Feminism – Feministe

On Being A Good Lebanese Girl

Or a good Greek girl. Or a good Indian girl. Or a good Mexican girl. Or a good any-ethnicity-that-has-ever-been-shoved-down-your-throat-ever girl.

I want you to meet Charlie. Charlie and I met each other just a little over a year ago—but I can’t believe it’s only been that short. He was holding an appletini and talking about fashion. I was drinking a Brooklyn Lager and talking about politics.

“I mostly write about the Middle East—it’s a little bit personal because my family is from there”

“Oh my god, me too. Where from?”

“Lebanon”

“Me too!”

That night, we talked about everything. We talked about fashion in Beirut. We talked about drag queen names—he said he would be, “Anya Knees.” We talked about Lebanon. I made him tell me stories about living there. We talked about our music. We talked about our culture. We talked about our families. We talked about our mothers. We talked about our traditions. We talked about that we were both Greek Orthodox. We talked about our recipes and our food—we talked a lot about food.

Our first date, just the two of us was a Middle Eastern restaurant in the East Village called Moustache. We only fell more in love.

Charlie is a self-proclaimed “Good Lebanese Girl.” He was born in Beirut—and came to the United States in 2006, when the country was rocked with instability as the Israeli Defense Force bombed the southern part of the country. His family went to California, where they opened a Lebanese restaurant that he worked at—later, he moved to New York City to study fashion design.

Once a month, Charlie drags me out to “Habibi Night”—a night of music and dancing for gay Arabs—or as he calls them, “gayrabs”—living in New York City. We dance. We celebrate. We get in conversations about our backgrounds with strangers and exchange stories.

On other nights, we’ve stayed in—cooking food and talking about our opinions on religion, traditionalism and how it’s affected our families and everyone else around us. We’ve talked about the differences of being Lebanese-American and being American, and how when we meet another one of our bretheren we feel more at home. Some of these conversations have taken place in his tiny studio apartment, underneath his gigantic Lebanese flag. Other times they have happened at other friends’ apartments, typically while wearing blonde wigs.

Recently, Charlie decided to move back to Lebanon—his parents had moved back there, and Charlie was both looking for a change and responding to a longing that he had felt since he left. I was nervous about him—he isn’t out to his family, and he was moving home to a country where homosexuality is illegal. Last time he was in Lebanon, he was younger and hadn’t come out yet—and despite the fact that it is painted as the progressive country of the Middle East because women can wear mini skirts, there are still many arcane laws and customs.

For our last dinner before his departure, we met at Moustache for old times sake. He looked stylish and fabulous as always—reading the Arabic written on the walls out loud to me. Equal parts gay and Lebanese, embracing and never compromising all elements of his identity. I couldn’t help worrying about him—as the country of our origins once again flirts with instability, all I wanted to do was hold him close.

But the time came to say goodbye. As I walked home, missing him since the moment we parted ways, I thought about our friendship, our heritage and our identities. Neither of us are exactly the ideal good Lebanese girl. I moved far away from my family, am twenty-one years old and don’t have a child with another one on the way and no intention of making this happen for a while. I am outspoken on a variety of topics, curse like a sailor and am most likely inadvertently offensive. I have no embroidery skills. Charlie is gay, a connoisseur of fine drag queens and fashion, is not and will never date a woman. However, when we are together, we talk about our heritage. We talk about our families, we talk about how politics shaped our lives—and brought us together to New York City, only to discuss the layers of history of another place that we identify with. We talk about how our identity has changed how we articulate our passions—fashion and politics. We dance. We celebrate our culture. We imagine meeting again in Lebanon.

We call our families everyday. We discuss and obsess over our heritage. We piece together our stories. We are proud. Our heritage and culture matters to us.

We are the perfect good Lebanese girls.

Hello! Thanks for Having Me.

Hi There!

For those who don’t know me already, I’m Anna–or perhaps my nom du tweet, @agoodcuppa.

I am a writer (no way, the guest blogger is a writer!), a social justice activist and rabbel rouser, and an unapologetic feminist with a bleeding heart.

I hail from the Bay Area in California. My mother is Lebanese and Greek, and my father is French-Canadian. I consider myself an ethnic mix of “questionably Brown” largely informed by being just Arab-American enough in post-9/11 America. I’m very Pro-Palestine, and have taken a long, painstaking journey to express this in a way that distinctly separates Judaism from Israeli-ness from Zionism and recognizes that Israel has been established as a state, and a solution must account for these effects. I have absolutely no idea what that solution will be–besides that it must include an end to the military occupation of Palestine. I hope–and have faith–that this solution will arrive in my lifetime.

I’m a loud-mouthed woman with a lot of opinions. I’m a millennial and a recent graduate. More of us need to be given a voice to express who we really are (hint, its not GIRLS), and how we are trying to negotiate this brave new economy.

Appropriately enough, I now live in New York City.

Content-wise I’m all over the place–and will probably write a lot about the Middle East, a little about Brooklyn and everywhere in between. In addition to writing, I’m an artist with a recent obsession with infographics–if you are lucky, my blog will include an occasional visual element. Get excited–my last infographic included a cartoon riot cop, described as equal parts adorable and terrifying!

A little word about comments–I will try my best to moderate, but am a busy lady and probably don’t have time to antagonize over your bull shit. So if you really have a problem with me, save it for a hardcore face to face barfight. I’m in.

So, welcome to my brain–I hope you enjoy your stay! Please, comment away on what you would like to see discussed! Big thanks to Jill for inviting me and Sally for suggesting me.

Teaching Feminism in High School: Moving from Theory to Action

By Ileana Jiménez, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine

During a recent Twitter chat on #sheparty hosted by the Women’s Media Center, I tweeted: “How many feminists know edu hashtags and vice versa?”

The point I wanted to get across is that many feminists today don’t know much about today’s education conversation and, in turn, educators don’t know much about what’s going on in feminist discourse, whether academic or activist.

My job as a feminist high school teacher is to close the women’s and gender studies gap for young people. To stop bullying, stop raping, stop perpetuating racism and sexism, and instead start making social change, I believe in bringing a gender, racial, and economic justice lens to education at all levels. Feminism does this work.

For me, connecting schools with feminist theory and action is personal. When I was in elementary school in Long Island in the early ’80s, I was called “Afro” and “nigger.” Recess was not fun; to the contrary, it was a time to be bullied by my peers, who surrounded me while I was on the swings and in the sandbox. I always wonder how different my life might have been if my white teachers and white peers knew something about racism or if the rich history of Puerto Ricans and African-Americans had been taught to us as children. The goal would not have been color-blindness, but safety and inclusion, respect and responsibility for each other.

Now that I am a teacher, I believe that the power of feminist theory and action is exactly what young people need to create understandings across differences, learn how to lead healthy lives and to make social change.

I start by teaching my high school students the very thing that colleges teach in feminist studies — intersectionality. The students read a variety of texts — Patricia Hill Collins, the Combahee River Collective, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Cherríe Moraga. Like any good high school English class, they conduct close readings, hold discussions and write about their interpretations. Their writing also includes blogging on their own feminist blog, F to the Third Power.

Things about me which please me (and even occasionally make me proud).

The other day I wrote about things I do of which I am ashamed.

This shame is based in my personal, and particular, experience with patriarchy and my understanding of feminism, and it’s real, but it’s dawned on me in the meantime that it might have been useful to note that I don’t exactly live my life soaked in shame or guilt. I have moments. The third and fourth things on the list plague me to a greater or lesser degree fairly regularly, but I don’t walk around in a morass of self-loathing. Mostly, on most days, I’m pretty ok with myself.

But if I think about it, expressing shame or guilt — while honest and I think even important (we can’t deal with something until we admit to ourselves that it’s a problem. Hello, daughter of the 12 Step Programs here!) — is hardly revolutionary. In fact, it’s kind of part-and-parcel of the Judeo-Christian (I cannot believe I just used that term) worldview, and — even more problematically — part-and-parcel of Western social norms and mores for women. We talk about what we’re doing wrong all the time, frankly.

What would be revolutionary, perhaps, would be to talk about what we do right.

This came to me yesterday after wandering around at Eat The Damn Cake, through the posts of ETDC blogger Kate & her guest blogger, Anna. Kate has a regular feature at the end of each post that she calls an “Unroast”; in each one, she expresses love for some part of her body or appearance. Recently this has included “Today I love the way I look in baggy shirts” and “Today I love my ankles. They’re an almost exact combination of my parents’ ankles,” both examples indicating a certain looseness and creativity to the idea which I love.

The attitude behind the Unroast (and, frankly, the attitude behind the blog’s name) leads me to visit Eat The Damn Cake frequently. I have even written in response to Kate’s work in the past, but yesterday, it was guest blogger Anna’s posts that really grabbed me.

Anna was veryvery pregnant as she wrote the posts in question, grappling with the reality of moving as a veryvery pregnant person through the world, and these are the two bits that made we want to go out in search of her to ask her to be my lawful wedded wife. The first is from We are already normal (a very pregnant post), the second from We owe it to little girls (emphasis Anna’s):

Women’s bodies. Want to know what normal is? Look around you. Working women. Mothers. Students. Friends. Teenagers. Grandmothers. We are normal already.

and:

Our attitudes influence more than just ourselves. If we’re going to change our body culture, we have to change our habits. Even those that are socially reinforced, even those that can be pleasant and bonding, as negative body talk so often can be.

And finally, we get to my point (which I swear, I have):

If I’m going to speak publicly about my feelings of shame, I should also choose to take the rather more revolutionary step of tooting my own horn. And thus, hereunder you will find a list of things about me in which I find pleasure, and even, occasionally, pride.

1. I have genuinely taken on-board the notion that if an article of clothing doesn’t work on my body, the problem is not my body, but the article of clothing. This seems small at first glance, but I think it’s actually kind of big. That moment, that moment when you stand in front of a mirror trying to take some piece of clothing (that you have been assured is gorgeous and all-the-rage) and make it look “right” on your own body and it’s.just.not.working — that moment is a moment of such deep intimacy with ourselves, a moment in which it is perilously easy to further swallow the lie that all bodies must look like one kind of body in order to be worthy, a moment in which it is so easy to get angry with our very flesh — it took me more than 40 years, but I have finally reached the point that when I start to hear those voices, I tell them to shut the fuck up, and I mean it. And I’m proud of myself, because it wasn’t easy.

2. I regularly contribute to the social dialogue about women’s rights, women’s bodies, and the fact that — given that we make up half the world — these are not “women’s issues” but human issues. In fact, there are days when I act like this is a job. I’m not particularly aggressive in my approach (often leading with versions of “I see why you’re saying that, but…”), but I am dogged. I write, I tweet, I confront, I question. I am part of the process by which society is undoing its assumptions about rape, women’s autonomy, our reproductive rights, and the essential human right of all people to make their own choices and live their lives precisely as who they are.

3. I am raising my children to be aware, thinking feminists. Our family talks all the time — at the dinner table, in the car, while watching TV — about how the world treats people, what society’s expectations are, and whether or not those expectations are fair or just or even reflective of the reality that we see around us — and the husband and I see the fruits of this labor all the time.

For instance #1: The girl recently complained that a very cool construction toy she’d gotten for her 8th birthday had no pictures of girls on the box, and when she found one on the instructions, she noted, with sarcasm positively dripping from her voice, that the model had built a princess crown “because all girls ever do are princess things.” For instance #2: The boy prepared this speech in honor of Martin Luther King last year for school (when he was all of 11), writing: “I have a dream that one day no one in this world will be able to push you down, regardless of any stereotypes. I have a dream that in all 50 states Muslim Boys and Muslim Girls and homosexual boys and homosexual girls and rich boys and rich girls and poor boys and poor girls and all of the boys and girls of America will join together and nothing in the world will be able to stop them.”

It matters that our girls and boys grow up to be feminist adults, but it also matters that they be feminist children. We need only look at schoolyard bullies to see the impact that children can have on people’s lives — loving, caring, egalitarian-minded children can help heal the world. And of course as their parents, it matters very deeply to us that the boy and the girl gain the tools they’ll need to shake off the world’s damaging messages. I am proud of the way that I am raising my children.

4. And finally, in the spirit of the Unroast: I love my hair. It’s long, of a vaguely once-was-blonde-now-is-brown color, streaked with bits of silver here and there and now that I’ve stopped using shampoos with Sodium Lauryl Sulfate has returned to the kind of softness and luster it had for almost all my life. It feels like a crown on my head, particularly when I wear it loose, and I love the way that makes me feel.

Things I do of which I am ashamed.

Please note UPDATE in the comments (#82).

I’m a feminist.

I’m 46 years old, and I have never known myself to be anything but a feminist, in word and in deed. I marched for the ERA as a young high schooler, had a copy of Our Bodies Ouselves when it was still thin, and knew even before I’d started dating that I would keep my own name if I got married. As for work? Well — of course. In whatever field I wanted. And if a man didn’t respect me or these ideas? He had no place in my life. Period.

I was raised by strong women: Two grandmothers who were among that less than 10% of American women who attended college in the 1920s, and a single mother, widowed when I was a baby, who worked hard and had a tool box with her name on it, so that we would remember to put the tools back if we used them.

None of these women ever took guff from anyone, none ever felt (or demonstrated to me, at any rate) that they should shrink themselves or their opinions to fit the world around them. I grew up knowing of Grandma Hauser’s bitterness that she’d been called home from college to tend to a sick mother when there were three healthy brothers at home, and that Grandma #2, known to us as Queenie, had been a flapper at a time that her sister was busy learning to keep home. The subtext to it all was always: You have every right to be who you are, and when the world tries to tell you different? Push the hell back.

I was lucky.

And yet, I am still a product of much more than that. I still move in the world as-it-is, not the world as-I-dream-it, and much as I am the first to say that the world used to be worse, I will also freely admit that we have a long way to go. I have a long way to go.

I’m a feminist. And there are things that I do, regularly, that I think feminists probably shouldn’t do.

1. I don’t leave the house without make-up. This one isn’t that bad, I figure. It’s decorative, and I actually mostly enjoy it. Make-up is fun, bottom line. But I know (because I have access to the deepest recesses of my brain, even if sometimes I wish I didn’t) that even on days that it’s not fun, even on days when it’ll make me late to take the five minutes I need to apply the layers — I’m going to take those five minutes, because I worry what the world with think of me otherwise. The look I achieve is minimalist, entirely natural (people often express visible shock when they hear that I wear make-up at all), but that just further proves the point that I’m using it as camouflage, not artistic expression.

2. I shave my legs and underarms. I have none of the above-suggested ambivalence about this one. I’m pretty confident that this is moronic. I know feminists have a variety of opinions on this (as on all things), but I can only be the feminist that I am, and this feminist firmly believes that the removal of the hair that serves as a secondary sexual characteristic, indicating that I have gotten through puberty, is a concession to the patriarchy, pure and simple. It’s about the assumption that straight men like their women to look like little girls. Which, you know, I’m kind of opposed to that sort of thing. And yet, I find my hairy legs and pits truly, deeply unattractive. That part of my mind is throughly colonized. So I carry on. But when my daughter watches me shave — as little girls will — she not infrequently gets a wee lecture in which I tell her that if she decides to never do this crazy thing, I’ll think that’s kind of cool.

3. I feel guilty about eating. I know I shouldn’t. I talk and write about how women have to heal their relationship with food. I don’t participate in those conversations that women seem to be forever having in which they beat themselves up for having a damn piece of cake, and I try to frame the damn cake in a positive way when I can. And I never, ever express this guilt out loud to anyone but my husband, in private. I do not need to add to the ambient noise, to the very problem from which I suffer. Most importantly, my son and daughter will never hear it from me, because I want them to shake this illness that plagues our society. Instead, I encourage them (with the assistance of their most excellent father) to listen to their bodies, to eat for enjoyment as well as health, and to love the bodies (tall, broad, and strapping) that the good Lord gave them. But the guilt? I feel it. It’s there, and I hate it.

4. I look in the mirror and love my body only grudingly. Like 90% of people, my body doesn’t correspond to the ideal with which we are inundated, and to which we are constantly compared. The ideal with which we as a society shame each other and ourselves. My bra size has only grown with pregnancies and my middle years, and my middle bits are a combination of scarred (two emergency C-sections + one major surgery to remove an enormous tumor — you can read all about it here, if you’d like!) and mushy, and there are days when all the kind words that I share with others, the things I say out loud to my daughter and son, and the unabashed lust of my husband — the best, most honest man I have ever met — matter not in the least. I wish my body were… different. I love it, sure, but kind of like you love the lame dog who does her best and is really sweet, so you forgive her for being so damn slow on walks.

I am a better feminist than I once was, and I think that — as a direct result of how they are being raised — my son and daughter will be better feminists than their father and mother are.

But it’s not easy. And there are days when it’s damn hard.

Back from Suffragette City

You’ve got your mother in a whirl/Cause she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl -Rebel Rebel, David Bowie

And for my last trick…

I’ve written about pop and dancing and falling in love and even a few political posts. So where to go from here? Bowie, of course.

David Bowie made me a feminist, you see. Well, not entirely. Lots of other things did, too. And certainly Bowie had little to do with that ever-present subject of argument, “when I decided to call myself a feminist.”

No, Bowie was just there when I needed him, whispering in my ear about the secret powers of glitter makeup and transgressive clothing. He wasn’t political and by not being so he was more political than anything else I was listening to. While Jello Biafra and the Clash made explicit arguments, Bowie was just there, convincing millions of straight boys to buy his records while he gleefully paraded in high heels and dresses and skintight leotards.

Never drag, really. Just the accoutrements that we associated with femininity but that he wielded as tools for transformation, again and again and again. Makeup to draw symbols on your face, exaggerate one feature beyond any reality.

What’s up? I’m Erica, and for the next two weeks, you’re mine.

Hey there!

So, I’m Erica Sackin, one of the many guest bloggers whose semi-capable hands you’ve been left in for the next two weeks.

I’m a feminist, but usually I write more about the young and tragically hip for websites such as The Awl, or FreeWilliamsburg.com. I also work for Planned Parenthood of New York City (where I sometimes blog), but everything I write while on Feministe will be mine, not the organization’s. Also, let’s be clear: I may write about our experiences with sex and sexuality, but I’m in no way a medical expert. So, like, don’t ask me for medical advice. I’ll just tell you to go see a doctor (or nurse, OBGYN, APC, etc.).

Please feel free to comment all over the place on anything I write. The internet has brought us a lot of great things (Cat videos! Searching for bars/restaurants! Directions!) but one of my favorites has been the vibrant feminist communities where people from all over the world can share their personal experiences together, without fear of (serious) repercussions.

Thanks !

Erica

PS – should you be curious, you can also find me on twitter, my rarely-updated Tumblr, or just plain old email.

I’ll make you a deal like any other candidate…

Melissa Harris-Lacewell and Katrina vanden Heuvel were on GRITtv yesterday to talk about the “Year of the Woman” framing that’s hit hard after the round of primary elections we saw in the States last week, and something that Harris-Lacewell said really struck me.

Transcript: This is part of what identity politics always does, it assumes that anyone whose voting record is contrary to the identity group from which they emerged, it assumes that they are therefore independent thinkers. We saw the same thing with Colin Powell as a potential Republican nominee for the U.S. presidency, the idea that as a military man and a Republican he wasn’t bound by race. It’s part of what made the election of Barack Obama so extraordinary. It wasn’t even so much the election of a black man but a black man in the Democratic party which was so surprising! I’d expected us, in fact, to elect a person of color, to elect a white woman as president, but I certainly thought that it would have come from the Republican party because there’s always this assumption that if you are against the interests of the majority of the individuals of the group from which you emerge, that you are therefore an independent thinker.

Sarah Palin’s whole “Maverick” shtick. Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, who my boss noted are just the acceptable version of any other multimillionaire, being able to play some sort of “outsider” game. These women get credit for being independent!!!! because they’re seen as having decided on their own to come to right-wing politics, having stepped outside of their identity group to join a politics that, let’s face it, favors well-off white people, especially men. They favor cuts to government services that disproportionately help women, they pretend that gender is no obstacle–well, sure, when you’re the former CEO of eBay or HP, your money buys you out of many of the obstacles that gender creates for women candidates in fundraising.

Me, I’m pretty far left in my politics, but in general I do support policies that would be assumed to be “identity politics.” Yet for me, it was completely contrary to how I was raised. My parents were conservatives. For me to come round to being not only a liberal but someone who identifies as a socialist, I had to do a lot of “independent thinking.” Solidarity wasn’t exactly a word that was used in my household growing up.

But suddenly the media has a narrative it likes; that this is the year of the (Republican) women. I spent a chunk of last month writing a piece that should be out soon on women in the Tea Party and Patriot movements, and their connection to feminism. I mentioned yesterday when writing about Labour in the UK the idea of requiring 50% women in the Shadow Cabinet, and Harris-Lacewell, elsewhere in the show (you can watch the full episode here), noted that having women and people of color represented is in fact a good in itself because it shows people who is considered a citizen, who counts. But that is a separate good from having candidates and elected officials who are in fact progressive and supportive of people who are oppressed, regardless of their identity group.

In other words, to simply be a member of a group does not mean you are actually advocating for or helping the members of that group. You see this even more with the kind of identity politics that are created rather than innate: the argument over who gets to call themselves a feminist, for example. Feminists are rightly angry that antichoice, anti-social-spending Sarah Palin wants to claim the title, and saddened when young women reject it. But just the fact that Sarah Palin and others put it on does not mean they are actually doing anything for us.

It’s what makes me like bell hooks’s statement that instead of saying “I am a feminist,” one should say “I advocate feminism.” It changes it from an identity to an action. Otherwise anyone can declare themselves a feminist and then have to do nothing to help women. One can say “I’m not racist” and then get angry when called out on a racist action. It becomes not all that much different from claiming to help women simply by being a woman in the race. Maybe on some level it helps to have more women calling themselves feminist, more women in office, but we need more than just words and presences. We need action.

lovers in a dangerous time

I know introductions seem to be the thing, but I’m going to jump in with both feet first and we’ll go from there. I’m Little Light, I blog here, and I’ve been a Feministe guest blogger before. Most of you know who I am.

What I do is preach. I wrap that preaching up in other things, but I will be the first to admit that sermons are sort of what I do. So let’s cut to the chase, shall we?

I’m going to start my stint at Feministe by admitting something we’re not supposed to–as Empowered Women, or whatever it is in a movement like this, and especially as a woman of color in social justice work, but I don’t think anyone’s supposed to admit this:

I am not doing so hot right now. I’m burnt out. I’m tired and I’m scared and I’m hurting. I’m disillusioned with online activism and it’s been so long since I posted in my actual blog–the one where it seems like every time I post, I get set on and taken apart by people who don’t respect my basic personhood and want me to know it–that last week I got a comment from a reader who thought I was dead in a ditch somewhere.

That looks like a statement of weakness, doesn’t it, to a lot of us? That’s like saying, hey, everyone, I’m super vulnerable right now, and here’s my wallet, not in the face, please. It’s like inviting everyone to know you’re right there and you can be hurt. There are a lot of good reasons we avoid admitting vulnerability. Most of us have been stomped somewhere, sometime. Most of us, along some axis or another if not many intersecting axes, have felt the sting of oppression–most people in a social justice movement like feminism, anyway, or they wouldn’t feel the need to care. Most of us have seen someone take advantage of that vulnerability. We have been taught over and over again to hide it, to not show our weak spots, to hide when we’re sick or bleeding and not let anyone know lest we be devoured. Whatever you are, don’t be vulnerable. Don’t tell them you’re scared. Don’t tell them there’s places to hurt you. At best, you’re not just being fatally foolish, you’re being weak. Whiny. Clearly you’re expecting someone else to clean up your mess, or otherwise infantilize you. You’re letting everyone down: family, friends, the however-you-define it movement, yourself. It’s, in many cultures, mine included, filthy like sin to admit your human limits and soft places.

What I am suggesting is that vulnerability is more than that: vulnerability is strength. Vulnerability is radical. And radicalizing vulnerability is vital.

Women Athletes: Choose Between Strong and Sexy

Laurie and Debbie say:

(Cross-posted to Body Impolitic.)

Unusualmusic, blogging at The Angry Black Woman, has an excellent initial post on what we expect American women athletes to look like, and live like.

One of the great problems that women athletes face is the idea that women are heterosexual sex objects. And the beauty ideal for these sex objects is a thin shape, with a bit of a curvy shape, (but not too curvy, thats fat), and a distinct lack of muscles. So female athletes are by definition considered deviant. And the more strength and height that their sports require, the more un-feminine, and deviant they are considered.

Caster_Semenya

Meanwhile, the blogosphere has been buzzing with the story of Caster Semenya, South African middle-distance runner who has been forced to take a gender test because her status as a female has been questions. (The International Olympic Committee doesn’t do gender tests any more. But the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) still does.

Unusualmusic’s excellent post sheds a lot of light on the Semenya story.

Basically, there are two points being made “against” Semenya: first, doesn’t look female enough, and second, “her astoundingly quick performance” must be evidence of a lurking Y chromosome somewhere.

What they really mean is what unusualmusic is writing about: we like our women at least a little fragile, at least a little vulnerable. Being blue-eyed and blonde makes a big difference too. We encourage women to be fit and strong, but not too fit, or too strong. Go to the gym, preferably at least three times a week, but pick those workouts so they don’t give you “ugly muscles.” Take up that sport, but don’t get too good at it (we don’t like our women really competitive, either).

unusualmusic quotes from gltbq:

Perhaps the most deep-seated is the fear that women’s athletics might erode traditional femininity. The global sports world registered this concern at least three decades before the institution of sex testing and long before the Renee Richards case.

In the early 1930s, when Mildred “Babe” Didrikson, the greatest woman athlete of modern times, set world records in the woman’s 80-meter hurdles and javelin throw, reporters continually remarked on her masculine appearance, and the press focused on the Olympic medalist in a campaign to restore femininity to athletics.

babe didrikson

The controversy finally ended when Didrikson married, started wearing dresses, and turned from competing in track, basketball, baseball, football, and boxing, to setting records in the more acceptably feminine world of golf.

Semenya’s situation is being treated like an isolated case, and a lot of attention is focused on how her fellow athletes react to her: “These kind of people should not run with us,” said Elisa Cusma, the Italian runner who finished 6th.

It’s easy to focus on the extreme cases and miss the trends. If you’re a successful woman in sports, and the press and the audience can accuse you of not being a woman, they will. But if they can’t find ground for that accusation, they’ll accuse you of not being womanly enough.

Women in day-to-day life face a lot of pressure to be the “right kind of women” (i.e., the ones men want). For celebrity women, the heat is turned up a lot … because, of course, celebrity women are the yardstick with which people measure the women they know, the yardstick by which the rules of sexiness, attractiveness, and appropriateness are determined.

unusualmusic’s article is loaded with links that underscore the point. A few women athletes fit into the “sexiness” box, but most of them don’t. Just as most of the rest of us don’t.

It’s been great guest-blogging at Feministe! Come visit us at Body Impolitic.