Posts filed under ‘State of the Universe’
Midday Barf O Rama
So in keeping with the topic of the Sluttoween, here are some links you can check out if you really want to throw up in your mouth a little:
For some reading that will make you want to give up on society and move to a yurt in the middle of the wilderness, check out the blog Packaging Girlhood. They are hoping the stripper pole marketed as a children’s toy is a hoax. So am I.
And if you really want to break your brain, see Salon’s article on sexy Halloween costumes for your pets. Now just because she’s a dog doesn’t mean Fifi can’t sex it up once in a while. Seriously, being seen with a dowdy, unattractive pet on Halloween is like totally embarrassing! No more hot-dog or bumble-bee costumes for my Dachshund, this year Sparky is going as a naughty nurse!
People, Sluttoween has gone too far. I call bullshit on these stupid costumes (which aren’t even clever most of the time) and hereby announce a boycott against un-inspired slutty costumes for women of all ages. Forget sexy cop, sexy beer wench and sexy prostitute, this year I’m going as Botulism. Don’t think I won’t do it. Last year I appeared in a fat suit as Teddy Roosevelt. I’ve also donned a zombie Lavinia costume involving so much fake blood that it made other trick or treaters gag. One thing is for sure, for the sake of my sanity the Catholic School girl outfit is staying in the closet this year.
Is Love Dead?
There is a fascinating conversation going on right now over at NPR’s On Point about the current status of Romantic love. Writer, essayist and critic Cristina Nehring claims that for modern people passionate love has become not an ideal to celebrate and strive for but a source of embarrassment and vulnerability.
Who’s to blame? Well there are the usual culprits, i.e feminism and the “hook up culture” (yawn) but thankfully Nehring goes beyond the tired scapegoating of feminism for the unravelling of everything good and decent in our society and probes at the truth beyond the hype.
Modern people live such chaotic and hectic lives that finding true love seems sort of frivolous in the face of trying to gain those status symbols that show we’re living worthy lives. Whether it’s a doctorate, a six figure job, or a chance at fame, taking time to cultivate romance seems like an unnecessary detour on our paths to achievement. After all, love may be fleeting, but that Fullbright Scholarship is forever. Heck, now they even write books about the dangers of marrying for love!
I see a lot of myself in Nehring’s description of the intellectual woman who feels the need to apologize for or hide her passionate feelings as if they are somehow a handicap, something that makes her less strong, intelligent and credible. According to Nehring I’m in good company. In her research she found that great women from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Margaret Fuller and Simone de Beauvoir all had precarious relationships between their intellectual and love lives.
As a young woman I was repeatedly warned away from getting over involved in my relationships or letting my love life distract from what my mom used to call, “the big picture.” At some times in my life I really did allow my goals to fall by the wayside in pursuit of several (doomed) relationships. After that I vowed to put my own goals first and for the most part I have. But how do you balance the single minded pursuit of your own happiness and still allow yourself to fall in love?
For ambitious women the lurking fear that romantic love will turn us into doting and subservient partners focused on catering to our significant other’s needs instead of our own is a very real one. We fear that the lure of partnership and family will steer us away from our goals, so the solution is to avoid romantic attachments altogether. The result of this very real and justified fear says Nehring, is a culture where we’ve compartmentalized love and sex. We have no problem talking about our one night stands, our favorite methods of birth control, even fertility. But love? Forget it.
She’s right. I feel totally free to dish about my favorite brand of lube over cocktails in mixed company, but talk about how much I love my boyfriend? I wouldn’t dare. I know it would clear the room in under five seconds. And I’d feel like a total goober for even mentioning it in the first place.
So does this sound familiar to you, gentile readers? Would you rather give yourself a fleet enema than talk about your crush in public? Is romance dead? Ridiculous? Something created to sell Hallmark cards? Did it ever exist in the first place?
What’s your take on modern love?
Weekend Update: Rage Edition
Most of the time I don’t mind the political wing nuts who protest in Harvard Square. Usually they are pretty harmless. Free Tibet? Why not? Stop global warming, don’t mind if I do! Sure, they can be annoying and self-righteous at times, but they’re political groups, that’s what they’re supposed to be like. I never found any of them offensive, until today.
This afternoon as I was walking through the square I passed a group of protesters carrying a giant sign that said: STOP OBAMA’S NAZI HEALTHCARE PLAN.
Because apparently trying to make sure every American has health insurance is somehow comparable to the systematic slaughter of six million Jews.
Usually I like to live and let live, but in this case I stopped and gave the people holding that asinine sign the finger, which was a lot nicer than what would have happened if I’d allowed myself to open my mouth. In that case I would have let loose a torrent of obscenity, nay, I might have exploded in rage. They’d be scraping bits of me off Bartley’s Burger Cottage for weeks. I think in that situation, giving the finger was the politest thing I could have possibly done. Those groups may have freedom of speech but so do I and I have a right to let them know that I might tolerate their overblown, ignorant, offensive and extremist opinions in my neighborhood, but I sure as hell don’t agree with it. Not just because I’m one of those commie liberal types that thinks every person deserves access to affordable health care, but also because I find the appropriation of the Holocaust to support a political cause to be absolutely unconscionable.
I am sick to fucking death of people comparing everything they don’t like to Nazism. What’s next, the kid at Berryline doesn’t put enough granola on your fro-yo and he’s Hitler? Come on people. And while we’re at it, I’d like to give everyone who compares Obama’s political agenda to communism, fascism and socialism (booga booga!) a fucking dictionary so they can look up the meaning of the words because they have absolutely no clue in hell what they mean. If they did, they would realize that the analogies they are trying to draw make no fucking sense. Those are just big, scary words that somebody wagged in front of their faces and told them they were supposed to be frightened of. Wake up people, for the last eight years we were practically a fascist country under the Bush administration, and you people ate it up. If socialism means putting my tax dollars to work for something that will actually benefit myself and others (health care reform) instead of just using them to fund a 2.5 trillion dollar vanity war then sign me up!
I can’t believe that so many people in this country have been duped into believing that helping those less fortunate than ourselves by making healthcare a basic human right somehow degenerates our society or makes us less free. You know what makes me feel less free? Slaving away at a job that offers me no benefits, not having the right to demand those benefits, and being robbed of my dignity by being unable to take care of myself when I’m sick. To me, that’s the essence of an unjust society.
I know I shouldn’t get so worked up about this. In all likelihood the people I ran into in Harvard Square today are the type of people who just need something to proselytize about on a Saturday, they probably didn’t even bother to really think through how offensive their words were. Obama’s health plan will probably pass, all of those people will realize that the sky isn’t going to fall in if their neighbor who just lost her job can actually go see a doctor when she’s sick, and they will move on to protest the next fashionable cause. In the mean time, I’ve got my work cut out for me trying not to end up rage-splattered all over Bartley’s.
Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle
An urban dweller needs a car.
Or so I would have told you six years ago. “A car is just a hole in the ground you pour money into. I’ll never own one.” I’d scoff as my parents, relatives and suburban cohorts wondered at how I managed without internal combustion. Back then I was an intrepid urban cyclist, trekking up Mass Ave on my way to class in all manner of weather with the menacing groan of the 77 Bus to my left and a lane of moving traffic threatening to car-door my kneecaps to smithereens at any moment on my right. I didn’t care that just getting to school every day was an adventure of Indiana Jones like proportions. Dodging potholes, evading disgruntled Boston drivers and arriving to class with my face flushed, heart pounding and a ribbon of sweat down my cheek made me feel more alive. I felt so daring and carelessly cool, cruising into my destination with my bike helmet in hand, Timbuktu bag with bike light still flashing jauntily perched on my shoulder. And let’s be honest, urban biking is a workout my friend. I’d never been a svelte as I was when I was commuting on a bike and all without a gym membership. I miss my bike-toned ass.
What happened? My first real job after grad school. It was a one-hour (each way) car trip up Route 93, unreachable by public transportation. They offered me health insurance and a living wage doing what I went to school for. After a year of just trying not to chew too hard on the side of my mouth with the ruptured filling and getting paid eight bucks an hour to mop floors and bag candy (worthy of a whole other story in and of itself) I jumped at it. Mom’s hand me down car was free and had seat warmers. I promised myself I’d only use it for “professional” reasons. I would remain in my heart a bike commuter.
Ha fucking ha. You’d think after two high-speed tire blowouts on the highway and a hit and run at the junction of 93 and 128 that ended up costing over $800 I’d have had enough of the motorized life, but it was just beginning my friends. A year later I was offered a job in my own city, slightly over a mile from my apartment. I went into the job interview fantasizing about ditching my car for good, then came their last question, “Do you have a car?” Say what? Apparently the new job required me to service 11 different cites across the city, thus being in multiple places in one day, all while lugging theatrical equipment. Car access was required. And thus, gentile readers, I was thrown into a new and even deeper co-dependent relationship with my car.
Now my car wasn’t just my means of getting to work, it became my de-facto office. On any given day, you might find me crammed into a parking space (I know where all the good ones are) on a city side street making phone calls, futzing with my schedule and preparing for meetings, all while listening to NPR. As the empty bottles of Diet Coke and Cliff Bar wrappers strewed all over the back seat can attest, I regularly eat at least one meal a day in my car. And my ass? Not even a shadow of it’s former self, despite my five days a week at the shi-shi gym I can now afford with my awesome new job.
I have attempted to forswear the car at many junctures. And by forswear mean I’ve threatened to light my car on fire and push it off a cliff— seat warmers and all. I can’t begin to tally the small mint’s worth of parking tickets I’ve had to pay over the years, and nothing says “productive day at work” like exiting a meeting to see your car being strapped onto a tow truck because you forgot it was street cleaning day because on top of all your other duties you haven’t yet managed to fucking memorize the street cleaning schedule in every neighborhood in the damn city.
Why don’t I get rid of it? In a word, I’m lazy. Having the car allows me at least an extra 30 minutes of sleep in the morning, sleep I desperately rely on. In addition, the bus schedule in these parts is often unreliable not to mention, have you ever tried loading 200 pounds of theatrical lighting onto your bike and riding across town with it? Didn’t think so. Also: I’m hopelessly clumsy and trying to navigate the icy city streets on foot in the winter is not something I’m eager to do. I’d rather just spend two hours on a snowy winter morning trying to hack my car out of a block of ice with a shovel. Clearly, that’s the hassle free route.
In all seriousness, I’ve built myself a car dependent lifestyle. My car allows me to go to the nicer gym that’s a little further away from my house, get to rehearsals quickly on weeknight, attend regular physical therapy appointments for my fucked up foot (another reason why walking everywhere is no longer as attractive as it once was), get grocery shopping, laundry and errands run faster and visit my parents and grandparents more frequently. Without a car it would be practically impossible to pack all these things into my long days without having a nervous breakdown.
So what’s a girl to do? I recently listened to a program on NPR (When I was where else? In my car!) about green alternatives to car commuting. The story stated that one of the biggest obstacles to people reducing the carbon footprint of their commute was the idea that they had to get rid of their cars completely. By making just one leg of your commute carbon free (let’s say, walking to the train station instead of driving and parking) you can still significantly reduce your carbon footprint and reap plenty of health benefits.
This idea sounded great. Baby steps. I can’t totally ditch my car but could I go without it at least one or two days a week? Of course! I decided that this time I wasn’t going to view things as an all or nothing proposition, my goal was to reduce my car commuting (and thus, a great amount of my personal stress) by using a combination of walking, biking, and public transport.
The only problem is that after five years of commuting in the privacy of my car I am woefully out of practice at handling the nuances of a public commute, especially on the T. For example, in the past few years I have come to view my iPod as just another thing to lug with me to work each day that could possibly get lost, broken or stolen, so I frequently go without it. In the T commuter’s world though, the iPod is a weapon of urban warfare, sort of like the MACE of unwanted social interactions.
The first time I remembered this vital fact was on my way home from a late night rehearsal. I had just hopped the train when I was engaged by a seemingly harmless young gentleman who told me he thought my Le Sportsac purse was, “Fly.” Never one to turn a blind eye at a compliment I said, “Thank you” and the conversation just degenerated from there.
Over the next two T stops I learned that his name was Nino and he was an aspiring recording artist recovering from a gambling addiction. He then proceeded to tell me that “If I was his woman he would spend all kinds of money on me.” I feigned flattery and told him that was very nice of him, but I had a boyfriend. Any normal person would have backed off at that moment, not Nino. He then proceeded to tell me that, “If he had a woman like me he would never let me go out on my own.”
Why, why, why does every creepy guy on the planet think that telling you he’d never let you out of his eyesight is somehow this huge romantic compliment? Gee whiz, what I really want isn’t a relationship based on mutual trust, but some guy who will lock me up and throw away the key like that Austrian man who kept his daughter in a cellar for 24 years! Nothing says love like forced solitary confinement!
By this time I was so creeped out that I said a hurried goodbye and immediately hopped off the train at the next stop, which was by the way, not the stop I planned to get off at. As I stood on the subway platform contemplating this 20 minute detour precipitated completely by my own naiveté I realized that if I’d had an iPod on like any normal, self respecting T rider, I would have been able to avoid that entire scenario.
So OK, lesson number one re-learned: Never board the T without an electronic device firmly strapped to your skull. Or a book. Preferably both. Otherwise you’ll end up having to stare really intently at the Chinese newspaper somebody left behind while trying to avoid the leer of the guy next to you who said, “Helloooo pretty lady”, to you in this very Jack Nicholson in The Shining type way when you boarded the train. (Also a true story. Which brings me to lesson number two, if there is nobody sitting within two seats of any individual on a crowded train, there’s probably a good reason why.)
Non-withstanding my run-ins with Nino and Jack, commuting sans car has actually been kind of refreshing, invigorating, and dare I say, liberating? Cursing the traffic behind the wheel of my dilapidated fossil fuel guzzler is so hopelessly bourgeoisie. When I walk to work I’m not an average office drone, I’m a romantic and whimsical heroine completely in tune with the rhythms of the world around her, stopping to sniff every flower and pet every dog she passes. I am the quirky star of my very own Indie flick. Will I continue my car free experience despite all my travails? For the sake of the environment and my ass, I certainly hope so.
Love Me, Love My TV
Growing up I wasn’t allowed to watch very much television. My parents gave me the familiar spiel about how TV rots your brain and how I’d be better off reading a book or playing outside. However as an adult who has done more than her fair share of child-care for somebody that doesn’t actually have kids of her own I have realized that half the reason had to have been because most children’s programing is really effing annoying. I mean, have you ever seen Sponge Bob!? Some people love it, to me watching that show is like having a bad acid trip while locked in a room with a bunch of hyenas hell bent on clawing the flesh off your bones.
All those years that I thought my parent were being strict, loving, compassionate people who valued my intellectual curiosity and development so deeply that they didn’t want my childhood marred by advertising and junk culture, but in reality they probably just wanted my sister and I to turn off the tube so they could get some damn peace and quiet.
The moral of the story is that Kid Sister and I didn’t get to watch much TV so what we did get to watch we really had to make count. Although I probably only watched about an hour of TV a week as a kid, the shows I grew up on really did influence me. So here we go kids, the top TV shows that made little Fever who she is today:
Fashion Sense:
Clarissa Explains It All
Oh how I shamelessly ripped off Clarissa’s fashion sense as a pre-teen. I remember watching the premiere and going straight up to my room to desperately try and reconstruct my unfortunate mid-90s wardrobe of over-sized flowered palazzo pants and puffy poet blouses into something cooler.
Clarissa’s life was everything a young Sassy reader like myself could possibly covet. She was an aspiring journalist (I soon after published “zines” with my friends that were xeroxed off of notebook paper and sent around via the mail. Back in the days of dial-up before every teen with an opinion had a blog with which to broadcast her every inner desire this was how we rolled, biotches!), with a hip, floppy haired best guy friend (OK, so at that age I made fun of any boy who approached me until he rolled up crying in an emasculated ball which is probably why I didn’t date much as a teen, but a girl could dream), and an awesomely decorated room (that boys were allowed in!) with a real life giant Swatch watch hanging on the wall. (Only the coolest of the cool kids had those giant Swatch watches, and I could never convince my parents to get me one.) What more could a child of the 90s ask for?
Sense of the Bizzare:
The X-Files
Just listening to the theme music on my shitty computer speakers makes my stomach churn deliciously in horror. It’s Friday night, circa 1997. My parent are out of town. What are my sister and I doing? We’re not hosting a kegger or sneaking boys into the house, we’re curled up in the dark in our suburban living room under grandma’s afghan watching the X Files and scaring the ever loving shit out of ourselves.
Pop Culture:
The Adventures of Pete & Pete
Most people’s first exposure to Godfather of Punk Iggy Pop might have been through a mix tape or a local college radio station. Mine was because of The Adventures of Pete and Pete, where he played Nona’s dad.
There were a million great cameos on Pete & Pete; Luscious Jackson played the school dance, Michael Stipe guest-starred as an ennui-ridden Popsicle man (let me know if I’m missing any others) but to me the real beauty of this show was it’s spot on portrayal of sibling relationships, first love, and the simple joys of growing up in the burbs.
Sick Sense of Humor:
Ren & Stimpy
When my sister was little I remember her kindergarten teacher telling my mom that bathroom humor was only a passing phase. Oh, how I know my mom wishes that were true. To this day I still can’t resist a good fart joke. I have no idea how such a demure woman gave birth to two such twisted individuals. Perhaps we were irrevocably warped by watching a show with a character called “Powdered Toast Man” who entreated his subjects to “cling tenaciously to his buttocks”. And of course, who could forget log?
Propensity for Loving Doomed Cult TV Shows:
Eerie Indiana
Remember Eerie Indiana? Neither do most people. It was like a kiddie X-Files with a little Twilight Zone thrown in there for good measure. My sister and I couldn’t get enough of it which means of course it got cancelled after like two episodes. Fortunately, the show’s creators don’t seem too worried about copyright infringement, as there are plenty of full episodes up on You Tube.
Budding Liberal Idealist:
The Wonder Years
Is it just me, or is there very little the Baby Boomer generation loves more than reflecting back on itself? This might explain why The Wonder Years was one of the few shows my family watched together, even my relentlessly channel surfing dad was transfixed.
Aging hippies love regaling their punk ass kids with how tough ‘Nam really was and how groovy that Jefferson Airplane concert was. The Wonder Years gave the ‘rents a chance to re-live those times without my sister and I stomping off to our rooms, slamming the doors and blasting Pearl Jam.
The ironic thing was that as I followed Fred Savage’s character throughout that series I actually felt like I grew up with him, losing a bit of my innocence along the way. For those of us who grew up in the gay 90s when the future was bright and the culture wars of our parent’s time seemed archaic, The Wonder Years was eerily prophetic of the times to come. Just like Kevin Arnold, we watched our parents behave like hypocrites, screwed up our first real relationships and lost faith in our government. I don’t think our parents ever dreamed that we would inherit a world that would become just as tumultuous as it was in the 1960′s but here we are, arguably worse off than we were a generation ago. It’s enough to make a person want to protest. Or grow their hair real long, or quit their job and travel the country in a VW Bus. Except these days we’re getting fired from our jobs, everybody’s way too freaked out about the economy to notice that we’re losing a war and gas is too damn expensive to facilitate any epic road trip/life altering experiences. Thanks George Bush!
So there you have it, my top handful of influential programming. It’s not a bad lot, if I do say so myself. Maybe it’s even a good thing that I drew so much inspiration from TV instead of all the books I read. After all, it could have been worse. Thank Maude I never went through a Little House on the Prarie fashion phase.
Gold Diggers, Skinny Bitches and Trophy Wives, Oh My!
Cue the Kanye kids; I feel a blog entry coming on…
Want to learn the secret to true and lasting relationship fulfillment? Don’t want to work when you’re over 40 (or perhaps at all)? Wondering why all your type A female friends are “slaving away” while all the bimbos you know are off getting hot stone massages? You need Smart Girls Marry Rich. Penned by the same altruistic mavens who brought you (the thinly veiled vegan-orexic propaganda) Skinny Bitch, Smart Girls Marry Rich is the ultimate guide to achieving security and happiness in your long-term relationship (hint: it has nothing to do with your dude’s sexy blue eyes). Because who else would you trust to give you relationship advice than the women who bestowed upon us the sage like nutritional adage: “Healthy = skinny, unhealthy= fat”?
OK, I know (or perhaps I just hope) that supposedly instructive tomes such as Smart Girls Marry Rich and The Rules are just a bunch of inflated crap that’s designed to be incendiary so the authors can get on talk shows and sign six figure book deals, but I just can’t look away. It’s not just that they fry me… they fascinate me. There is something about looking at a view so violently opposed to my own that I can’t write about it without squirming in my chair. Maybe it is because it forces me to examine and defend my own views, or maybe it’s because I love a fight. At any rate, here’s my take on Smart Girls:
First of all, I can’t stand self-help books that divide all women into two opposing camps. Either you are a miserable, overworked career harpy or a pampered, cerebrally challenged bimbo. Has anybody ever met anyone who truly embodied either of these stereotypes? What if the overworked career woman actually (gasp) finds her job fulfilling? And for the last time, why is it automatically assumed that every woman who doesn’t work outside the home lives a life of leisure? The hardworking (mostly) stay at home mom that raised me would take exception! She worked her ass off bringing up two kids, running a household and helping my dad sustain the family business. To this day girlfriend has never had a hot stone massage, although she sure as hell deserves one.
I may be about to start a feminist shit-storm by saying this, but I’ll say it anyway. Women, whether we’re high-powered career types, stay at home moms, or some amalgamation of those things, make choices. None of these choices are inherently weaker than others, they are just different. I think it is actually pretty cool that at some point in my life I will be able to make a choice to shift my focus from career path to mothering, to some sort of collage of those two things, and back again, as it makes sense for my family and I. I get to decide how to put my life together. Chances are the man I start my family with will never get to make those sort of compromises because it is assumed that the only way any natural red blooded heterosexual male would ever want to contribute to his family is by working a very narrowly defined 9-5 job. We all say how terrific we think stay at home dads are, but the overall subtext is that any man who would give up a life of ambition to focus on fathering is lazy, emasculated and unmotivated. We feel sorry for stay at home dads and the women who marry them. How can she respect him when she makes more money than he does? How can he feel like the man when he’s changing diapers?
Don’t even think your partner might relish having a more equal hand in creating a home bringing up your family. According to the Smart Girls you’re kidding yourself. Ask for anything aside from a traditional male partner who will play his part to provide, provide, provide and you’re asking for trouble. And he better be established before you tie the knot because a self made man whom you support in achieving his goals will leave you once he gains success. Once again, my parents who married in 1972 with 500 bucks between them and went on to start a successful business and own multiple homes would bristle at this assumption.
Nobody asks guys if they “still want to be working at 40.” Nobody expects that men would all be happier if they married wealthy and live their lives sipping Mimosas by the pool. Yet time after time, women are told that we’re supposed to feel unfeminine, nay, unnatural for having a drive, curiosity and ambition that might challenge us to explore (and even find deep satisfaction) outside the domestic sphere. Women’s work is incredibly undervalued in our society, yet we’re instructed that we give up all our chances for power, security and a happy life if we attempt to pursue other types of work. Clearly, the only power that is is safe and appropriate for me to have is the power to get a man to buy me stuff.
Smart Girls really plays into the whole security hysteria that is plaguing our culture right now. Everyone likes to think they could have avoided the stock market crash. We all would like a little more stability in our day-to-day lives. It is tempting to believe that marrying rich can provide that stability. I understand the point Smart Girls makes about the fact that romantic love is fleeting so a marriage that lasts a lifetime needs to be built on something more stable, but I disagree that money is what makes a marriage stable. Just ask all those bankers who are getting divorced by wives who “didn’t sign up for” life in the middle class.
I thought the whole point of an egalitarian society was that we don’t have to depend on our partners for material things so instead we can depend on them for the things that money can’t buy, you know… love, compassion, understanding, emotional support, all the stuff Bernie Madoff can’t embezzle away.
Maybe this is just an oversimplification by one of those single, career oriented, childless harpies. Perhaps once I’m gestating little Frances Bean Peaches Bjork Jr. in my womb I’ll start thinking about the cost of cruelty free prenatal vitamins, cloth diaper service, day care, braces, Rock n’ Roll Camp For Girls and Harvard and send my mate out packing to pull down six figures.
Until then, here’s one thing I do know: life’s a bitch kids. Getting up every day, going to work, making ends meet, raising kids, its hard work. I can’t imagine it all being worth all the toil sacrifice unless I’ve got someone I love deeply in my corner, fighting that fight right alongside me. Life is shitty enough, why the hell would I want to come home in the evening to someone I wasn’t crazy in love with?
Shine On You Crazy Diamonds
This Week’s Best and Worst in Feminist Blogging:
Best:
There’s an all out knock down drag out UFC style cage match going on between old school and new wave feminists right now and thanks to teh world wide web everyone with an opinion and an internet connection has a front row seat.
Linda Hirshman over at Slate’s brand spankin’ new feminist blog double X fired the first shots with the article The Problem With Jezebels. What’s the problem with these young feminists, drinking, having casual sex and not taking the blame for sexual assault? The nerve! My first reaction was, huh? Really? We’re still upset about this? Didn’t they invent the whole free love thing in the 60s? Why are old school feminists pissed now that their daughters are actually cashing in on it? If feminism means equal opportunity for both sexes, that means women have equal opportunity to not only climb the corporate ladder and influence society, but to get drunk, get laid and act like chuckleheads without having our lives and reputations destroyed for it. Because we’re human, just like men. And the victim blaming thing? Not cool. As long as society continues to put most of the responsibility for sexual assault on women, some men will continue to find reasons to rape. Why shouldn’t they when “she asked for it” is still accepted as a valid excuse?
This is where I find that I just don’t get second wave feminists. Or maybe they just don’t get us. In the immortal words of Will Smith, Parents Just Don’t Understand. Hirshman also doesn’t get why Jezebel’s Tracie finds this picture (NSFW) funny, saying, “How can Tracie…criticize the men who go to Hooters?” I think the picture is a damn funny commentary the phenomenon of “accidental” celebrity coochie sightings. But then again, I’m one of those lazy, spoiled new wave feminists who thinks women shouldn’t have to behave like a “model minority” to get ahead. I also think I should be able to vote for the candidate who best represents my ideas regardless of their gender, drink what I want, fuck who I want, and laugh at my own vagina.
For the record, Salon’s Rebecca Traister thinks the mud slinging fest is great, and I’m inclined to agree. After all, the fact that now we’re having a multi-generational non-linear debate about what a feminist is means that contrary to the rumor, feminism is still alive and kicking.
Worst:
Yahoo’s newish website for women has been bugging me for a while. I’ve been holding off on writing about it since it’s mostly too stupid to pay attention to (think Jezebel only with a lobotomy or Martha Stewart’s Living minus the style). Shine is supposed to be the female’s destination on the web, all a girl really needs in her online day. In reality it is Journalism Lite, a thinly veiled platform for advertisers to capitalize off female insecurity in order to get us to buy into a certain lifestyle and ultimately spend money.
Mostly I’m just annoyed that Yahoo keeps sending Shine updates to my inbox, as if I’d actually be interested in it. The topics on the front page include: Manage Your Life, Fashion & Beauty, Parenting, Love & Sex, Food and Astrology. This is what I’m supposed to be interested in? Notice that the news isn’t even on this list. I’m supposed to care about astrology before I care about current events? Who gives a crap about Darfur as long as I have my star forecast! There’s no section on careers, business or the economy, nothing on science, entertainment or the arts. However there are articles on How To Woo Him With Your Phone Voice, How To Make Yourself Interesting, Why You’re Not Losing Weight and if that all fails, How To Get Back At Your Ex. Well thank god! I thought I was going to have to live the rest of my life as a fat, boring loser with a bad phone voice! Thank you Shine!
Don’t get me wrong, I believe that there is plenty of room in feminism for fashion, lip gloss and relationship advice. I love magazines like BUST that give a nod to craftiness and the culinary arts, honoring the DIY domestic spirit of our grandmother’s generation instead of discarding it. After all, being able to knit our own leg-warmers or whip up a great three bean casserole doesn’t have to be a function of oppression, it can be a way of overthrowing the patriarchal society that says we have to shop, eat and dress a certain way in order to have value.
What I really resent is the assumption that most women don’t care about the world beyond our own appearances and relationships and all we’re capable of consuming is articles about fashion, beauty and dating. I believe that most women genuinely do have interest in the greater world around them. However the media that is marketed toward us refuses to address those interests unless they come pre-packaged from some sort of “women’s issues” angle. As if I can’t possibly relate to, let’s say, suffering in Iraq unless it has to do with women and cute little children. I’m so tired of the assumption that I’m not going to read a news story unless it has to do with a kidnapped white girl.
So boo on you, Shine, for adding to the glut of junk Cosmo Girl Culture we have to wade through in order to get to anything of substance.
Can You Afford to Have a Kid?
Well it turns out, I have numbers to back me up now. Do you have the bucks to squirt one out? Take this quiz and find out:
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/alpha-consumer/2009/1/26/can-you-afford-a-baby.html
Forward your answers to your family members next time they give you a hard time about giving them grandkids.
I scored a 2.
Well That Was A Great Christmas, Time To Blog About It!
Its become a habit. I’ll have a memorable experience, start writing the blog entry in my head before I’m even through with it and possibly even cut the experience short, just to go home and blog about it while its still fresh. What can I say? It’s a disease.
So it’s Christmas. I’m at Cape Cod with the fam. To begin with, there is something deliciously special about being someplace when you’re not supposed to be there. That’s what made sledding at the golf course or heck, even going to school at night for the spaghetti supper so cool when I was a kid. Or maybe I just didn’t get out enough. Who knows.
The Cape is a summer place for my family. Right now when I look out the window it’s sunny and bright, if I didn’t know better I might think it’s summer out there. But it’s a little quieter. There’s no boats on the water, no bikes on the street. Everything’s a little barer, whiter, more zen.
We used to beg my parents to let us come down the Cape for Christmas, but there was always some excuse. It’s too far, it’s too much work, we’re expected to host people at home, yada, yada, yada.
But this year is different. To begin with, my mom made seared Ahi Tuna and crabmeat sushi for dinner last night.
That’s right, my uber-Italian, pasta making, never met a spice she liked, never met a dish that she didn’t think could be improved by red sauce made Asian food for dinner. Normally my mom won’t touch anything made with seaweed in it with a ten foot pole. In fact, she’s known for being so food unaventurous that it’s become sort of a tradition that every time my mom goes out of town my dad, sister and I find the most unusual restaurant we can and order the weirdest, spiciest things off the menu. One time we went to this Malaysian place in Harvard Square where my sister got an entire pan fried trout with the head on and everything.
But last night, instead of making raviolis, we all fumbled around the kitchen making sticky rice, slicing avocado and rolling Nori. It was a blast. Then we trimmed the fake tree! Seeing a Christmas tree glimmering in the front windows of our summer house is quite the trip.
Then dad and I drank too much wine. We all went to bed snug with the wind howling around us outside.
The next day we woke up and decided to walk to Stage Harbor Light.
I think it’s kind of rad that the lighthouse used to be used as a secret stash for liquor during the prohabition days.
As always when I walked there, I imagined what it would be like to live all the way out on a sand dune in a lighthouse. I pretended that I was a heroine form an L.M Montgomery novel. Why not? Cape Cod 100 years ago must have looked very much like Prince Edward Island did 100 years ago. And there was nothing Emily of New Moon loved more than a solitary ramble. And hey, doesn’t the below picture of Harding’s Beach look just like the opening shots of the Anne of Green Gables mini series!? Cue the heartwarming music, this plucky young teen is about to teach the town curmudgeon to believe in kindred spirits again!
My sister ran about on the dunes documenting everything with her new camera.When we finally got home, mom had a pile of Italian anise cookies to decorate. The kind of soft, melty ones with the chocolate kisses on the inside. KO and I dipped them in homemade frosting and all sorts of different sugary toppings, just like we have since we were kids. Just like back then, I still have to resist the urge to put a single red-hot at each sugary crest, thus turning them into boob cookies. Mom still doesn’t think that joke is funny.
Now we’re hanging out by the tree, watching the CNN interview with Barack and Michelle Obama and making dinner and yes, blogging. I’m liking this whole guilt free, adult Christmas thing…
Kicking The Habit…
So my gals at Jezebel and Shapely Prose have informed me that this week is International No Fat Talk Week.
At first I thought this was a nice idea but probably some thinly veiled marketing scheme to get chicks like me to buy feminine hygiene products. But no, it’s as real as any other awareness week, complete with endorsement from bona-fide women’s groups like NOW.
My internal monologue gave a self-satisfied snort, yeah right, there’s no way you can get women to stop complaining about the size of their thighs. After all, fat talk is an addictive behavior and just like any other bad habit, we make constant justifications about why we don’t have to stop, or why it’s ok just this one last time.
Then I watched the video and saw that more American women suffer from Anorexia and Bulimia than breast cancer. Let’s just pause for a moment and take that in. More American women suffer from Anorexia and Bulimia than breast cancer.
Check it out.
I don’t think it’s a big secret around here that I struggled with an eating disorder in high school, and I fight to keep a healthy body image every day. There is a cynical part of me that doesn’t believe that you can stop women from repeating the ingrained behaviors of body hatred. Another part of is totally supportive of body acceptance, as long as it means that other women can learn to embrace themselves while I myself can continue to pound away in pursuit of the perfect body. Love yourself! Eat the ice cream! Now I’m off to blast away all my unsightly flab at the gym.
Body acceptance is OK for other women, but not for me. Because I used to be a chubby kid and if I let down my guard and love myself the way I am I’ll become fat and miserable again. Because the thing that keeps me from having a perfect body isn’t genetics, it’s laziness, and I really need to do something about that. Because I need to drop another five pounds, and after that it’ll be totally cool to love myself. Because, because, because, because.
As all these familiar thoughts swirled in my head, I realized something. If my boyfriend talked to me about my body the same way I do, I’d dump him. If I spoke to a friend or loved one that way I’d be considered an abuser, and if a female friend of mine was dissin’ on herself in front of me the same way I diss on myself in private, I’d suggest she see a therapist.
Sure, 2008 was even the year I decided to stop dieting, and the year that I realized that maybe the reason why I have so much trouble losing those last five pounds is because maybe I like the way I look right now and I secretly don’t want to lose the weight. So why then does my heart sink every time I get on the scale and the number hasn’t gone down? Why is it that I preach body acceptance while secretly pledging to exercise my own pudge into submission? Why do I rarely feel as useful and motivated as when I’m on a new diet? Why can’t I just let myself be?
I don’t know the answer to that question. I do know that I’m tired of being unable to accept meeting any of my fitness goals such as being able to do more push-ups, improving my flexibility or having firmer thighs if it doesn’t come with a lower number on the scale. I’m sick of putting qualifiers on loving myself, “Sure I like the way I look but I still need to get rid of my flabby belly.” Why does the last part of that sentence need to exist? Why do I feel so wrong just simply saying, “I like myself”, and not tacking some sort of self-deprecating qualifier to it?
Like I said before, I don’t have any hard and fast answers on that. Maybe it’s because I’ve been on a diet since I was about fourteen and loving myself the way I am just isn’t part of the mental routine for me. Maybe it’s because I grew up with a self-loathing fat mom. A vibrant, intelligent, beautiful woman, who nonetheless was always ragging on herself for being fat. Her famous quote being, “The world is not ready for me…in a bathing suit/an evening gown/ dancing/riding a bike”. For her, being fat was an excuse not to try new things, and later in life became an excuse not to do the things she loved. I never wanted to be like that.
I don’t have the answers, but I know I’m ready to change. I’m ready to love my body without tacking a qualifier onto it. I’m ready to look at pictures of myself and have my first thought be if I look happy and healthy, not if I look fat. I’m ready to not be so self conscious about, “taking up more space” than my more petite friends. I’m ready to stop allowing one night’s binge on red wine and cheese to turn into an emotional meltdown about how I’m destined to become a 500 pound shut in.
I am almost 30 years old, it’s time to leave behind the neurotic, futile self criticisms of youth and replace it with…something else. What exactly I’m not sure yet, but I’m willing to start looking for it, and looking for that better place where I’m finally at peace with my body… all of it.
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