Apoderamiento

My host family has two little dogs, Hanzi and Cookie. Early last week, Cookie got her period for the first time. I’m not sure if it was the smells or what, but two days later Hanzi discovered his crazy dog libido, and he hasn’t spent much time dismounted from Cookie’s back end since. Normally, I would find this mostly humorous, and at most, slightly annoying. But it’s been driving me crazy. I get really frustrated every time I see it happen. It’s like Hanzi knows the feminist in me is in captivity, and he’s standing on the other side of the bars, rubbing it in my face.

Okay, “captivity” is a very dramatic metaphor. But people have asked me what’s been the hardest thing to adapt to culturally, and for the most part, it hasn’t been hard at all from a cultural standpoint. But an answer landed in front of my face this week. Empowerment. I feel like there is such a lack of women’s empowerment here. 

But the catch is that this empowerment is incredibly elusive, so I can’t really tell if I’m justified in making this claim. 

Women have plenty of presence here. In the pharmacy my host family owns, there’s a pretty equal amount of men and women employed. Since I’ve been doing a lot of shopping for a wedding lately, I ended up in shoe stores where men were assisting me, and carpentry stores where women assisted me. Backpacking stores are pretty equally staffed, too. There are loads of women studying traditionally male professions and Argentina has a woman president. The problem is not that roles in society are inaccessible. 

I feel incredibly different here though. I know in the US, I care less about my image than the average woman. But here, the contrast between me and everyone else feels distinctly amplified. I walk by a lot of people every day and there is no one else wearing cargo shorts and old flip flops. No one else whose hair is still wet from showering. But I do find lots of long hair and high heels and mascara. Again, not different than the US. Just more of it. And less of me.

I was paying for something the other day, and before any words even came out of my mouth, the cashier asked me where I was from. I get this question a lot, but usually it comes after my terrible Spanish accent or lack of suitable vocabulary, so I attribute it to that. 

It amuses my host mom to point out how I am different than Argentine women. During one car ride, she brought up the way that every other women at their church dress and look, and explained that “our men” like it when we make the effort to look nice for them. It helps them to be proud of us and not be tempted to be with other women. I almost laughed out loud, but the sadness that this is a real thought lots of people live by stifled my laughter. If a woman doesn’t look good and their husband starts pursuing other women, this is in part her fault for not trying to look more pretty? Where is this duty in our wedding vows? How does any of that line up with love, faithfulness, and self-control?

Several men have told me that “women in Argentina just really like to dress nicely and spend time getting ready.” Do the women realize that the men don’t know it’s for them? Do the men ever wonder why the women are spending so much time on their appearance? Who are we doing this for? And why? I doubt anyone is intentional in their ignorance, but it seems like so few people are asking questions that need to be asked. 

It’s not that being interested in what you wear and how you look is wrong. Enjoying it isn’t the root of all evil. I know several incredibly empowered women who love to spend time on their wardrobe and the appearance they give off. They have reminded me that clothing and bodies can be sites of art and expression. For all of humanity’s existence, we have been expressing ourselves and our thoughts and beliefs through what we wear and how we present our bodies. Not inherently bad. We are embodied people.

Still. When it’s almost everyone in a culture operates one certain way, that seems more like indoctrination, not free thought. 

But I get caught here, because I am not from this culture. So I can’t say for sure what is closer to right and what is closer to wrong. I carry my own history into this history. 

I want to talk to people about it, but it’s hard, because I can’t easily approach the topic without coming across as offensive or ethnocentric. 

It seems like almost all the women here enjoy the roles they have. And I fear acting like a colonizer, coming in with my sociology degree from the US and weighing another culture’s amount of women empowerment against my concepts of beauty and gender as social constructions. 

Oppression is so much easier to discern when the oppressed know they are being oppressed and can validate that to you. Maybe nobody is being oppressed here. But I don’t really believe that when I say it. 

As I was eating lunch today, I watched my host mom’s face as she was laughing about something. It struck me how incredibly beautiful she looked in that moment. I wondered why it struck me just then. And then I realized she wasn’t wearing any makeup. How did we ever get to the point of thinking products make us more beautiful than laughter does?