So I talk the talk but have an awful hard time walking the walk. It's terrifying how much easier it is to just sit around and let somebody shit on you than it is to actually move or take any kind of action against it. My problem's always been that I'm too chill (actually too much of a coward) to do anything except kinda roll with it, which in this instance led to a terrible date and these irrepressible tremors that oscillate from panic to hubris and then back again. I swear, it's a great thing that I can still remember my childhood delusions because deconstructing them helps with my contemporary ones. Today I cut through jackie cooper's backyard and ran past scott's house and remembered the stuff that he used to pull and how I would desperately embrace the drama and joint dreams of my earliest romantic relationship; one time he made me cry in front of his brother and it was humiliating. I wouldn't learn how to wrest control over my life out of some boy's grubby little fingers for at least another five or seven years, or, God-forbid, longer. So when I engage in these sporadic acts of courage and autonomy I never know how to deal with them and make them permanent, instead of a brief departure from my ever-excusing, ever-enduring, "natural" character. If there's anything that I truly excel at, it's grinning and bearing it! So it doesn't make the slightest difference what kind of boy that he is- it seems to become more pronounced as the objective quality of the man in question declines. So it doesn't matter that he is going to be bald in like ten years or less, or that he isn't enrolled in school right now for a mystery reason, or that he tried to charm me with racist jokes and sports trivia, or that he had a kitchen full of flies and dirt, or that he waked 'n baked. It only matters that he was super mean. And although I finally got the courage to belatedly tell him that his james franco grin and sexual prowess weren't going to cut it--the sort of high-calibur feat to which I've aspired all summer!--I'm having to constantly squelch my impulses to just text him something funny. Cutting my losses is a hard one, but that's what I'm working on now. Good thing I can cut and run to Italy in 2 weeks.
but Jenny knows. as always. I have two days of work left this whole summer and I have only the discussion section left on the first draft of my diamond scholars paper. I mean I got a lot done and I had a lot of fun but there's still work to do. as always.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Naomi Wolf on puberty
"But of the girls' own experience, what their own senses are telling them--the prickling smell of male salt in a school corridor, the intrigue of newly darkening down on a forearm, the pitch of a voice shifting into low gear, the slouch that stretches denim over a thigh, the taste of Southern Comfort on a half-educated tongue, of filterless Lucky Strikes filched from a dresser, the corrosion of stubble, windburn--they notice it all, they see it; but they are powerless to tell it. The fact that such images elicit awkwardness in both the teller and the listener attests to how unused we are to encounter young girls in our culture as sexually awakening subjects.
...
The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, becomes estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to find out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful than those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting and film.
This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually...many confuse sexual feeling with being sexually felt...many confuse desiring with being desirable. ... Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body; that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire.
Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal relative to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to the cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the cultural prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it relate to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for straight women to actively pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, savored, and consumed for his?"
- Naomi Wolf, "The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women" (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991), 157-8.
...
The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, becomes estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to find out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful than those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting and film.
This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually...many confuse sexual feeling with being sexually felt...many confuse desiring with being desirable. ... Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body; that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire.
Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal relative to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to the cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the cultural prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it relate to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for straight women to actively pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, savored, and consumed for his?"
- Naomi Wolf, "The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women" (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991), 157-8.
29 days
Decided to create this with the ostensible purpose of chronicling my adventures and misadventures in Rome this fall, scheduled to begin exactly 29 days from now which is insane given the pace and productivity of this summer. But it's also because I get excited about other things like trying to figure out truths, most especially when I expunge the feminist rage that runs through my veins. Past 3 days I've been reading The Beauty Myth and have proceeded to tell pretty much everybody that I know all about it and how important that the things that it says are. Julia is one of the best, kookiest and smartest people that I've ever met and I've been endlessly fortunate to be able to work for her this summer and get paid to learn so much sociological theory and get better at writing and have a killer time. So it's been a great summer so far, really top notch. But only 29 days more, so here's hoping there's more crazy shit to come
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