It is right there, outside the window, A slight breeze ruffles its yellow leaves; I should water it; I should pull up the weeds growing in clumps around it; I should care. I watered it for two years, Sleepless nights, hours of tears, It lived; It did not thrive, But not for lack of care. Some days I walk to the front window, I pull down the blinds and look at it. Some days I feel a stirring of concern; Some days I think about watering it; Some days I do. Today, like most days I only think of concern. I do not feel. I do not put on my shoes. I do not open the door. I do not even look out the window. That life I was building, That career, That body of work, That reason for being, Is not forgotten, It is withered. I have tried to define it. Malaise. Lethargy. Apathy. Depression. Laziness. Boredom. I have tried to give reasons. The wrong choice. Too hard. Too much criticism. Bad luck. I just wasn't good enough. It wasn't the right fit. I'm just in a bad spot. I'm just depressed. I just need to start moving. I just need to do SOMETHING. I worry that I cannot worry, that the tasks and stress I carried for so long now are absent. That drive and work ethic that found me waking at 4:30AM is long gone. I wake late and lay in bed with plans that fall short and plans that overwhelm. I try to care. I try to feel. I try to try. It feels like too much; I feel too little. Can one commit suicide through inaction? Can you just stop making choices? Can you just stop deciding? Can you just wither away like a plant unwatered? Can time speed on and wander away while I remain a part of the past?

Why I don't watch much Television

Yesterday I was supposed to have lunch with one friend visiting from Sweden and one friend visiting from LA...both were essentially canceled. So instead I stayed home and prepared for the 9 house guests I'll be hosting this weekend. I left the TV on while I did laundry, mopped the kitchen floor, swept, vacuumed, etc. This is far more television than I normally watch.

Then, as it began getting late the prime-time shows came on. These are mostly the shows I often hear about in advertisements but never see until they're re-runs. I'm just rarely home when they're on and not interested enough to watch them online or download them.

Last night I watched an episode of the new "Beverly Hills 90210" (same as the old premise but more glam and possibly better acting)and an episode of "Privileged" (Twenty-something Yale graduate turned tutor/nanny for young, naive, and sexually adventurous high school aged trust fund babies). Both shows I found rather disturbing.

The 90210 I remember had a bunch of awkward rather clean cut teens, with Dillon as the one "bad boy" although honestly the "bad-ness" of him seemed to be his broken home and cool sideburns. It was centered on the sweet and idealized Midwestern family of the Walshes who were a loving nuclear family. Poor acting made it a little cheesy and less dramatic (which made it also more fantasy than reality). The new 90210 was full of young adult-acting teens with polished looks, expensive designer clothes, and all-access passes to the world of fashion, sex, and drugs. The one episode I watched dealt with drug addiction, sexual predation, racism, and jealousy. Perhaps it's my imagination, but I don't remember THAT much of the nastiness of the real world exerting it's influence on my generation's 90210.

"Privileged" has an uber-cute character, Megan the tutor, who is the perfect Mary Jane at its core, so how could it go wrong, right? We're going to be teaching good values and bringing these over-privileged children back onto the right track, right? I assumed that was the premise anyhow. This episode dealt with the younger girl (14?) trying to become more sexually capable by buying porn (defiantly saying that she's not a virgin anyhow). The well-meaning Megan feels it's necessary to say something to discourage this girl or say something was wrong with her beliefs but doesn't know what to say, so she does a bunch of research on porn, watches a bit of the girl's DVD and frets about her own sexual history. Meanwhile she contemplates whether or not she should sleep with the guy she's been seeing on their next date (their 4th). She decides she really likes this guy and is going to go through with it and then gets nervous at the last second and freezes up. Meanwhile she says nothing to the 14 year old but instead berates the young boyfriend when he comes over and demands to know if he really cares. (Eventually the girl realizes on her own that the guy doesn't really care and dumps him.)

The young girl solves things on her own while the Tutor waits to see if the guy she didn't sleep with will call back (we are led to assume that the reason he isn't calling is probably because she didn't sleep with him and she struggles to believe this was the right decision). He finally does and she rushes to his house to have sex with him.

I'm confused. Maybe it's just that I was expecting the "adult" to make the wiser choices and be the example for the younger characters?

I'm guessing the moral of this show was that if you're prudent it's okay to sleep with a guy on a FIFTH date? Or that if you don't sleep with a guy by the fourth date and he doesn't dump you, he's a keeper and NOW you should sleep with him (to keep from losing him)? Or that it's okay NOT to teach young girls about self-esteem and the repercussions of comparing your sexual experience with the unrealistic sexual portrayal in porn, because kids are smart these days and they'll figure it out themselves?

The show ended with a Public Service Announcement-type statement that One in Three girls becomes pregnant before the age of twenty.

Wait a minute...

ONE IN THREE??????

HOLY CRAP! Where have I been living? Is this true?...so I did a little research:

When teens give birth, their future prospects and those of their children decline. Teen mothers are less likely to complete high school and more likely to live in poverty than other teens. Pregnant teens aged 15–19 years are less likely to receive prenatal care and gain appropriate weight and more likely to smoke than pregnant women aged 20 years or older. These factors are also associated with poor birth outcomes.

About one-third of girls in the United States get pregnant before age 20. In 2006, a total of 435,427 infants were born to mothers aged 15–19 years, a birth rate of 41.9 live births per 1,000 women in this age group. More than 80% of these births were unintended, meaning they occurred sooner than desired or were not wanted at any time. Although pregnancy and birth rates among girls aged 15–19 years have declined 34% since 1991, birth rates increased for the first time in 2006 (from 40.5 per 1,000 women in this age group in 2005 to 41.9 in 2006). It is too early to tell whether this increase is a trend or a one-time fluctuation in teen birth rates.

from the US Center for Disease Control

Wow...

Um...

Wow...

Yeah, I'm apparently naively living in another time.

No more television for me, it's going to give me nightmares.

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Female Chauvinist Pigs and Thoroughly Rotten Morals

I'm reading "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture" by Ariel Levy right now, and it's really hitting on a lot of the things that have been bothering me lately.

I know I posted recently about the "Identifying" t-shirts women are wearing that bother me, as girls identify themselves as sexual or as some type of gender stereotype. I've also posted about how it feels as if the choice for women today is to be sexual, or to be labeled as repressed. The "freedom" of sexual choice has become the freedom ONLY to be sexual.

The book I'm reading is in line with a lot of the things I've been reading, but it also touches on a few other aspects of this subject as well.


Business world still generally= the MAN's world, and in order to succeed women have had to act like men, and have taken it so far as to be attending strip clubs and buying into the T&A power play culture. “If you can’t beat them, join them,” and "If a guy is an idiot and I can use sexuality to my own advantage over him, why not?" seems to be the attitude.

The problem with these attitudes is that they continue a culture that places women as sexual objects, and heightened sexuality with worth, while simultaneously saying that a woman’s place is to be submissive and willing. The "Female Chauvinist Pigs (FPGs)" Levy talks about as accepting and buying into that culture and acting "like a man" generally don't identify themselves as part of that group (women) who use their bodies to get ahead, and will make fun of those women and try to portray a strong front "like a man" while seemingly completely oblivious that they are keeping the station of women below that of men and that no matter how well they “fit in” to a man’s culture, they will continue to be women.

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Even young girls recognize that with promiscuity and sexual openness now comes advancement in popularity and even celebrity (note how Paris Hilton's "sex tape" came out just before her reality series aired, and how young girls are posting sexy pictures and even videos online for their classmates and the world to see and comment on). Women are being rewarded for these actions, and if they speak out against them are generally told they just “don’t get it,” or are “repressing” their sexual nature.

Why was it that the convergence of the Women's Liberation movement, and the Sexual Revolution led to women being not freed from their role as a sexual object, but instead embracing and enhancing their role as a sexual object and objectifying other women as well in a kind of sleazy one-upmanship?

Why do women NOT see themselves as a group working together, but would rather be "one of the guys" (who are, of course, as a group very united and very willing to assist each other advance) to get ahead?

"Women who've wanted to be perceived as powerful have long found it more efficient to identify with men than to try to elevate the entire female sex to their level." (Ariel Levy) Women wanting to get ahead in the business world have found loopholes and behaved in ways that they found effective and those ways have generally been by imitating and fitting in with the men. And at some point those highly successful women will be "complimented" by others who will applaud her with phrases like “Masculine-like independence” or with some version of the phase "like a man."


Why do we buy into the idea of the attribute of a woman being "quiet, weak, and submissive" and the attributes of a man being "outspoken, strong, and dominant"?

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Why has our culture SO strongly embraced the idea that to feel sexy and to be sexually desired is an important part of a woman's self-worth and self-confidence? If this were inherently necessary for a woman, would it not also be inherently necessary for a man? And do we see the media forcing young men to outdo each other with vulgar displays of sexuality? How many men are out there exposing themselves the way girls are, just to try to be considered "hot" and become the object of desire?


In one part of the book Levy discusses a school where all the middle school girls were coming to school in mini-skirts and tiny tank tops and a motion was put forth for a school dress code--so that the boys wouldn't be so distracted.
Levy comments:

It's interesting that the teachers were concerned about boys getting distracted. Teenage boys tend to find teenage girls distracting no matter what they are wearing. As David [one of the students interviewed] put it, "What girls don't understand is guys always want girls. If every girl dressed casually, you'd still like girls. It's like, you don't have to exhaust yourselves." The people who are really distracted by the competition to look and seem sexy are the girls themselves.

How can we continue to ignore the way our culture is screwing up the generation of women behind us, who is so bombarded with messages telling them it is important to be hot, and to have the “right” wardrobe and nails, and bikini wax that they no longer have a foundation of self-worth OUTSIDE of their physical attributes and desirousness?

Okay, on a lighter note, please listen to Ernie Cline's "Nerd Porn Auteur" for a refreshingly humorous "guy's perspective" on how current plastic hotness falls short.

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Feminism/Morals/Values

Hey look, some people agree with me:

I was well-prepared for a career as a journalist, but I was sadly ill-prepared for a career as a strong, solid woman, with all the gifts and capacities that that word once implied. The character traits I should have been cultivating were neglected in favor of ever-stronger intellectual skills, and as a result I've spent the past few years playing catch-up.

While there is value in higher education, it doesn't teach the most important life tools—how to be a nurturing, kind, patient individual. It doesn't teach you how to be a mensch when you're sleep deprived or running a fever. It doesn't teach you how to be loving or lovable. These days, my ambitions are to acquire and internalize these qualities, and to strengthen myself as a woman, internally—not vis-a-vis what I look like through the eyes of a man, or how "successful" I am by society's standards. And the more I cultivate these inner qualities, the deeper and richer my life and my relationships become.

In addition to my ambitions as journalist, I had spent years striving for the perfect body, the perfect clothes, the perfect apartment—in short, all the external trappings of what I thought would make me look and feel good about myself. Needless to say, none of it ever worked for long.
~Andrea Kahn

Kind of hits on what I was discussing a few posts ago about how society today is ill-prepared for creating meaningful marriages and families. Our core attributes are sadly malnourished and the values that are most prized in society--ambition, independence, and a keen fashion sense ;) do little to prepare you for life as a spouse and parent.

I also on the same website I read an article by someone who agrees with my long-held interpretation of "Grease":

As readers here probably know, the story of Grease is about a girl and boy who meet one romantic summer and believe that they have fallen in love. The girl arrives unexpectedly as a student in the boy's school in September, and they are both shocked. She is taken aback by his cold and crass behavior, and he by the realization that he would lose his friends and his macho identity if he dates her as he had that summer, showing her love and respect without approaching her sexually. The tension in the film grows out of the inevitable choices that must be made: either the boy will have to give up his entire social community or she must--to put it bluntly--have sex with him. We all know what happens.

Now I never read it so literally as "she had to have sex with him", but I did read it as--she had to abandon herself, and all of her ideals and moral ways (Sandy went from being "lousy with virginity" to a smoking, drinking, high heeled, leather clad dominatrix of sorts) in order to fit in with HIS society, and THEN she could choose her keeper and "tell" him what to do ("you'd better shape up...because I need a man").

I still cringe every time I flip past that movie on TV and wonder how so many women could love it so much.

Outside of the catchy tunes it's a blatant smack in the face of feminism. It disguises the objectification of women as sexual liberation. Sure, Sandy is free to do what she wants and be with who she wants, but she'll only really be happy if she abandons her moral ways to "become" exactly what a man wants.

It's the sexual freedom of choice women have waited so long for--so long as that choice isn't virginity.

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More discussion on beauty

I've been on a discussion board that's been discussing some of the same issues with women and beauty and society and have been having some interesting discussion.

As someone there said:

My points thus far have been made to point out what I believe to be a comparison of the amount of direct influence males have over a woman's inadequacy (and thus her need to feel beautiful, etc) vs the amount of influence females have over the same sense of inadequacy.

I think that through a woman's lifetime, her female associations have more of an effect on her self image than her male associations.

Consider:
- A woman will usually interact first with female peers regarding gender issues, even before 'first contact' with a member of the opposite sex.
- In the early stages, issues such as who's ugly, who's cute, who's hot, who's a whore, etc etc are discussed with her female friends. At this point, she learns how to act, how to feel, how not to dress prior to any interaction with males.
- In the early stages, males are goofy. Period. If you're claiming that they are consciously attempting to shape the female psyche in order to maintain a stranglehold of control of the unliberated female psyche, you're on crack. Males at this age snort milk through their nose, and momentarily lose motor control when they *think* they can see a girl's undies.
- Women go to the bathroom together. This happens ALL the time. This. Does. Not. Happen. With. Guys. Ever. And if it does, it is not discussed. Ever.

Humour aside (it's 2 in the morning. I'm weak.) women spend a whole lot of time convincing each other about why other women are beautiful and why they're ugly before they ever get any kind of commentary from a guy. This happens in their early years all the way through to first contact. The issues are discussed at length in slumber parties, between classes, in teen magazines and women's magazines. I mean, you've got publications that are allegedly written BY women FOR women about 'health' and 'Beauty', and you've had that for generations prior to the very first GQ.

You talked about the "early stages" but I think you're skipping ahead of the real "early stages". I'm sorry I don't have the actual study, but I know I've read about it too:

I keep thinking about that study a few years ago where the researchers took a bunch of babies and dressed them all like girls. Then they asked strangers to interact with them. The adults assumed (because of the clothes) that the babies were all girls. When the handled them they did so gently, and used words like "pretty" and "fragile". Then the researchers took the same babies, dressed them as boys and repeated the experiment. This time, the adults played rougher games with the babies and called them things like "strong" and "smart". Overall, the adults assessed the "boy" babies (who were really boys and girls) as healthy and competent, and the "girl" babies as "tiny" (even though they were the same babies) and "beautiful". It made me wonder how many assessments I make about babies based on their gender, and how I treat them without even thinking about it.

We are told what we are and how we should behave and look from our infancy by both Men and Women. Children pick up on the traits that are most desired and accepted. Boys are guided towards being "tough" and a "big boy" and girls are encouraged to be "sweet" and "pretty" by encouragement of every adult they meet who either lavishes attention on these positives or scolds them for their opposites.

Studies also show that uglier children get less attention from their parents and others than their more attractive counterparts, so just as a two year old has already figured out exactly how to manipulate their parents into giving them popsicles for dinner, how much do little girls also figure out that the prettier they make themselves the more love and attention they will receive as a reward?

By the time we reach slumber parties it's more like we're comparing "trade secrets" and "marketing strategies" than just encouraging our friends to buy into the concepts.

Can't you all just exist without putting yourselves in the context of a man?

I don't have a fully formed thought on it, but it does seem interesting to me that when there is a large enough community of homosexuals a certain culture develops and that the gay male culture seems quite based on looks and physique, and the lesbian cultures seem far less focused on physical attributes. Could it be that we all market ourselves in the way we find most effective for our prospective mates, and when women no longer need to market themselves to men the physical aspects are of less importance?

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Gender, Beauty and Self-Worth

Today Stephanie said something that touched a few ideas that have been aggressively tangoing about in my head. While knitting baby sweaters she wondered about whether to use a particular pattern on an infant boy's sweater:

I keep thinking about that study a few years ago where the researchers took a bunch of babies and dressed them all like girls. Then they asked strangers to interact with them. The adults assumed (because of the clothes) that the babies were all girls. When the handled them they did so gently, and used words like "pretty" and "fragile". Then the researchers took the same babies, dressed them as boys and repeated the experiment. This time, the adults played rougher games with the babies and called them things like "strong" and "smart". Overall, the adults assessed the "boy" babies (who were really boys and girls) as healthy and competent, and the "girl" babies as "tiny" (even though they were the same babies) and "beautiful". It made me wonder how many assessments I make about babies based on their gender, and how I treat them without even thinking about it.

I have been thinking a lot lately about gender roles, sexism, and our percieved sense of value/self-worth in regards to gender lately.

It started in a variety of ways, but I think I voiced it (which somehow is how I come to more concrete thoughts) when I read a post of Lacey's where she was complaining about being whistled at while walking down the street. A guy had responded that we are all narcissistic to some degree and that we enjoy feeling attractive. I replied (basically, but I've added stuff later):

I think the men who believe or say that they are complimenting women by accepting or participating in these behaviors also have to have the underlying idea that a woman's self-worth is based (only?) on her attractiveness to men. That somehow, her person is made to feel more worthy by having outside attention placed upon its beauty. Not only is this a misguided sense of worth, but is very one-sided, as the same cannot be said about men. Men are rarely given this type of attention for their physical bodies, and we don't see a beautiful man and believe him to be a success and an ugly man and assume he is a failure, as is often the case when people judge women. We have words like "gold-digger" and "cougar" as derogatory terms for women who place a man's worth according to his pocketbook or his youth, but there are no words for men like this...we seem to just accept that the universal judging of women according to looks alone is okay.

I'd prefer someone to compliment me on my style, my attitude, my intelligence, my choices, my accomplishments,or my hard work over my body or looks ANY day!

Lacey responded to the thread of comments by saying:

What I'm learning is if I want to "blend" and just become part of the woodwork (which is GENUINELY what I want when walking to get coffee), I have to purposely make myself look less attractive.

I wish I could say that I was unaffected by what people around me do, but it gets to me. There are some things that I couldn't care less what someone thought of me, but when it comes to me physically, it bugs me. They point out the good as well as the bad. I don't want to hear either.

And I agree, I don't want to hear it either. Whether I feel good about myself should have little to nothing to do with what my physical body looks like. If I'm bathed and dressed in clean clothes that should be sufficient physically. It should be about the life I choose to live and how I've lived it that determines my self-confidence & pride.

I've just become really sick of our society and media telling us/showing us that women have to be beautiful to be successful and confident and to realize our full potential. I feel like I'm unable to fully voice all the ways this is done, and how different this is than the way men are treated. My brain swims with examples, but finds very few that I can hammer down and say "here, look, this is IT"... especially since women seem so willing to accept it and buy into it, and participate and further its cause. How can I say that we should not be subjected to it, and then turn around, put on make-up, wear a form-fitting outfit and help my friends pick out outfits to "better flatter" their figures? Is this the Overeaters Anonymous paradox? The paradox wherein one must break the addiction and yet cannot completely give up the errant/addictive/unwanted activity? How we say that beauty is unimportant and somehow NOT base our worth upon it, but still take part in things meant to achieve it?

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