Sex, Power and Mental Health: Uncovering the "Dirty-Girl Effect" (Part 2)
When it comes to sex, it’s easier to explain how dirtying plays out in the lives of women and girls—especially black women and girls. Last week’s blog post was all about that, and it might as well have written itself. The information just flowed. But how do I explain the ways in which the dirty-girl effect plays out in the professional world, in the lives of women with ambition? How do I make the case that women with ambition are often made to feel dirty just for wanting and striving for more? What proof can I offer that we are often shamed for wanting to have the kind of power that allows us to assist others, open doors, and address the very same issues that we ask others to solve on our behalf? That’s the challenge of this week’s blog post — at least, that’s part of the challenge.
Did He Just Say That?
“A black woman with a PhD is worse than a woman with HIV.” I’ll never forget those words from a man that I respected. He was dark— skin so black it was blue, a handsome man. He was a father and a husband. His children and my children attended the same school. In fact, his son was the same age as my daughter. I’d see this dad dropping by his boy’s classroom, checking in on him, making his presence felt, making sure he was doing what he was sent to school to do: learn. And I admired that. I wanted that for my own wayward son, who stayed in so much trouble. I admired their family: a two-income household, led by two beautiful people, with two adorable children. They had it together, at least, that’s what it looked like from the outside. They owned a home and two cars. The wife— who was completing her master’s degree— was a real-life, black, soccer mom. They were “couple’s goals.” So you can imagine my surprise when I heard this successful, upstanding, admirable man utter those words: “A black woman with a PhD is worse than a woman with HIV.” I didn’t respond. Instead, I looked over at his wife. I wondered about how she felt hearing him say that. She put her head down. I wondered what it meant for her to be married to a man who held that belief. How far could she rise and grow with a partner who felt that way? And then I wondered what it meant for me, a black woman who was, at the time, earning a PhD.
This man who would later rise to become a professional and pillar in the community, a man who was respected and influential in both public and private spaces and a man who had the power to shape the careers of women who worked within his organization had stated in no uncertain terms that educated, successful women were like a disease. And we weren’t just any disease, we were the kind of disease that people feared and judged, to say the least. We were the kind of disease that came with stigma and stereotypes. As a single woman, for the first time ever, I wondered if my education and pursuit of something bigger was making me ineligible and undesirable in the eyes of potential partners. Coming from two departments (Afro-American Studies and English) where male professors had nurtured and encouraged and invested in me, I wondered if I was naive to believe that the rest of the world would receive me— and women like me— the same way.
Moms Pay a Price for Doing More
In her book, The Likeability Trap: How to Break Free and Succeed As You Are, Alicia Menendez touches on the problems women with ambition face. Menendez shares a study that introduces two fictional senators: John Burr and Ann Burr. Both Burrs had some of the same descriptors in their blurb, including the word “ambitious.” According to Menendez, “Ann Burr paid a price for being ambitious. Voters were less likely to vote for her when her bio included ambition and strong will. John, in contrast, paid no price. In fact, his transparent desire made him seem stronger and tougher in the eyes of voters, and thus more appealing.” So what’s the issue? Why is it that ambition works for John but against Ann? Here is Menendez’s explanation: “Men have power and so it is assumed that it is in their nature to seek it out and grab for it. By seeking power, they are simply fulfilling their biological destiny…Women, in contrast, are expected to want what is best for everyone. Running for office, aspiring for power, can easily be interpreted as a power grab.” She goes on to clarify her words by saying, “For men, running for office is just doing what men do. For women, running violates the cultural expectation that they act in service to the group. Merely intending to gain power can lead others to believe that a woman is aggressive and selfish, and not as warm and focused on others as she is supposed to be.” In a woman’s possession, power is read as personal and self-serving. It’s perceived as anti-communal even when the whole reason for her pursuit of power in the first place is to help make a difference in the lives of other people. The moment a woman announces that she is seeking power, she is seen as dirty.
Moms who seek power are especially dirty, as the unspoken but understood question is this: While you are trying to grow in influence, increase your bottom lines or gain other resources, who is taking care of your children? Although no one ever said to me that I was an unfit, abusive or neglectful mom while raising my children and juggling graduate school, it was apparent that I had become a “suspect.” Neighbors and teachers sent the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) or Child Protective Services (CPS) to my home for “wellness checks”— not because my kids had bruises on them or because they were starving. Instead, the social workers were being sent to my home because of the “perceived” dangers of being a single mother managing so many children while trying to move from one income class and social status to another. I was doing all of this so that I could offer my children a better life, and I was doing it because I was passionate about teaching and research. I wanted to make a difference in the lives of other people. And yet, those efforts were being sullied by other people’s, often other mothers’, surveillance and policing. I spent all of my years as a PhD student feeling afraid and worried that I was going to lose my children to the “system,” even while I was doing everything in my power to keep them safe, including uprooting our family from the Southside of Chicago and moving to Madison, WI in search of something better. Over time, that worry and fear turned into social anxiety, making it difficult for me to go into public places— including school events— with my children for fear that I would lose one of them in the crowd or lose them for any other reason. I didn’t trust people and became paranoid because no one felt safe. I never knew who was policing me and calling CPS and who was genuinely supporting me.
My experience, unfortunately, wasn’t exclusive to me. In fact, to revisit Menendez’s work, let’s look at the cautionary tale that is Jane Swift. In 2001 when Governor Paul Cellucci stepped down from his position to take on the role of ambassador to Canada, Swift became acting governor. Within a month of being in that role, she birthed a set of twin girls becoming the first governor in history to birth children while in office. Instead of being celebrated and raised up as an inspiration, the haters did what haters do. They critiqued her and “threw shade.” Their words had real implications for her life:
“Swift’s critics asked who would raise her child while she was busy working. Would she really be able to focus on governing while mothering?...What’s more, the critiques evolved into an official investigation: questions swirled about Swift’s use of staff to babysit her daughter, and her use of a state helicopter to travel home one Thanksgiving. Both issues seemed to answer the question ‘How is she balancing it all?’ with a nefarious answer: she’s abusing the power of her office to make it all work.”
In her effort to “balance” mothering and ambition, Swift became dirty in the public’s eye. She became both a terrible mother and a terrible governor. And yet, was the issue really about her mothering or her ability to do her job well? Or was she being penalized for “doing too much” and having the audacity to believe that, as a woman, she could both pursue power and raise a family? Was the criticism a legitimate concern or was it about putting her in her place?
Pathologizing Ambition
Some years ago, my brother committed suicide. At the time, I had been in therapy for months, maybe even a full year. My therapist was a white woman who seemed cool enough, but understanding how implicit bias works, I never put my guard down. The weight of my brother’s unexpected death wore on me, so much that I finally allowed myself to become fully vulnerable. When I did, this woman who had, in the past, told me that she wished she would have pursued her degree but birthing children prevented her from doing so, pulled a gray book from her shelf. It was called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She then told me that I was bipolar, as I had been operating at a very high-functioning level and now I was crashing. (Never mind that the crash was from my brother’s suicide.) I considered her diagnosis. In fact, I was ready to accept it. That’s how broken I was. I called a friend of mine who was (and still is) a psychiatrist in New York. He listened as I shared with him the news. By nature, this man has always been very calm and easy going. But as I relayed my experience to him, I heard the anger in his voice. “I’ve known you since kindergarten. I’ve known you your entire life. There is nothing bipolar about you. Find a new therapist, please.” Unable to reconcile in her head how I had been a single mom of (at the time) five children who was completing a PhD while she was a married mom of two who felt that her education had to stop because she birthed children, she blamed my success on a mental illness that made it possible for me to do well because of manic spells. It was her way of pathologizing me. It was her way of making me dirty. That’s not to say that people who live with bipolar disorder are dirty. Just like I’m not saying that the person who lives HIV is dirty. It is to say that in both cases, people’s use of the terms is not based on objective truths. They are subjective, and they are being weaponized against the targets: women with ambition.
Little Girls Read Books and Rooms
But this isn’t just an issue that women, in general, and moms in particular, face. Little girls with ambition are also dirtied. In the previous blog post, I wrote about adultification and how little black girls are often perceived as less innocent than their white counterparts. In her book Unapologetically Ambitious: Take Risks, Break Barriers, and Create Success on Your Own Terms, Shellye Archambeau, one of Silicon Valley's first female African-American CEOs, tells us this: “Research shows that little girls don’t stay innocent to the ways of the world— or confident in themselves— as long as we might think. A 2017 study discovered that by the age of six, gender stereotypes are beginning to set it. The same is true for racial stereotypes.” If you’ve read last week’s blog post, this may not be news. And if you’ve lived enough life, the quote that follows may not even be news: “In these fragile years, kids take cues from their parents and teachers about social expectations, and they begin applying those expectations to the people around them and to themselves.” But what may be fresh information is this insight from Archambeau: “A six year old…starts to categorize herself by gender and race. She begins to adjust her perceptions of her abilities and opportunities according to social norms. So while she might have liked math in first grade, by the third grade she might say she’s no good at it.” Think about the little girl who hears her dad saying something like “A woman with a PhD is worse than a woman with HIV.” Or in Archambeau’s case, what happens to a little, smart girl who was walking home from school and then gets attacked by two boys who are classmates? How does she begin to categorize herself?
You Are Not Safe
Recalling an incident that left her bleeding and crying, Archambeau tells the reader that the “damage was done, and it would take a long time to repair it.” She then tells us that when we experience such cruelties at an early age, we internalize it. According to her, “Early childhood experiences like these can lead to a nasty case of ‘imposter syndrome’ later in life. Imposter syndrome is what happens when you start believing what an unjust society says about you”— for example, “A woman with a PhD is worse than a woman with HIV.” Archambeau continues with her explanation, “It is most common among girls and women, and especially women of color…Imposter syndrome appears as a feeling of unease, a lingering sense that you don’t ‘deserve’ your own hard-earned accomplishments, that everyone belongs except you.” Imposter syndrome is a kind of dirtying because it makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong for succeeding or for wanting more. It shames you and makes you feel as if you’ve stolen what belongs to you. It’s the actual virus, the thing that gets in our heads and reprograms us to believe that we are less than for being so much more— more than what society says we can be. But unlike the other forms of dirtying that happens to girls and women, imposter syndrome is bigger than mud being splattered all over one’s face and name. It’s more pervasive than that. It’s more like what happens when an ink pen busts and the content spreads all over, sticking to whatever it touches, leaving a stain that is hard to remove, if it can be removed at all.
I’ve never met Shelly Archambeau, but I can tell you that her experience with these boys resonates with me. I have countless stories of young men that I admired calling me “Oreo” because I refused to sleep with or date them. They took shots at my intelligence and drive when they felt they couldn’t call me slut. But the impact was the same. As a child, boys who perceived me as being a nerd or resented that I went to the neighborhood Catholic school bullied me for thinking I was “better.” To put me in my place, one boy took my brand new, white Nike hat off my head and urinated on it in my face. Meanwhile, his friends stood by and watched. While home from my boarding school for the summer, one young man, angry that I didn’t acknowledge him by name, dragged me by hair, pulling out my braids from the root, leaving bald patches in my head where the extensions once were. Again, the other guys, this time much older and much bigger, stood around and watched. Dirtying, in these ways, looks like violence and years of being unprotected. It looks like the boys, and then men, in your world beating, pissing on, and spitting on you to remind you that you are not only disrespected by them but you are not safe with them. And Archambeau is right. It does make you question if you’ve earned what you’ve labored so hard for because how could someone so dirty be successful and comfortable, even when she’s worked hard for such a life?
Ambition is Our Superpower
This week, I offer no takeaways. The goal of this blog post isn’t to inspire. It’s to invite you to think about the ways in which power is taken away from women in public spaces through the process of dirtying. It is to invite you to think about ways in which people in your life and systems around you have tried to deny you access to your own power— ambition— by making you feel dirty for wanting more. And it is to invite you to reclaim that power by calling their actions and words what they are, an attempt to make you small, to smear, beat and police you so that that fire in you goes out. Don’t let their dirtying— or your own— smother that fire. Feed your desire to succeed, protecting and nurturing it at all cost. I will leave you with this quote from Menendez: “You know how in Super Mario Brothers, Mario, with the help of a Starman, will become temporarily invincible? You know how it supercharges him through every hurdle along the way? Allowing him to jump higher, to blast through noxious critters unscathed? That to me is the potential power of ambition. No wonder it evokes such disdain.” For many of us, our ambition is our superpower. It may not make us invincible like Mario, but it will help us accomplish the “impossible.” Equally important, will you be a Starman (or Starwoman) to another woman’s Mario? How will you support another woman’s ambition in a world that tries to sully it?
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ABOUT THE BLOGGER
Dr. Sagashus Levingston is an author, entrepreneur and PhD holder. She has two fur babies, Maya and Gracie, six children (three boys and three girls), and they all (including her partner) live in Madison, WI. She loves all things business, is committed to reminding moms of their power, and is dedicated to playing her part in closing the wealth gap for people of color and women. She believes that mothering is a practice, like yoga, and she fights daily to manage her chocolate intake. The struggle is real, y’all…and sometimes it’s beautiful.
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