Category Archives: sexism
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.
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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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Guys Are Getting More Romantic
Guys are all about getting sex and avoiding love. Guys want random sex more than committed relationships. Women, the old ball and chain…
That’s what stereotypes say. But that’s not what guys say. A large-scale survey called “That’s What He Said” found that young men between the ages of 15 and 19 are more romantic than past generations.
That’s right, 95% of them would rather have sex with their girlfriends or someone they love than with a random girl they don’t know and don’t care about. In fact, over half of these guys don’t want to have sex with a woman unless they really love her. And three-quarters want to lose their virginity to someone they love.
The lead researcher told the New York Times:
In fact, (the young men) often used strong, almost hyper-romantic language to talk about love. (A) boy whose condom broke told me the most important thing to him was being in love with his girlfriend and “giving her everything I can.”
Interestingly, while 61% do say they’d rather have sex with a “super hot” woman than with someone who is smart and funny, 78% would choose a relationship with someone who is smart and funny over super hot. So it logically follows from the above data that if a young man is in a relationship with Smart-and-Funny he’d rather have sex with her, too, right?
Further, if they must choose between sex and love, most choose love. Two thirds would rather have a girlfriend and no sex than sex and no girlfriend. These young men say they could be happy in a sexless relationship.
Sounds mind blowing.
Yet these findings resonate with a recent study of sex on college campuses where casual hookups are supposedly all the rage — yet really aren’t — as well as another large-scale study reported in the 2006 American Sociological Review which found that teen boys were just as emotionally engaged in their relationships as girls.
The researchers cite one surprising force behind the change. Now that internet porn can so easily feed their sex drive, young men can seek love and not worry so much about sex. But young men should be warned: overindulging may lead them to lose sexual interest in real women. (See my post Porn Can Cause E.D.?)
But young men today also have greater emotional depth, or are at least more willing to express it, than men of past generations. That may be due to less sexism and homophobia, leaving men better able to tap into and express emotion, and feeling less need to act macho and prove their manhood and heterosexuality by screwing a girl.
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Teen Cougars at Prom
A cougar is a hot “older woman” who pursues men twenty years her junior, right? Well, lately teen cougars have been asking junior guys to senior prom.
So why do young women increasingly want relationships with younger men? Once was, girls only dated older guys. As one mom observing the phenomenon explains:
Back in my prom days (when the big slow dance was still “Stairway to Heaven”), I went with a boy who was not just taller than me, but older as well. O.K., I was only a few months younger than him, but that still mattered to my friends and me. We would never have even considered venturing out to the prom, let alone the school parking lot, with a boy in a lower grade, unless we were baby-sitting him.
Why the change? It may be that we no longer expect guys to be “ranked” so much more highly than girls anymore.
We’re not completely over gender ranking, which places males above females. You still see it when a man avoids dating or marrying a highly successful woman, since that success gives her higher rank than him. Or, when guys do girl-things like hopscotch they’re “lowering themselves” and taunted as sissies, wimps and fags — or girls. But girls can climb trees, play with trucks and be tomboys with little worry. And, girls can wear pants but guys can’t wear dresses. Girls aren’t demeaning themselves by doing boy-stuff.
Traditionally, women have wanted someone “older and wiser” as sixteen-year-old Liesl sang to Rolf in The Sound of Music:
I need someone
Older and wiser
Telling me what to do
You are 17 going on 18
I’ll depend on you
But suddenly girls don’t need someone older and wiser.
Furthermore, these girls like “nice guys” who are more respectful and nicer to date than the dominant “bad boys” that girls are thought to prefer.
When they get to college upper-class women often continue favoring younger men:
Here at Dartmouth we have a saying, ‘Get the guy before he pledges’ (because) that way you grab them before they are corrupted by fraternity brothers.
That would be frat boys who work hard to create a “superior man” status by demeaning women as bitches and sluts, and who maintain their independence and invulnerability by avoiding relationships with women, choosing to conquer them in one-night-stands, instead.
But back in high school a senior girl simply reasons, “The senior guys at my school tend to like to go out with the younger girls, so now I guess we are doing the same with younger guys.”
I’m all for gender parity. Why not?
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Crying Religious Intolerance While Violating Rights
Last week Notre Dame and more than 40 other Catholic institutions announced they are filing lawsuits suing Obama on the contraception mandate. As usual, they’re claiming that the government is running all over their religious rights.
Meanwhile, bills have been proposed claiming to protect the conscience of employers to opt out of providing coverage that goes against their religious convictions, including the Bunt Amendment and a similar bill in the Arizona Legislature.
Are Catholic Bishops and other employers the only people who hold religious beliefs? Or the only ones whose religious beliefs count?
You’d think so to hear the debate on the matter.
In the face of this war on women progressives have rarely questioned whose religious rights are in play. And so conservatives have undisputedly argued that employers – Bishops or otherwise – must be free to follow their conscience. But that leaves women forced to follow the conscience of their employers. The argument is then framed as “right to contraception” vs “religious rights” which makes the latter stronger since that is undisputedly in the constitution.
Maybe women’s religious beliefs are ignored because the perspective of the powerful tends to trump the perspective of the powerless. The powerful have a history of airing their beliefs and they can bully from their pulpits. The Catholic Church has historically been powerful. Women have not. Business leaders have historically been powerful. Women have not.
I was heartened to hear Salon editor, Joan Walsh, finally make the reverse argument last week, five months after the start of this debate. She pointed out that the Priests have religious freedom backwards as they try to force their religion on everyone else. They and the Republican Right are working to impose their religion on the country. Maureen Dowd and the New York Times editorial page have thankfully followed suit.
Shouldn’t the pious be the ones to sacrifice for their convictions instead of asking everyone else to sacrifice for their beliefs?
And when there is a conflict, the religious beliefs and conscience of those whose bodies, health and well-being are directly affected should certainly trump the conscience of those who simply hold the purse strings.
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So Nice We Let Others Hurt Us
By Anonymous
Some people are so nice that they let others hurt them. I have been hurt. But I wasn’t nice.
I thought of this as I read a piece called, “Betrayed by the Angel,” by Debra Anne Davis.
When Debra was little, a boy named “Hank C” kept jabbing his pencil into her arm as she sat in her third-grade classroom. It hurt, but she didn’t want to be mean. When she finally got up the nerve to tell her teacher, she was told, “You go back to your seat and tell me if he does it again.” She sat mum.
At age 25 a stranger rapped on her door. She opened it a crack and immediately wanted to slam it. The man scared her.
But she didn’t want to be rude.
He forced the door open and pushed her against a wall.
I want to open the door and shut him outside and then slam the door in his face, rude or not, I don’t care now. Frankly, I don’t push him aside with much determination. I’ve made a mental choice to be rude, but I haven’t been able to muster the physical bluntness the act requires.
And she was raped.
When Debra became a teacher she asked her students what their parents taught them that they would not teach their children. One student said, “My parents always told me to be kind to everyone. I won’t teach my children that. It’s not always good to be kind to everyone.”
Debra wishes she had learned that lesson sooner. Now she knows she shouldn’t always be nice.
My story neither starts nor ends like hers.
I have a memory that I wish were only a bad dream.
I wasn’t feeling well and stayed home from school that day. Soon after my mother left to pick up my cousin from school, my uncle came home. It happened so fast. He bribed me to let him in my room. I was young and didn’t understand why he wanted to do that. So I let him. He pinned me to the bed and started kissing my neck. I told him that my mom would be home any minute. He stopped and bribed me not to tell anyone. I agreed just so he would leave me alone.
I had seen TV shows where children were raped and the rapist warned that he would kill the family if they said anything, but it never happened. So I did tell my mom what happened as soon as she got home, crying through the whole thing. My uncle never touched me again.
I believe that how I reacted had a lot to do with where I grew up, in East Palo Alto, surrounded by violence. A place where you must stand up for yourself.
Like Debra, I still find it hard to talk to men I don’t know. Not because I don’t want to, but out of fear. But unlike Debra, I do speak out loud and clear because I want to be heard.
I agree that parents should not teach their children to always be nice.
This post was written by one of my students, who asked to remain anonymous.
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Lose Virginity, Lose Self-Esteem?
When women lose their virginity, they can lose self-esteem, too, experiencing a small drop. That’s what a recent Penn State study reveals.
Why?
Women college students were surveyed over time. Before sex the women felt increasingly good about their bodies. But after first sex they felt worse. Looks like when they’re in bed women start worrying about whether they look good enough. Masters and Johnson tagged the phenomenon of watching yourself from a third person perspective instead of focusing on sexual sensations or your partner, “spectatoring.” Women are much more prone, being the objectified. Then, feeling they don’t measure up, self-worth drops.
Other usual suspects may also affect self-esteem, including the double standard that provokes worries about labels like slut and whore. Tracy Clark-Flory over at salon.com points to a 1995 study that found “women were significantly more likely to report that their first sexual experience left them feeling less pleasure, satisfaction, and excitement than men, and more sadness, guilt, nervousness, tension, embarrassment, and fear.” Even now women continue to experience that bind.
The double standard strikes again when women feel used, unappreciated, and worried about reputations after short flings or one-night stands.
Meanwhile, a study I recently posted finds 35% of women in strong partnerships feeling sad, anxious, restless, or irritable, after sex. Researchers don’t know why. Commenters, speculating on their own experience with the phenomenon, fingered sexual repression or difficulties with orgasm (which are related to repression) as culprit.
Studies repeatedly find that women are less likely than men to enjoy sex. Other research suggests the problem is not biologically based, or inevitable. Women in sex-positive cultures enjoy sexuality a great deal.
We are going to have to move beyond sexism for women to reclaim their sexuality. That would benefit both women and men.
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Vibrators Were Invented to Cure Hysteria
Hollywood has made a major motion picture that’s all about vibrators and women’s orgasm. Who da thunk? In a series of new movies, women’s sexuality is making its film debut.
“Hysteria,” tells how vibrators were created. Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville fabricated the device around 1880 to cure “hysterical paroxysm,” a condition that had been concerning the medical community since Hippocrates.
Symptoms included anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, fluid retention, insomnia and erotic fantasy, and was thought to result from a blocked reproductive system. The cure involved clitoral stimulation to orgasm. But women should not necessarily administer the cure themselves. As The Guardian explained:
Avicenna, the Muslim founder of early modern medicine, advised women not to treat themselves for the condition. It was, he wrote, “a man’s job, suitable only for husbands and doctors.”
So strangely, vibrators were created as a medical device having nothing to do with women’s pleasure – or so the good doctors thought. Sex, in fact, was believed to have little to do with women’s satisfaction at that time.
Vibrator as medicine and not sex aid? That’s probably why it managed to be the fifth electrical device to be mass marketed at the turn of the last century, right after the sewing machine, the fan, the kettle and the toaster. And that’s certainly why Sears was selling it in their 1918 catalog.
In bringing women’s sexuality to the screen, Hollywood has changed direction. There, sexuality had always been about men’s, with women’s body parts the focus of male desire.
The notion that sex is for men, while women look good for them, seems to have real-world impacts. In casual college hookups women often give men blow jobs while they go without, reasoning that men need sex but they don’t so much. Or, Caroline Heldman, Assistant Professor at Occidental College, found that women are often focused on how their bodies create men’s pleasure while ignoring how they feel sexually, themselves.
Meanwhile, women’s sexuality is thought more dirty and unspeakable, with lots of choice words to describe the sexual woman (slut, ho, skank…). Or, Viagra ads appear on TV but aids for the female libido are off limits. Including vibrators, which have even been banned in some states. Not surprisingly, “Hysteria” took seven years to make because producers balked. As producer Tracey Becker, explained,
When it came right down to it, we had this script which dealt with these very blush-inducing themes and most of the time it was in the hands of a male executive, who had the veto power.
With a slate of female directors making films like “Hysteria,” “Take This Waltz,” “Elles,” “2 Days in New York,” and on the small screen, “Sex and the City” and “Girls,” women’s sexuality is beginning to come out of the Hollywood closet.
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Women Don’t Rape, They’re Merely Insatiable
A 43-year-old German man met a 47-year-old woman in a bar. He went to her home and had sex with her, but when he wanted to leave she trapped him and demanded more. Seeing no other choice he agreed, expecting that afterwards she would let him go. But more wasn’t enough. Desperate, he fled out a balcony and cried for help.
She met her next victim on a bus. After his ordeal he was found “sobbing in the street” and begging the police, “Oh God, it was hell. I can’t walk. Please help me.” Sounds like she wounded him to prevent his escape.
Police charged her with sexual assault and illegal restraint. Yet the press is not calling her what she is: a rapist.
Beneath a photo of a couple in bed, the Mirror described the woman as a “nymphomaniac” while the Province posted the story next to a couple pictured blissfully in bed, and called the woman merely “insatiable.”
The inability to see this as rape likely stems from stereotypes about what rape is and who commits it.
Some people simply can’t conceive that men can be raped or that women can rape men. And that is likely mixed up with notions that men always want sex, and are – or should be – insatiable, themselves. And then there’s the belief that men can always overpower women, regardless of “technical help.”
Other stereotypes hold for both male and female victims. Such as, “What do you expect if you go to his/her apartment?” Or, “Once you say ‘yes’ you can’t say ‘no.’”
Some believe “rape myths” (false notions about rape) because that’s what they’ve always heard. Others hold to them because they make them feel safe. If a woman believes that only “bad girls” get raped, then she can feel more safe and secure. If a man believes that women can’t rape men, then he can feel secure, too.
Some just don’t get that rape means “sex without consent.”
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The Cure for Cellulite
FDA-approved Cellulaze can get rid of cellulite with one doctor’s visit. The cost ranges from $2,500 to $12,000 but the procedure promises long-lasting results.
Only problem is that cellulite doesn’t actually need curing. Ninety percent of women past puberty have it. It’s simply the way women’s fat lays on their bodies. If you are a woman without cellulite there may be a problem, such as too-low bodyweight.
While cellulite is perfectly natural, Cellulaze works by singeing healthy connective fibers inside your body with a laser. It may be FDA-approved but this doesn’t sound too healthy.
Once upon a time cellulite was thought beautiful, as with the voluptuous women Rubens painted happily dancing in their dimpled flesh.
In her book, The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf points out that cellulite was classified as unsightly, disfiguring and “polluted with toxins” by Vouge in 1973.
Untrue. But a good way to sell magazines offering advice, along with products and procedures advertised in their pages to hide or get rid of it.
Wolf goes on to observe:
Women’s flesh, you could acknowledge, is textured, rippled, dense, and complicated; and the way fat is laid down on female muscle, on the hips and thighs that cradle and deliver children and open for sex, is one of the most provocative qualities of the female body. Or you could turn this into an operable condition…
How can an “ideal” be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic does not exist on the woman’s body?
Do we need a cure for cellulite? Or do we need to cure a sick society that is obsessed with finding ways to make women feel bad about themselves? And might the best remedy be love for your body instead?
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