All they say is "na na na na na"

1ngi wrote a good post about the way sexism hurts men too. This isn't at all a response to that post, I'm just using it as a jumping-off point.

I find that I mostly only think about gender roles in relation to me (rather than as some kind of abstract thing) when other people voice their worries, and (possibly because of this) most of my angst around these issues is kind of second-order angst: I'm a female programmer and I'm not particularly feminine, will this encourage people to think that (or think that I think that) female geeks can't be femme too? If I want to have children, will feminists tell me (as they have in the past) that this is letting the sisterhood down? (I already know that if I do have children everybody will tell me I'm doing something wrong, and hopefully by then I'll have learned not to listen to them.) If someone asks me "As a woman, what do you think about..." am I overreacting if I give them the three-page disclaimer about how I'm happy to answer for myself but while my biological sex and my gender are a part of that they're not necessarily the most important part and I don't regard myself as particularly representative of Womankind and certainly wouldn't want to think that I was being assumed to speak for anybody other than myself of any gender? If someone tells me that I am being discriminated against at work because of my gender, and if I don't feel it or see any ill effects then that just means I've been stunned into submission, are they in fact full of shit?

Anyway. I find it hard to synthesise the things I notice about my gender, gendered reactions, sexuality etc into any kind of coherent whole. So instead, ( a series of disintegrating observations about myself... )