Today, I got into my car, turned it on and realized there was a spider on my windshield. I thought he would blow off in the wind, so I continued to drive away, happily. But the spider refused to leave.
He really didn't bother me much until he started creeping towards me. All of the sudden, I became unreasonably nervous. He was kind of small, but he was hairy, or furry, or whatever spiders are. In any event it was gross and it was coming toward my windshield. When the spider reached the windshield, he decided to climb into the space between the hood and the windshield glass. In that moment, I was convinced that at any second I was going to be confronted with eight shiny, somehow villainous eyes. I considered pulling into a parking lot somewhere and removing the spider, but then he somehow reappeared (on the other side of the glass, thank goodness) and began crawling up the windshield.
Finally, I thought,
he's right where I want him! And so, in an effort to rid myself of this awful thing, I turned on the windshield wipers.
But somehow, the spider that ends up on my car is a genius and jumps onto the wipers and takes a ride. Now it's personal. I decide to try and lull the spider into a false sense of security by driving patiently home. While I drove, trying not to look at the abomination on my windshield, I plotted its demise. Simply flicking it off would not do. No, now I needed its blood. So I laid out a simple plan that would bring the spider to its end. First, I would stop the car and walk over next to the windshield nonthreateningly. Then, I would flick the spider onto the ground with a piece of paper, so I wouldn't have to touch it. And finally, as the spider struggled to regain its multiple legged balance, I would stomp on it.
As I planned this, it occurred to me that I was playing something of a cliche. Girl versus spider. Spider is the victor. When I realized that this battle is one of the stereotypes our society tells us about women, I forgot about the spider. From a young age, television and other media feeds us the age-old scene of a woman screaming on a chair with a small, harmless spider on the floor. If someone wanted to further the cause of gender equality, they might try attacking these old stereotypes that seem ingrained into our minds. Instead of attacking politics or a society as a whole, one might look to themselves and see someone that conforms to societies norms and generalizations instead of being a case in point of individuality.
By labelling myself as a hypocrite, I gained enough confidence to confront the spider. When I parked my car, I walked around to the front and tried to gently remove him. How was I supposed to know he was attached? What ensued was really a frenzy of waving the piece of paper I had used to nudge him around in the air, trying to get the little furry monster unstuck. What happened next is not one of my prouder moments. The spider landed on the front of my shirt and I screamed, frantically smacking my shirt. I fell backward and hit the ground, the spider still on me, though the minute I was on the ground, he seemed to jump off and then scurried underneath a rock.
Well, gender equality and the destruction of stereotypes IS a work in progress.
