Whoa! Put me out of business, Torah, why don’t you?
This thought always crosses my mind as we collide with this
week’s Torah portion, Ki Tetze. It’s
one of those Torah speedbumps. You’re cruising along through the portion,
enjoying good, sound, compassionate dictates about helping your neighbor and caring
for life and then, bang:
Lo yihyeh chli gever al ishah v’lo yilbash gever simlat ishah.
No male article shall
be on a woman, nor shall a man wear a woman’s garment.
And the reason for this prohibition?
Ki to’avat Adonai Eloheycha kol oseh eleh.
Whoever does this is abhorrent
to Adonai, your God.
(Which is not even a reason, frankly. It’s like saying,
“It’s so bad we don’t even need to give you a reason!”)
I’m sure some people have been waiting a long time for me to
take up the issue of this prohibition since, by my own estimate, I spend upwards
of 80 nights a year soundly planted inside a skirt and heels, as Winnie of the
Kinsey Sicks.
When I was younger I naïvely imagined that by the time I had reached
middle age, this prohibition would be academic. The distinction between men’s
garb and women’s would have shrunk to a mere matter of size and fit. That as
women claimed a place of power in the culture, the age-old cultural imperative
for women to dress for men, to gussy
themselves up in prescribed ways that we unquestioningly consider appealing and
always consider sexual, would have fallen away.
But this is clearly not the case. Our secretary of state,
indisputably the most powerful woman in this country, is still asked by reporters
what designer she’s wearing and is criticized for appearing in public without
applying paint to her face. George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, I’m sure, were
never treated in this way. And the fact that this very thought brings a chuckle is a
good clue that there’s a real problem here.
The pressure on women to look a certain deeply conventional
but deeply unnatural way is astounding. Anyone who has taken a walk through the
girls’ department of Target can see that we continue to train our daughters,
with great gusto, that the price of being on this planet is their showing
their skin: legs, shoulders, arms, midriffs. Our awkwardly adolescing sons are
allowed to make themselves invisible in baggy pants and hoodies. Our daughters,
though, are told that no matter how awkward or self-conscious their young age
makes them, they are not permitted invisibility. They must put themselves on
display for judgment by the male-driven culture. They can opt for baggy pants and
hoodies, but I’d wager that most girls who do, feel like they’ve already failed
in the marketplace of the flesh to which we subject them.
 |
| Winnie & cohorts. Photo: C. Stanley. |
When I dress as Winnie on stage, I like to feel like I am
pointing a finger at these inequities; demonstrating the artificiality of what
we call femininity. Winnie, in her gawkiness, with skirt and heels and
high-piled hair, with her secretly non-conforming body, is no more comfortable or
natural in her getup than many or most women for whom dressing this way is the inescapable
key to worth and self-worth.
We say we’ve reached a kind of gender equality in this
country, which may be true in the law books but is not remotely the case on the
ground. The fact that a man in a dress is either laughed at, stared at, or
gushingly admired in the international press for his bravery (if he’s straight
and European and doing it in solidarity with his 5-year old dress-wearing son) is
a clear signal that men and women are not equal. If they were, why would it
matter what he wears? Why would it be considered campy if he’s gay or brave
if he’s not? Does anyone consider the bravery of a woman who is forced every
single day to live with her physical appearance being the first and primary
axis on which she is judged? And who, in response, lives a life in clothes that are
too binding or too revealing for her own comfort? Who, for the sake of social acceptance, consents to
wear shoes that make it impossible for her ever to flee an attacker?
That’s not to say women don’t succeed in this country far
beyond any time in history. Of course things have changed! But women have to
reckon with how they are seen in ways
that men never do. They may choose
on any given day or week or year whether to put on the dress and the makeup or
just the jeans and the face that Nature gave them. But nonetheless, they must
choose, and unlike for men, the choice is never a neutral one.
In Torah times, the notion of gender equality would have
been an alien one. There were all sorts of codified social inequities. There was
slavery, and indentured servitude. Women were property of fathers and husbands;
they had no legal standing; except in rare cases they could not own land. In a
system that relies on such distinctions in status, it becomes extremely
important to know who is who. Status blur upsets the system. In a similar way
to how mixed-race marriage was outlawed in the American south. If there are
people whose natural role and purpose is to be oppressed, you must be able to
confidently identify who they are.
The deep preoccupation people feel when they encounter
someone and are uncertain how to read their gender is very revealing about how
central - unnecessarily central, stupidly central - gender is to our culture.
It seems someone’s gender is the most important thing we can know about them.
When a baby is born, their sex is the first thing we ask, before we even ask
about their health. We don’t know how to begin thinking about a baby without
a proper pronoun, and an appropriate set of colors, toys and aspirations to go
with it. (Even if the aspiration is that the baby should defy the limitations
placed on their gender.)
There are people working hard to think about what it might
be like to live in a society not so deeply marked by gender dualism. What it
might be like for every binary opposition we dream up (hard/soft;
loud/quiet; tough/compassionate) not to be painted onto gender. What it might
be like for gender not to be revealed in pronouns. What it might be like really
not to know the gender of people you hear about or hire or even meet. But
people thinking or talking aloud about such questions remain on the fringe,
because really thinking through and past gender conventions continues to be one
of the most transgressive, outrageous things one can do.
In a world of extreme gender inequality, Torah, in this
verse, in this prohibition, seems to be concerned with truth in advertising.
I, personally, would rather see other kinds of truth in
advertising. I think plutocrats masquerading as populists are a much bigger
problem this year. Haters of women dressing themselves as protectors of
children. Racists garbed in ideas of meritocracy. Haters of the poor pretending
to be proponents of economic tough love. That, my friends, is cross-dressing. And
that is abhorrent.
If deep down, Torah is trying to say, “show your true colors,” then
it is time for all of us to do just that. Whatever our true colors are;
whatever our true colors tell us to wear. We owe this broken world that much.
We owe our broken ideas of gender that much. We owe it to our mothers who weren’t
allowed to just be. And even to our fathers who were never allowed the dress.
We owe them that much. So let us show our true colors. To do anything less is
abhorrent.
* Note: Irwin Keller readily admits to being a drag queen but vehemently denies being a rabbi.
