I was an active child. Almost every day after school, I went to one form of practice or another. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were for ballet; and Tuesdays and Thursdays were for rock-climbing. Saturdays and Sundays were often eaten up by competitions for one activity or the other. I would relish in telling people that I was a ballerina and a rock climber. It was entertaining to watch them try to work out how one person could be so involved in such different activities. It was not until I reached adulthood that I was able to pinpoint why it was so strange to them—ballet is a delicate performance of pretty positions and delicate tulle and rock climbing is a daring sport of fear-facing and chalky, sweaty grime. To be fair, it seems impossible to reconcile the idea of Anna Pavlova and Alex Honnold into one person. However, bridging these gaps was never an issue for me. My memberships into the ballet and rock-climbing communities were always just a part of me, and since I accepted it, I thought others would, too. To me, they were always just sports with no extra meaning attached to them. It was about learning the trade and perfecting it—not about fitting into or being an abnormality within that domain. What had never occurred to me before adulthood was how much of an issue it would present to other people. People gender everything, and the lifting of that proverbial veil rocked me.
To be a successful climber, you need strength, discipline, and grit—all of which are traditionally masculine traits. I knew that I possessed those traits, but I realized that many people in the rock-climbing community did not see me in the same way. The image of a female is not automatically equated with strength, so when we hear of strong females, we assume something must be wrong with them. To be a strong female means that from the get-go, one is already out of bounds of femininity. Typically, this leads to questions of whether the athlete is a “real woman.” Does the person in question have the genetics of a woman? Is the person masquerading as a woman to get ahead of everyone else?
I was never subjected to this because I was also a ballerina, and people saw me as a ballerina in a rock-climbing gym. To them, I was out of place, rather than a genetic anomaly. From this lens, people could see that I was a good climber, but I was always judged on my finesse, flexibility, and strangely, the quietness of my footwork. To be clear, these are all valuable attributes to have as a climber, but the words were backhanded and patronizing. They pinned my finesse, flexibility, and quiet footwork to my background as a ballerina, concluding that my skills were not hard-earned from hours on the walls, but rather from my pursuits at the barre. I knew that that was problematic, but I could never articulate why it was problematic, and I never truly realized how extensive the issue really was until I took a step back from the rock-climbing world.
When I went to college, I took courses that dissected ideas of identity, and it was from these courses that I realized how much systemic biases distort our views. This is commonly understood through the concept of rose-colored glasses, meaning we put positive or negative “spins” on reality based on social discourses. Through this lens, I realized that because I am a woman, I am a subaltern—a person valued as the “other,” or abnormal to what is considered right and good. Society uses discourse to describe the subaltern, and this discourse is so pervasive that we immediately have a surfeit of language that we will use to describe it upon recognition. Society ascribes traits that are preexisting, and because of the preexisting nature of these traits, the subaltern can never be heard. Anything they say or do will always be viewed as an extension of the discourse we have about them. All of this serves to trap the subaltern within a matrix of domination, which is so entangled with other systemic forms of oppression that it becomes impossible to see just how imbedded the discourse has become. Because this system is so pervasive and old, many people consider it to be natural. They are unwilling to confront it and allow for the hierarchy to be changed, so they just let it persist.
The perceived naturalness of this matrix seems to be a root cause of much of the sexual harassment, assault and discrimination that takes place across many fields. When the ideas of femininity and delicacy were ascribed to me as a climber, I was pinned under millennia of discourse that said real women cannot be strong. This pinning ultimately forced me out of rock climbing when I was a teenager. It felt like too much to exist in a community that could not accept me as both strong and feminine.
Francis Fukuyama talks about masculinity or femininity being bred into the bone, saying that gender norms are normative because they come from genetics. This is such a commonly held belief that we see it, speak it, and cannot speak against it. But while it is impossible to ever completely transform the matrix, perhaps we can change norms and create a culture in which women can comfortably and consistently challenge it.
Challenging the matrix of domination is next to impossible because people do not find it particularly problematic. We can accept that certain things are blatantly wrong, but we often forgive many things because we consider them exceptional circumstances. Evelyn Alsultany describes this in terms of race, calling it ambivalent racism. Ambivalent racism is the concept that we generally accept racism to be bad, except in certain circumstances in which not being racist would endanger security. We see this dynamic play out consistently with police brutality. In foreign countries with oppressive regimes, we cry out at new reports of the police or military injuring or killing civilians. Yet, when a police officer kills a black man or woman in the US, the narrative becomes that the victim was engaging in an activity so egregious, that police execution was the only justifiable means of rectification.
This same idea can be applied to sexism, and it can therefore be surmised that this system of disempowerment is greatly aided by ambivalent sexism. We can all accept that sexism is bad, but then we find ourselves allowing it in certain circumstances—particularly when a woman is upsetting the gender hierarchy. We find comfort in the exceptionality of our sexism, but we fail to realize that this feigned exceptionality is just a reflection of our true feelings. We only need look to the Harvey Weinstein scandal and social reckoning of the MeToo movement to see this. Society can generally accept that sexual harassment and rape is objectionable, but when it looks to specific cases, it often finds fault with the survivor.
As the lower-valued gender within the matrix of domination, women will always be much more likely to be subject to sexual harassment, assault, and discrimination. We will always have to be cognizant that the system has painted us as lesser-than men, and it will be impossible to ever fully change this because of the depth, scope, and age of the system. Yet, theory allows us to envision how we might transform the matrix into a less toxic version of itself. Franz Fanon immediately comes to mind—the only way to ever become a human in the oppressor’s eyes is to show them your strength through violence. However, if women were to use violence against men, the women who did that would be viewed as the select few women in the world capable of wielding such force. They would be explained away through discourse as the Emily Wilding Davison’s or Margaret Thatcher’s of the world—exceptional, one-in-a-million, troublemakers of women.
It would be better to transform the gendered matrix of domination through an approach like Stephen Biko’s. Through the idea of black consciousness, Biko writes that counting on the white liberal to be an effective ally is useless because they are only willing to help so long as it does not affect their relationships with other white people. In that sense, black consciousness must be a movement by and for black people, and in the case of sexism, if women are going to transform the matrix of domination, then we must gain power by relying on each other and building off each other’s strengths. If women can build a strong coalition in which we empower each other to speak out and confidently show our presence, then perhaps we can transform the system that has been built against us.
Obviously, this piece has its limitations. Because of the intersectionality of our population, everyone has a specific spot in the hierarchy. Women of color and LGBTQ individuals are considered hierarchically lower than me, but even more greatly affected by the gendered matrix are the poor. Socioeconomic standing plays a huge role in the ability of women to transform challenging and unfair situations for themselves. Because I am economically empowered, I can legally pursue those who harass, assault, or discriminate against me if I desired. Poor women are further silenced by their socioeconomic disadvantage. It is much harder for them to legally go up against the system. Currently, most routes of remediation that we have that work for the betterment of women work to help white, economically empowered women. We cannot claim that we are actively working to transform the matrix of domination until we figure out a system that works to help all women, regardless of their color, sexuality, gender, and socioeconomic status. Women across the board are affected, and if we ignore certain groups of women and silence their experiences then we are working for the same matrix we claim to be working against.
I remain hopeful that one day things may change for the better, and I look to my experiences with rock climbing as a shining example of that. I thought I left the sport for good when I was 18. The toxicity of my situation as the subaltern weighed on me, but in college, I found my way to groups that understood how to recognize strength regardless of gender. It is still challenging to overcome the matrix—I have caught myself and other climbers saying that a woman’s small frame or a man’s grip-strength are the reasons they are successful at various climbs. It is a daily, never-ending struggle to work against the matrix, and the rock-climbing community and its struggles are a microcosm of the issues we face. Yet, armed with the knowledge of how damaging discourses can be, it has become easier to disengage it, and I look to it as a shining example of what the future can be.