Feminism

What Women Want

February 11, 2013 — 2 Comments

Reading Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting yesterday, I came across the story of Sir Gawain and the Loathely Lady. The authors’ retelling of the story shortens it and softens its rough medieval edges, focusing on the answer to its central question: what do all women really want?

If you have a few minutes, I suggest reading this translation of the story before coming back to this post. Spoilers follow this paragraph, and it’s a fun story to read before listening to further discussion of it. Especially this week, with Valentine’s Day coming up, I invite you to enjoy a romance that is decidedly of a different time and place! (Why do I suggest this particular translation? Because it appeared to be the most authentic translation of the original story that came up on the first page of Google results. Yes, thank you, I am such a scholar.)

In the story of Sir Gawain and the Loathely Lady (aka Dame Ragnell), we learn that what all women really want is sovereignty. When I read this story in Everyday Blessings, I thought for a minute that it couldn’t be an actual King Arthur story, spouting modern ideas like this one!

But reading the translation of the original, I see that “sovereignty” is treated more as “in charge of everything” than as “the right to rule oneself.” So that it may be more about the classic battle of the sexes, and the notion that in any relationship between two people, someone must always be in charge.

But, defining sovereignty as “the right to rule oneself,” I think this is a fitting answer to the question, and I might clarify further that women – just like men, just like politically-defined nations – want their sovereignty recognized, not bestowed (because it is no one else’s to bestow).

Or, as Mary Pipher writes in Reviving Ophelia (quoted in Everyday Blessings), though women all have different wants, each woman wants to be “the subject of her life and not [merely] the object of others’ lives.”

You Are. Now Eat.

January 29, 2013 — 8 Comments

This morning I crawled out from under my rock and learned about thinspo. Sometimes there is absolutely no fun involved in a loss of innocence. This was one of those times.

I first heard the term “thinspo” last week on a podcast. Yes, really. Just last week. I googled the term today and glimpsed an Internet subculture that shocked and saddened me. There really are women who publicly, matter-of-factly, and completely reject their fully-functional, highly complex human bodies, because they are “fat.” There appears to be no self-pity in this, no seeking of a “there-there, I love you just the way you are” virtual hug from anyone.

The images and pep-phrases of thinspo (“thinspiration” – think “successories” for weight-loss fanatics) strike me as stoic rally cries for soldiers going to battle. The war is for acceptance in a cruel world that has no place for cellulite. These soldiers seem to be past making value judgments, as any effective soldiers are. They purse their lips and accept hard reality, willing to fight to the death for a place in this wretched culture rather than live oppressed and kicked around any longer.

Just over a year ago, I stepped on a scale and faced a new tens digit – one I had only seen between my feet before when I was pregnant. I looked up my height, weight and frame size on a BMI chart and discovered I was overweight. So I decided to change direction. Over the last year I lost twenty pounds and gained new strength as I began running regularly and started eating mostly whole, plant-based foods.

Blah-blah-blah. If keeping my mouth shut about my success would in any way encourage a thinspo soldier to open hers and eat something substantial, I’d do it.

But maybe the best thing is to talk honestly about it. Yes, I moved the needle on the scale. Yes, I dropped a couple jeans sizes. Heck, I even have some defined abs to show for my regular core-muscle workouts.

But the only way an image of my body would make it into thinspo would be as reverse-thinspo, images of not-thin-enough bodies to inspire the thinspo soldier to keep that mouth firmly clamped except for the occasional diet soda and iceberg lettuce.

The thinspo ideal is not the human body at its best. It is a matter-denouncing self-loathing shroud.

I met my weight-loss goal, and I did it because I wanted to, when and how – and if – I wanted to. Now I run and eat well because it’s my habit, my lifestyle, and one of my life’s pure joys. Not my means to salvation from a hateful body-self.

A thinspo soldier doesn’t know or care what she wants. She can’t do her soul-crushing job with any effectiveness unless she shuts her mouth – not only to food but also to her own voice.

My body is amazing, and so is yours. I’ve routinely listened to negative self-talk that tells me otherwise – in my case, that my breasts are too small and my thighs are too large. But what does that even mean? What is “too small” and what is “too large?” My breasts functioned flawlessly in feeding both my babies. My thighs have never failed to support my body and move it from place to place.

That’s not to exclude those with dysfunctional breasts or thighs from the statement that your body is amazing. The fact that you are here at all, breathing air, thinking thoughts (or not), pumping blood through miles of tubing, experiencing life as only you – only you of anyone else who has ever lived – can experience it: that is amazing.

Whatever else we are, you and I are embodied beings. Enfleshed. Incarnate. We must learn to live in peace with and within our bodies. Yoda had it so right and a little bit wrong when he said,

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. . . . Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

I beg to differ, honorable Green One. Luminous beings are we, alive through this amazing matter.

I’m including no links to thinspo material in this post. That’s because I know that images and catch-phrases are powerful, and our culture already screams at women, all day long, that they are not thin enough, small enough, weak and insubstantial enough. So if you choose to “go there,” view thinspo’s brutal additions to the daily stream of attacks at your own risk.

And let’s all think twice about how and why we pursue health and beauty, and how we talk about that with each other. There are too many young women of inestimable worth on the brink of enlisting in thinspo’s ranks, and our careless words can give voice to the lies that recruit them.

Matryoshka Doll

October 2, 2012 — 5 Comments

Here’s a poem I wrote last year, about my multilayered identity of recovering good girl, wife, mother, and aspiring artist.

Matryoshka Doll

When they drop by the house
I am in my apron in the kitchen.
In their eyes I see a glimmer of worship
At sighting a domestic angel.
My young son is building superstructures in the living room
And I am baking bread
So I am a stay-at-home mom
(Apparently).

Once, remarking on my unpainted face,
Someone asked for counsel
About wifely submission.

They find me writing at the coffee shop
And praise my husband for giving me time off
From what (apparently) is my real work.

A little girl within
Believes them
Craves their favor.

A woman deeper still
Knows more
Feels lonely feisty misunderstood
Amused
Angry stuck sad useless.

At her heart is a human
Being
Living
Gestating
Faith hope love.

The heart of her heart
Throbs with the secret
And the strength
Of labor
The grip of death
That releases life
And, once more,
She breathes.

Women’s History

March 29, 2012 — 3 Comments

It’s the end of women’s history month, and I’m thinking of three stories of women today, all part of women’s history.

The first is recent history. In May 2000, Pakistani woman Fakhra Younus claimed that she suffered an acid attack at the hands of her estranged husband, while she slept in her mother’s house. Twelve years and more than thirty-six surgeries later, in Rome, she jumped from a height of six stories to her death.

Fakhra Younus wasn’t the victim of someone’s psychopathically creative crime. “Acid throwing” has its own entry in Wikipedia. And it isn’t limited to the present day or the non-western world. Which brings me to the second story.

I remembered this morning, after reading Fakhra Younus’s story last night, that I had read about an acid attack in my own family history. When I was younger, my grandmother gave me a copy of an account that her father had written of his life. His mother died when he was six years old, and his father took the children to a “Catholic home” and never visited them.

My great-grandfather Gus Dominguez grew up and re-connected with his father. “He started off by telling me that he was married again and has two fine girls and that he changed his name and that from now on I will have to call him uncle. He said he had to change on account of something he had done in Brooklyn – that the law was after him. Then I asked him, did you kill, steal or what was it all about. Then I heard the story.

“He was running around with a young woman and that she wanted to marry him. They became engaged but he found out that she was a high flyer and try to give her up but she did not want it that way, so to get rid of her he throw acid in her face. From then on he left town with the full account in the paper and police after him. So he change his name to Mr. Frank Hidalgo.”

I read this story years ago with great interest. My great-great grandfather was such a colorful man. I told this story to other people and even laughed a bit as I mentioned casually, “he got in trouble with the law for throwing acid in a woman’s face.”

It wasn’t until today, connecting these two stories, especially after seeing photographs of acid-attack victims, that I ever imagined the story from the perspective of the woman who “Uncle Frank” accosted.

Which reminded me of the third story, another one whose most sobering details I had simply missed the first few times I read it. It’s a story in the Bible, in Judges 19, subtitled in the NIV, “A Levite and His Concubine.” When I read this story as a child (oh yes I did; how do you think fundamentalist children get through long boring services with only a Bible to amuse themselves?!), I was most intrigued by the man cutting the woman’s body into twelve pieces and sending them to the twelve tribes of Israel.

Somehow I missed the much more disturbing piece of a husband sending his wife (concubine to be specific) and a father sending his daughter out on the street to be gang-raped by a crowd of men, in order to avoid the “vile” and “outrageous” act of the man himself being raped by the men on the street.

This story hit me with its full force when I came across it again in my young adulthood. I spent an entire day simply sitting with the story. I wrote a song for the nameless woman. She needed to be remembered.

Women’s history is filled with amazing accomplishments and beautiful stories. It is also laden with suffering. I end with a simple but powerful word from my friend Jodi, who arrived in Haiti just before the earthquake hit. In her remembrance of that day, she said, “Don’t forget the suffering. Add to the beauty.” These are words for all of us to live by, as women and men remembering and making history.

Random Thoughts on a Touchy Topic

March 13, 2012 — 15 Comments

When I was young, I knew with certainty that abortion was wrong. It was a black-and-white issue. A baby is a baby is a baby. Life begins at conception, and abortion stops a beating heart. Abortion is murder. I couldn’t understand how anyone could see things otherwise. I was sure that anyone with a different opinion was godless and heartless.

In my young adulthood, I met a young man who was also an evangelical-striped Christian. But he voted Democrat and identified himself as pro-choice. He explained that even if abortion was a moral wrong, he didn’t think it was right for a mostly-male Congress to be making laws governing women’s choices about what was going on inside their own bodies.

My thought-evolution on this issue has continued. Currently, I would say that I am undecided.

Here is a random list of thoughts and things I have learned related to this issue. These are not points or arguments. Please don’t read them as such. I am thinking out loud:

Planned Parenthood is mostly about providing low-cost or free health care to women. I was always taught that this organization was pretty much pure evil, so even today when I know better, just the name “Planned Parenthood” still elicits a visceral negative reaction for me.

Medical technology has advanced so that surgery can be performed on babies in the womb, and babies can survive birth at earlier stages of development than ever.

The phrase “every child a wanted child” rings a little hollow to me. It has been used as a pro-choice argument that no child should be born to a mother who doesn’t want him or her. I agree with this sentiment, but I think a better solution is to build a world where people welcome and support children (and by extension, pregnant women and mothers of young children), not where unwanted children are denied existence.

I find the ideas on Feminists for Life‘s website intriguing, especially their FAQ answer regarding criminalizing abortion (though it seems a bit evasive).

Adoption is often held up as an alternative to abortion. But carrying a pregnancy to term is a major life disruptor in and of itself, especially if a woman already has young children (and most women who get abortions are already mothers of previously-birthed children).

It is possible to hold a pro-choice position concerning legislation and a pro-life position concerning morality. I suppose this would be a libertarian position, similar to positions on other issues such as drug use, alcohol consumption, sex, and religious beliefs.

This is a controversial issue for good reasons. The entire journey that an egg and a sperm make to become a newborn baby happens inside a woman’s body. Is it really good policy to dictate to her what she does about that activity going on inside of her? If we can make laws about whether women may terminate their pregnancies or not, can we also make laws about how they will treat the growing child inside their body? Can we make it illegal for pregnant women to smoke or drink?

Why are so many “pro-life” people also outspoken critics of welfare in any form? If you want to reduce abortions, wouldn’t you want to help build a world where children are cared for, no matter their household income – and where women have access to contraception to prevent pregnancy in the first place? But I understand that many people who are opposed to government-sponsored welfare think that churches and community groups should be the ones providing poverty relief. And that’s another non-black-and-white issue for another day . . .

According to recent demographic research, poverty – and the inadequate health care and lack of access to contraception that goes along with it – is a significant contributor to the choice to abort a pregnancy. This blog post and video discusses this information more.

Referring to his daughters, President Obama once said, “I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” Unfortunate choice of words, I’d say. Whatever he meant by that, I think it reflects the reality of our patriarchal society which marginalizes women and even more so marginalizes children (and the elderly, mentally/physically challenged, etc.) and the people – often women – who care for them. Once again, this raises for me the reminder that abortion must be understood in its larger context of social and systemic issues that de-value people who don’t “keep up” with the expected pace of American life – 16+ years of formal education, 40+weekly hours working a “real job,” etc.

That’s a long enough list for now.

Abortion, like life, is not a black-and-white issue. I’m weary of both pro-lifers and pro-choicers ignoring the complexities involved  (though of course not everyone from either perspective does so).

These are just some opening thoughts to a conversation I hope we can have here. Let’s talk. What do you think? Or feel? Or wonder? Or what have you experienced? Or learned? Or considered? I’m looking for a thoughtful and respectful conversation about an often-heated topic. So it may be a good idea to read your comment over one extra time before you make that final click.

*Update: Recently I heard this OnBeing podcast  with David Gushee and Frances Kissling about abortion. I highly recommend it as a model of thoughtful conversation on this issue.