Translator: Avish Jain Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
Okay, so a number of years ago, I was singing in this women's chorus,
and for one of the productions, the choral director decided
that we would use part of the concert to reclaim the word "cunt."
I just said "cunt" in a TEDxOSU Talk.
I did.
I know a lot of you probably had a really negative reaction
to that word when I said it,
and so did I and so did the other members of the chorus.
And in fact, we have had a lot of debates about it.
Women cried, women yelled,
people were really concerned that we would alienate our audience,
that we would re-traumatize women
because we have been taught that it was a horrible word,
that it was the worst word.
And in fact, it has been used in terrible, horrible ways.
It's used by abusers of women, people who want to hurt women.
But there's some evidence that suggests that, long ago,
it actually was a word of positive power,
and that we as a community, across time,
have taken that word and turned it into a word of horribleness.
And so if we created that, we could un-create that.
Now, I really had a decision to make
because the character that I was playing in this part
was scheduled to say the word "cunt" 23 times in one line.
Yeah, I was going to walk across the stage
and call each of my friends some variation on the word "cunt."
I used a little pirate voice and all sorts of other things.
And then, at the end, we were going to sing two little songs,
one of them to a Mozart tune, no less, with the word "cunt."
Yeah, so I really had to be all in or all out.
And to make this decision,
I thought about my daughter who was about seven at the time,
and I thought about a world
where that word wouldn't have power over her anymore,
where she would be free to make her own meaning of words,
and I decided to go all in.
And that is really the start of my life as a gender deconstruction worker.
Since that time, I've spent a lot of time thinking and studying
and reading about gender and sexuality
and I've come to the conclusion
that socially constructed gender norms are always limiting,
often harmful, and sometimes deadly,
and I wanted to share some of those observations with you today.
Now, how are they always limiting?
Well, it might not surprise you to find
that if we ask people to wear a bathing suit and then take a math test,
or if we ask them to wear a sweater and then take a math test,
that some people wearing a bathing suit may do more poorly on that math test
than people wearing a sweater.
What it might surprise you to find is that that effect is really only true for women.
Men can take a math test wearing a bathing suit or wearing a sweater
and it doesn't seem to affect their performance,
but for women, what happens is, when you put a bathing suit on them,
you activate all of that societally constructed body shame
and body surveillance,
and they have to actually use some of that energy toward that,
and thus, their performance is limited on the math test.
And so, you say, "Well, Lisa, that is not realistic.
Nobody is going to ask you to take a math test in a bathing suit.
Didn't you bring us a real world example today?"
I did.
Think about the AP Calculus exam, you know, that minor, tiny little test,
the AP Calculus exam that might determine what courses you take in college,
maybe even what major you decide on,
maybe even what path your life will take.
So, on the AP Calculus exam,
research finds that if we put that checkbox at the top,
that says, "Male or Female,"
women do more poorly on that test than if you take that same checkbox
and put it on the bottom after the test.
Simply by reminding women that they are women,
you activate the stereotype, "Girls aren't good at math."
And so then, during the test, they have to actually some of that cognitive energy
that they should be using on the calculus test
because calculus is hard.
They have to use some of that energy to suppress that stereotype,
and thus, their performance may be limited.
Now, for often harmful, I want to rely on the brilliant Jackson Katz.
So, Katz has this theory of the gender socialization of boys,
and what he says is that we socialize boys within a box.
Now, inside that box are all these great descriptors
like independent, assertive, manly, strong, tough,
all the stuff you want to be called.
Outside that box, those are bad.
That's where wimp, fag, wuss, that's where those descriptors live.
Outside that box is where you're bullied and teased and called a sissy.
And so to get all the good descriptors,
you have to stay within this narrow, tight, little box.
You have to learn and internalize that to be a man
means not expressing human emotions.
It means never showing when you're in pain and it means resorting to violence
as a preferred method of conflict resolution.
And he says that we need to stop forcing our boys in this tiny little box.
We need to allow them to be the full human beings that they are.
Further, we're so inculcated in thinking of men as violent creatures
that they've actually dropped from the narrative about violence.
We see headlines like, "A woman was raped," "A woman was assaulted."
You don't see headlines, "A man raped a woman," "A man assaulted a woman."
They've become what Katz calls an invisible majority,
that is, when I say gender, you think woman,
and that makes violence against women a woman's problem.
You get things like Take Back The Night marches
that won't allow men to participate,
as if it's the women's job to solve the violence,
instead of a human's job to solve the violence,
sometimes deadly.
Okay, so when I was selected to give TEDx OSU Talk,
I was so excited and I had no idea what I was going to talk about.
I mean, gender and sexuality, sure,
but I didn't know specifically what I was going to talk.
And something you probably don't know about me is that I love to laugh,
and more than that, I love to make people laugh,
and the idea of coming and laughing together
with more than a thousand people at one time
was really powerful and really compelling.
You saw that from Ida's brilliant demonstration of us laughing together.
So, what I decided was I would write
this really funny, enjoyable, we'll-all-laugh-together talk.
And as I was always doing some research across the holiday break,
I came across this story of Leelah Alcorn.
Some of you know this story already.
Leelah was a 17-year-old transgender woman living here in Ohio,
and she posted on social media her heartbreaking journey
through depression and loneliness and isolation,
and her family's struggles with her gender identity,
that though she'd been born with the body of a boy,
she had the gender identity of a woman.
This was such a heartbreaking and lonely and hopeless situation for her
that, on December 28, 2014,
she committed suicide by stepping in front of semi-truck on the freeway
and she died.
Her parents, for all of the love that they had for her,
could not move past society's ideas about what it means to be a man,
what it means to be a woman, and now they have a dead child.
One of Leelah's last pleas was, "Please fix this."
And as soon as I read that, I knew I couldn't just come and laugh with you.
I knew I had to talk with you about this.
I knew I had to come and ask you to join
what I'm calling Bob the Anti-builders league of deconstruction of workers.
(Laughter)
You remember Bob the Builder: "Can we build it? Yes, we can."
Well, we've already built it.
And so, the question is, "Can we fix it?"
And I think the answer is yes, we can,
because I think again about my daughter,
that daughter who I thought about all those many years ago,
when I sang the word "cunt" to a Mozart dizzy.
She's an adolescent now and she gave me a little gift the other day.
It was a sticker and on the sticker was a bluebird,
and the bluebird is wearing some sunglasses and riding a skateboard,
and it says underneath there, "Gender is a social construct."
(Laughter)
And I am so proud that, every single day,
she and her brother remind me that, when we ask, "Can we fix it?,"
the answer is, "Together, yes we can."
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)