Universal Messages

This is the next in, I guess, what's turned out to be a series of posts about the myth of some sort of universal experience. For the past couple years, I've been trying to parse my own fractured relationship to feminism, so I'm drawing on my past for this. This is one example.

A while ago, Jezebel posted about the lack of women in STEM fields and someone commented on how it goes back to girls being dissuaded from math and science because...

"Girls can't do math"

I'm sure I heard this growing up. I know I did. But in addition to that message, I also got one that said that said people like you (poor, working-class) don't go to college, so why bother being good at math (or anything else)? I got this from multiple sources, by the way -- family, friends, school counselors especially. (Yep. The guidance counselor -- the one who's supposed to, you know, guide me, basically told me I wouldn't amount to much.) Because I was routinely made to believe that I wasn't smart, I did well in school to prove otherwise. The "girls can't do math" message was pushed to the bottom. If I wanted to prove that I wasn't some uneducated hick, I had to ignore it or write it off as BS. I was good enough at math to advance to a fourth-fifth grade class as a third-grader, so I guess I did that.

(I should note that all my math and science teachers in grade school were women. This was also a big part of dispelling the message that girls don't do math.)

And then in jr. high someone got the brilliant idea to teach "new math" leaving everyone unprepared for high school algebra*, but the point I'm trying to make is that the "universal experience" of being expected to be bad at math and science gets a little muddy for me, even though I know the reality for a lot of girls is that they are dissuaded from math and science. But discussing it in a feminist context means my experience doesn't fit into a nice, neat little box -- and I hardly think I'm a special snowflake. Gendered experiences, for me, are also classed, but since feminism does a piss poor job of addressing classism (among other things, but this is the "ism" I'm most qualified to talk about), I don't think my voice is needed or wanted. And that's... okay. I don't mean that to sound flip, because I think feminism does a pretty good job, provided you are a straight, white, cis, able-bodied, middle-class woman. It fails -- grandly at times -- when you're not all those things. It's repeated so often, it sounds like a mantra, but it's palpably true.

* This isn't always the case, but I think the teachers who decided that our class was going to be the new math guinea pig were ill-prepared to teach it themselves.