The art of spitting and walking

In the art of personifying the “opposite gender”, one can find a million subtle ways in which we are trained to perform a gender role.

In this post, I will focus on two of them, spitting and walking, because they illustrate two dimensions of gender differences:

• Walking is an activity which men and women have in common, but execute in different ways, although that difference is usually invisible in our daily lives.
• Spitting, instead, is an activity assigned to the masculine gender exclusively. Spitting isn’t “ladylike”.

We will therefore analyze these two actions from the perspective of gender social roles and my own experience as a Drag King.

The way we are, the way we walk

One of the most consistent examples of behavior which is learned, but generally deemed as “natural”, is the way we walk.

It’s something we do every day, hardly noticing we do it in a special way.