our fourth stop I took the stage, took a deep breath, and followed our script. During the lecture I remember thinking to myself, “she is so much better at this and more knowledgeable.” When I was done I braced myself for the impending crucifixion. At first there was the now normal silence. And then…….applause. Lots of it, followed by cheers and an eventual standing ovation. After all of that I fielded questions which amounted less to actually questioning and more to congratulating me on conducting such “groundbreaking work.” While exiting the stage elderly professors slapped my back and joked how much “fun” it probably was to research pornography. There were plenty more crude comments and jokes but I would rather not get into them.
Beginners luck maybe? Nope, my next lecture (lecture 5) was a similar experience. At that point I thought perhaps we had turned a corner for the better and convinced my colleague to do lecture 6. Big mistake. The sexism and misogyny was as evident as ever. Needless to say I conducted the last lecture and the disgusting pattern of responses remained consistent.
When all was said and done my colleague and I wrote a brief report on our experience gave it to our Department Head and went our separate ways. Our ordeal forged a friendship between us to this day. And I can say she was never the same. This study was to be the beginning of her life’s work. Yet not soon after our tour she shelved it for good. It was never seen again. Less than a year later, she left academia for an administration position in government. She still never talks of our endeavor.
Yet I was not the same person either. I got to witness first hand institutional sexism and misogyny at its most terrible. My world view, socialized into me by family and society, shattered by the weight of its own hypocrisy. This was my epiphany, my moment where my true self was awakened from its sleep.