In rat research, these kinds of pervasive problems are called “chronic, mild stress.” Rats may be deprived of food and water for unpredictable—but not dangerous—periods of time; their cages tilted at a 45-degree angle for a few hours; water poured on their bedding; strobe lights flashed for hours at a time. Everything is just a little bit too hard, so that every day, bit by bit, the survivable helplessness eats away at them.10 In human terms, researchers are creating for these rats a context of “one damn thing after another.”
In the twenty-first-century West, “one damn thing after another” is what being a woman often feels like. It’s a constant, low-level stream of stressors that are out of your control. Most individual examples are little more than an annoyance…but they accumulate.
We’re not saying life isn’t difficult for everyone, or that men and boys don’t struggle with these issues, too. They do. The pressure to conform to an ever-shrinking mold is increasing as companies discover how much profit there is to be made from telling men they aren’t valuable unless they have six-pack abs or instantaneous erections. People of every gender die in mass murders, often including the killer, and men are more likely to die by violence, including at their own hand. Misogyny doesn’t just kill women.
But that’s another book. We’re here to address the fact that we exist in an environment where women are more likely than men to get back to their nest to find that someone has poured water on their bedding.
Womanhood as a “chronic, low-level stress” is even messier than it sounds, for two reasons: First, it’s very possible that female and male biologies respond differently to that stress. When male rats are exposed to these chronic, mild stressors, their swim time in the forced swim drops in half pretty much right away. After six weeks, it drops in half again. Female rats, by contrast, take three weeks to drop their swim time in half…and it doesn’t change after six weeks. Female rats exposed to chronic, mild stressors persist more than males do. They work harder in the face of difficulty; it takes twice as long for their brains to shift into helplessness. Even female rats, it seems, #persist.
And second, one of the stressors we experience is being told that we’re not experiencing any more or different stress than men. One aspect of the patriarchy (ugh) in the modern West is that it says it doesn’t exist anymore.
Gaslighting
Remember the movie Gaslight? Ingrid Bergman’s husband flickers the lights (gaslights, from before electricity) but tells her she’s imagining it. He puts a watch in her bag and tells her she stole it. He snoops around in the attic looking for her dead aunt’s jewels, and tells Ingrid she’s imagining the footsteps she hears. He denies her contact with other people, saying it’s for her own good because clearly her nerves are shaky.
Isolated and trapped, what can she do but believe him?
In the movie, Ingrid Bergman is finally vindicated when a policeman, dreamboat Joseph Cotten, comes to her house and says, “Yes, the gaslights are flickering. You are not crazy.”
This story resonated so strongly with generations of moviegoers that “gaslighting” has become a term to describe the larger phenomenon of women and other marginalized groups being told over and over that it’s their imagination.
That thing people do, when they tell you you’re imagining the discrimination? They’re gaslighting you.
And that feeling you have when someone is doing it to you but you’re not sure because maybe they’re right and you’re overreacting and being too sensitive? Like you can’t trust your own senses, except what your senses are telling you is unambiguous? That’s feeling gaslit. You’re filled with simultaneous doubt, fear, rage, betrayal, isolation, and panicked confusion. You can feel that a situation is wrong, but you can’t explain why or how. So you worry that you misunderstood something, or you feel inadequate for being unable to articulate your objection.
It’s hard to go to a friend and explain what happened, how you reacted and why. Without recognizing gaslighting for what it is, you might even hesitate to share that story at all because gaslighting is designed to make you question your own credibility and competence. But rest assured. You’re not wrong or stupid: you’ve been gaslit.
Pundits on TV inform us that sexism isn’t a thing anymore (#notallmen, and P.S.: neither is racism #alllivesmatter), so if we’re not paid as much as the men (or the white people) we work with, that’s because we haven’t earned it—or, worse, because men ask for what they want, and if we would just ask, we would get it. And if we ask but don’t get it, it’s because we didn’t ask the right way. Magazines tell us that if we just drink ten green smoothies a day, we’ll feel great and look great, our kids will say “please” and “thank you,” and our boss will give us that promotion. And if none of those things happen, it’s because we failed to drink the ten green smoothies; it’s certainly not because of systemic bias.
The message is consistent and persistent—whatever is wrong, it’s your fault. It can’t be true that the whole rest of the world is broken or crazy; you’re the one who’s broken and crazy. You haven’t tried hard enough. You haven’t done the right things. You don’t have what it takes.
Eventually, what can we do but believe them?
Gaslighting creates deeply uncomfortable feelings of being trapped, while making you believe you put yourself in that trap, which just makes you angrier and sadder and less hopeful.
Some people who gaslight you are doing it on purpose.11 They’re the bully who grabs your hand and slaps you with it, chanting, “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!”
But not everyone who gaslights is a jerk. Some of them suffer from what we might call “patriarchy blindness.” We’ve found two causes of this blindness: Human Giver Syndrome and the “headwinds/tailwinds asymmetry.”
Patriarchy Blindness #1: Human Giver Syndrome
At the heart of Human Giver Syndrome lies the deeply buried, unspoken assumption that women should give everything, every moment of their lives, every drop of energy, to the care of others. “Self-care” is, indeed, selfish because it uses personal resources to promote a giver’s well-being, rather than someone else’s.
Human Giver Syndrome is the framework on which the “second shift” hangs—the shrinking but ongoing inequality in the time and effort spent on childcare and housekeeping between men and women—forty hours per week for women versus an hour and a half for men, globally.12 Even in the most balanced nations—which include the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada—women still spend 50 percent more time in this unpaid labor.13 For example, the difference was twenty-six hours per week for women, versus sixteen hours for men in the United Kingdom, in 2016.14
Worse, Human Giver Syndrome is the framework on which sexual violence hangs—the basic belief that men have a right to women’s bodies, and if a woman looks attractive to a man or puts herself in a position where a man can take control of her body, well, that’s what happens; men have a right to take what they can get. This isn’t just an emotional and cultural dynamic. It has been and still is a literal, legally sanctioned reality. For millennia in the United Kingdom, a woman and everything she possessed became the legal property of the man who married her. Only recently did a woman gain the right to keep her own property when she married (1882), to keep her name (1924), and to not be raped by her husband (1991).15
Human Giver Syndrome is so deeply ingrained, it takes being confronted with statistics and dates to reveal the imbalances and injustice to us. Without large-scale, objective measurement and historical perspective, it’s all too easy to feel comfortable with the familiar inequalities: Human givers don’t own or control anything, not even their bodies, so when we hear about a woman being sexually harassed, abused, or assaulted by a man, we lament the ways an accusation of sexual assault or harassment will hinder the man’s promising career, and suggest that the woman doing the accusing brought it on herself. Accusers get death threats, and the accused is put on the Supreme Court.
In short, it’s easy to be blind.
So how do we keep our eyes open, and help others to see?
When we teach college students about human beings and human givers, we ask, “What’s the solution?”