Dressing up as Princess Leia for Wondercon, a comic book convention, imparted me with a brief glimpse of the every day sexism women have to put up with. Totally not the experience I had in mind going into the convention, but an important one that allowed me to reflect further within myself, and my relationships with women. However, before getting into that recent experience, a bit of history to help contextualize things.
I grew up with women in my life. I’m the oldest and the only male in my immediate family. I have three younger sisters, my mom, and my dad. For all the B.S. male masculinity my dad tried to impose on me, I know I take after my mom. Still though, I got the standard male-oldest son preferential treatment at the end of the day. There was this one time when one my sisters called out my mom on the double standard between us. It’s was funny to me at the time just because of the way the conversation went down, but in that moment I didn’t think nothing of it, I had no reason to, I’m a guy.
As such, I never felt an obligation growing up to ponder or even reflect on my actions as a heterosexual Latino male. Traditional gender roles were the norm in my family because that’s what my parents grew up with and that’s what I saw. Again, I never had an inclination to fully analyze the male centric bias that is passed down as tradition, I’m a guy and on the winning end of that deal.