No original or stunning insights, just a snapshot of how I feel

I read this article to day from Jezebel, a general interest piece about what (straight) men are attracted to in our culture versus what characteristics they choose in a girlfriend based on what other men will think of their choice.  The characteristic in question was weight.  The article is by Hugo Schwyzer, a regular Jezebel contributor and writer of his own blog where he interrogates gender norms from a feminist male perspective, here's a link to the piece I'm discussing:

 http://jezebel.com/5909282/are-men-attracted-to-what-they-think-other-men-approve-of

The long and short of it is that Schwyer suggests that straight white men tend to emphasize thinness not necessarily because that is what they genuinely desire in a partner, but because that is what they believe other men will be impressed by.  He is careful to point out, though, that enculturation functions in a way that can often collapse the two concerns, so that they are indistinguishable to the men in question, but also to the women who take their cues from them.  Because women do try to conform to cultural standards of beauty, usually without the kind of critical unpacking that I'm wont to do, and which doesn't erase the pressure of measuring up (or not, in my case).  I'm absolutely not saying that thinner women don't experience other types of body policing or worry that they're not attractive enough for a host of other reasons, but fat-shaming is hugely prevalent and happens to be an issue I can speak on with a bit of authority.

While Schwyzer does an excellent job raising the issue and challenging men to be mindful of their desires and the expressions of them, from where he stands he can't speak to the effects this phenomenon has on actual women.  That's where I'd like to elaborate a little bit.

When, as a woman, you're faced with the unpleasant reality that your body not only doesn't match the current standard, but that people are going to read things like laziness, poor hygiene, limited IQ and low social value merely from looking at you, it's hard to remember that the people around you will love you for your true self.  You may come to expect that while there are plenty of men willing to fuck you, they won't be in any rush to introduce you to their friends or incorporate you into family gatherings.  And even when they do, you show up feeling apologetic because you both know, whether you discuss it or not, that someone's going to notice and judge harshly, and when you really like someone, you want to be a credit to them, you want them to feel proud to be with you. It's like you're wearing the elephant in the room around your middle, and with every introduction it whispers, "Sorry, I'm fat...".  And even if you can get past a lifetime of feeling not good enough to find a man who genuinely likes you and has no interest in your weight, you feel self-conscious and worth less.  Which often means that you lower your expectations and standards for care.

I've come to realize about myself that I believe that being in love contains an element of carnal attraction, the kind where you catch sight of the person and are so into them that a wave of lust crashes over you and you're temporarily stunned by the need to drag them to the closest horizontal surface on which to have your wicked way with them.  In a conversation with Ticket last week, he made a throwaway remark about how he knew I'd be offended over being objectified. I had to correct his impression--I think most people like to be objectified within an appropriate and power-balanced context.  Every lover wants their partner to find them sexy...right?  And for overweight women, or at least the ones I've had the chance to discuss it with, the kind of objectification that so ubiquitously plagues thinner women is mostly absent in our lives.  As fucked up as it is, if you go from the premise that men only see value in women as sex objects, being left out of even that category renders you...invisible.  It's amazing how small being fat can make you feel.  The really crazy-making part is that the messages from society are so conflicted that it's hard to know whether what you're experiencing is a real reaction or your own paranoid projection, whether you should be offended at a slight or are getting angry for no real reason.  Which is frustrating and lowers your self-worth even more because bitches be crazy, right?  And fat girls can't even offer that one thing that makes it worth putting up with Teh Crazy--street cred with your bros.

Partially because of these attitudes (which I'll admit carry so much emotional baggage that I can't even present my ideas here without getting sidetracked by tangents and tripped up in my own reactivity), I feel of very low value on the girlfriend spectrum, and don't really expect that anyone will fall madly in love with me.  The most I feel I can hope for is a friendly comradeship with great sex.  If I'm very lucky (which I usually am). I don't expect to be ardently pursued by a man who just had to spend more time with me.  I don't expect grand gestures or love poems.  I feel surprised when my man friend wants to be part of my life outside my bed.  Feeling apologetic and less-than because of my weight throws a pall over the things I really like about myself, even the things that make me feel special.  I may be smart and hilarious, but there aren't really any outfits that accentuate those qualities.  Maybe I'm enthusiastic and adventurous in bed, but I'd rather swallow the glass from the mirrors on the ceiling than confront my image in them.

And there's no question that I have other issues mixed in with body-image problems, and that many women love their bodies no matter what the size.  But my point is that I have a number of powerful critical tools at my disposal--education, exposure and internalization of feminist counter-narratives, a strong sense of self and a cadre of enlightened and genuine men who care for me a lot, to name a few--and I'm STILL plagued by these doubts.  My rational brain calls shenanigans, but a fat lot of good that does me when I'm trying to negotiate boundaries with a love interest and I can't shake the feeling that when we're out and about together his choice to hold my hand in public is an act of cultural non-compliance.  It feels like asking someone to love me contains an implicit caveat that they will be exposed to the reflected censure I receive as an overweight woman.  They'll be fat-by-association.  And who would choose that just to be with me?

What must life be like for women without my exposure to endless discussions about gender norms, body issues, fat acceptance and self-actualization?  How must it feel to be a passive receiver of this culture, to not know that you have agency in shaping it, let alone how to activate that?  I believe that fat-shaming really dims the shine of countless amazing women of all sizes, diverting their attention from being awesome and causing them to devalue themselves.  I agree with Hugo Schwyzer that encouraging men to interrogate what they really find attractive and to act accordingly would be a powerful step toward changing this tyranny-of-the-bodies of women.  But another part of me weeps uncontrollably, because I'm still so invested in what men think of me, and I don't know how not to be.

Little (Voice) Boxes

Today I followed a link on Feministing to this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html?pagewanted=all

Even more than the admittedly small-sampled research and associated musings by the author, I was intrigued by the comments. I'm still wading through them. Essentially, the article argues that certain speech patterns originate with young women--specifically uptalk, vocal fry, and the use of the word "like"--but quickly become adopted by American society at large. The author suggests that, far from being frivolous and flighty, the use of these vocal strategies can serve a social function, especially among young women who are highly sensitized to nuanced social cues.

In the comments, you find two schools of thought that seem to echo the two major arguments about language: prescriptive versus descriptive. Prescriptive is a black-or-white attitude that essentially allows people to justify judging people based on their mode of speech. The idea is that there is one proper way to utilize the language (in this case English), and all other usages are incorrect and reflect badly on the speaker, making them sound lazy, bored, uneducated or downright stupid. The other paradigm, the descriptive approach, is the one employed by academic linguistics, and much like its cousin, cultural anthropology, assigns no value to speech patterns, but instead observes and catalogs without judgement the ways in which people are using language.

What I noticed about the comments was a lot of discussion about how these linguistic "tics", as they were referred to over and over, make the speakers sound. There's so much vitriol about how these young women sound stupid, bored, disrespectful, insecure. To be fair, many commenters have brought up the fact that women are still not socially rewarded for sounding too smart, too sure, or too assertive, and that mitigating speech strategies might be useful for conveying information in a socially acceptable way. I agree with that assessment quite a bit--uptalk makes the speaker sound unsure of their statement, and thus less threatening, which is a vital skill for navigating social interactions where seeming to be in opposition can land you on the defensive.

But the two things that bothered me most were the following: 1) how many posters said that this was a ridiculous topic for the NYT or academia to be pursuing/young girls' speech patterns are totally inconsequential to real life, and 2) how few people stopped to think that maybe young girls could give a fuck less how they sound to outsiders.

To address the first topic--I find this sexist AND agist. Young women are a fairly large portion of our total population, and even before you consider that they're someone's daughter, and that one day they will become adults, what about them makes them less legitimate people than those of other demographics? What are the criteria for mattering in our society? Commenters dismiss this whole group as flighty, foolish, conformist, superficial, insecure and unimportant, condemning their speech patterns as evidence of these qualities--which they are ascribing to a group of people whom they have never met, and in fact, have not been clearly defined. Are they under twenty? Under thirty? White? Black? Straight, bi, lesbian, asexual? Do higher SES young women have more influence? Does the experience of a poor teenage girl matter less than her counterpart, be it a richer girl, or a poor male? These are mostly rhetorical questions that come to my mind immediately to complicate this homogenized group being criticized so harshly.

The second issue I take is that everyone assumes that these young girls (whoever they are), do and should care what people think of their language choices. Just as we often decry the male gaze in how women understand themselves, this situation goes one step further. The way these commenters talk about young girls seems to completely discount their own opinions of self. When these women speak among themselves, and even to people outside their peer groups, the choices they make may not be totally self-aware at every moment, but language use is a powerful way we define ourselves. And these young women absolutely have the agency to make choices about that and the intelligence and social acuity to do so in a very sophisticated way. Many posters point out that code-switching is a strategy used by almost everyone alive to relate to different people in the most appropriate ways. It's dehumanizing and condescending to imply that young girls, only by virtue of those two categorizations lack the skills or savvy to do this, when the article clearly mentions that these complicated social interactions are one of the things young women are socialized from an early age to understand and navigate.

I argue that the discussion of what these women are doing linguistically is interesting and potentially very significant to the rest of society, since their patterns DO seem to get adopted into the mainstream. And even if that weren't true, they are part of society and thus a valid subject for study and discourse based on that alone. Finally, if we're going to be eavesdropping on these young women while they converse in public places, we should take responsibility for that and realize that it is not THEIR responsibility to please us with their private decisions. If you think uptalk makes a young woman sound insecure, that's your ascription, not an objective fact. That young woman makes her decisions based on a thousand variables you don't have access to, and who the hell are you anyway, to think that she should be "on" all the time, and pleasing to an adult audience? Why is it always she who must adjust herself to social expectations, and why do we get so angry at the prospect of her being a participating agent in the shaping of our culture? Why is she so unqualified? Why, in short, should she care at all about what you think of how she speaks to her friends or parents or whomever...let alone adjust that speech to meet with your approval?

Great Link!

Just stopping in really quick to post this great link.

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/2005/12/02/privilege-is-driving-a-smooth-road-and-not-even-knowing-it/

Best quote ever?

"Of course, everyone – regardless of race and sex – will hit occasional bumps on the road. And everyone, white men included, has put out some sort of effort to get where they got. But when the folks on the smoother road go faster and further, let’s not pretend it’s because they’re better drivers."

On not being the right man for the job...

I am grumpy today. I'm reacting to a situation that feels very gender-based to me, but part of me wonders if my recent uptick in feminist blog-following has made me more sensitive to existing disparity or if I'm becoming a hammer that sees every problem as a nail. I lean more towards the former, but wanted to be honest about how hard it is not to internalize all the feminist-backlash information that's out there.

So, without further ado, here's the situation that has me all annoyed and dispirited.

One of my best friends is an artist. His drawing skills are amazing and when he's in a groove, he's so prolific that drawings ooze out of him, seemingly whether he's consciously focused on it or not. As a fellow artist, and one who loses nothing by openly admiring others, I sometimes collaborate with him on projects, or on exercises that we do just to stay sharp and creative. I discuss my work with him and am genuinely interested in his constructive criticism.

That said, he has a tendency to be artistically condescending. He's a classic man-splainer, about everything from art to how to drive off-road. And while he DOES have a well-developed style and many fine skills, he works mainly in a single medium--pen and paper. He seems to take my openness to learn from him as tacit acceptance that he is the teacher and I the student, though I work in multiple media and have a style and skill set arguably deeper and broader than his own. Normally, I laugh about it, take it in my stride, and love him regardless.

The other day, however, I ran hard up against a wall with him and I think it's inextricable from our dynamic as a woman and a man. While we were hanging out he got a text from a friend at work inviting him to collaborate on a huge piece of public art. Throughout the evening more texts and calls flooded in, filling out some of the details of the project. Overhearing the exchanges, and then listening to my friend enthuse about the great new opportunity, I felt wistful that I wouldn't be involved in such a cool thing. Until we went into another room and my friend began to explain the project to his roommate, Josh--and asked him right away if he would be interested in joining. Right in front of me! Wtf?

I was dumbfounded. But I spoke up right away, "What am I, chopped liver?!" Both men looked at me sort of awkwardly, and my friend said, "But Josh...he has experience doing street art." To which I replied, "Yeah, but it's a mural, right? And you don't know whether or not it's guerilla art or if it'll all be above-board in broad daylight?" I have massive mural experience, incidentally, and am not averse to a little artistic subversion in the form of public-art bombs. Aside from that, the only way a person ever gains experience doing something is by...doing it. And wouldn't you think that as a friend and fellow artist he'd jump at the chance to help me grow? But as he became more defensive about his choice to exclude me RIGHT TO MY FACE, and Josh refused to look me in the eyes, I suddenly got this prickly feeling that this wasn't about my skill set or abilities as an artist. This project, a mural based on a classic video game, wasn't FOR ME. It was a boy thing. Of course. *facepalm*

What little I know of street art and graffiti reveals that same lack of representation of women as so many other areas of the public sphere. I'm certainly no expert on guerilla art culture--but I wonder, is this disparity because women have nothing to say or that this particular medium doesn't appeal to them as a way to say it? Or, as I seem to have encountered, is there an element of the classic old boys' network, where men support and include and share knowledge with each other without considering the female artists they know? At first it felt like just a case of them having man-blinders on, and I was sure once they thought about it they'd say, "Duh! Of course you should be in on this--you have tons to contribute!" Their actual reaction crossed the line into the feeling that they actively believe that women have no place in subversive, public, or REAL art. And that hurt a lot.

A sympathetic female friend suggested that perhaps he thought he was protecting me from potential legal repercussions. But again, this happened when the best available information suggested a publicly sanctioned project and BESIDES I'm a grown-ass woman who can look out for myself. And what a convenient argument that has always been for keeping women out of the public sphere: "Aw, honey, it's DANGEROUS. You could get hurt, or in trouble! Better leave it to us tough, rebellious men-folk." It seems like THIS is where the women are in street art--subjects to be gazed upon, with men speaking on their behalf (this was the first Google entry for "women in street art"):

http://unurth.com/289249/JR-Women-Are-Heroes-Video

Just to keep this from being all anger, no action, here are some neat links about women in street art. This first one confirms my suspicions about the boys' club:

http://www.at149st.com/women.html

And now that I've seen this, I know what I want for my birthday:

http://www.creativecloseup.com/graffiti-women-street-art-from-five-continents

The Harry/Sally Paradox

I've been wondering a lot lately about the old trope that men and women can't be (platonic) friends. It feels wrong to me, having as I do, quite a few male friends. On the other side of the issue, it would be a lie to say that those relationships have never been complicated by issues of sex or romance.

What is problematic for me about this idea is that sex is the default relationship between people who are female and those who are male--as if our primary value to one another socially is reproduction. Does it then follow that gay and straight men can't be friends, because the issue of desire will always come between them? Should I be wary that all of my women friends who prefer other women romantically secretly have designs on me? That's ridiculous. It also completely disregards those times when two people of the same (read: "safe" for friendship?) gender find themselves attracted to one another in spite of previously preferring partners of the opposite gender. And where does that leave all the people who present and identify between the two poles? Or entirely outside of that binary altogether?

As a wise friend of mine once said, "It's never JUST about sex." To me, this means that even if you engage in an encounter with someone casually, say as a one-night stand or a friend-with-benefits, you can't predict or limit your emotions. They're going to do what they do, no matter where you stand ideologically. And that's not such a bad thing. Personally, I have to like at least some other things about a person than their body if I'm going to want to share mine with them. Right there, that creates a facet of the relationship that is more than sex. Also, I don't think that an underlying sexual tension is a problem in a relationship that is otherwise platonic, even one that you intend to keep that way. I have several friends that I find very attractive with whom discourse is the only kind of intercourse I'll ever have, and it adds an exciting element to our debates and interactions, a piquant little zing that makes me smile. But then, I've always like a bit of pain with my pleasure.

Aside from being factually wrong, I think this idea and set of attitudes is dangerous. It promotes the idea that there is something fundamentally different between men and women. That the only place we can fit together is our genitals. It necessarily limits what we can be to each other, and crams us into essentialized little boxes. The older I get, the more I realize about myself, and for years I've been trending towards a more androgynous outward presentation. What I've come to understand is that in addition to being a more accurate reflection of who I feel I am inside, this also functions an effective strategy for neutralizing some of that sexual tension that is apparently inevitable. One consequence of that is that I find other people accepting me at my own estimation, listening to my opinions and engaging with me intellectually without (dis)qualifying my attitudes based on their perception of me as a woman. A not-so-nice consequence is the difficulty I have making a transition when I DO want a friendship to evolve into something more physical.

I will also admit that it lends me a sense of security which is sometimes false. It makes me feel less visible to those that might want to take advantage of me based on my gender, and sometimes enables me to bury my head in the sand when friends start to feel more. I am startled and shaken when men say blatantly sexual or threatening things to me (as yet, I have never been on the receiving end of a comment like this from a woman)--and part of that is because I choose to surround myself with respectful, open-minded people, but part of it is that I've let myself feel complacent with people I've already vetted, rather than force myself into a state of constant (and exhausting) high-alert.

I hear from men and women alike that men don't seek platonic relationships with women, that every guy friend I have would happily indulge in a sexual encounter with me without a thought for the consequences it might have for our friendship. Now I have plenty of friends of both genders that I am *patently* NOT interested in sleeping with--handsome men, beautiful women, people with dazzling wit and steel-trap intellect who, for whatever reason, don't fire my pistons. Can men be so completely different that this isn't true for them? Isn't the idea that men will sleep with anyone they'll talk to a really damaging idea along the same lines of their legendary, never-flagging readiness to bone? And on the other side of the coin, I've experienced for myself the way that many men my age are not interested in what I have to say on any subject because they aren't physically attracted to me--and I think that's cultural rather than inherent. These are guys in class who look surprised when I offer an opinion, because honestly, they didn't notice me sitting there! I read it somewhere put very succinctly that for many men a woman to whom they are not physically attracted is a useless entity. I think this is a damaging assumption--when women buy into it and perpetuate it, it can lead to feelings of low self-worth and hopelessness about men, and when men internalize it, it can cut them off from a whole group of people with whom they can interact on tons of different levels. Those guys in class are missing out on my hilarious dry wit and sincere interest in the backstories of video games--and I am left fighting my urge to reduce them in all their (presumable) multi-dimensional glory to stupid, sexist, lookist assholes. And what then, shall I tell my man friends who are gay? That they're harboring some unacknowledged desire for my lady parts? That I'm secretly a man (let's see if he notices...)?

A couple final thoughts on this: I've been reading The Ethical Slut, which is a practical guide to polyamory and open relationships. The authors suggest that sex can be a healthy part of many friendships that one never intends to make romantic. Sex is fun, free, and it feels good. It undeniably gets us closer to one another and forges intense bonds. They suggest that plenty of friendships CAN and SHOULD contain sexual elements, and that relationships can be improved by the addition. I'm intrigued by this idea, ideologically I really like it, and the prospect of having sex available to me even when there's no one on the horizon I feel I could fall in love with is immensely appealing. I'm not quite sure how practical it is for me personally though, as not all of my friends feel the same way about free love as I do, nor do I believe, could many of them handle a physical relationship without falling into the normative social script of compulsory romance. And there are some people that I wish to remain friends with in spite of the fact that I'm not comfortable going to pieces in their arms as I inevitably do during great sex. Just some food for thought. What do you think?

I do NOT stand with Naomi Wolf

Pursuant to the following link, I just want to make my stance clear.

http://www.fugitivus.net/2010/12/22/dear-second-and-third-wave-feminists-with-publicly-recognizable-names/

Early Morning Linketry

Cool link I just discovered. I thought it might be a good one to have access to and look back upon. Also, a thinky thought about my thesis (thath rigth). I think I'll post more of the cool links I find here, instead of to my FB account. Social networks are an important tool for my snowball sampling, and I might skew the results if I send out a call for participants in a study about feminism when I make my opinions so public. Only for the length of my research though.

Anyway, without further ado:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/aug/08/comment.gender