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Jun. 11th, 2004 07:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaSo I was in the locker room after my water aerobics class, getting dressed next to the instructor.
"Have any fun plans this weekend?" she asked me.
"Yes," I said. "Tomorrow we're having people over for a cookout, and then Sunday we're going to gay pride in D.C."
She followed up with: "Are you married?"
Huh.
I, personally, would not choose to respond to "We're going to gay pride" by asking "Are you married." It just wouldn't occur to me. What was she thinking? I can think of three possibilities:
(1) She had such extremely accurate gaydar that she correctly perceived me as bisexual. (I wasn't, for example, wearing my wedding ring.)
(2) She wasn't thinking - she was clueless. Maybe she wasn't listening, or maybe she didn't recognize the phrase "gay pride," or maybe she didn't stop to think about the normal audience at gay pride.
(3) She was in a state of homophobic panic brought on by being nekkid next to a queer person.
What do you think?
[Poll #306787]
Water aerobics, incidentally, is insanely fun. I had no idea that I would enjoy it that much. I came home in a lovely peaceful floaty endorphin haze, which unfortunately has now worn off to be replaced by sore muscles. But still: water aerobics is way fun.
I realized that I automatically expect to be the worst at any physical activity. There was another woman I spoke to in the locker room before class - this was her second time doing water aerobics. She was tall and slender and conventionally pretty, and I automatically assumed that, given that we were both beginners, she would be much better at it than I was. She wasn't. In fact, she had a lot of trouble figuring out how she was supposed to move, and I pretty much did okay.
The same thing happened when I learned to shoot, and when I started doing English Country Dance. I'm good at both of them, and I was fairly good at both - and a quick learner - from the beginning. But in my mental image of myself, I still expect to be hopeless at anything physical. I begin to suspect that I may not be uncoordinated and awkward after all - that my problems with physical activity may just be due to disability-related weakness, and not to any inherent klutziness.
It's a weird feeling.
"Have any fun plans this weekend?" she asked me.
"Yes," I said. "Tomorrow we're having people over for a cookout, and then Sunday we're going to gay pride in D.C."
She followed up with: "Are you married?"
Huh.
I, personally, would not choose to respond to "We're going to gay pride" by asking "Are you married." It just wouldn't occur to me. What was she thinking? I can think of three possibilities:
(1) She had such extremely accurate gaydar that she correctly perceived me as bisexual. (I wasn't, for example, wearing my wedding ring.)
(2) She wasn't thinking - she was clueless. Maybe she wasn't listening, or maybe she didn't recognize the phrase "gay pride," or maybe she didn't stop to think about the normal audience at gay pride.
(3) She was in a state of homophobic panic brought on by being nekkid next to a queer person.
What do you think?
[Poll #306787]
Water aerobics, incidentally, is insanely fun. I had no idea that I would enjoy it that much. I came home in a lovely peaceful floaty endorphin haze, which unfortunately has now worn off to be replaced by sore muscles. But still: water aerobics is way fun.
I realized that I automatically expect to be the worst at any physical activity. There was another woman I spoke to in the locker room before class - this was her second time doing water aerobics. She was tall and slender and conventionally pretty, and I automatically assumed that, given that we were both beginners, she would be much better at it than I was. She wasn't. In fact, she had a lot of trouble figuring out how she was supposed to move, and I pretty much did okay.
The same thing happened when I learned to shoot, and when I started doing English Country Dance. I'm good at both of them, and I was fairly good at both - and a quick learner - from the beginning. But in my mental image of myself, I still expect to be hopeless at anything physical. I begin to suspect that I may not be uncoordinated and awkward after all - that my problems with physical activity may just be due to disability-related weakness, and not to any inherent klutziness.
It's a weird feeling.
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no subject
Date: 2004-06-11 07:10 pm (UTC)As for shooting, in some 20 years of teaching people to shoot, females fare better. They come with very few pre-conceptions about what they are supposed to do, and they have no cultural baggage telling them they are supposed to know how, so they listen to instruction.
And most of shooting (exp. with a rifle) is about patience, more than anything else, which is easy to have, when one isn't trying to prove anything.
TK