Home»May»Grandma's Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes FROM THE MAY 2013 ISSUE
I don't have a maternal bone.
Also, I perform female gender roles extremely poorly:
So why funnel me in that direction?
Especially when I am already adapted to toning down the emotions for a very high stress environment?
GENDER ROLES
I'm not autistic but I don't like a lot of flowing, emotional information. School teaching, where I have to decode a flood of such info all the time, would have been hell for me. The military, had I been suited, would have been heaven. There is no requirement to decode emotional information there, at all. My minimum requirement is for there to be a basic social structure in place that does not depend on my readings or misreadings of emotional information. That's putting too much pressure on me. It feels like emotional blackmail as in "get the next packet of information wrong and you're out of a job!" I do become more and more tense when that is what is demanded of me, and in states of tension, I'm actually less perceptive. I switch off when I go into survival mode and act only according to necessity and logic. I don't read the subtle cues at all.
And that, my dear ladies and gentlemen, is why I am a feminist. It's not -- as my enemies would like to contrive it -- because I "want to be a man", but because I really, genuinely can't read the emotional nuances unless in optimal conditions. I do have to be very relaxed and at ease. Being treated like this mode of interaction comes easily to me make me feel like a fraud. When someone says, "You should make more effort with person X" or "person Y" I feel like I have to draw together limited energy reserves to try to figure out what is being asked of me. Inevitably, the more I strain at the challenge, the more my energies are diverted to logic and survival. It's like emotional hypothermia. Just as I've said on my videos, I'm very skilled at emotional repression for survival purposes. I remember the day we had planned to go out somewhere. it was 1976. Then the phone rang and a very serious voice asked to speak to my father. I put him on the phone -- and he fainted. His brother had been killed in action. We still went out on that day and did what we had planned. Nobody spoke -- nobody cried. None of us has ever shed a tear.
That's basic survival for me: If something emotionally serious happens, immediately I don't feel it. At least for a time and then I have to go back later and pick up the pieces.
That's why asking me to do "women's work" is a nightmare. Or, I'm hired for a job and I think it's not women's work (emotional work), but it turns out to be be that. Then I have to leave, traumatized, because I switched off, fearing the situation, when I'm supposed to have emotionally interacted. I can't emotionally interact, because the implicit threat, "Your job depends on this," hangs over me, and so long as there is a threat to my survival, I do not feel emotion.
It's an odd thing, but a cultural and adaptive tendency. People tend to make their own interpretations, which relate to what they can understand about contemporary society. One, as I have said, is they think I am "trying to be a man".
I don't feel helped by that. People's perspectives are self-serving. Feminists have not been helpful.
The Beat Goes On
Together, Meaney and Szyf have gone on to publish some two-dozen papers, finding evidence along the way of epigenetic changes to many other genes active in the brain. Perhaps most significantly, in a study led by Frances Champagne — then a graduate student in Meaney’s lab, now an associate professor with her own lab at Columbia University in New York — they found that inattentive mothering in rodents causes methylation of the genes for estrogen receptors in the brain. When those babies grow up, the resulting decrease of estrogen receptors makes them less attentive to their babies. And so the beat goes on.
I don't have a maternal bone.
Also, I perform female gender roles extremely poorly:
“The thing I’ve gained from the work I do is that stress is a big suppressor of maternal behavior,” she says. “We see it in the animal studies, and it’s true in humans. So the best thing you can do is not to worry all the time about whether you’re doing the right thing. Keeping the stress level down is the most important thing. And tactile interaction — that’s certainly what the good mother rats are doing with their babies. That sensory input, the touching, is so important for the developing brain.” [my bolds]
So why funnel me in that direction?
Especially when I am already adapted to toning down the emotions for a very high stress environment?
GENDER ROLES
I'm not autistic but I don't like a lot of flowing, emotional information. School teaching, where I have to decode a flood of such info all the time, would have been hell for me. The military, had I been suited, would have been heaven. There is no requirement to decode emotional information there, at all. My minimum requirement is for there to be a basic social structure in place that does not depend on my readings or misreadings of emotional information. That's putting too much pressure on me. It feels like emotional blackmail as in "get the next packet of information wrong and you're out of a job!" I do become more and more tense when that is what is demanded of me, and in states of tension, I'm actually less perceptive. I switch off when I go into survival mode and act only according to necessity and logic. I don't read the subtle cues at all.
And that, my dear ladies and gentlemen, is why I am a feminist. It's not -- as my enemies would like to contrive it -- because I "want to be a man", but because I really, genuinely can't read the emotional nuances unless in optimal conditions. I do have to be very relaxed and at ease. Being treated like this mode of interaction comes easily to me make me feel like a fraud. When someone says, "You should make more effort with person X" or "person Y" I feel like I have to draw together limited energy reserves to try to figure out what is being asked of me. Inevitably, the more I strain at the challenge, the more my energies are diverted to logic and survival. It's like emotional hypothermia. Just as I've said on my videos, I'm very skilled at emotional repression for survival purposes. I remember the day we had planned to go out somewhere. it was 1976. Then the phone rang and a very serious voice asked to speak to my father. I put him on the phone -- and he fainted. His brother had been killed in action. We still went out on that day and did what we had planned. Nobody spoke -- nobody cried. None of us has ever shed a tear.
That's basic survival for me: If something emotionally serious happens, immediately I don't feel it. At least for a time and then I have to go back later and pick up the pieces.
That's why asking me to do "women's work" is a nightmare. Or, I'm hired for a job and I think it's not women's work (emotional work), but it turns out to be be that. Then I have to leave, traumatized, because I switched off, fearing the situation, when I'm supposed to have emotionally interacted. I can't emotionally interact, because the implicit threat, "Your job depends on this," hangs over me, and so long as there is a threat to my survival, I do not feel emotion.
It's an odd thing, but a cultural and adaptive tendency. People tend to make their own interpretations, which relate to what they can understand about contemporary society. One, as I have said, is they think I am "trying to be a man".
I don't feel helped by that. People's perspectives are self-serving. Feminists have not been helpful.
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