For the record, I just want to say that I am not a feminist in any form or fashion and, generally speaking, I regard the mere word—feminist--with a shudder. It seems almost dirty. It puts me in mind of scary he-women who stomp angrily around the earth with a permanent chip on their shoulders and talk a lot about how much they hate men. Some even hate sex. Believe me, I am not one of these people.
In fact, I grew up in a family with traditional gender roles—and I like it. Generally speaking, my parents have two fights. I will recount them for you, in all their gory details, here.
1. Let it first be said that my dad very much enjoys power tools. And tractors. And my mother really likes her garden. It is a fight that brings my mother to tears almost every year when my dad takes the chainsaw to her crepe myrtle.
2. My mom does the cooking and cleaning, including washing the dishes. Sometimes, though, women and machinery—like garbage disposals—do not mix. Every so often, my mom gets something stuck in the garbage disposal, and my daddy has to come fix it. “God damn it, Amy,” he always says. Which, I have to admit, is a nice change from “God damn it, Katie,” which he says much more frequently.
Traditional gender roles have dominated my life. As a born and bred southerner, I like these things and take pride in ritual. I look forward to having and raising children, and fully expect to host a number of dinner parties and Thanksgiving dinners for family and friends. I don’t care for manual labor and expect to be exempted from these tasks.
That being said, I am an educated person. I am going to be, if not the primary breadwinner in my future family, a major part of it. I don’t have anything against stay-at-home mommyhood (and, if it was an option for me, I’m not sure I wouldn’t jump on the opportunity), but I fully expect to work for a living.
Also, I hunt and fish with the best of them. Which brings me to the problem I’m going to address today. On Friday, I went hunting with Andy at some old family property near home. My granddad owns quite a bit of land, inherited from distant property-owning relatives, and he, the founder of the family business, believes strongly in hunting and fishing---and in his granddaughter’s access to hunting and fishing. I was hunting at one piece of property, near a big, beautiful oak tree that I have dubbed Grandmother Willow (I am well aware, of course, that she is NOT a willow), and Andy was hunting a few miles down the road at my great-great grandmother’s property. I got in my stand at like 12:30, and sat all afternoon without seeing much more than mosquitoes, several choice specimens of the elusive gray squirrel species, and three turkeys. I wasn’t discouraged, though. I knew that things would just get better and I had a good amount of faith in my spot and the set up of my stand. Around 3:30, I knew things were just getting good, so I stayed really still, my excitement mounting with every passing minute.
Just after 4:00, I heard a lot of rustling. That’s weird, I thought. It’s not a squirrel. Definitely not a deer. What on earth could be making all that noise? Within a couple minutes, I saw the rough silhouette of something I have never before seen walking through the woods: a trespasser. Without a moment’s hesitation, I set down my bow, climbed down from my stand, and marched purposefully across the bottom, past Grandmother Willow and up to the stranger. I did not consider at the time the potential dangerousness of marching up to a strange man unarmed and demanding that he leave my property immediately. Hands on my hips, I walked straight up to him and asked, loudly and clearly, “who the hell are you?” He told me that he was the son of a groundskeeper my granddad employs. I told him to leave. Immediately. He was apologetic, but I was furious. I texted Andy, complaining. I knew my hunt was ruined, but I got back up in my stand, hoping that in the last hour or so I had until dark that things would improve and that I might at least see something.
At about 4:50, I hear more un-deerlike rustling. Then I spotted the second trespasser: the groundskeeper himself. He, in full camo, walked right up to MY stand with a rifle (in a non-rifle county before general firearms season opened---completely and totally illegal—not to mention the trespassing and attempting to hunt in MY stand). I asked him to leave and he tried to have a conversation with me. Asked if I had seen anything and how long I’d been there. I was so mad I was shaking. Told him to leave, and, finally, he did.
The biggest injustice didn’t happen until the following day, when I called my granddad to tell him about the trespassers, the rifle, and the sheer injustice that they felt that they were entitled to hunt in my own personal stand.
“What are you doing in a tree?” was the first question he asked. I was a little surprised, I wasn’t the one who had done anything wrong, after all. I was where I was supposed to be.
“Hunting,” I told him. I mean, duh.
Granddaddy went on to lecture me about the impropriety of a girl hunting from a stand. After all, he says, you can hunt just as well from a truck in regular clothes. All this camo and tree stands, he told me, was good for business, but, frankly, unnecessary. Especially for a girl like me.
But he didn’t stop there. Not only was it dangerous for silly little me to hunt in a tree (after all, I could fall!), but he also had another beef: Andy was too far away from me. “What would he have done if you had fallen?” he demanded. “Who would have known?”
For one thing, no one would have known regardless. If we had been on the same property, I wouldn’t have been visible to him anyway and, if I had fallen, he wouldn’t have known til he came to get me. I told my granddad as much, but he wasn’t convinced.
Apparently, hunting from trees is acceptable for men—like my dad, my uncle, and my brother---who is four and a half years younger than me. But, for silly little girls like me who just don’t know what they’re doing (and, furthermore, are unable to tell the difference between muzzleloaders and rifles), tree stands are unacceptable.
This isn’t about hunting. This is about me being a young, healthy, physically fit adult who is perfectly capable of doing many of the same things as my male counterparts. I can do all sorts of things. I may not be able to win a logging contest or something, but, let’s face it, what value would THAT have anyway? There's also a relatively large number of things I wouldn't WANT to do--but, if I put my mind to it, I could, and I do not appreciate being told that I can't. It's not like I climbed up trees with spikes in my boots or something. I mean, there was a ladder involved.
Please excuse my rant. I can't help it. I'm not a feminist, but just for a few minutes I wanted to stand up for my I don't appreciate feeling like a silly little goose of a girl who can't do anything that requires any level of skill. I'm not a feminist, but a little girl power is almost always in order. The Spice Girls had it right after all.
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