Indecisive Peach

I spoke earlier to someone who defined her role as a women as a direct reaction to the existence of men. I went on to query her about this and then reflected that for me, the role of female only is played out in the contrast and complimentary ways I see women around me. Femininity and the archetype of woman becomes this model and how I recognize the reflections on that model, in my innate actions and ways to strive to stretch and enjoy myself as a woman, defines my notion of it.

I’ve commented on this before, but I do have a lot of testosterone in my life. And while I do think that several of the men I have interactions with are not necessarily loading their representations of masculinity with things that media might value – beer-swilling, roof-fixing, sport-watching – they do decidedly inhabit a different gender model. [This is starting to sound very grad school theory here.]

The point: when a female friend of mine, K, was scheduled to arrive from Colorado to spend a couple days around the end of the year, not only was I happy in the idea of catching up, I was crazy excited to do things that established me firmly in the role of woman. Moving away from high falutin’ language, I wanted to do damn girly things.

“Oh my God. You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen.”

I sneak through the racks behind her as she says this to the boy behind the counter.

“Please, please tell me you’re dating someone,” she breathes.

He gives a bit of an abashed chuckle. “Yeah. And his name is Jesus.”

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For some reason, all my education has been focused around the idea of being intently focused on your audience. In journalism, you had to be highly aware of almost speaking down to your audience in an effort to bring the most concise information to the widest reach of your core readers. In rhetoric, there was the idea that knowing your audience to the highest degree gave you a higher measure of power in persuasion.

I think, however, that the demand toward knowing your audience came when I was in my first incarnation of college education. I hesitate to mention it, but I never really aimed high when it came to my college education. I had the pick of full-rides to any schools in the state when I left high school and I simply decided to continue on with my high school educational career. I was into computers, enjoyed the tinkering, was hoping to get a bit more provoked into that sort of study *insert waving of hands* at a higher institution. [This is why letting an 18-year-old mold your career path can be a very bad thing.]

I went to the state’s premier research institution and was wildly excited by two things: they gave me money back at registration and that male to female ratio was about 4:1. I was rebuffed by the type of people I encountered – nope, I did not find numbers interesting, nor lines on graphs, or hacking into my graphing calculator. Interestingly, I enjoyed my writing classes the most.

These were embarrassingly small classes. A technical writing class of three people and a teacher was one I took one of the two semesters I was there. The teacher liked the idea of bringing in people from “the field” who would tell harrowing tales of working with engineers who didn’t like to shower or comb themselves and who would write worse notes than a doctor on LSD. As one such professional started off her thirty minute presentation, she ultimately gave my entire initial common sense reasoning behind why one should know their audience.

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