"I don't understand..."

Lately I see a lot of comments that begin with phrases like: "I don't understand why people would say..." and then go on to criticize, villainize, or dehumanize a person, a group, a concept, or an idea. I find this frustrating. Maybe it's the teacher in me. Maybe the world-traveler. Maybe the empathizer.

You will NEVER understand anything you don't actually try to understand. (pause, let it sink in, reread if necessary)

You will NEVER understand anything you don't actually try to understand.

Let's say, for a hypothetical you don't understand why anyone would advocate for laws that allow people to terminate pregnancies. I'm sure you also don't understand why when abortion was illegal there were women who were willing to either commit suicide or risk their own lives when they put themselves in the hands of virtual butchers to try to terminate unwanted pregnancies. When you can truly understand the desperation of that woman, when you can empathize with her on a human level, regardless of your feelings about abortion, you will UNDERSTAND why she feels the way she does and why people who know her and care about her or someone like her don't want her in that situation. You will understand as a human.

We'll make it even and say that you don't UNDERSTAND why someone would advocate laws that prohibit women from terminating pregnancies. You may also never have known the grief of losing a child you had loved to miscarriage, or of loving a child that might have never been born. You may not know how it's possible to attach the degree of love and attachment to a "bundle of cells" that a family that has gone through miscarriage of a wanted child has suffered. You may not know the spiritual grief an empathetic person feels every time they think of those lost children. When you empathize with this person and recognize their emotions you will UNDERSTAND why they feel the way they do. You will understand as a human.

There are no monsters here. No evil creatures with unknowable designs.

You can't understand the decisions of those you disregard and refuse to empathize with. If you cannot understand a person's decisions it does not make them illogical or a monster, it makes you ignorant of what they are thinking.

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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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sodium

THINK ABOUT IT...

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Amazing Post by an Female Baha'i Judge

Inspirational!
First Women: Dorothy W. Nelson
Submitted by Judge Dorothy Nelson on 6 February 2007 - 3:13pm.



It is an honor to participate in the “First Women Lawyers” series of Ms. JD. I am particularly happy to do so in the company of Professor Barbara Babcock, one of the most admired and distinguished members of our profession. She is a marvelous mentor to her female law students, many of whom I have hired as my law clerks.

Like Professor Babcock, I was the first woman faculty member of the law school that hired me-the University of Southern California. At that time (1957), I decided to insert into the curriculum something that had not been taught but was part of my deeply held beliefs. This was contrary to the advice of my friends on the faculty who advised that as the first woman on the faculty, I shouldn’t “rock the boat”. Nonetheless, I noted that everyone on the faculty appeared to accept the “adversary system” as a given and no courses or materials were offered in the field of alternative dispute resolution. As a member of the Bahá’í Faith, I believe in the process of consultation to resolve conflicts peacefully. I inserted materials on mediation, the closest thing to consultation, in my seminar on the administration of justice. One day at a faculty meeting, I overheard a faculty member say to another, just what is this thing called mediation that Dorothy is teaching in her seminar? The response was: “Oh, it’s a woman’s thing. She is trying to get everyone to love each other”. Well, it gives me the greatest pleasure to say that alternative dispute resolution (particularly mediation) is one of the hottest topics in the justice system today.

When I became the first woman dean, one of the senior faculty members called me into his office and advised me to arrive at the next faculty meeting 15 minutes late to show the faculty who was boss. Instead, I rushed home and baked 5 dozen chocolate cookies and arrived 15 minutes early to greet everyone. I also announced that we would have food at all faculty meetings henceforth. I have always found that in meetings and in crisis situations, food brings people closer together and improves communication immeasurably.

These two small examples reflect what I think is important to remember as a woman. While men and women must achieve full equality with respect to education, employment, salaries, and advancement opportunities, men and women have some distinct attributes which must be present if we are to have a just and peaceful society. In the Bahá’í Writings it is stated that men and women are like the two wings of a bird-the one is male and the other is female. Unless they are both strong the bird cannot fly heavenwards. However, you cannot take the left wing of a bird and put it in the right socket. The wings although equal have different qualities.

Why are so many women opting out of the legal profession? One answer may be that women have tried to conform to a male model which values long hours and neglect of family in pursuit of material wealth. One of my favorite stories is that of one of my first woman clerks. She was brilliant, highly motivated, a superb writer and researcher with an impeccable resume. She went to work for a major law firm after clerking for me. She called to tell me that she was pregnant, but had told the law firm that she had already hired a nanny and would be at work the day after the baby was born. The day after the baby was born, she called me from the hospital and said: “Judge, I’ve got a problem.” I said, “I know what it is. You don’t want to go back to work right away.” She agreed. I told her to call the law firm and ask for three months leave. She did and the leave was granted.

Two months later she called and said: “Judge, I have a problem”. I replied that I knew what it was. She wasn’t ready to go back to work full time. I told her to decide just how many hours she would like to work and ask the law firm to let her remain on a part-time basis. She worried that she wouldn’t make partner as soon as her contemporaries. My reply was to ask her if that was her purpose in life - to make partner as soon as her peers. She did call the law firm and the request was granted. However, three months later, the senior partner of the law firm called me and said: “Judge, what are you doing to my law firm? Three young male associates who had families said they had been observing my former clerk and like her wanted to spend more time with their families. They knew they wouldn’t make partner as soon but they decided their families were more important. I said to the senior partner that I thought it was wonderful that they were making this decision, especially considering that fact that the local bar association was spending close to $200,000 a year offering counseling to young associates who had drug and marital problems. The senior partner agreed and the environment of the entire law firm has changed. Thus, women lawyers have much to offer in improving the lawyers’ workplace.

Laws and practices need to be radically different from what we are accustomed to now in all aspect including parental leave times, flexibility in schedules, “interrupting” careers for raising children, perhaps employment type benefits for parents who are engaged in full time rasing of children (such as social security, health insurance and disability coverage). Society should act as if it seriously cared about child-rearing and should accept responsibility for these endeavors.

Carol Gilligan’s work in the book “A Different Voice” suggests that women invoke an “ethic of care”, and are concerned with preserving relationships and with the context of problems. Men, in contrast, invoke an “ethic of rights” on abstract notions of right and wrong and on objective rationality. This may be one reason why women have been playing such a role in alternative dispute resolution. The adversary system with its win-lose philosophy is, in the words of former Chief Justice Warren Burger, “too costly, too painful, too inefficient and too destructive for a truly civilized society. The movement is toward more appropriate forms of dispute resolution such as mediation where parties voluntarily and confidentially try to reach their own solutions with the help of an impartial neutral. Here the qualities of mental alertness, intuition, and the spiritual qualities of love and service, in which women are strong are gaining ascendency.

When I was meeting with the All China Women’s Federation in Beijing for the first time in l989 and discussing many of these issues, my husband (a retired Superior Court judge) asked for permission to speak. The women were delighted for men had never participated in their discussions. My husband stated that until women achieve full equality, men can never be the best of what they can be. After thunderous applause, the President of the Federation ran down the hall and returned with a gift of lacquered boxes for him. As we left, in gestures uncharacteristic for Chinese women, they patted him on the back as he went by and called out in Chinese, “model husband. model husband”.

As Professor Babcock wrote, the male-created and male centered model is under an unprecedented attack. Like her, I believe that the scene is set for revolutionary change-but not just for women but for all of mankind as well.

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Provocative T-shirts

Interesting article on the T-shirts many of the young folk are wearing these days.
Here are a couple excerpts:

Call it rude, call it crude, call it the latest sign of civilization’s decline — there is no escaping message Ts.
Some are harmless. JCPenney sells T-shirts that say “Be happy” and “Looking for my prince.” Some are ironic: “You couldn’t afford my expensive taste” is the message on a $12.99 shirt at Charlotte Russe.

Then there are the baddies of the T-shirt world — the sexy girls smokin’ in the bathroom. “Stop staring, they don’t talk.” “Yes, but not with you.” “Are you a good boy?’’

In a society soaked with sexual imagery, such messages are being worn by girls barely old enough to drive, or in some cases, stay home without a sitter.

But when does playful cross the line to trashy? And how should educators deal with sexual messages in the classroom?

At International Plaza’s Abercrombie store, 16-year-old Rebekah Stellick of Clearwater purchased a shirt that read:

“I may not be perfect, but parts of me are pretty awesome.”

Ariel Levy , author of the book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, says provocative shirts are a symptom of a culture obsessed with sexual showmanship.

“Even if you have a dress code that says you can’t wear that to school, it doesn’t change the fact that the entire culture is set up in a way where that is appropriate,” Levy said. She said it trickles down to youngsters from women who confuse sexual explicitness with feminist liberation.

Personally I rarely wear anything that says something at all, if I do it is usually either humorous or advertising for something I believe in. I object to even the "Princess" and "Boy crazy" t-shirts I've seen young girls wearing today because I really feel that the labeling makes girls WANT to fit the words and become some stereotype more than they might already have become. ICK! Why are women creating an ever-heightening sexual atmosphere and hierarchy for OURSELVES? Why do we take over where men leave off and push it even further?

GRRRRRR!

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Marriage/Commitment/American Dream/Chastity

Why has the status of marriage sunk so low that we believe we can get by with on-the-job training rather than years of disciplined study and growth?

A friend of mine was talking to me recently when she said this:

"So anyways monogamous bliss isn't so blissful all the time"....."in fact it lacks a little spice".

So today I was on a Myspace group page with a bunch of Baha'is talking about chastity and I came across some interesting views and a cool analogy that reminded me of her words

Here are some excerpts from the discussion:

[sex has] become totally MATERIAL. People are viewing the material in a significant other before anything else, thus they idolize it....sex becomes another activity, a material activity like any other - one to explore and take lighter than these standards [the standards of chastity and upright behavior set by religion].

It's like food. If you visit cultures where they eat the same thing everyday, they are not discontent with that at all. They never say, "oh I wish I had a different food". Of course not, because they don't know of different food, they are comfortable with what they have. Likewise if you try to get them to eat something totally foreign, they would be compelled to eat what their diet is used to. However, if you or I were asked to eat the same thing every day, we couldn't take it. Why? Because we are so used to having something new all the time.

I don't know if it's just having something NEW, we're used to having sweet, and savory, and spicy. We try it all, and we can't imagine life without dessert. If and when there aren't limits (such as weight gain, cost, and societal norms) governing us we tend to overindulge and gorge ourselves on these things. (I know I would live on chocolate, cheesecake, dr.pepper, and fatty cheeses and sugary desserts forever if I could). But take a poor child in Africa and ask them the last time they "ordered" dessert, or gorged themselves on cheeses or chocolates. Perhaps it is not their CHOICE whether or not to eat these indulgent foods, but in their world they do not yearn for them either, or miss them the way I would if they were taken from me.

How different are the pleasures of "the flesh" from the pleasures, desires, and cravings of palette? Do our actions create our cravings?

It is the same is with our "romantic relationships" in the West. We are surrounded with it in this society. Not just in practice, but in how there is just an exaggerated emphasis put on it in society. It is very very very VERY difficult then, to go from having all of that [liberty, variety and sexual freedoms], to going to a stable monogamous relationship. People get discontent so fast with another, and no longer wish to stay in [the relationship], then go off and find something else.

There were days in this country where the focus from the beginning of a young person's life was to find a good partner and then marry them. That was the dream. What was the classic tale of the 50's? Marry your high school sweetheart.

Today it seems that dream has been contorted into something where most people believe it is normal, expected, and ideal to:
-have a sexually adventurous life while young and "free",
-become emotionally and financially independant, and
-get some great toys,
and then you will settle down and have kids when you find someone who complements you (sexually, financially, and socially).

If this truly is to end up in marriage and child rearing, this is not only an improbable dream, it is set up for failure, as the things one would need for the end result are not taught through the practices at the beginning and indeed, the opposite values and needs and desires would be nurtured and grown.

Would you expect to become a CFO by
-taking many short term jobs,
-dating a lot of people and
-shopping yourself into debt?

No... why not? Because in order to become a CFO you must not only prove yourself to the people that will hire you, but you must spend years to develop your skills. Those skills being nurtured by
-long-term employment and responsibility,
-relationship building and management skills, and
-financial planning skills.

THIS is why CFOs are more likely to have had longer term employment, be married or in a stable relationship, and be personally financially sound. Not because they became a CFO and then found these things, but because they became the sort of person that would have the qualities necessary for being a successful CFO and eventually became one.

So why would one think that

-having a sexually adventurous life,
-becoming emotionally and financially independant, and
-getting great toys

would prepare them to be a suitable spouse... Where

-monogamy,
-shared finances and an emotionally co-depentant relationship, and
-a bit of sacrafice and restraint in your buying in order to save for children and future expenses

is going to be important.

Could you be a great CFO without the work experiences? Maybe. Could you be a great spouse without the experiences that help you develop skills for being a successful partner? Maybe. But do you really think the person who has been at many short-term, low-responsibility jobs will adjust easily to the pressures, hours, and responsibilities of a C-Level position? Do you really think what we (of the West) seem to consider "ideal" for a young person today is really best preparing them for a married life?

Why has marriage been alloted to the type of low-status ideal that has on-the-job training? Might lack of training, be why it also has 50% turnover rate?

Why do Americans spend millions of dollars reading self-help books to find out how to "make things work" and develop better timesaving, business, organizing, and managing skills and so little time or energy becoming more loving, more nurturing, more kind, more giving...becoming the kind of person who is READY for a loving relationship and that can raise intelligent, thoughtful, creative, and loving children?

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We decided/ I decided/ You decided

The "Morning After Pill" was passed by the FDA as an over-the-counter drug this week.

Abortion opponents threatened political retribution, however, and were displeased when President Bush backed the agency’s decision.

“Let there be no mistake about it,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, president of Human Life International, an anti-abortion group based in Virginia. “Today’s decision lies at the feet of President Bush and has created a lasting rift with the Catholic faithful who comprise a large part of his support base.”

I am always a bit torn between feeling that some people are extremists and trying to decide where the line is that determines if my own beliefs are extreme.

While I generally look at the hardcore “right to lifers” and wonder how it is that they can feel capable of making decisions in the lives of thousands of strangers they’ve never met. Although I believe in life beginning at conception, I have never been in the situation and hope to never be in the situation of having an unplanned pregnancy. I do not even guess at the immensity of that position and the consequences it entails. I would not ever choose to make a decision for someone else regarding the propriety of their decision one way or another. I consequently think of myself as someone who can hold a set of beliefs and values and standards for myself without feeling that I am judging others by those standards, much less forcing them to adhere to them. Just like in the matter of gay marriage and abortion, I feel there is a HUGE difference between disagreeing with a belief or a choice and creating a LAW to prohibit others from exercising that choice.


Then I progress on to the thought of government interference in our lives and think with some distaste of the thoughts of a certain friend of mine who believes government has no right to pull the “in the public’s best interest” card in ANY circumstance-- be it road construction, smoking bans, environmental regulations, or public health crisis and believes that supply and demand, public support/action, and individual choice will make these things work themselves out without government interference. I feel strongly that government SHOULD be involved in things that promote the health and safety of the public, the environment, and the individuals within the population it looks after. I am FOR seatbelt and helmet laws, gun control, environmental accountability, and drug control. No matter how much they may hinder an individual, I put the public well-being above that and believe that many times people will make bad decisions when it comes to money, power, and pleasure and that by making those decisions harder or impossible to make we are protecting people from themselves and paths that will make them a burden on others.

So what’s the difference between these two? How can I say that I am NOT expecting to live by my beliefs and standards and then say (in essence) “EXCEPT for”…wearing your seatbelt/helmet, using drugs, buying guns, when you intend to pollute, or otherwise put yourself or others in what I consider to be a bad position? aren't I just "creating a LAW to prohibit others from exercising that choice."

hmm...

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A tipping point?

I took a college course on Italian Art History from the 1400s-1600s several years ago, and as many interesting things as I learned about artists, and frescos, and technique, nothing stuck with me as much as the idea of the values of an Italian city. The city was formed and held three important positions: it provided protection, it provided city services (roads, water, etc.) and it provided for the beauty of the city. A city's pride was based on it's beauty and you could not get permission to construct something new without first having a panel of people evaluate the plans and agree that it would add to the beauty of the city. It was believed that the beauty of a city would lead it to greater peace and prosperity. I have felt since then that this is an overlooked aspect of urban planning and city government. I have always hated people who disrespect the environment around them by littering or defacing property. I have believed that the more rundown a place looks, the more people will treat it disrespectfully and believed in the value of art to elevate a place and the people that use that place. I've often thought government implemented mixed income housing must be so much more successful than low-income housing in single structures, or that is all grouped together; and it seems they are moving in this direction. Although it was often the city that got the blame for poor maintenance of public housing, I think it had more to do with the "tipping point" at which a certain amount of decline in the facilities (which could occur for any number of reasons) became a dramatic factor in the lack of pride or respect that people had in/for that property and led to an exponential decline in the safety, cleanliness, and livability of those areas.

I just listened to (an abridged version) of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and found it very interesting. In the book Gladwell talks about how epidemics are started--epidemics of style, thought, crime, and disease. He talks about how a single, or a small number of factors can become the "tipping point" that allows an epidemic to break out and spread more rapidly than anyone looking at one of those individual factors would ever imagine.

He discussed how New York City's crime rate in the transit system took a dramatic turn for the better when they began diligently removing grafitti and cracking down on farejumpers. Although those small factors seemed incredibly unimportant and a waste of time to many of the transit police at the time, changing the way they handled it and the seriousness with which they took it led to a change in the way people saw transit stations, trains and transit police, and the way they subsequently treated and acted in the system. These changes led to changes in the overall policing of the city, and eventually to dramatic drop in the murder rate in NYC.

Although it seems amazing that removing grafitti could contribute to a drop in murder rates, it is a definite contributor to the end result. We tend to put certain "logical" and "big picture" things much higher on the list when thinking about creating change, but more often than we realize it is the small changes that make the difference between something spreading one-by-one and something spreading exponentially.

These ideas are so interesting to me, and I've been cycling through different ideas that fit within this model, and thinking about change and how it works/can work. Expect a few more posts on this subject when I get those thoughts collected. :)

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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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