Win. At least til the booze wears off.
So here's the next in a series of horrible papers, although the first one got an A. I think everyone that turned in something that looked like coherentish english got the full points, so I'm not too proud of it.
This lovely assignment was basically to talk about how Brandon Teena, a girl who dressed and lived as a male, ultimately met her end because of society's compulsory heterosexuality. I'll post the whole stupidass assignment next time I feel like typing a bunch of bullshit. Besides this paper, I mean.
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It’s a beautiful night. I’m walking along the side of the road in the crisp night air and gazing up at the stars, lost in thought. The road is empty and the world is blissfully quiet. At this hour, even the city lights seem to have fewer numbers, and the stillness is comforting. All of a sudden a police car comes whizzing down the road and flashes his lights to stop me. The officer pulls alongside me and proceeds to give me a hard time, asks where I’m coming from and what I’m doing out in the middle of the night, runs my ID while shooting me suspicious looks, and finally lets me go about my business after wasting my time and making me stand around embarrassed in the cold.
I’m a night person. If I could sleep when and how I wanted to, my schedule would run from 2 pm to 6 am, with sleep during the “normal” active hours of 6 am to 2 pm. A walk at 4 am is perfectly normal behavior as far as I’m concerned. Getting up at the ungodly hour of 9 am to attend classes all day requires far more effort of me than most people.
What does this have to do with homosexuality and Brandon Teena? A lot, actually. Was I pulled over and harassed because I was out in the middle of the night and society forces us to follow the typical common schedule of the “daytime people”? Or were there other reasons behind this? I’m not the only person like this; in fact, there are a lot of people who run on an opposite schedule as the “rest of the country”. Should I write my congressman and demand myself the rights that I’m denied because I can’t follow the hours of the general public? Should I demand that school excuse my absences created by my inability to get up in the morning? Should I and the people like me revolt and have parades until everything in the country runs 24 hours to accommodate us?
Compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory biorhythms, compulsory acceptance, compulsory anything. At which point does it become so utterly ridiculous that people stop listening? Our world is already so PC (politically correct) that we can’t say anything anymore without offending someone or being an insensitive bigot, regardless of our intentions. I’m going to refer Brandon Teena as “she” for this paper. Why? Let’s say I’m holding a small, round, orange-colored fruit. Slicing it open reveals a circular array of sections with pulpy fruit inside. The flavor is sweet and tangy. You probably know what it is, most people can identify it. But I’m going to call this fruit a pear, because I like the word pear and that’s what I think it looks like, for whatever reason.
Calling an orange a pear does not make it a pear. Teena Brandon/Brandon Teena was, by all the physical information presented to us in class, a female. I don’t know what childhood experiences altered her perception of self or what mental processes were at work, but the internal psychological idea of gender is not what we go by in society. Considering myself the Queen of England does not, and should not, encourage everyone in my presence to refer to me as “Your Highness”. Therefore I will refer to her as a she.
If I look at someone and I honestly can’t tell if it’s a male or a female, and I ask them what they are (assuming I throw aside all of the rules of proper and polite behavior), I will call them whatever they inform me. I will not, however, take secondhand words from someone else and use them merely because I’m told to. Watching a 25 minute section of a video, which even in its entirety is only a window into a person’s entire life, and reading writings by women completely out of context, is not going to provide us with any type of tools or any right to write a paper analyzing an individual or society’s effect on them.
We know nothing of her previous relationships with her assailants, nothing of her mental state, when she started to dress as a male, no details of her life other than the snippet of the documentary. All we know is that she dressed and attempted to pass herself off as a male, and as a direct or indirect result of this, was raped and ultimately killed.
A “regular” girl gets raped and killed and there is no long investigation, no uproar from the community, no documentary or candlelight vigil or class studying the event years later. It happens ALL the time, and the only reason that this case stands out is because the victim was aberrant. And it IS aberrant.
The concept of socially constructed gender is another paper in itself, but for the sake of brevity, I’m sticking to biologically and socially accepted definitions. Reducing humans to the basic levels, a male has a penis and XY chromosomes, a female has a vagina and XX chromosomes. A male and a female mate to produce offspring. This is, by nature, “normal behavior”. There are physical deviances from the norm, whether they are due to birth defects, evolution, or just a line of DNA that got misplaced. And then there are psychological deviances, for a myriad of reasons, which lead males and females to deviate from the typical behavior pattern.
So what we’re supposed to be talking about is how society’s forced heterosexuality caused these events to occur. But examining the issue with that narrow-minded focus causes us to see things the way we want to and close our minds to other possibilities.
The second-rate, poorly done documentary speaks more about compulsory heterosexuality than any of the events we saw. What this low-budget production tells us is that homosexuality and transsexuals are issues relegated to public access channels, private groups, and mandatory college classes that no one wants to take.
One line that stood out to me was “I have a sexual identity crisis.” It’s the only thing she said clearly in the entire interview with the police officer, and then when she was asked for elaboration on this bold statement, she stated: “I don’t want to talk about it.” It feels like a cop-out answer, an escape rather than a response.
I have a social disorder…but I don’t want to talk about it. I must be mentally ill in some way or another. There’s a name for everything, a pill for everything, an excuse for any and every ill that we may or may not truly have. Compulsory acceptance opens up more questions, doubts and fears in children’s and society’s (who as a group has the same mental faculties as a child) minds. Start forcing compulsory acceptance on them, teach them from a young age all about lesbianism, transgenders, bisexuals, or whatever the current hot button issue is, and they become uncertain and paranoid. “I think my best friend is pretty, that must make me a lesbian…” First grade children, too young to understand any type of sexual feelings, are coming to these conclusions.
It is fine to be a lesbian, it is fine to be gender confused, it is just dandy to do whatever you want on your own, but when you start forcing your views on everyone else, how long before it becomes compulsory to be on the other side of things? Homosexuals couldn’t speak out in class for fear of being outed or hated before? Now heterosexuals can’t say anything for fear of being looked at like intolerant, insensitive heathens. Political correctness makes us mince words, call our boyfriends and girlfriends “partner” instead of their names to spare everyone’s feelings. People can’t speak up in class because anything contrary to the instructor’s opinions is shot down immediately. Why can’t we coexist without having a dominancy struggle? Why do we have to jump to blame tragic events on the scapegoat of intolerance?
“The way she was treated by the sheriff”? It’s called an investigation, a cross-examination, it’s called a police officer doing his job. When you interview a suspect or victim, you don’t play nice, you have to gather all of the facts. It doesn’t matter if it’s your best friend, a police officer has to take the hard line and throw out his emotions. In a small Podunk town where a police officer has done nothing more than save a cat stuck up a tree, lesbians and transsexuals and rape are things from the big scary wide world, and anyone with some intuition or interpersonal reading skills could tell he didn’t know how to handle it.
The fatal shooting incident, which not only involved not only Brandon Teena but two other people and a child (spared probably because of its innocence)? If these two men were intending to destroy evidence or the person to testify against them, wouldn’t they have planned a little better than to have to kill an entire house full of people? There were other factors at play that we will never know about and we can’t begin to understand.
What happened in the minds of the men when she was outed as a female? A person that kills another is generally deemed to have psychological issues. Was the shock from the deception enough to push a deranged person over the edge? We can’t answer these questions.
When we sit around and try to overanalyze our world, we end up applying our own set of beliefs and standards instead of looking at things with an open mind. I can’t deny that Brandon Teena’s life was affected by society’s standards of gender roles and heterosexuality. But at the same time, I can’t attribute everything that happened to these factors.
Although this may just be because society is imposing its compulsory biorhythms on me, forcing me to write this at 3 pm…the middle of my night.
