BIRTHday

It happens consciously, unconsciously, and constantly: I compare myself to other women. I think it’s part of the perpetual quest to prove to myself that I’m actually ok, to illustrate to that loathsome little critical voice in my head that I’m just like everybody else and that it should just shut the hell up. This backfires on me more often than not as I always find somebody taller, prettier, skinnier, sexier etc. than me. This kind of thinking is not entirely some diabolical invention of cosmetics companies, but it is most certainly perpetuated by them. The model we see in shampoo/mascara/wrinkle cream/underwear/lip gloss commercials is not someone many of us can identify with, and she is held up as the ideal feminine, what we all could be at our most perfect. We are trained to look at women to see how we measure up- to see how much more we need to change.

These comparisons work because we buy into an understanding that other women are radically different from us. They’re skinnier or fatter or prettier or younger. We obsess over these differences and blind ourselves to what it is we share...

We all have the ability to do something so huge and amazing and unthinkable. We can nourish and bring into the world another human life. Today’s my birthday, and as a nineteen-year-old and a person to whom childbirth seems so distant and superhuman, I’ve spent some time thinking about exactly what it was that went on nineteen years ago today. The ability, the strength to be pregnant and have a baby is preposterous and gross and beautiful and wonderful, and I salute every woman that has ever done it. EVER. You are awesome.

That is what we share. We are not just our differences, our placement on the perfection scale, skinny, curvy, tan, or tall. We have a common history, a tradition, and a future of bringing life into this world. We ALL do.

So, happy BIRTHday to you, Mom. Today I celebrate you.

Drive-by

I was walking down the street this afternoon when some men in a passing car decided to let me know through a variety of quick unintelligible noises that they found me sexually attractive.

I have experienced this more than once since I turned fourteen, and never once has it made me feel good. For the most part I’ve encountered situations similarly involving a passing car, but there was one exception. This past summer, my good friend Stephanie and I spent the day in New York City together. A middle-aged man came out of a shop we were walking past and made some completely degrading sexual remark to me. It wasn’t until after he’d passed that I realized what he’d said and that it had been directed at me. The part that sickens me most is that when I turned and reacted, he smiled, quite satisfied with the offense I had taken. I can still see the smug look on his face.

My first impulse was to blame myself. God, I was asking for it, I though. I shouldn’t have worn this dress. As I kept walking and more distance was put between me and this man, I gradually saw the flaw in my logic. The fact that my body is made a certain way, and a dress I love hits me in certain places does not give this stranger the right to address me like that and leave me a buzzing, angry mess for as long as it takes me to shake it off. I continued to blame myself, however, this time for not confronting him. What a fool I said to myself. And you call yourself a feminist. The anger I was feeling towards myself was slowly redirected as I realized that there was nothing I could have said. Any response, anything—positive, negative, hateful, flattered—would only have made him feel bigger and more important. If I’d said something along the lines of “Hey, that was incredibly disrespectful of you. I am much more than my body and you had no right to comment the way you did,” I seriously doubt he would respond with “Oh wow, you’re right. I apologize for offending you. I hope you have a lovely day.” No, he would have kept smiling his haunting, smug smile and gone on his way.

I tried it once, confrontation. I was out with a group of my friends and a car full of guys passed us, shouting out rude and derogatory things, and I flew off the handle. In the foggy, emotionally charged heat of the moment, I let the obscene words and gestures fly. They found it hilarious.

Then there is the question of flattery. What do you do with the fact that, despite the anger and feelings of dehumanization, there is always this instantaneous response of Oh, he thinks I'm pretty! I mean I guess it makes sense if you think about it. More civilized versions of this kind of response are the reason we spend a bazillion dollars on make up and clothes and heels and such.

So, this afternoon as I stood there alone and watched those men drive away, the feelings of blame and shame and doubt (and short-lived, misguided flattery) came rushing back. As aware as I am of their irrationality, they come none the less. It is the human response to being rendered an object by someone you’ve never met.

Thank you, Denise Levertov, for putting these feelings into words better than I ever could.

The Mutes By Denise Levertov

Those groans men use
passing a woman on the street
or on the steps of the subway

to tell her she is a female
and their flesh knows it,

are they a sort of tune,
an ugly enough song, sung
by a bird with a slit tongue

but meant for music?

Or are they the muffled roaring
of deafmutes trapped in a building that is
slowly filling with smoke?

Perhaps both.

Such men most often
look as if groan were all they could do,
yet a woman, in spite of herself,

knows it's a tribute:
if she were lacking all grace
they'd pass her in silence:

so it's not only to say she's
a warm hole. It's a word

in grief-language, nothing to do with
primitive, not an ur-language;
language stricken, sickened, cast down

in decrepitude. She wants to
throw the tribute away, dis-
gusted, and can't,

it goes on buzzing in her ear,
it changes the pace of her walk,
the torn posters in echoing corridors

spell it out, it
quakes and gnashes as the train comes in.
Her pulse sullenly

had picked up speed,
but the cars slow down and
jar to a stop while her understanding

keeps on translating:
'Life after life after life goes by

without poetry,
without seemliness,
without love.'

Countdown Clock

I sit down to write sometimes and find myself staring at the flashing cursor on my empty page, fingers heavy and sedentary on the keys. That cursor is like some kind of countdown clock, tick-tick-tick, gently reminding me that every second I’m not writing is indeed a second gone by, one I can’t retrieve and have done nothing with.

When writing about a cause as close to my heart as this one, those wasted seconds pound heavier and heavier on my conscience as they fall away. There is simply so much I want to address—the [sad] truth is that the universe has given me an abundance of material.

A professor of mine told me, after reading the blog so far, that I need to remember to pace myself. I come from a generation of instant gratification—I would like to see it all fixed now. I would like my friend and my cousin and my mother and my grandmother and your grandmother and every woman everywhere to realize how much they love themselves, mind, body and soul.

But I’ve realized that, while looking at the endless to-do list is immeasurably important, it’s just as important to look at successes, things that have been “crossed off” so to speak. To understand that what’s still to be done is do-able, we have to remember where we as women have come from.

For instance, it’s so infinitely exciting to wonder what Betty Friedan would think of this:

Thanks to my roommate Kate for posting this on her Facebook wall!

The Cosmic "No"

I am tired of living in a contradictory world. I am tired of hearing a cosmic “no” as soon as I start to feel good about myself. I am tired of being reminded I should be sexier whenever I feel really creative or smart.

Because that’s the way it works, ladies. We have moments of complete confidence and contentment. We look in the mirror and love what we see, or we bask in the success of some new idea. But those moments are fleeting. They are gone before we can experience them enough to be able to remember them later. Leave the house beautiful and a billboard or TV show makes you chubby. Do something you’re proud of and a movie will surely remind you that there’s no sexy in that.

This week is what my University calls “Love Your Body Week,” and tonight they had a speaker named Stacy Nadeau come to talk to us about “real beauty.” Stacy’s credibility comes from the fact that she was one of the six models in Dove’s Real Beauty campaign… and from the simple fact that she is a living female in our society. In her presentation she threw out a terrifying statistic: when asked if they feel comfortable calling themselves beautiful, 2% of women said yes and 98% of women said no. This shows me two crucial things

1: Women cannot feel proud of themselves the way they are. The unrealistic, crazy, pretend idea of beauty projected onto us is something that 98% of women can’t identify with. Instead, they spend their lives wishing they were something or somebody other than themselves. That kind of hate can’t be good for the soul.

2: This statistic is shocking because feeling beautiful is something we count as very important. What about feeling smart? Or clever? Or funny? Or industrious? Or successful? Or happy? There is so much more to the self than that which we can see. That’s why we’re sad when people die. Its not their physical bodies we miss, it’s their true, precious, valuable selves. Everybody has one, but it breaks our hearts when people don’t feel beautiful.

Don’t get me wrong. I think feeling beautiful and comfortable with yourself is a terribly important thing, but I’m working for the day when it is just as important to feel smart or caring or ambitious.

So I have decided: I’m not going to listen to that cosmic “no” anymore. I’m going to embrace the immutable aspects of life and not try to be more of anything. I am determined to be “enough” for the rest of the world and for myself, and I would love it if you would join me. And let me tell you, tomorrow is a much more exciting day knowing I get to wake up and just be OK.

-E

"Girl" Power?

I’m about to open a big can of worms. This is something I’m sure I’ll come back and address time and again because there is such a wealth of material to write about.

Infantilization of women: the tireless commitment society has to ensuring that we are perpetually seen as children. When this concept was first presented to me a few weeks ago in my “Philosophical Perspectives on Women” class I was completely blind to this phenomenon—now I see it everywhere.

In the typical child-adult relationship, the child has an undeveloped sense of reason, and the adult must handle the reasoning. The child cannot make decisions or take care of themselves. They must be protected and possibly educated by the adult. Children are not equal and have very few rights.

Society, through language and images and cultural patterns, has infantilized women, producing a dynamic frighteningly similar to the one above. They don’t have to do much; just little visual or aural reminders are enough to subconsciously associate women with children.

Where do we see this? I’ll throw out a couple examples:

FASHION. Look at the whole baby doll trend. Betsy Johnson is a prime example. Everything has bows and ruffles—it’s like a little girl’s Easter dress

SHAVING. This is a big one. In order for us to be feminine, we must be hairless… like a little girls.

WEDDINGS. The bride is escorted by her parents and given permission like a child while her fiancée waits for her on his own, mature and self-sufficient. Not to mention she has to be carried into the honeymoon suite…

GIFTS. What do you get women? Teddy bears. What do you get men? Tools, pocket knives, ties.

The list goes on and on and on and the evidence starts popping up everywhere once you’re aware.

When I was getting dressed the other morning, I turned to my roommate and I said, “I want to look cute today.” How do you replace that word? Is there more affirming synonym? How can we take infantilization out of our lives if it is built into our language?

Baby steps.

-E

Marnie: Portrait of a Strong Woman

My paternal grandmother “Marnie” is 83 years old. Just a quick character sketch: she still dyes her hair jet black, she refuses to wear her dentures, she is quite liberal with the term “mother f**ker,” and she spends a good deal of her time playing the slots. These are the eccentricities that stand out most about her, the ones that hit you the way her cloud of overbearing perfume does when she wheels into the room on her “Go-go.” This is the caricature I have of her in my head. But when you strip away this idiosyncratic character, she is one of the strongest women I know.

Margaret Moosa was born and raised in New Orleans, the 11^th of 12 children. Her father died when she was young and her mother was the matriarch of the Lebanese immigrant family. Her closest friend and younger sister Lucy inexplicably died in her early thirties. Many of her siblings met similarly tragic ends. She married my grandfather, a Naval officer, and over the years they had 3 children. When they weren’t moving from base to base they lived in the “crazy house” with her entire family. My grandpa was away on leave for months at a time, and when he came home he brought his alcoholism with him. He died in 1992.

Fiercely independent and insistent upon living on her own, she’s been battling stage four cancer for a few years now. Frankly, she’s kicked its ass. That’s not to say that she’s cancer free. She’s quite the opposite, really, but she’s been fighting tirelessly in her own obtuse way.

My clearest and most poignant memory of Marnie finds her sitting at my kitchen counter in the fall of 2005, a Hurricane Katrina refugee. Constant CNN coverage streamed on the TV in the background as Marnie talked to our relatives in Texas to get the status on her two 80-something-year-old brothers. They had finally made it to Houston after spending days in the New Orleans convention center without air conditioning or water. It was just Marnie and me alone in the kitchen, and I watched in silence as she pounded her fist on the countertop repeating a visceral “No, no, no.” Her autistic brother Rudy had been put on life support, and she didn’t want him surviving on machines. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen her break.

She came to me later, privately, and, without reference to the incident in the kitchen, told me that sometimes we can’t cry. Sometimes we just have to be strong and keep going. She has a passion for giving directions, but she has never been clearer or more adamant with me than she was that day.

After she broke her hip on Sunday, she told her surgeon that she didn’t think she could go through another surgery and another recovery process. In response, her surgeon antagonistically asked her if she was a quitter.

“I’m not a quitter,” she said.

No, Marnie, you certainly are not.

I’m lucky to have lots of strong women in my life, but I’m luckier because she’s one of them.

-E

Superbowl XLV

Yesterday, the country worshiped at the Altar of Masculinity.

Isn’t that really what went on?

We all gathered around and watched these hyper-men crash about, playing a sport women are not allowed to play (unless of course we’re in our underwear).

We watched commercial after commercial that hammered in stereotypes with all their might—each one meant to aggrandize manhood, making it a product more marketable than whatever it was they were selling. Probably beer. Or a car. Most female stereotypes were present and accounted for:

The nagging girlfriend (Pepsi Max)

And of course the mindless sexual object. (GoDaddy and Sketchers).

One classic infantilization/objectification of women was missing from this year’s Superbowl festivities, however. Neither the Packers nor the Steelers had cheerleaders.

Gasp!

How would the players manage to do their jobs and earn their ridiculous salaries without the bouncing encouragement of cheerleaders? Many an article was written on this question. Seems to me the players did just fine. Remind me again why we need to have perky girls in minimal clothing cheering from the sidelines, reinforcing to every woman watching that that is where we belong?

So, we gave you your day. We dressed in your jerseys and watched the sport you won’t let us play.

Now give us our day—a day where we celebrate the power and pride of femininity.

Cause it takes guts to be a woman, to knock against stereotype after sexy, submissive stereotype and still hold your own.

-E

Fun House Mirror

There is never a bad time or place to share this video.

Evolution of Beauty- Dove Campaign for Real Beauty

The beautiful, healthy, real woman in the clip sits down and is systematically transformed into what looks like an alien for about .5 seconds... until your perspective adjusts and you realize that the final product is what we would call "pretty" in any other situation.

Every time I watch this, the part where they photoshop her send shivers down my spine. They do crazy things we'd never think of like shrink and elongate her neck and enlarge her eyes and lower her shoulders-- like she's looking in a fun house mirror. She's warped and distorted in order to fit our own similarly described concept of beauty.

Images like this one are what girls and women base their own SELF WORTH on. Too bad it's pretend.

The bar is set at some imaginary, computer generated goal we will never achieve.

We sure as hell try, though.

It's a dose of optimism when you look at the fact that the video brings this fallacy to people's attention. I have a special kind of gratitude for the people at Dove who've put together the Real Beauty Campaign. It certainly does put a little wind in my sails to think of the way this video exploded onto the internet. I'm fairly positive you've seen it by now, and if you haven't, prepare to never look at a magazine cover the same way again.

So thank you to the people at Dove for reminding us all of reality.

-E

Anachronism

A little while ago, a friend of mine was telling me a story about his high school’s school nurse. He told me that the nurse was a man and that he was proud of his job and then paused for comedic effect, assuming I’d think that was funny. Apparently he’d forgotten who his audience was. “And?” I asked. He proceeded to tell me that the funniest part was that the male nurse's wife was a doctor. Again, he paused.

“It’s backwards," he said.

Of course I was offended. The frightening part was that I was expected to laugh with him. When I told him why the comment upset me, he clarified that it was meant as a joke. He didn’t actually think that.

What bothered me most was that on some level I felt like I was being a bitch for not laughing, for bursting his bubble and pointing up that what he’d said wasn’t funny at all. It was actually incredibly sexist. Why did I hesitate at all? No one would blame me for standing up to him if he’d made a racist joke? Why is sexism any different?

This is not at all an attack on my friend. He apologized sincerely. The big problem is the fact that this kind of backwards thinking, so antiquated and ignorant, is being encouraged by laughter. Laughter trivializes problems. If you can laugh about them, they can’t be that bad.

To me, this comment sounds anachronistic. It doesn’t belong here. I’d respond the same way if I saw a Model T putting along the highway. What is it doing in the minds of the generation that’s soon to be in charge?

What good is a woman’s doctorate-level education if it isn’t respected? It makes me wonder where we were left after the embers from all those burning bras burned out.

-E

Facing the Furious Girl in the Mirror

A few days ago, I read Alice Walker's essay "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self" for my creative writing class. She writes so candidly about her relationship with the scar on her eye-- how she hated it and how she learned to love it. As a corresponding exercise, we were asked to write a short piece about a part of our bodies we hate. It was meant to be an exercise in voice; what voice would you use when describing this part of your body? Humorous? Wry? Angry?

As soon as I put pen to paper, it became clear that anger would be my medium. I was determined to write truthfully, and so I didn't shy away from the hate I was putting on the page.

This is what I wrote:

It pools beneath my belly button and spreads, thick and languid, out toward my hips. It shivers at the slightest motion, hanging in excess from an invisible string about my waist, above which everything is fine.

“What a shame,” I think as I stand back from the mirror, taking my reflection out of focus. I can’t stand to see it close up any longer, the way it swells and rolls, the way it creases pink and white when I bend or sit. Disgusting.

“What a shame.”

When I didn’t go to the gym on Tuesday, when I wanted grits for breakfast in stead of granola, when I didn’t stay hungry long enough; all that is in there, pliable and fixed about me every jiggling step I take. Arrogant and stubborn, it displaces as I pull and pinch it. I plead with both my imagination and my reflection to show me what I would look like without it. How beautiful would I be? How sexy, perfect, proud, confident, commanding, alluring, free would I be without all this goddamn fat?

Fat!

The word is a heavy smack across my face, across my belly, which quivers in response, finally ashamed.

We both are, my stomach fat and I.

We are both ashamed and sorry for existing, hoping the furious girl in the mirror will abandon her hideous daydream of finally just taking a knife and hacking it all off.

To read it again was painful. To revise it, even worse. How could I have so much hate for myself, a part of my body, something I bring with me everywhere, all the time?

And then I realized, the only reason this felt wrong to me was because I had finally written it down. I was forcing myself to acknowledge the hate.

Every day, we live life HATING pieces of ourselves. Our thighs. Our nose. Our ass. Our stomach fat. But this is acceptable to us because our society supports it. In fact, it encourages it. If we didn't hate ourselves, we wouldn't want to pay lots of money to change ourselves.

So I encourage everybody to write down what they hate about themselves and experience how irrational and wrong it feels.

More than that, I encourage everybody to write down what they LOVE about themselves. And I'm not talking about what others might find sexy. It's your body-- it comes with you everywhere, so you might as well love it.

For instance:

I love my fingers.

-E

First Order of Business

I spent plenty of time debating how to get this project rolling, tossing about ideas but always reluctant to commit to one thing. Tonight, my answer appeared quite clearly on my Facebook news feed. What better issue to christen Body Paragraphs with than the sick and public marring of the mere principle of positive body image?

That's right.

Tonight (or rather early this morning) I logged on to Facebook for one last check before bed. That's when I noticed a disgusting, degrading, graphic image on my news feed. I stared in absolute confusion, realizing that this picture (and others similar to it) were coming up under the heading of a virtual event I was attending called "Tell Her She's Beautiful."

The event, entering it's second year, was inspired by a woman explaining to a friend how the media made her feel like she wasn't good enough and that she thought she wasn't beautiful. This friend started the Facebook event to encourage people to reach out to someone in their lives and remind them that they are beautiful. Nice premise, right? This event had noble goals, and I liked it's attitude. It's definitely the kind of thing that will take us in the right direction.

Why, then, were there disgusting, degrading pictures coming up on my news feed whenever a friend of mine agreed to attend the event?

You see, the event was "public" and the privacy settings allowed anyone and everyone to upload whatever they want to the page.

These images were awful.

Oral sex, nude pictures, even photos of the naked and battered bodies of murdered women. I felt sick and so overwhelmingly sad that this was even possible today. In 2011.

We haven't come such a long way from the subservient housewife days of the fifties if people do this to someone's valiant attempt to tell women the message most men get the minute they're born: Yes, you are good enough.

The pictures weren't the only scary part. The comments on the event's wall were awful, too.

One, from James, read:

"Kitchen or c** dumpster, these are the two roles of women that will make her beautiful. It isn't degrading or discriminative, it's just what females are born to do. I'm not a chauvinist, I'm just stressing the truth."

Another, from Bob, read:

"Want to hear a funny joke?

Women's rights."

Perhaps just as frightening is the fact that the event's description actually included a disclaimer that said:

"NOTICE: If someone is spamming the wall and being too disrespectful, don't provoke them. Just report them please! :)"

This kind of behavior was expected! It was anticipated! It was prepared for!

We of the Facebook generation have been so numbed to the disrespect that comes with every women's rights joke and pornographic image that we even stick a cute little " :) " on the end to make sure we don't sound too harsh.

This scares me. And it should scare you, too.

Because it has showed me through the sick and violent images that will flash though my head as I fall asleep tonight that we've got a lot of work to do. Yes, we've made strides in legislation-- we can vote, we have civil rights. But that doesn't change the way people think. That's what needs to change.

If I could just figure out how to go about doing that...

-E