Silent Treatment

Anyone who has ever been to the theatre or been in an argument knows that silence is a very powerful tool. It makes people uncomfortable—there is nothing to do but think when everything is silent. Think and wait. Sometimes more is said in silence than in words.

I’ve inadvertently used this tool over the last month. I haven’t posted anything since March 26^th. At first my writer’s block was nothing more than a source of shame. Why couldn’t I think of anything to write? Our culture has quite unfortunately given me a wealth of material on my topic. In fact, sometimes, there seems to be too much to write about. For some reason I could not organize my thoughts enough to say anything even marginally important. What was stopping me?

Then, one morning a little over a week ago, I realized why it was I’d been silent so long. I was trying to decide what to wear, and I was stumped and frustrated. I started to feel that burning anger and disappointment in the pit of your stomach that comes with disliking your own body. Then a thought crossed my mind: “Who are you to be promoting healthy body image when you can’t even practice what you preach?”

I snatched that one out of mid-air and examined it. Am I really a hypocrite? Do I have zero credibility because I tweeze my eyebrows until my eyes water on a regular basis?

After giving it some thought, I realized that my credibility comes from the fact that I am living the issues I am so passionate about. First hand. As are we all. I fight it hard every day.

My month of silence reminded me of how intensely difficult it is to be conscious of the sexist issues in our culture. It is hard to be aware the stuff that locks us into demeaning and insulting stereotypes and the experience it day after day after day.

It hurts.

But it’s worth it.

So keep me loud, internet. Tell me what you want to discuss. Cause we’ve got plenty of stuff to talk about.

-E

The Wise Words of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One's Own that "we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure." While I don't agree that great men writers are useless to us, I see Woolf's point about our "mothers." The women writers' tradition is a very young yet very important one. As women writers and women readers, we need to explore the work of our literary mothers. It shows us where we've come from and who we are and what we are capable of doing. Something as slight as my little blog has showed me just how tough it is to capture the female experience with words. I can't even imagine what it must have been like for Currer and Ellis Bell.

I have spent my first year at college thinking back through my mothers, and have been collecting little pieces that I think every woman needs to read. And I want to share!

So. Take a look to the right and notice the tab called "Through Our Mothers". That's where I'll keep my collection. I'll add to it whenever I find something new or think of something old.

Here's a poem from the Myth of Amherst herself, Emily Dickinson, reflecting on those facets of womanhood she was fascinated with and managed to avoid her entire life:

271

A solemn thing—it was—I said—

A woman—white—to be—

And wear—if God should count me fit—

Her blameless mystery—

A hallowed thing—to drop a life

Into the purple well—

Too plummetless—that it return—

Eternity—until—

I pondered how the bliss would look—

And would it feel as big—

When I could take it in my hand—

As hovering—seen—through fog—

And then—the size of this "small" life—

The Sages—call it small—

Swelled—like Horizons—in my vest—

And I sneered—softly—"small"!

Emily Dickinson

Liz

One day last July, I was in the grocery store with my parents. When we got to the check-out, I was doing the obligatory skim of the trashy magazine headlines, checking out the different kinds of gum, when something caught my eye:

In grainy, gorgeous, dated Technicolor was Liz Taylor on the cover of Vanity Fair. Classically, stunningly beautiful.

The photograph transports you to a time when one-pieces weren’t just for people too self-conscious to put on a bikini and something as simple as her strap sliding off her shoulder was pretty darn provocative and the media portrayed people as PEOPLE.

Among her peers on the magazine rack, Liz seemed the only human represented.

(July 2010)

When you look at the three of these together, your eyes play tricks on you. What’s pretty and what’s weird? What’s perfect and what’s not? Do we trust old photographs or HD to tell us the truth? As my dad pointed up (thank goodness he's so conscious. Dads shape their children’s feminist consciousness just as much as Moms do, but that’s a topic for another day.), One of These Things is Not Like the Other. Liz is the only one who hasn’t been photo shopped within an inch of her life. The ONLY reason I recognized the practically comical perfection of the other two is because Vanity Fair very kindly reminded me what real people look like. Otherwise, I would have glanced at the Cosmo and the Glamor and thought nothing of them.

All of our generations with Barbie and her various mutations have finally caught up to us. We want plastic. We want giant eyes and tiny waists and other weird, crazy stuff that makes beauty so unattainable that no one will ever look like Jessica Biel. Not even Jessica Biel.

And don’t even get me started on the article titles.

All the memorial coverage of Elizabeth Taylor (and most of the coverage throughout her life) made sure that we knew just how beautiful she was. And she was incredibly beautiful. BUT she was also awesome. She was a gifted and accomplished actress. In fact, she won the Oscar for best actress twice. She was also a vocal and instrumental HIV/AIDS activist and humanitarian.

Count her husbands and talk about her lavender eyes all you want. She was a talented, deserving, well-respected artist and a self-sufficient, dedicated, WOMAN.

Rest In Peace, Liz.

(2/27/1932 - 3/23/2011)

-E

Mine and No One Else's

All over the world, women alter themselves surgically as part of their quest to be enough. Cosmetic surgery is considered a very legitimate option in most cultures. Here in the US, we are quite familiar with the idea of tummy tucks and nose jobs and liposuction and breast lifts and implants and Botox. There is a silent accord among women not to judge those who get plastic surgery—they are simply doing what they must to cope with that pressure. Cause all of us feel it. It’s actual pressure, pushing on our stomachs, breasts, noses, faces, trying to get them in and up and out of the way.

Many may argue that they do it for themselves, so that they can feel more confident. But why is it that these women didn’t feel confident enough in the first place? Because they didn’t feel beautiful—a “virtue” to be evaluated by heterosexual men. Now, I’m not saying that women shouldn’t want to feel beautiful. I’m not passing judgment on those that get plastic surgery. I just can’t wait for the day when we don’t feel like we need it.

I, personally, am terrified to get my wisdom teeth out—and that’s something I HAVE to do. The idea of going under and getting cut open isn’t something I handle very well, so a completely voluntary surgical procedure like a face-lift or a tummy-tuck is quite foreign to me.

I was reading a book the other day and came across a passage that I stopped and re-read three or four times. It was a quote from author Inga Muscio’s interview with Somali film maker Soraya Miré:

“In America, women pay the money that is theirs and no one else’s to go to a doctor who cuts them up so they can create or sustain an image men want. Men are the mirror. Western women cut themselves up voluntarily. In my country, a child is woken up at three in the morning , held down and cut with a razor blade. She has no choice.”

Her reference, of course, is to female genital mutilation. When you step back and look at it, plastic surgery is remarkably similar- both require a woman to mutilate her body to fit what society thinks she should be. The BIG difference is that here in the USA, where we have the physical, legal, and fiscal ability to be whoever the hell we want to be, and we CHOOSE to mutilate ourselves. We elect to be changed. We’ve internalized the kind of hatred that is inflicted on little Somali girls in the middle of the night; nobody has to hold us down. Yes, the procedures serve different purposes and have very different end results, but it all boils down to the same principle: “Women, when you came into this world you weren’t how you should be. So change.”

The next time I find myself begging all the magical forces of the universe to make me taller or skinnier or whatever, I’ll take a second to thank my lucky stars that I live in a country where I can have money, a body, and a voice that are mine and no one else’s.

-E

Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras is fast approaching, and all of New Orleans knows it. The whole city is green, purple, and gold and the St. Charles neutral ground is so covered in post-parade trash that you can barely see the grass.

Of course, we all know the reputation Mardi Gras has and why it’s a terribly dangerous place for a feminist. Maybe dangerous is the wrong word. I just find myself struggling to have the same incredible time as everyone else when surrounded by objectification in its purest form.

Yesterday evening I went to see a parade. This wasn’t the heart of Bourbon Street. I certainly wasn’t among the worst of it. There were families and children everywhere and the atmosphere was fun and celebratory. In short, I wasn’t concerned. But there was a woman about my age standing near me who chose to wear only her bra and a pair of shorts during the parades. Of course I pass no judgment; everyone has their own comfort levels. But the mere fact of her shirtlessness managed to raise so many questions for me.

For these parades, the “krewes” were all-male, meaning that only men were riding on the floats and throwing beads to the crowd. When a float rolls up in front of you, it obscures everything else. You can see nothing but papier-mâché and the eerie partially masked faces of the men staring down at you, searching for a worthy recipient of whatever they have to throw. It’s a very disorienting experience, losing all reference points, surrounded by screaming people. There are moments that I can’t tell if its me or the float that’s moving.

As floats came and went, I began to realize that standing near this woman made me (and most everyone else) practically invisible. She was a bead magnet. I began watching the men on the floats, marking how they responded to her. Sometimes they would indicate with nothing but an anonymous stare and a subtle gesture that they wanted her to bare it all. I’m not sure if she ever did or not. I just know that the krewe responded favorably.

I felt positively puritanical standing next to her in my dress and tights and boots. I noticed an unexplainable (and definitely not indulged) urge to compete. And that’s what made me stop and ask myself some questions.

1. Why is objectification such an excepted part of this celebration? What makes Mardi Gras different from any other time?

2. Was there something admirable about how comfortable she was with her body? When I first saw her, I thought to myself, “Wow, she’s brave. I wish I were that confident.”

3. If I did manage to be as comfortable with my body as she was with hers, why would I have to immediately become a sexual object?

I found no answers to these questions and the many more that arose throughout the night. I will add them to my never-ending list of similar questions. Undeniably, Mardi Gras is determined to show me the kind of stuff that makes me so incredibly angry at the world that I stew and stew until I can articulate it enough to put it in my blog. There is no getting around that. It exists. Objectification is out of my control. People will see and say and think what they please. I do, however, control whether or not I indulge it.

I was here for Mardi Gras 2006—the first after Hurricane Katrina. I remember distinctly walking through the airport and noticing that it was completely empty. There was no carnival tourism boom that year. There were only brave New Orleanians who had returned to rebuild, coming out from under their blue-tarped roofs to celebrate life as the city always has. I remember the exhausted but tireless spirit of the crowd, the elaborate satirical floats that rolled through the streets. That Mardi Gras was for everybody that made it home and for those that couldn’t come home yet. It was broken and genuine and beautiful.

So let the terribly sad and sexist things occur. I will have no part of them. I’m celebrating the rich, exhuberant, resilliant, hilarious holiday with my new and beautiful city.

Happy Mardi Gras, everyone!

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