Last Thursday, I went to a friend’s house to go on a hike and listen to a salsa band on Mt. Tabor in Portland. She told me she had a weed whacker that wouldn’t work, because the nylon cords would not come out the sides. She wondered if I could fix it.
I have never believed I was adept at these “masculine” tasks; shamed by my mother who was adept at every one of them. She pulled tasks away from me because I didn’t “get it” the first time. Her motto was “if you want something done well, do it yourself!”That usually meant “herself,” disempowering everyone around her, especially her children.
There I stood in front of a piece of equipment I had never worked with, being asked to fix it. It took 90 minutes and became a lesson in spiritual presence, staying in the moment, suspending any judgment, patience, and, above all, a deep insight about the irrelevance of gender to succeeding at the task at hand.
I had to study the whacker carefully to understand how it might work; just look at it. My friend said there was some kind of snap that opened the housing. Found them and pulled the housing off.
I was looking at something I had never seen before – a cream-colored cylinder with holes in the sides and channels away from the holes. Two green plastic cords were loosely wrapped around it – the business end of the whacker.
I tried to put the housing back on over they cylinder; it would not snap back on, despite multiple tries. Ok, let’s go to the first resort of the homeowner – is there a manual? My friend didn’t think so, but then found it in a box in the garage. Like most such manuals, it was written for people who already understood the device and the problem; not real helpful to the amateur.
The heart of my problem was how to line up two arrows, one on the dial that turned the cylinder, the other on the housing. I couldn’t find the one on the dial, despite a diagram; what I was looking for was not clear from the manual. I wondered if it had worn away.
So I moved to the second recourse for the homeowner – the internet. Had anybody ever tried to open up this brand of weed whacker and made a video? Up the video popped. (Some guy, explaining, somewhat unclearly, what to do. It is almost always a dude doing these videos – the gender distribution of expected skills and roles being what it is.)
I searched the housing and the dial for those pesky arrows, since the guy in the video insisted that they had to be lined up for re-threading to work. Very intense scrutiny of the top of the dial finally revealed it – a very thin, worn-away outline of a of a triangle. It took some time to get the two arrows to line up; the dial was very sticky.
“It’s finicky,” the guy in the video repeated, every time I backed up the video to see if I could reproduce what he was doing. Damn, right, it was finicky.
With the housing open, and two separate threads wrapped around the cylinder inside, I decided to pull them out altogether and re-thread it, even though I wasn’t sure of the next step. What the hell; I pulled the cords out, and then slid just one of them back in. Miraculously it reappeared on the other side of the cylinder. I made the mistake of pulling it out again. Then I tried for 20 minutes to reproduce what I had done the first time. “Let’s take it to the garden store,” my friend proposed, not for the first time.
I almost gave in, but the repair had become a puzzle to solve; patience, I felt, was the answer. I remembered Robin Pirsig’s book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Let the machine tell you what it needs and keep asking until it becomes clear. My mother’s voice was long gone; patience and being in the moment was the answer. After another ten minutes of repeated failure, the cord finally decided to reappear on the other side of the cylinder. I figured out what the manual and video meant by having cord ends of equal length on both sides, so I pulled the cord through until about 20 inches appeared on each side.
I lined up the arrows and locked the housing and dial in place. The dial did not like the suggestion that I turn counterclockwise, according to the instructions. I asked my friend if she oil; olive oil was the answer. I snapped the housing back in place, doused the dial in the key ingredient for salad dressing, and borrowed gloves to get a grip on the greasy dial. I slowly cranked the threaded cord into place around the cylinder until about 6-8 inches were exposed on each side. My friend slid the battery pack back into the top of the handle and took it for a spin in the grass. Whirr, slice – it worked perfectly.
All this detail is not about fixing a whacker – go to the manual and video if you really have to do this. Not even about managing to do it. The detail is simply what I was doing outside, in view, with my hands and the whacker, while I was doing other work internally - being patient, non-self-judging, and in the moment; absorbed in the task, taking one step at a time. Time was suspended and I was in a steady, persistent flow.
I thought about how differently I had approached the problem from the past, when I would let my own mechanical ignorance and insecurity about my ability to solve such a problem get in the way. A failure before I had even started. Not a real “man,” who can fix everything. A sissy, like my father, despite my mother’s urgings to be more masculine.
With patience, lack of anxiety or fear of judgment, ready to fail, if I could not figure it out and be OK with that, I had just worked my way through a piece of machinery about which I knew nothing and fixed it.
This is the gender lesson. Doing what I had just done was not gender-related at all. Determination, staying in the moment, are human traits, not gender traits.
My whacker repair was not something “masculine” people were better at than “feminine” people. Few or even none of the supposed innate differences between masculine and feminine in the cis-gendered binary view of the world are actually innate; they are largely culturally determined. Living in a gender fluid world, I realized I am deconstructing the whole notion of gender-related traits.
Behaviors, capabilities often assigned to a gender are a cultural assignment, not a statement of inherent truth that is related to different sets of body parts. The same is true of such things as “rational,” or “intuitive.” “Nurturing” or “boundary-setting.” “Unemotional” or “hyper-emotional.” “Compassionate” or “distant.” “Dresses” or “pants.”
A culture assigns these traits to a particular gender. The idea that woman’s place is in the home was treated as “innate;” still is in many cultures. It was social and political movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that assigned this “norm” to women; the women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s successfully disputed this assignment. The subordination and oppression of women, gay/lesbian, trans people is a socially-driven phenomenon, not the result of something eternal and “natural” or “unnatural.”
In the Queer world, these cultural assignments by the cis-gendered, heterosexual majority emerge more clearly. Societal and cultural norms, often influenced by religious messages, set these norms, assign them in a binary way. In the Buddhist world, such norms are “conditioned” by broader messages, reenforced by advertising, and hammered home by moral/religious practice.
Deconstructing this set of culturally-imposed rules is important. The “hand-me-down” gender expectations I received as a young person were non-conforming. My mother had many traits that society would call “masculine,” butch before her time. She judged herself for being too masculine, even as she reveled in it. Her understanding of behavior traits was stuck in the binary, though she was living proof that a binary construct is meaningless. My father was somewhat disturbed that he was too “effeminate” for her; kept taking on board the notion that he could be judged for that defect, instead of just accepting that he was who he was and gender expectations were irrelevant.
As a child, this gender-behavior link was confusing to me. I absorbed the binary notion and was not measuring up to the behaviors assigned to my gender. Once that binary framework is deconstructed, most things to do with gender go away, except the physiological fact of the reproduction and voiding apparatus between one’s legs.
One little weed whacker experience and a very big lesson. My behavioral traits – dress, emotions, desires, practices are not really gender related. Like all of us, they are just mine.
Nice. I especially liked your recognition of the gender bias on what a friend of mine calls "The University of YouTube. I had a similar recognition recently. I've always felt that men and women grieve differently: women sitting in circles, looking each other in the eye; men standing shoulder to shoulder working on a "project." Then I read a wonderful essay by a former student who belongs to a women's jogging group in which she talked about how much easier they all talk about important issues when they're running shoulder to shoulder, avoiding eye contact.
Excellent! Reading this, I realize how lucky I was to have two parents who were (a) relaxed and willling to be flexible in "gender roles", and (b) familiar with basic (or advanced ) psychology . I only realized how wonderful they were when I had to live without them ( the State of Maine, at that time, not having a college/university that could provide a high-level education).