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?