Category Archives: women
Education Will Shrink a Woman’s Uterus?
Classes have begun for many this week. In honor, I’ll ask this question: Does education shrink a woman’s uterus?
At one point this was a real worry. In 1873 Edward Clark of Harvard voiced his concern. In 1889 the renowned scientist R.R. Coleman cautioned university women:
You are on the brink of destruction… Beware!! Science pronounces that the woman who studies is lost.
Scientists fretted because the more education a woman gained the fewer children she bore. They hadn’t imagined the most obvious cause: That educated women simply put off marriage and childbearing.
Who knows how many women were discouraged from education from such silly concerns.
Worries about weak minds were accompanied by worries about weak bodies: Some 19th Century doctors explained that corsets were needed because women’s bodies were too frail to adequately hold themselves up.
Uneven bars were invented for women gymnasts, who were thought to need rest between each move.
Moral of the story:
Don’t make judgments, scientific or otherwise, that assume biology lies behind social patterns and stereotypes.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Are Women Naturally Monogamous?
Boob: A Breast? Or a Fool?
“Cock” vs “Down There”
Share this:
Can Men and Women be Friends?
Harry told Sally that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way. The question remains.
Short answer: Yes, they can.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be romantic undertones; in fact, there usually are. Typically, “he” starts a relationship hoping for sex, but “she” isn’t interested. Yet he stays friends because he likes her. And he’s often expecting that more will come of it.
Naively, I’ve been in cross-sex friendships without noticing the “underlying attraction” part.
Before I married I had more male than female friends. I now realize this was simply because I’m an introvert (I gain energy from being alone) and am perfectly content reading, writing, painting, or biking. But men would call to chat or get together for lunch or a movie. With these guys there was no physical affection, no kissing or handholding. We talked of nothing romantic. I just thought they enjoyed my company as much as I enjoyed theirs. Until each eventually made a move and I pulled back. Yet we remained friends.
After I married and lost my men friends I realized I’d actually have to take some initiative to have women friends. It was all so disorienting, and I’m still not consistently good at it. I was lucky to have my men friends.
In some ways cross-sex friendships mirror same-sex friendships, but they’re different, too.
These relationships can offer an “insider” perspective on the opposite sex. Especially when all involved are unconcerned with charming each other and can let their hair down and tell the truth about their own sex.
They are strong in trust, respect, acceptance and enjoyment. But they are less satisfying, maybe because they don’t fulfill the underlying sexual tension that is so often present.
And intimacy can be hindered when friends create space to protect against romance, since sexual involvement becomes a threat to the relationship. Over time, sexual tension wanes.
Yes, men and women can be friends. But as Harry warned, the sex part can get in the way.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Sources of Power in Relationships
The Allure of Bad Boys
Women Make Men Dumber?
Share this:
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.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Beauty Tricks to Remove Your Power
Am I Ugly? Girls Ask YouTube
The Plump Beauty Ideal: Exotic Dancers in 1890
Share this:
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.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Does Sexual Objectification Lead to Bad Sex?
Why Aren’t Male Strippers Sexy?
Anything Good About Being A Sex Object?
Share this:
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.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
You Are “Less Than”?
Best Not To Be Popular In High School
Boys on the Bus Grasping at Fake Power
Share this:
Passionate Love: Like a Drug, or Mental Illness
The passion of early love! Giddy, and intense. Heart thumping in the yearning breast. Can’t eat, can’t sleep. Can think of little else.
In fact, passionate love is like a drug. Or a mental illness.
Researchers asked volunteers to look at photos of their partners. Those in passionate love responded in ways similar to drug addiction, as captured in brain imaging. Lead researcher, Helen Fisher, commented, “When I first started looking at the properties of infatuation,” she said, “they had some of the same elements of a cocaine high: sleeplessness, loss of a sense of time, absolute focus on love to the detriment of all around you.”
According to Psychology Today, a brain chemical connected to falling in love rises with infatuation, heightening euphoria and excitement.
Meanwhile, brain areas that control impulses, fear and negativity become less active. Obsession and reckless behavior increase. As Dr. Fisher put it, “Infatuation can overtake the rational parts of your brain.” Passionate love resembling mental illness.
The turbulent times are marked by ecstasy and fulfillment when love is returned; but sadness and despair when it is not.
Over time passionate love settles a bit. Not a bad thing, really, for who can function drug-addicted and mentally ill?
Something is lost, but something may also be gained as greater intimacy and commitment join passionate affection, rounding out the three pillars of love, which psychologist, Robert Sternberg has identified in his “triangular theory of love.”
Sternberg calls love that is marked only by “intimacy,” but not passion or commitment, “liking love,” or good friends.
When love consists only of “commitment,” nothing but duty keeps a couple together. He calls this “empty love.”
But when intimacy and commitment meet passion, a couple moves into “consummate love,” the best of all worlds.
Few couples continually stay in a state of consuming love. And many will go through various loving styles as feelings rise, fall, and rise again.
Perhaps the trick is going with the flow and creating ways to enliven the relationship.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Men Watch Porn, Women Read Romance. Why?
Men Have Higher Sex Drive. Why?
Orgasm: It’s All in the Mind
Share this:
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!”
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
How to Look Like a Victoria’s Secret Angel
Beautiful Women’s Hips Are Thinner Than Their Heads?
I Can’t Believe I Ate A Whole Head Of Lettuce!
Share this:
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!
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Child Rape: Not As Bad As Contraception
Crying Religious Intolerance While Violating Rights
Should Organized Religion Have More Rights Than Women?
Share this:
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.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Cheerleader Ordered To Cheer Her Rapist, and Other Stories
Steal $11, Get Life Sentence
Rape Culture and Penn State
Share this:
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.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Real Women Competing With Porn Stars
Men Are Naturally Attracted To Unnatural Women
Men Aren’t Hard Wired To Find Breasts Attractive
BroadBlogs 