Category Archives: feminism
Is Beauty A Worthy Goal?
Last week I wrote about 14-year-old Nadia Ilse, who had gotten plastic surgery to stop kids from bullying her. Her ears were pinned back and her nose and chin shortened.
Over at The Nation Jessica Valenti wondered whether beauty is a worthy goal in the first place. At best, beauty is a short-term solution. And not much of a solution at that, if the sole focus is a one-dimensionality that keeps us shallow.
Plus, Valenti says,
We create a trap where anything that makes a girl feel better about her appearance, no matter how harmful, is a reasonable solution. (How many times has plastic surgery been preceded by an “I’m doing it for me!” explanation?)
Throughout history women have been convinced they must have various physical characteristics or accessories that harm their health: tiny waists, small feet, high heels, girdles, corsets, boob jobs…
All at the expense of extreme discomfort, scrunched vital organs, pulmonary disease, varicose veins, a lack of vital nutrients, crippled feet and knees, deadened erotic sensation, a block to cancer detection, death…
It’s all made worse by calling variation from beauty norms a “deformity” – just to make a buck. Doctors have told some of my students that they needed corrective surgery for their breasts. And that’s how Nadia’s doctor described her “need” for an operation:
She wasn’t picked to have her surgery because she was bullied. She was picked because of her deformities.
No wonder Valenti groaned,
This is our culture now: teen girls thinking that the slightest perceived imperfection—any deviation from what they see in magazines—is tantamount to deformity and in need of surgical correction.
… We should tell girls the truth: “Beautiful” is bullshit, a standard created to make women into good consumers, too busy wallowing in self-loathing to notice that we’re second class citizens.
And in fact, being called ugly can be useful. Jessica was teased before she grew into her face, as she put it. But,
In a lot of ways I’m glad I was considered unattractive as a kid—there is an upside to ugly. I developed a sharp sense of humor, a defense against the taunts. I thought more deeply about how good and bad people can be. I started writing. I found feminism.
Some who commented on my first Nadia post had similar experiences:
I was teased relentlessly when I was her age for my big ears, flat chest, and the amount of body hair that I had. Today I am grateful for a mother who didn’t care that I was being bullied for such superficial things and did not allow me to make permanent changes to my body to escape bullying. Eventually I grew into my body and in the meantime, while it was painful, I found people who didn’t give a shit about those things, and now most days I feel completely comfortable in my body and my own unique beauty.
Some come to understand that the tauting isn’t about them but about the taunter.
I suffered bullying when I was a kid, and I discovered that people who do this kind of thing usually are trying to move attention from them; they usually have self-esteem problems.
Instead of agreeing that beauty is worth having, Valenti suggests we should be warning that a culture that demands as much is toxic.
Or, as another commenter suggested, maybe we can expand our notions:
I used to have a pretty narrow definition of beauty until at age 15 I started drawing the faces of the people I saw around me, often on the city bus on the way home from school. That is when I began to see a new world of beauty everywhere I looked.
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If Sports Were Covered Like Women’s Beach Volleyball
In case you missed this… interesting contrast between photos of men’s and women’s beach volleyball. For men you find tough, competitive guys:
And for women:
Oh, and here’s a woman actually playing the sport. In that outfit she stays sexy!
Interestingly, there are a number of pics of women listed under “men’s beach volleyball” but no men on the women’s list.
When Nate Jones, over at Metro.us, innocently searched for pics of women’s Olympic beach volleyball, he was left asking, “What if every Olympic sport was photographed like beach volleyball?” Here’s a sampling of what that would look like (you can see all his pics by clicking here):
As the camera hones in on women’s body parts and ignores men’s, you can see why all of us – men and women – come to think of women as the sex objects in our society. Even the fact that women volleyball players wear such a skimpy outfit doubles down on the whole, “women as sex object” thing.
And so ignored men’s bodies leave us ignoring men-as-sexy while the women’s body-focus makes them all about sex. And actually, that’s not very good for our sex lives – or for well-rounded lives. For more on that, see the posts below.
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Does Sexual Objectification Lead to Bad Sex?
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Getting Plastic Surgery to Stop Bullying
Fourteen-year-old Nadia Ilse got plastic surgery on her ears, nose and chin so kids would stop bullying her. She told Good Morning America:
I felt horrible. I felt like I was like dirt. They said that I have the biggest ears that they’ve ever seen. They called me ‘Dumbo,’ ‘elephant ears.’
Over time the bullying escalated. School became a nightmare, and she got so she couldn’t bear to look at herself in a mirror as she began to believe the slurs.
All this raises questions.
Like how the world seems to think that beauty – a plastic, superficial part of us — means something real. Like how moving a few millimeters of skin, bone and cartilage here and there makes all the difference. A few tweaks and kids go from bullying to accepting. And Nadia goes from crying herself to sleep and having suicidal thoughts to just going about her day.
Why do so many of us see the world in such superficialities?
I would like to ask the bullies if they would judge a person unworthy on such flimsy grounds if they were the ones whose ears were a bit large.
What if there is a God who purposefully creates people who go against beauty norms? What are we supposed to get out of that? Are we to develop empathy and compassion? Are we supposed to move away from the surface and superficial to see what really matters? Should we learn about what is real and what is ridiculous?
And should we really care what ridiculous people think?
Gore Vidal once said:
Don’t care about what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them.
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You Are “Less Than”?
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Give Those Girls A Donut…Please!
Taken alone, the VS models seem almost normal.
In comparison, like scarecrows.Oddly, they look like two different species, almost :}
Those are my friends’ verdicts on the “Victoria’s Secret: Love My Body” campaign as it faced off against its nemesis, “Dove: Real Beauty.”
Real beauty wins in my book.
In fact, I’ve long thought that VS models look a bit like aliens. The ones from “Close Encounters,” as the beings first come into skinny focus. (Hmm, close encounters — almost like a Freudian slip with the demand: look like this and have a close encounter!)
But skeletal is an acquired taste. If acquired at all. Unfortunately many do, complete with the glamorized “anorexic chic” look. Some girls do all they can to avoid eating in hopes of becoming “beautiful.”
Scary, when nourishment becomes the enemy.
Shows how far we can stray from evolutionary psych notions that we are attracted to healthy people.
Some choose not to promote the problem. Kylie Bisutti had beaten out 10,000 hopefuls in a Victoria’s Secret Model Search, and then quit. In part out of her Christian beliefs and in part because of a conversation she had with her 8-year-old cousin.
I was doing my makeup in the mirror one day and she was watching me. She looked at me and was like, ‘You know, I think I want to stop eating so I can look like you.’
It just broke my heart because she looks up to me and I didn’t want to be that type of person that she thought she had to be to be beautiful. Thousands of girls think that being beautiful is an outer issue and really it’s a heart issue.
Luckily, many men actually prefer women who are well-nourished. One man commented on the VS/Dove face-off, saying:
The women below look much prettier. I am skeptical as to whether the women in the first picture actually love their bodies, or themselves.
And I have to agree with another friend who said, “Give those girls a donut…please!”
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God-Wrestling Nuns
Nun kicks a heavy bag in a gym. Photo by Martin San/Getty Images.
U.S. Nuns are grappling over a response to Vatican concern with their doctrinal loyalty. Church leadership wants them denouncing abortion and gays more than saving the lives of women and children, and affirming God’s love for all of humanity.
One sister explains:
We have a differing perspective on obedience. Our understanding is that we need to continue to respond to the signs of the times, and the new questions and issues that arise in the complexities of modern life are not something we see as a threat.
The sisters are in line with Bible heroes.
When Jacob wrestled with God he received a new name, Israel, meaning “He struggles with God.” At the end of the tussle God “blessed him there.”
God blesses one who struggles with Him?
Or, Job questioned why God made him suffer. His companions admonished him, demanding he accept God’s judgment.
Yet God did not think highly of the friends who spewed standard lines about submitting to divine will, repenting and being humble. God said, “You have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.”
And then Job conversed with God, proclaiming, “I knew of you with the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes have seen you.” He got to know God, and this would never have happened had he taken the standard “counsels of piety” and played the submissive, unquestioning part his friends advised. It was only by being authentic in his doubts and questions that he could bring enough of himself to have a chance to get to know God.
These Bible stories speak well to the nuns’ intentions.
Go get ‘em girls!
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Gag Orders Shield Rapists Who Post Photos
Last summer when Savannah Dietrich was sixteen she had a few drinks at a party and passed out. Two acquaintances raped her and took pictures, which they sent to their friends. Gossip spread through her school, and Savannah was forced to “just sit there and wonder, who saw, who knows?”
With the humiliation she cried herself to sleep for months and avoided being in public.
Many young women don’t report rape for fear of further shaming, but Savannah did.
When her attackers pled guilty they requested a gag order to protect themselves, and the judge agreed.
First Savannah cried. Then she got angry and tweeted the names of her rapists:
There you go, lock me up. I’m not protecting anyone that made my life a living Hell… [Protecting rapists] is more important than getting justice for the victim.
Twitter closed the account.
Next, she posted on Facebook:
If reporting a rape only got me to the point that I’m not allowed to talk about it, then I regret it, I regret reporting it.
Victim’s rights activists worry about the message sent in jailing victims.
Elizabeth Beier was so outraged she created a Change.org petition asking the judge to throw out the charges, stating:
I think what she did was very brave … and I think a lot of people who may have been victims or survivors of assault and didn’t get the justice they deserve probably see themselves in her… Everyone wants this girl to have peace and time to recover and not another trauma like jail time.
The petition gathered 62,000 signatures in one day.
A defense attorney withdrew the request saying, “The horse is out of the barn. Nothing is bringing it back.”
Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, is thrilled, declaring:
a huge victory not only for Ms. Dietrich, but for women all over the country… These boys shared the picture of her being raped with their friends and she can’t share their names with her Twitter community? That’s just crazy.
So the gag order was lifted because the Defense gave in. But you have to wonder why the justice system protects admitted assailants who ruin others’ lives, and who could ruin still more under cover of silence — and who have already revealed themselves, anyway!
I wonder if these rapists, who appear to be white males (if a site posting their names and photographs is correct) were protected because they are white and seen as “boys who made a mistake” and not the criminals they are. Too often we protect privileged members of society (white, male, rich) over others (ethnic, female, poor).
Some might also blame a girl for getting drunk. But is drunkenness a worse crime than rape? Sometimes drinking even gets boys off the hook in public opinion – “He was drunk and didn’t know what he was doing.”
Yes, publicizing these men’s names could sully their future.
Maybe they should have thought of that before attacking Savannah — and posting pictures, themselves, on the internet.
And maybe these boys should have worried more about ruining Savannah’s life.
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Men Find Fewer Women “Porn-Worthy”
Feminist, Andrea Dworkin, had feared that easy access to internet porn would turbocharge women’s objectification and turn men into wild, raping beasts. But it looks like internet porn too often has the opposite effect, deadening male libido in relation to real women, with men who over-consume finding fewer women “porn-worthy.”
This is what author, Naomi Wolf, noticed when students talked about their sex lives during her speaking tours of college campuses.
Others have made similar findings.
Pamela Paul interviewed over one hundred people, mostly men, in her research for Pornified, and found that porn-worthiness was a common concern among those who over-indulged.
One young man talked of his change in perspective.
My standards changed. Women who are otherwise good looking but aren’t as overtly sexy as the women in porn don’t appeal to me as much anymore. I find that I look more for women who have the attributes I see in porn. I want bigger breasts, longer hair, curvier bodies in general.
I find that when I’m out at a party or bar I catch myself sizing up women. I would say to myself, wait a second. This isn’t a supermarket. You shouldn’t treat her like she’s some piece of meat. Don’t pass her up just because her boobs aren’t that big.
Paul went on to cite a 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com poll which found that one in 10 men admitted he had become more critical of his partner’s body with exposure to porn.
Meanwhile, 51% of Americans believe that pornography raises men’s expectations of how women should look.
Many of the college women Wolf spoke to complained that they couldn’t compete, and they knew it.
Men, she said, learn about sex from porn but find that it is not helpful in teaching them how to relate to real women. She ended with this observation:
Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.
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Why Do The “Isms” That Affect Men Seem More Important?
You’re never going to have this revolution happen unless there’s also a sexual revolution.
That was Bill Maher’s verdict on the push for Democracy in Egypt as he discussed the matter on his show, Real Time with Bill Maher.
Pro-feminist, Tavis Smiley, agreed that women need to be treated better. Yet he inserted a different spin: “When we have these conversations about how they treat women, as if we treat women better in our country, it demonizes Muslim men.”
The most well-meaning among us, men like Smiley, work hard to respect other cultures. Yet sometimes we need to discern whether powerful elements of a society are harming less powerful targets. And really, is pointing out a need for improvement “demonization”?
Mr. Smiley is a-okay in my book, and I appreciate his aim here. Yet there is plenty of room for change in cultures that (depending upon the country or province) stone women for being victims of rape, beat women for leaving home without a male relative, keep girls out of school, forbid women from driving, make divorce difficult for women but easy for men, remove battered women from shelters, and cut women’s genitals – leaving them in pain, crippled, or dead.
It’s a sad turn of events when early Islam did so much to improve women’s rights in the world. The Koran gave women the right to work, inherit and own property. Female infanticide and slavery were abolished. Women were given the right to consent to marry. Protections against abuse became instituted.
Today Islamic scholars like Dr. Jamal Badawi work to support women’s rights. Meanwhile, large majorities favor legal, political and professional freedoms for women in North Africa and many countries in the Middle East and the broader Muslim world, according to a 2007 Gallup poll. In fact, the Islamic culture of West Sumatra, Indonesia is one of the most peace-loving, egalitarian places on the planet.
Islam isn’t the problem. Neither are Muslim men.
Still, problems abound. Yet Smiley seems more concerned with ethnocentrism than sexism, given his desire to cut off conversation. Why do the “isms” that affect men seem more important? And did women have equal power to create the cultures that oppress them?
When ethnocentrism and sexism are at odds, which worries should prevail? Cultural relativism – don’t judge one culture from the perspective of another – is a good guide most of the time. But what if someone is being harmed? When people are killed for reasons other than self-defense, when they are crippled physically, emotionally, intellectually or spiritually, those circumstances must trump all others.
Must we worry more about offending those who create cultures that harm women than freeing women who are harmed by them?
Meanwhile, Islamic feminists complain that Western women can be too fearful of offending ethnic sensitivities to back their feminist sisters.
Now, is lecture the best way to handle this? Dialogue is better. Other cultures have perspectives that can benefit us, too. Perhaps we can learn from each other.
Love Tavis. But he insists we cannot criticize until we perfect ourselves. We’ll never be perfect. Still, we must fight oppression wherever it is found, here and there, to whatever degree we find it. Tolerating intolerance is not progressive.
I’m on vacation. This was originally posted on February 25, 2011
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What If Women Went Topless?
Unprecedented East Coast heat has prompted Moira Johnston to go topless in New York. Why drown in a hot, puddley bra when you can rip off your top, as so many men do when temperatures rise?
Moira also wants to raise awareness that, “It’s legal for woman to be topless anywhere a guy can be without a shirt since 1992 here in New York State.”
Jamie Peck gave it a try and found the only objectors were those worried about children, which she ponders:
Personally, I think that viewing a bare breast as inherently sexual and hence corrupting of innocence is silly; I’d much rather my hypothetical kid see women of all shapes enjoying the outdoors and being comfortable with their bodies than, say, two fully clothed people dry humping on a bench.
Plenty of men would love this, and judging from the crowd Moira attracts, many do.
But what would happen if women did go topless? All of them, in mass, for a long time?
Men would probably be disappointed as the breast fetish faded away. After all, it doesn’t exist in places where women walk around topless all the time, like tribal societies. And it withered in Europe and Australia in the 80s when breasts were bared in magazine and TV ads, and on billboards, and where women went topless on the beach.
The woman who reported this piece for Stuff appears to be Australian, and she can relate:
Why do we still treat bare breasts as such objects of scandal?
I must admit it’s always puzzled me. Growing up, as I did, in the ’80s, my template for adult womanhood was that it was perfectly natural – nay, expected – to whip ’em out in summer.
We’d turn up to the beach, three or four families or so, stake out a spot, and then the mums and aunts and friends would roll their one-pieces down and pour on the Reef. Consequently my approach to beachgoing is similarly au naturel.
So freeing. And some feminists recommend this breast baring to de-objectify them.
On the downside, women would probably still be judged, and some might feel pressured to uncover when they’d rather not — the inverse of some Arab women who feel pressured to cover when they’d rather not.
Still, women from once-topless societies aren’t expected to have such huge breasts today, saving money and potentially dangerous, unnecessary surgeries. As an ex-pat now living Portugal reveals:
My wife, who teaches at a local university, had an interesting conversation with one of her students. He’s a cosmetic surgeon, one of the very few in southern Portugal who does breast augmentations.
“I’m curious,” said my wife. “What size do most women ask for when they have an augmentation?”
“In Portugal? A B-cup,” he replied.
“A B-cup? That’s all? I’d have thought women who were paying for larger breasts would want something a little more…sizeable.”
“No, a B-cup is the average here, and in Europe. But if you go to the United States, it’s a different story.”
“What do American women ask for?”
“A D-cup,” he said. “The difference between Europe and the US is two cup sizes.”
Interesting to see the law of unintended (or intended) consequences in action.
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Women Gazing At Men
Lately I’ve been asking why women don’t get so excited by naked men, why women are often uncomfortable with male nudity on stage and screen or in print, and why these nude men can seem “gay” to the women who gaze at them.
Elizabeth Hall Magill has been asking the same questions over at Yo Mama. And she’s wondering how women can better appreciate the male form, without objectifying them. Here’s an excerpt from one of her posts.
So—where does that leave a woman’s gaze?
Neither here nor there.
And yet, we have eyes. We gaze. And we like what we see.
As I pondered this issue, I realized something: perhaps men posing sexually seem homosexual not only because we are used to the male gaze. Perhaps it is also because we are used to the female pose. And here we encounter a difference between media (artful or otherwise) and life: real sexiness is rarely posed. It just happens. But in “sexy” pictures of women, the women are aware of the gaze and arranging themselves for it. So, when a man does the same thing, we read him as feminized. And when a man strips for a woman, he can be seen as “performing” something generally feminine, and therefore we define it as insincere, the object of a joke. Not true eroticism.
In one of my favorite essays of all time, Looking at Women, Scott Russell Sanders says:
When I return to the street with the ancient legacy of longing coiled in my DNA, and the residues from a thousand generations of patriarchs silting my brain, I encounter women whose presence strikes me like a slap of wind in the face. I must prepare a gaze that is worthy of their splendor.
This is how I feel about men. And I bet I’m not the only one.
We’re all conditioned to ignore the fact that women feel this way about men. How many times a week do you think a man checks out his wife as she reaches into the refrigerator to get something from that bottom drawer, or reaches high above her head for a rarely-used dish? How many times a week does he check out the women walking by him on the sidewalk, riding a bike in the gym, or sitting in the next office? Magazines love to make little pie charts telling us about how often the male brain does these things. I’ve never seen a pie chart telling me how often the female brain does similar things.
And yet.
Men get things from the refrigerator or the top shelf, and often look damn good doing it. They walk on the sidewalk, ride bikes, and work right next to us, looking good all the while. And women notice.
What we need is more women noticing themselves as they notice men. Thinking about how they feel when the tide of desire leaves and returns, leaves and returns. And owning that tide.
And then we need women talking about it—not giggling, not blushing, not encouraging men to mock the idea of their own desirability. Somebody ought to talk about it so often and so loudly that a pie chart becomes inevitable, cause we just know women are thinking about sex so dang much that we better measure it.
After that, we need female photographers and directors, tons of them, taking pictures of and telling stories about men being men. Holding babies in the middle of the night, shirtless and vulnerable and full of fatherly love and strength. Squatting in the middle of a road, looking at a rock (clothed, as squatting naked in the middle of the road is unnatural and possibly unsafe). Running on treadmills, making copies in the office while wearing snazzy ties, washing the dirt off their hands after a day working outside, laughing with their friends, kicking a tire and making dinner and coming home at the end of a long day. We need to see men being men through the eyes of women, not men posing as the objects of female desire. And we should see them in all their shapes and colors—in all their splendor.
You know what I think?
I think men would totally get being sexy in this way, and I think they would love it. They wouldn’t feel like objects, they wouldn’t feel feminized, they wouldn’t pose or feel goofy. They’d be themselves, and they’d be damn glad that the women they’ve been checking out all this time are checking them right back.
Which means the female gaze would no longer be marginalized, masculinized, or mocked. It would be honest, and it would be powerful—as powerful as desire itself.
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