Category Archives: psychology
Real Photos for Real Girls in Seventeen Magazine
17 magazine real girl cover girl
Few young women have good body image. The trouble starts early, thanks to Photoshopped pics in magazines like Seventeen — or even grown-up fare like Cosmo, or your typical billboard — all creating impossible standards that even models cannot achieve.
This is especially a problem for young women who are just beginning to develop a sense of themselves, and whose self-esteem is too often based on their looks.
Even Penelope Cruz knows the agony, having felt insecure as a young woman. Angry now, she says:
I would close down all those teenage magazines that encourage young girls to diet. Who says that to be pretty you have to be thin? Some people look better thin and some don’t. There is almost a standard being created where only thin is acceptable. The influence of those magazines on girls as young as 13 is horrific.
Consequently, too many young women starve or go under the knife in anxious attempts to feel good about themselves. But you can’t compete with Photoshop.
Fourteen-year-old Julie Bluhm knows this. She knows that girls her age are not all slim with glowing skin and shiny hair. And she tired of her friends’ endless rants about their “imperfections.”
And so she began an online petition on Change.org asking Seventeen to use at least one unretouched spread in each issue.
In her “David meets Goliath” moment Julie won – at least a few points. After collecting more than 84,000 signatures, Seventeen published an eight-point “Body Peace Treaty” promising to “celebrate every kind of beauty,” and pledging not to retouch girls’ bodies or faces, instead showing “real girls as they really are.”
Julie won a battle, but necessarily the war. As Ms. points out:
The letter overtly confirms that Seventeen will continue to retouch photos. And (the editor) still claims that Seventeen “never has never will” alter its models’ bodies–a statement that contradicts the very accusation Bluhm (and her 85,000 supporters) made with her petition.
At the least, Julie has gotten a conversation going that has clued many young women into knowing that things are not always what they seem, and learning that they need not strive to meet the nutty body ideals sent down by the gods of media — and the money to be made by offering helpful “fixes” after making women feel bad about themselves.
Goal one has been achieved: be empowered, don’t just take it.
Now we must work on goal two: critiquing looks as the major source of self-esteem.
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Why Aren’t Male Strippers Sexy?
Channing Tatum in “Magic Mike”
The typical atmosphere in such an establishment isn’t one of arousal and longing, the kind that reliably fills the air in a female strip club. As far as I can tell, female patrons are typically cracking up, shielding their eyes in mock horror or cartoonishly objectifying male dancers as a performance for their friends.
Her observations come by way of the new movie, Magic Mike, which gets a lot right, she says, but shows male stripping as it mostly is: “goofball, absurd and sometimes repulsive,” which is how she describes her own first – and last — male strip show outing:
Onstage was an overly tanned dark-and-handsome type dressed like a race car driver. He slowly unzipped his onesie while popping his knee to the throbbing techno music, which was accented by sounds of a car engine revving. Once naked, he took his flaccid penis in his hand, stretched it out as far as he could and let go; it snapped back to his body and flopped around as he wiggled his eyebrows at the crowd.
And so she asks why these strip shows are libido-killers and offers her thoughts. On some points we overlap, on others we don’t (for instance, I think evolutionary psych is full of crap). Here are my own musings:
Some of what I’ve written before applies here. For instance, male bodies aren’t sexualized in our culture. Since I’ve discussed this in pieces like, “Men: Erotic Objects of Women’s Gaze,” or “Women Seeing Women as Sexier than Men.” I won’t dwell on the point. But whether out of homophobia or because women have only recently become involved in creating media, literature, art, or anything else that could eroticize the male form, we see few sexualized images of men. So lusting after men isn’t something that women learn to do.
Some say women are just more erotic, yet breasts are only sensualized in places where they are either hidden or selectively hidden and revealed. The U.S. is so obsessed by the secreted breast that even women can develop a fetish. There’s no biological reason for that.
Repressed sexuality may also make it more difficult for women to respond to the visual. I don’t have data on this other than personal experience and talking with other women about it, but a few of us were better able to respond to visual stimulation when we were very young and less repressed.
Forces of repression? I’ve discussed this before (so see refs), but it arises as women are told that sex is bad – for them – and slut-shamed, from being the ones who get screwed and f’d, from being told not to touch themselves (males are more likely to figure out pleasure sources due to differences in anatomy), and from sexual abuse.
Making matters worse, when men do show skin they can look “gay.” This seems to occur because women are so used to nudity being meant for the male gaze that they come to see nude males through male eyes, too. That’s jarring, not a turn-on.
Men doing women-things (stripping) might be jarring, too.
Another problem is that straight women get more aroused by being desired than by desiring men. (Being desired by men they’re interested in, not by any ol’ guy.) Probably due to culture. While women don’t learn to see men as sex objects, they do come to see themselves that way. So in a convoluted form they can become aroused by experiencing how men are experiencing them. Yet another factor preventing women from desiring men in a fetished way.
And then floppiness could add to the problem, erasing any fantasy of being desired by the stripper. Flaccidity – at least on a twenty-something — communicates that he’s just not that into you. (Maybe a male strip clubber’s fantasy is helped when no obvious bodily sign tells him that the female stripper’s not into him.) But standing at attention might not work with a whole houseful of ladies anyway, since he’s still not necessarily into you.
Also, even if the stripper were erect, women may still have the same reaction that they have to strange men who flash or sext them: repulsion, trauma or laughter.
Yes, women have a very different reaction to the male member on a stranger than the men they love.
There are plenty of reasons why women think men look sexier fully clothed.
But why do gay men find male strippers sexy when straight women don’t? I’ll visit that question next week.
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sex in the third person
Poet, Susan L. Daniels @SusanDanielsEden, was inspired by my post “Sex Objects Who Don’t Enjoy Sex” to write this poem. Thank you Susan.
if I and you
shifted to she and he
when we should be
just us
lost in the heat
of this we
fusing
there would be no
true union
just she
filtering feeling
through a camera lens
a voyeur
assessing performance
from across the room
Susan L Daniels is a firm believer that politics are personal, that faith is expressed through action, and that life is something that must be loved and lived authentically–or why bother with any of it?
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Sex Objects Who Don’t Enjoy Sex
Sexualizing women can have its perks in the bedroom, with breast fetishes and butt fetishes heightening men’s arousal.
But surprisingly, sexualizing women can have the opposite effect, harming both men’s and women’s enjoyment. And in many ways. Here’s one: self-objectification.
Drowning in “sexy women” images, men and women can both come to see women as the sexy half of the species. So what happens in bed? Because men aren’t seen as especially sexy (at least by comparison) men are focused on women and women can be focused on themselves.
Caroline Heldman, assistant professor at Occidental College, found that some women become preoccupied with how they look instead of the sexual experience. “One young woman I interviewed described sex as being an ‘out of body’ experience,” she said. “She viewed herself through the eyes of her lover, and, sometimes, through the imaginary lens of a camera shooting a porn film.”
Sounds a bit like Paris Hilton: “My boyfriends say I’m sexy but not sexual,” she mused. “Being ‘hot’ is a pose, an act, a tool, and entirely divorced from either physical pleasure or romantic love.”
Heldman feels that girls and women are learning to eroticize male sexual pleasure as though it were their own. She feels they need to explore their sexuality in more empowering and satisfying ways than this vicarious act.
Cultural theorist Jackson Katz has similar concerns. “Many young women are now engaged in sex acts with men that prioritize the man’s pleasure,” he reflects, “with little or no expectation of reciprocity.”
When having sex, these young women may be enjoying themselves, and how great they look. They may gain a boost to self-esteem as they dwell on their “hotness.” But they’re not enjoying sex.
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Brave Princess Fights Men, Women Holding Her Back
Bold, boisterous, untamed hair that will be ruled by nothing and no one suits Brave Princess Merida just fine.
Some try to control and limit her. Merida will have none of it.
Brave mirrors the story of women letting off shackles and moving into independence and empowerment even as societies – and some women – fight to sustain the status quo. It’s also a story of women at odds reconnecting.
As a young girl, Merida was let out of the gender box when her father, the Scottish King Fergus, gave her a bow and arrow. Riding horses and shooting, she lived a life of freedom and adventure. Her big confidence made her seem bigger than she was, as Manohla Dargis at the New York Times described it:
She’s a wee thing but her flaming hair and fiery daring — she shoots from the saddle, bull’s-eyeing targets — make her seem bigger. When she takes a breather, surveying the land (this is her land, you sense) while her horse rolls on the grass like a puppy, you see her at peace with herself… She slips into the ecstatic when she scrambles up a rock wall and twirls on its summit, laughing, happy, free and alone.
All to her mother’s chagrin. The Queen has a long list of DO’s and DON’T’s. Do: rise early and always be perfect… Don’t: chortle, raise your voice or place your weapon on the dining table…
Oh, and DO marry whom I want and when I want.
When Merida is told to marry a young prince among the kingdom’s royal allies, she refuses. Her mother tries to change her mind by telling of a prince who forsook his duty, causing his kingdom to crumble.
A contest is made for a worthy suitor. But Merida enters, herself, insisting she’s eligible to compete for her own hand. And in so doing, she fights for her life, her heart and will.
Her mother is furious.
So Merida runs away and meets a witch who casts a spell to “change her mother.” Unfortunately, mom is changed more than expected, leaving Merida to reverse the spell, which is finally broken through love and reuniting.
Brave makes me think of women’s march to independence and autonomy.
Once was, women had little control over their lives. They rarely had a career choice, motherhood being a hallowed, but lone, option. (Motherhood’s not the problem, having no option is.) Unable to make money, women relied on husbands to care for them, leaving many focused on financial security and not love.
It’s all reflected in a slew of novels portraying young girls as free and adventurous (think, Faulkner’s Caddy Compson) who grow into young women that are all about sexuality (think, Caddy Compson) and who move into motherhood, dissolving into household routines that tell them nothing about themselves and who they might be. Little wonder that moms in fiction so often disappear, mostly sick or dead (think, Caddy’s mom).
No wonder the brave princess rejected that script.
Even now, some women fight to cut off possibilities for other women. Like Merida’s mom, my own mother wanted me to focus on marriage and not career. She felt it was the right thing to do. What both God and Society wanted.
Others may be jealous of opportunities that they are, or were once, denied.
Some want other women to obey the men they control, as an overbearing mother-in-law might.
And some control women to gain favor with men, as some sorority sisters do.
But Brave also holds the possibility, and reflects the reality, of women working from a place of love and not fear or envy, uniting to help each other move forward.
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Do Wrinkle Creams Work? Who Cares?
Women in their early 20’s are now buying anti-aging potions. Used to be, the serums were sold to middle-aged women and older. But why start so late when there is money to be made?
Of course, “It’s hard to know if a wrinkle cream is working when there are no lines yet to erase,” Christina Brinkley of the Wall Street Journal points out.
But that’s an advantage to the sellers. No evidence that their products don’t work. Good thing for them, since they probably don’t.
Much of the medical establishment says anti-aging potions are ineffective. Consumer Reports has tested several and agrees:
After six weeks of use, the effectiveness of even the best products was limited and varied from subject to subject. When we did see wrinkle reductions they were at best slight.
Even the best performers reduced the average depth of wrinkles by less than 10%, the magnitude of change that was, alas, barely visible to the naked eye.
According to the National Institute on Aging we should be skeptical:
Despite claims about pills or treatments that lead to endless youth, no treatments have been proven to slow or reverse the aging process.
Instead, the Institute offers this advice on aging well: eat healthily, exercise regularly, don’t smoke, and of course, protect your skin from the sun.
We are a world that worships youth. But age was once valued when it was harder to survive and when a long past meant great wisdom and great skill. But now it’s ordinary to live long, higher education can give us more knowledge than our parents, and technology mass-produces high quality work.
Baba Cooper wrote a piece on becoming old women. Old age shouldn’t be feared, she says. It should be a final ripening, a meaningful summation, a last chance for risks and pleasures.
There are different ways of seeing. Does age erase our beauty? Or does it show off the laugh lines of our happiness? And might the wisdom we have gained be more worthy, worthwhile and fulfilling than the outer shell that contains it?
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Honesty, The Best Policy In Relationships?
Honesty is the best policy in relationships, right? Show yourself as you really are and your partner should accept you, warts and all. And be sure to see your partner’s warts, too!
So if your girlfriend asks if her new jeans make her look fat you should frankly respond, “No fatter than the rest of your clothes.”
Honesty may be overrated.
Psychological research is mixed. One study found that couples who idealized each other early in a relationship were likely to still be in love months later. But couples who saw each other realistically early on felt less in love, or had broken up, over the same time period.
In fact, passionate love makes us see each other in an idealized way — love is blind! But when we are passionately in love we also put our best self forward. We look nicer and we act nicer.
So we fall in love with idealizations, not realities, which can be hard to sustain over time.
And we probably want to be known and loved for who we really are. We want others to see us as we see ourselves. (But in another twist, most of us see ourselves through a positive bias.)
Another study found that dating couples were most intimate when their partners viewed them most favorably. But married couples were most intimate with partners who saw them as they saw themselves (read: with a slightly favorable bias).
Maybe we want our lovers to see us both how we really are and in a flattering light, the researchers suggest, since the contradictory findings were looking at slightly different things. We want to be accurately seen when it comes to little things like whether we can be charming in front of their friends and family. But we also want them to have a favorable view of us – we’re wonderful, intelligent and physically attractive – in the broader sense of who we are.
Maybe we really want our partners to see our best selves, focusing on our finest traits and playing down aspects that aren’t so hot.
As the researchers point out, marriage in Victorian times can seem pretentious. Each partner dressed for dinner, tried to look nice at all times, were courteous and kept up their best behavior – almost as if they were still courting. But all this helped their partners to see them in the most favorable light. And these marriages were the longest lasting in Western history.
Maybe it’s not a bad idea to be on our best behavior with the ones we love.
And if your girlfriend asks if her new jeans make her look fat, why not honestly tell her that you think she’s beautiful?
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It’s Not Easy Being A Man
Norah Vincent passed as a man for a year and a half. She wrote a book about the experience, Self-Made Man, which was published in 2006. When one gender visits the world of another it can be eye-opening, so let’s take a peek at one part of the woman-turned-man experience.
Turns out, it’s not easy being a man.
Norah had thought she’d love joining the privileged man-club that, until her transition, she had only glimpsed from the outside. Instead, she felt strangely inadequate.
For instance, as a lesbian, she’d expected to have great fun dating women. But it was arduous. In her new man-role she felt an expectation to lead, take charge. This made her feel small in her costume.
I felt this especially keenly on one of my earliest dates, waiting for a woman at a fancy restaurant I’d chosen. I was sitting alone in one of those cavernous red leather booths that you see at old-world steak houses, and I was holding the menu, which also happened to be red and enormous, and I felt absolutely ridiculous, like the painful geek in a teen movie who is trying to score with an older woman. I felt tiny and insignificant.
Living with pressure to always show strength, never let down your guard, and yet never measuring up, she observed:
I guess maybe that’s one of the secrets of manhood that no man tells if he can help it. Every man’s armor is borrowed and 10 sizes too big, and beneath it, he’s naked and insecure and hoping you won’t see.
Michael Kimmel, a leading researcher on men and masculinity, agrees, including that quote in a book he wrote called Guyland.
Men have to prove they are men. Women don’t have to prove they are women.
Yes, gender-ranking strikes again. Men are bestowed higher rank in society, and so men feel they must earn that high status. But it’s hard because ranking men over women is not natural.
So men are under constant pressure to show strength, lead, walk like a man, talk like a man, sit like a man… or as Jackson Katz put it, wear a tough guise: look tough, talk tough, and be tough guys.
Some harm themselves or others proving their fearlessness through dangerous drinking or dangerous driving or avoiding doctors. Some work to turn “weak” feelings like sadness and depression into “strong” feelings like anger. But then wives get beaten and women get raped, and some boys are bullied to build others up. Or guys cave to peer pressure just to dodge being called gay, wuss, fag… or girl.
But most times they’re just trying to live up to the high expectations of manhood that demand strength, power, confidence, invulnerability, leadership and success, which may become benefit or burden — or both.
On her time being a guy, Vincent declares:
I know that a lot of my discomfort came precisely from being a woman all along, remaining one even in my disguise. But I also know that another respectable portion of my distress came, as it did to the men I met in (my men’s group) and elsewhere, from the way the world greeted me in that disguise, a disguise that was almost as much of a put-on for my men friends as it was for me. That, maybe, was the last twist of my adventure. I passed in a man’s world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball. Only in my men’s group did I see these masks removed and scrutinized. Only then did I know that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every guy in the room.
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How I’m Seen Differently in a Female Body
Joelle Circé, “Waving Pride”
And if others’ responses shifted, so did my own. The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If the case was too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.
Women treated me with a frankness which was one of the happiest discoveries of my metamorphosis. But I also found men treating me more and more as junior. I discovered that even now men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative, and certainly less self-centered than they are themselves; so I generally obliged.
The above lines were penned by a woman who had transitioned from being, bodily, a man. Certainly there is plenty to learn from our sisters, brothers, and others who live in-between, all of whom have transitioned away from the gender they were assigned at birth. One of the most obvious is the difference in how women and men are perceived and treated. Another is the experience of oppression for daring to cross accepted gender lines.
The passage was written in 1975, early in the movement for gender equality, so I wondered if things had changed. And then I came across artist, Joelle Circé, a woman of transsexual origin, and asked her about it. Here’s what she said:
I’ve always felt that I am a woman in my heart and my brain, but after I transitioned everything about my life changed. I noticed a very marked difference in how I was treated in public. The important parts of it are wonderful and beyond great. But some changes have been troubling.
Men are more likely to talk down to me as if I were a child. I get challenged by young male art supply clerks about the materials I want. I have over 20 years experience as an artist but they seem to think they know better, grrrrr.
And when I lived in a male body I seldom gave thought to my personal safety as I walked around, day or night. Now I do. Some aspects of my life have become dangerous and frightening.
At first I thought it was solely due to the transitioning and how I presented to others, especially men, but it didn’t take long to figure out that it was because I now look female that I’m harassed by some men, who look at me as if I were a piece of meat.
I’ve also gained weight due to hormones and eating when stressed, happy or sad. So now, like many other women I have felt yucky about my body’s size. I began thinking about self-loathing and of saying no to the media’s insistence we all have a certain body type. I had a friend of mine pose in our bathtub that was surrounded on three sides by mirrors with a sledge hammer in her hands and making as if to hit at her reflections in the mirrors. I call the piece ‘Smashing Images.’
And only after surgery did I begin to fully appreciate my body and those of other women. As a female born in the wrong body I speak to female eroticism, the beauty I see in my sisters, the joys and power of being a woman.
Being a woman of transsexual experience has permitted me to better understand oppression and prejudice, even as a woman by other women. I am conscious of myself, my sexual identity, my gender and my orientation. I am aware of communicating my hopes and fears, my joy and my anger as well as my sadness, my chaos.
My paintings maintain this constant in that I celebrate women, those who are empowered, those who are downtrodden, those who are invisible and those who are despised, hated, feared and oppressed, beaten and abused.
If anything, my art, is a reflection of my path and I hope it has some impact, brings some pleasure and happiness but also introspection and much questioning.
Thank you, Joelle Circé, for sharing your experience. You can go here to see her gallery.
June is LGBT Month
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Snow White’s Dark Forest of the Psyche
Snow White’s popping up all over with two movies, a popular TV series and another on the way. A graphic novel centered on the Snow White fable is out. Even indie rockers and Snoop Dogg are flocking to Snow.
What’s up?
As one of our earliest childhood memories, Snow White has a certain primal appeal. But the lack of plot leaves room to explore the dark forest of the psyche, that shadowy, terror-filled place of dreams that Snow White, and all of us, must make our way through.
As these regions are reflected in Snow White, matters of beauty, power and love loom large. How have they evolved since Disney’s Depression-Era version?
Beauty is crucial both now and then. Though then it was the whole story. Now there’s more.
In Once Upon a Time Queen Regina is less concerned with being fairist than seeking to avenge the lost love that Snow unwittingly took from her.
In Snow White and the Huntsman Snow’s death would bring Queen Ravenna immortality. The Queen is also wounded and angered by a patriarchy that commits sexual crimes without penalty. She thinks herself a righteous avenger.
But beauty does weigh heavily. For much of history this has been a rare source of female power, a lesson Ravenna learned as a little girl. But the pursuit of beauty destroys her.
Which provokes questions: What will we do to gain allure? And might we destroy ourselves chasing beauty?
Certainly, the pursuit of beauty messes with our health as some live on diet coke and cigarettes, becoming malnourished, anorexic or bulimic, which can end in death. Implants too often deaden sensual nerve endings. Some die on the plastic surgeon’s table.
When beauty feels evasive we can get depressed and down on ourselves, a spiritual dying.
Queen Ravenna devours raven hearts to gain eternal youth. An LA Times reviewer suggests this is frighteningly reflective of our times.
Those bloody little raven hearts she seems to be munching would sell like hotcakes if they had half of the rejuvenating properties we witness on screen.
The evil Queen has been deemed a female Darth Vader who loses her humanity, capturing beautiful women and seeking to consume Snow White’s heart so she can remain “fairest of all.”
In our envy, women become alienated from each other. We demean and slut-shame those whose beauty seems to threaten our own, not seeing that the shaming dampens our sexuality. We scorn others’ flaws even as the distain highlights our own blemishes.
No wonder Ravenna, angry at male dominance, directs her wrath at other women. Too often we do so ourselves.
Or, in one village women disfigured themselves to avoid Ravenna’s evil. How often do women diminish themselves to appease power?
But we find women becoming empowered, too. Disney’s Snow White needs to be rescued. Today’s Snow kicks butt. Sometimes she’s saved. But she saves too. She’s strong, she battles, she defeats Ravenna, ending her reign of terror.
And then there is love. Throughout the decades love remains the most powerful magic. “Love conquers all” is both trite and true. Trite, because we hear it all the time. But maybe we hear it so much because it is true. Love overcomes alienation, reconnects us to one another, brings back our humanity, empowers and offers deep fulfillment.
Perhaps we may have a happy ending, after all.
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