In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: November 2009

But, but, but, SHE’S FAT!

gabourey

Something to make you see red today: “Congrats on the role of a lifetime, Gabourey Sidibe. Self-esteem is a beautiful thing. But we should celebrate your performance, not your size. Obesity is a national epidemic.”

Hey, Gabby, you may be an amazing actress and you may have high self-esteem and you may be really satisfied right now because you’re smart and beautiful and talented and successful BUT! You’re a fatty-fat-fat! So quit acting like you deserve happiness.

So putting aside the PC platitudes, the facts tell a different story. Yes, Sidibe is a promising performer, one who’s already generating Oscar buzz. So if we just stick to her acting, kudos. But if we’re talking about her size—which has become part of the conversation—are people delusional? A five-foot-something woman tipping the scales at over 300 pounds is not something to celebrate. That’s SUPER fat, and no matter how passionately you argue the opposite, medical science will pull the plug on that position: Your health will suffer from carrying such an extreme amount of weight. Obesity can lead to a host of dangerous health issues including high blood pressure, diabetes, respiratory problems and sleep apnea—and that’s just the short list. When you’re extremely overweight, even walking becomes a struggle.

And what about the psychological issues? As well adjusted as Sidibe purports to be, there’s got to be an emotional disconnect between the mind and body. Finding comfort eating one’s way to morbid obesity is not healthy, nor is it self-affirming.

The author also criticizes the hyper-skinny norms in Hollywood and advertising, and concludes that we should all just be healthy — she cites a 180-pound woman in Glamour Magazine and the Dove Real Beauty campaign as steps in the right direction. She writes:

Real women can, and do, have curves; people do come in all different shapes and sizes. So the message is to be the healthiest you. That means not hauling around a mountain of excess of weight that limits activities and invites health problems. Nor does it mean starving yourself or over-exercising to the brink of cardiovascular failure. It’s about being comfortable in your own skin and loving yourself, but always striving to be better. If you’re overweight, say yes to dropping some pounds, but do so with an emphasis on obtaining better health.

So… people come in shapes and sizes, except really skinny and really fat. And Alicia is the arbitrator of what’s what.

I also support healthy eating and exercise. I think we should do more to make healthy foods accessible; we should do more to make exercise a reasonable possibility (that means more leisure time, more sidewalks, more parks, more open spaces in urban areas, accessible spaces for people with disabilities, and better healthcare so that people feel good and are physically able to move and to exercise). I think food is a great pleasure, and we all deserve to eat food that nourishes us and keeps us healthy. I think exercise is fun, and we all deserve access to it, whatever that means given our physical abilities. These are good things. I even think that, beyond making them accessible and available, we should incentivize them.

But, a couple of caveats. If, despite the availability of healthy food, someone wants to sit on their couch all day and eat Big Macs? Wouldn’t be my choice, and I don’t understand it, but, meh. Go for it. Not really my business. And even if we all ate healthy, nourishing food, and even if we all exercised, there would still be fat people. There would also be skinny people. And online columnists who have no idea what Gabby Sidibe eats or how often she exercises would still be totally unqualified to evaluate her physical and mental health.

Teens get money for college if they don’t get pregnant

So… that means that if they do get pregnant, they’re cut off? Oh right, because teen moms don’t go to college! Because they’re lazy and morally lax, of course. I’m sure lower rates of college attendance among teen mothers has nothing to do with deeply-ingrained social biases against teen mothers — the same kinds of biases that make programs like this sound totally acceptable — and practical difficulties, like finding childcare and affording both school and a baby.

Obviously we should work with all women, younger and older, to make sure that pregnancies are planned and wanted. For most teenagers, pregnancy erects substantial barriers. Of course we should focus on trying to lower the teen pregnancy rate.

But that focus should come out of a greater goal of helping teenagers — and that includes teen mothers. Mama or not, girls should be able to go to college. Too many teen moms are forced out of school, or assumed from the get-go to be lost causes. Programs like this don’t help.

Posted in Sex

Baseball Flame

Have I ever mentioned that I played softball? For like ten years? Because it was a huge part of my childhood and one of the reasons feminism came so easily to me. Spend all your free time in a team sport while Growing Up Girl and tell me that feminism won’t come easily to you, being around all your capable peers, seeing them make decisions on the fly, depending on one another for a group goal. Like many folks who play sports during their primary and secondary school years, team sports has given way to a rotating routine of half-hearted gym time or a completely sedentary existence.

Anyway, after a fifteen year hiatus from most things baseball, I started watching the 2009 World Series. While I’ve enjoyed the season so far — and discovered I have a soft spot in my heart for Pedro Martinez — I am reminded why I don’t watch professional sports anymore.

1) Instant replay is so meta it sucks the fun out of spectatorship. All the state of the art technologies diagramming the speed and trajectory of a pitch, or replays that contradict the ump’s call, for example, take the debate out of the game. In one of the early games a runner slid into home plate and was declared safe by the umpire in a call that by all means appeared a solid call to anyone else watching in real-time, BUT with the magical effects of Instant! Replay! it was discovered that not only was the player out, he never actually touched home plate at all. Cue the next fifteen minutes of commentary on whether umpires should be murdered or simply relieved of their duties.

2) When someone is at bat and they split the TV screen so you can see the batter on one side and the catcher on the other, they put up a little box in the middle with a closeup of the catcher calling the pitch. Except they call the pitch in between their legs right at the crotch, so with the angle it looks like the catcher is masturbating himself. It’s porn-y. I’m all, “You. You and the pitcher. You’re on national television. Get a room.”

3) When teams like the Yankees buy all their talent, it takes the heart out of the game for fans who appreciate the  teamwork and training needed to achieve a mutually shared goal like winning a national title. Where’s the art in buying your team?

Duality

I’ve lived in Australia all my life, and it’s a beautiful country, but it has never quite felt like home. I don’t know that anywhere would. I’ve got my ancestral culture on the one hand: rich, both deeply joyful and sad, mine. And on the other I have the mainstream white culture of this country: brash and casual, friendly and strong. If I try to move into one more than the other, I feel like a stranger. I don’t belong anywhere.

I only speak English, and my mother gets sad because I can’t understand, feels bad because my non-English education stopped and started (no one’s fault, really, it just happened like that, and I’ve got little talent with languages other than English). If language informs the way we think, I’m struggling with ways of being in the world I can’t quite articulate and therefore can’t quite realise. Yet I don’t quite have the knack with white, Western ways either.

Two cultures, two senses of time, two ways to use my hands in conversation, two ways of talking, two ways of being.

I don’t belong anywhere, so I try to belong in myself. But we need people, we need people to tell ourselves to, share experience, build culture. ‘Do you feel it this way? Do you feel it, too? What does this mean to you? Do our minds work the same way, have I absorbed ways of thought as you have, as everyone else has?’ Culture is built together, and we must relate it to each other. So I have to risk branching out. I find community where I can.

If you’re in a similar situation, do you experience this as a split in your soul or being richer? Or something else?

Pet Peeve

If you’re riding the subway during rush hour and it’s time to get off the train and walk up the stairs, it’s also time to put your newspaper down. I understand you may be reading a really interesting article, but when you read while walking you run into people, block the entire staircase and slow everyone down. For the love of keepin’ it moving, please take your nose out of your newspaper and exit the station properly.

What’s on your nerves today?

Why have referendums on basic rights?

I’m glad to see that Referendum 71 — the “everything but marriage” gay rights bill — is pulling ahead in my home state of Washington. It’s welcome news, especially since Maine just voted marriage rights away from same-sex couples.

But same-sex marriage and rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people shouldn’t be up for a vote. The United States is not a pure democracy, and our government was set up as a constitutional republic with checks and balances and an independent judiciary for this exact reason: So that the majority cannot do harm to the minority at will. We also already have a law that pretty well covers this issue. The fact that the courts have generally been too cowardly to draw the obvious conclusion does not mean that voters should be given carte blanche to strip away minority rights.

Peeling the sticky tape away from sex ed

I went to a Christian girls’ school. Now, not to say that all Christian girls’ schools are run like this, but I’m sure you can guess what the sex ed was like. No sex before marriage for you, girls! (Because you’re getting married, and to men, don’t you know.) You are like a piece of sticky tape: every time you stick yourself to someone, you get more bits of dirt on you until you find you can’t stick to the person you want to spend the rest of your life with! Look at these gross pictures of gross sex diseases, eww!

Suffice it to say, we were taught about uteri and fallopian tubes, but not about what this mysterious clitoris was. We weren’t taught about masturbation, or any sort of non-PIV sex, and we only got a hushed ‘and use a condom!’ at the end of the course. We were too embarrassed to look at each other, let alone discuss our fears or excitement or the gaps in our knowledge.

When we were in Year 11, we had a personal development day together with a boys’ school and another girls’ school. We all trooped into the boys’ school and prepared for a day of speeches, much like those we’d been given through school. But part way through, we got a rather unusual speaker who I’d encountered once before, have met once since and have never, ever forgotten. I’ll call her Mary. Mary was a very loud, enthusiastic woman: enthusiastic about teaching us, enthusiastic about being a Christian, enthusiastic about sex. Her manner was pretty full on, going from joyful shouting to (somewhat) hushed prayers. On this particular day, one of these prayers contained, ‘and I thank the Lord for my clitoris!’ Not a Christian myself, I wasn’t in head bowing mode at the time, so I had the opportunity to look around the hall – once I got over the shock that someone actually said that word out loud, that is. Half of my classmates were tensely frozen – particularly the ones sitting near boys – and half of them were whispering to their neighbours. Even though I couldn’t hear any of them, I knew exactly what they were saying. ‘What’s a clitoris?’

Looking back, I shift between describing this moment as hilarious and horrifying. From ‘I thank the Lord for my clitoris’ on through the rest of high school, I made it very clear to my classmates that they could come to me for any information or resource recommendations they might want and I wouldn’t shame them.

What’s a clitoris? It’s a question I’ve had to answer many times since that day, but every time it makes me very sad that I’m the one answering it. It should have been told these young people by their parents and their teachers, not that oddball feminist they know. It should have been taught along with all the other information they were given, through education formal and informal, about their bodies, and relating to people, and information about how the world works. Because whether they’re waiting for marriage or not wanting to have sex ever or already starting out on their sexual lives, young people have the right to information that will allow healthy, informed decisions about their own selves. And it’s terribly sad that young people are so often left to glean this information as best they can.

I think about this kind of sex education and how damaging it can be, causing anxiety and shame where there shouldn’t be, for a start. What kind of educator wouldn’t want their charges to have proper information so they can make up their own minds and run their own lives well? Mine, apparently.

Recommended related reading: Recently I rather enjoyed Que(e)rying Sex Ed by WildlyParenthetical, who teaches a university gender and sexuality course.

[Cross-posted at Zero at the Bone]