our bodies, ourselves

Seeing real people's bodies is the best antidote to the culturally-inscribed feelings of self-consciousness and inferiority that many of us have spent our whole lives feeling. It might sound like weird advice, but seeing your friends naked is really good for you. Since you already love them, you are not judgmental about the way that their bodies look because their bodies are the physical manifestation of the people that reside inside the bodies. And it helps you realize that your body is the same way. I've lately been consumed with love and affection for my own body--not because I have big round boobs or a flat stomach (see Fig. A.) because I have neither of these. Instead, I've become less concerned with the way it looks from the imaginary observer's standpoint (into which I'd formerly constantly placed myself) and more concerned with the way it works and the way that it feels from the inside. My boobs are important and wonderful because I get pleasure from them. My stomach is wonderful and important because it digests the food that I eat and it strengthens and clenches from laughter, not sit ups. If my body does so much for me - from keeping my heart beating, to moving my legs so I can get around, to effortlessly forming on my lips the words that I want to speak - how could I be so ungrateful as to wish it were different?

Fig. A. 50% insane discipline and repression of appetite, 50% photoshop
Nobody that I know actually looks like this, and I probably won't meet anybody who does.

Fig. B. Much closer to the way that I look and the way that the people I know look. She's not dieting or obsessively working out but she's obviously living the life. She's also more womanly than Fig. A. who looks more like a teenage Barbie.
(P.S., who is the girl puking in the background?)

so dance around your house naked even if the neighbors see you over the fence. Fuck it.

Naomi Wolf on love and beauty

(got this book for christmas and i still love it as much on the reread)

But we long to be loved the way we were, if we were lucky, as children: every toe touched, each limb exclaimed upon because it was ours alone, incomparable. ... [Yet,] Those elements that make each woman unique--the unrepeatable irregularity of her face, the scars of a childhood trauma, the lines and furrows from a life of thought and laughter, grief and rage--exclude her from the ranks of mythical beauties, and from the charmed playgrounds, we are told, of love.
...
Women understand that there are two distinct economies: There is physical attraction, and there is the "ideal." When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The actual body, the smell, the feel, the voice and movement, become charged with heat through the desirable person who animates it. ... The way in which women regard men's bodies is proof that one can look at a person sexually without reducing him or her to pieces.
...
"Beauty" is only visual, more real on film or in stone than in three living dimensions. ... So humans, in order to become dependable, sexually insecure consumers, had to be trained away from these other, more sensual senses. One needs distance, even in the bedroom, to get a really good look; other senses are more intoxicating close up.
The shape and weight and texture and feel of bodies is crucial to pleasure but the appealing body will not be identical. The Iron Maiden is mass-produced. The world of attraction grows blander and colder as everyone, first women and soon men, begin to look alike. People lose one another as more masks are assumed. Cues are missed.
Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can't relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry, she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movements will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand the airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been blocked in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him.
CHRISTIAN LACROIX GIVES WOMEN BACK THEIR FEMININITY, reads the fashion headline. "Femininity" is code for femaleness plus whatever a society happens to be selling. If "femininity" means female sexuality and its loveliness, women never lost it and do not need to buy it back. Wherever we feel pleasure, all women have "good" bodies. We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it.
Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking.
Many, many men see it this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light in her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe...
The fact is that the myth's version of sexuality is by definition just not true: Most men who are at this moment being aroused by women, flirting with them, having crushes on them, or making love to them, are doing so to women who look exactly like who they are.
-Naomi Wolf, "The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women" (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991), 172-178.

io sono mia

dear friends,

today has been such a good day for feminist raging that I can't help but share with you guys. first of all, last night I had to do some recovering because a prospect fell through and it was a bit rough. thank god for feelings mgmt though, i mean writing out and through all of the bad ways that i feel is usually good enough to banish them at least for awhile and sometimes for always. so that was the first one. second, in greg smith's class today we talked about italian feminism and i heard the slogan "io sono mia" which basically means "i am mine" and which is an extremely powerful and reassuring thing to say and to remember and to believe. i mean in italy the context is extra extreme especially in terrible places like sicily where your parents have the right to kill you and your lover if you have premarital sex, and where there was not a law passed against rape until 1996 (1996!!!! what the fuck!!!) and before that it was a common practice for men to kidnap and rape the girls that they wanted to marry and then the girls almost always married them because their reputation was so tarnished that they couldn't ever hope to marry anybody else. so for sicilian girls saying io sono mia is a powerful and political statement but it is for us too. next i had a big phone talk with lindsay about her discontent and relationship and self-trouble and talking to her i dug up this gem on my xanga from freshman year so i have decided to post it. it is a little bit long and might have outdated references, but here it is nonetheless:

Thursday, March 19, 2009

waxing philosophical (practically a dissertation)

Currently All Hail West Texas By The Mountain Goats Color in Your Cheeks see related I think I know what it is: Thinking about who I am/was/will be, one of those things is held constant is a girl. Hate to be so gender-specific but a lot of the problems I've had and the problems i see other ladies having re:boys, self-esteem are the same. Legacy of oppression blah blah blah because it's hard to see the modern significance of that fact until you start to compare. I mean I'm honing in on what's important, just generally speaking, just regarding my life and everything nowadays and I'm glad. Ok. Relationships: never had one that didn't completely overtake my mind. Is that because it's love? Could be, but I think a better explanation would be the fact that being a half of a couple so overtook my identity that it took up most of my time and mental capacity with being the kind of girl and the kind of girlfriend that I thought I should be. A common complaint I see, mostly in long-term couples, is that the lady is upset that her boy doesn't pay as much attention to her as he did in the beginning. myself included--I vividly remember the feeling and it really sucks. But what in us trains us to yearn so hard for increasing amounts of attention and affection? The lovey-dovey sweet actions that constitute romance performed by men is short-lived if that. It dies! Always! Why do we fool ourselves that we can resurrect it? Why do we need it so acutely in the first place? I guess I should be more clear on my definition of romance--because romance being simply a poetic moony notion that we can use to color the dullness of everyday life is perfectly acceptable. This romance we fabricate in our own heads, but what we don't realize is that we generally fabricate the kind associated with love that way too. I guess my argument is thus--that we should not depend on boys for romance, because they will inevitably let you down sooner or later if that's what you are concerned with. Construct romantic notions in your head at your leisure, but the kind of romance from nicholas sparks is not the kind that you're going to get--the female appetite for romance is so ravenous that no man can satisfy you as well as you would be able to satisfy yourself with pure fantasy. dani got a boyfriend over break, the one she called a "stage 3 clinger" when she first met him while she was seeing tim. I gather they talked on the phone and texted a lot before break, saying I miss you etc nightly even though they had only been on one date really before this. He surprised her friday night by showing up to a fancy party she was at and they talked and they are going out and they said love yous. Mind you, it's been a week? two? It's funny how often I use her for character study--I have so many observations that I can't say to her but I meditate upon and use to refine my personal philosophy. I don't want to diss on her, because I do love her, but the more time you spend with a person the easier it is to see their flaws, and believe me, living with somebody puts them right in your face. The decline of our friendship taught me how sean fell out of love with me because I saw her the way i'm pretty sure he saw me near the end. it was the snoring, believe it or not, and the fact that both of my calves cramped up from walking on eggshells around her. Think she thinks i'm a hard ass from everything I've told her about how I relate to boys that I like. Think she thinks she's strong because she won't let him pay for her but that's not really what it's about. I'm almost certain that 90+% of our lives happen in our heads, and the way you perceive something becomes, to you, what happened. Strength is mental and learning who you are is the most important part of life, and can indeed be a full time job. Who am I? a girl for starters, which can be problematic considering the default gender is male. Truly, my male friends mostly seem to have a better handle on their identities than my female friends including myself. Why? stupid moony fantasies of big weddings and rose petals come before intellectual pursuits or moral imperatives. surely our narcissism plays into it--this is a human problem after all--and I know I can only speak for myself but every observation has led me to conclude that this is more or less universal. I would almost wish that I hadn't been one of those girls to have lots of boyfriends in high school, but I honestly am not quite sure if it would have mattered. I was equally starry-eyed as a nine year old as I was a 16 year old, and I feel like I would have been anyway, boyfriend or no boyfriend. Not to say that there's anything wrong with looking for love--there's not. But we're looking a lot harder than the boys are and we're willing to sacrifice our individuality more easily and for a lower quantity than the boys are. I'm almost positive about this. Audience--i think almost everyone who reads this is a girl, except maybe the occasional mike. Not knocking on boys, you know i love em, and not blaming them for our plight. Who's to blame? society maybe, and us for being dopes. Straight up, I know I'm a dope and I know I care too much about stuff, I know I long too fervently. I know I construct a lot of stuff--but this realization is powerful in and of itself, because what you construct you can control. Really, your own mind and body is all you've got but at least it is definitively yours. So be willful, be mindful, and construct your own world from the inside out. All I know is that nobody, boy or girl, is going to co-pilot mine ever again. and that's that.

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.