I Enjoy Being a Girl
Today two things happened that I want to write about, but I just can’t quite articulate. One was when a friend of mine was going on about how she was ten pounds overweight for her height and how she was determined to lose that weight, you know, for her health. She’s not the kind of girl who has big body image issues, but sometimes she says some stuff that makes me want to smuggle her out of the country and put her… I don’t know where… someplace without televisions or other fucked up women or men who feel fine about teaching her the meaning of the word “asshole” so that she doesn’t internalize this idea that she should always strive to be smaller and weaker and less noticeable than she is. The other was when a friend of mine called up to complain about some guy at work and, as she was explaining her predicament, it was clear that she was trying to show proper deference for his position and he was reading that as weakness and her as someone who didn’t need respect, but instead the guiding hand of a wise teacher.
And I just keep thinking that it’s like we run along pretty okay through life until something happens, and for most of the women I know, it seems to have really kicked into gear in junior high, where you are just hobbled by the bullshit women are just supposed to take.
Someone smarter than me has probably already written about this at length, but it’s like we, as a society, are constantly enacting these patterns that, if were particularized to a specific family, we would recognize as abusive. And maybe that’s how you understand it, that it’s right when we are old enough to realize that things are truly fucked up, that we cope with that knowledge by assuming that it’s our fault, that we bring it on ourselves, and if only we could figure out what the fuckers wanted, we could end the abuse.
So we go about making ourselves seems as weak and harmless as possible so that we won’t draw attention to ourselves, especially attention that might be negative. It’s like we’re trying to send this message: no need to hurt us, we’re already hurting ourselves. Move along.
I do that, too. I’m not trying to set myself up as someone who’s better than all that nonsense. I’m not.
But I see it. I see it all around me. I just don’t know for sure what steps we can take to act against it.
Filed under: Fun with Feminism
“…no need to hurt us, we’re already hurting ourselves.” Nicely put (and wisely observed).
“…she was ten pounds overweight for her height…”
the body mass index is basically a crock of shit. I just felt the need to say it.
I often wish I had a magic wand to wave over every woman I know, to make those body issues disappear. Too often I’ve watched glorious, gorgeous women attack themselves for their “flaws”. It’s heartbreaking.
And maybe that’s how you understand it, that it’s right when we are old enough to realize that things are truly fucked up, that we cope with that knowledge by assuming that it’s our fault, that we bring it on ourselves, and if only we could figure out what the fuckers wanted, we could end the abuse.
Ow. Yeah.
The training for this response is so constant and institutionalized. If I can just change my behavior the right way, you will stop hurting me. If I can just love you right, you will stop hurting me. If I can just phrase this so you will understand, you will be just. If I can just erase myself enough, you will stop erasing me.
All of which keeps the focus on the target and her behavior rather than the abuser, whose behavior gets to stay the same.
Theriomorph - exactly - “Oh, if I’m skinnier, boys will like me and girls will be jealous of me. If I don’t speak up in class and show how smart I am, people won’t make fun of me because they’re not so smart or think being smart is bad…” is not so far in the conditioning chain from “If I cook his favorite meal and have it done on time and just do what he wants and be quiet, he won’t hit me.” None of these address how the other’s perceptions may not be correct, may be harmful, may be complete BS that a girl doesn’t need to spend time worrying about. They’re also about minimizing a person’s individuality for the comfort of others, which again, is total BS.
A long story, but brought to mind by this:
So we go about making ourselves seems as weak and harmless as possible so that we won’t draw attention to ourselves, especially attention that might be negative. It’s like we’re trying to send this message: no need to hurt us, we’re already hurting ourselves. Move along.
I have certainly done this too, it’s a survival strategy. And, I try to live in situations where I don’t have to do this, these days, as much as possible.
But reading your post, especially that quoted bit, brought up serious shades of the dojo where I trained before I moved further north, and an active bulimic woman training there - a situation now iconic to me in terms of how this fucked up stuff is enforced:
Here’s this context where we’re all kind of weirdly unstoppable and strong, doing crazy feats of athleticism and stamina and strength, and she had altered the math of eating disorder calorie vigilance (which I know well from personal history) *just enough* to be able to not faint during training, but to still be able to use it as her compulsive excercise (training 2 and 3 times a day), emaciated and dizzy and floppy and tearful and sick and barely functional. For years.
Her mother died of bulimia. She was actively fostering an eating disorder in her young daughter. The sensei and the people in the dojo knew all this, and would speak openly about it. And? She was the sexual fetish of the sensei; not only enabled but actively and publicly rewarded and sexualized for her illness, and heavily protected from intervention by anyone who was concerned with this paternalistic (and sexualized) support of her sickness - because it made her ‘valuable’ by way of being thin and weak and ‘pretty’ and in need of protection-with-hard-on, which is the greatest fetish of all.
*In a karate dojo.* *Where strength and health is the key.*
And it made me nuts politically, but also personally, since part of what I was doing in training was recovering muscle mass and bone density after years of active anorexia, so the battle in me day to day was doubled (and yeah, I suppose it forced me to hold my own healing ground even harder blah blah, but meanwhile, she and her daughter go down).
I tried to talk to her, and to the sensei, carefully, over time, and I think I did it ‘right,’ and certainly very ‘humbly’ as dojo etiquette requires, but the only result was defensive rage followed by undermining from her (which I could deal with and even repair/shift over time), and a retreat to rank hierarchy and framing as sexual competition from the sensei (which was not as reparable, because it enlisted me and my body into his fetishizing of small women and divide and conquer tactics of keeping them focused on him, which was, in the end, the largest thing that made me leave that dojo in spite of huge investment).
And yeah, that dojo was a particularly sexist place. But you know, *everywhere is* - underneath, if not so overtly - and these dynamics were happening in a place where a bunch of women were literally sprinting around the building with huge men on their backs, throwing people, doing hundreds of situps and push ups and proving daily that their bodies could do these incredible feats of strength and stamina and be as effective as the men’s - and yet, the surest course to ’success’ in that dojo - in terms of praise and support and ‘protection’ was via creating a weakness/protection hard-on in the senior men. Just like everywhere else, just in even more starkly crazy terms because of the context.
Bleak. Painful. The powerlessness I felt in being able to do anything to ‘fix’ that dynamic or help her or help myself or be able to keep training there still feels like shit, too.
/ novel
Whoops, missed yours, Rachel. “Conditioning chain.” Exactly. What a perfect phrase for it.
Kate just wrote another awesome post on this stuff, too - did you all see it?
I’ve got mixed feelings about this whole take on things. My first response was that it’s practically so obvious as not to need stating. But then I figured no, it works as a metaphor but not as reality, because individual abusers ultimately cannot change or even be appeased (in my own experience, at least), and the best we can do is get away from them and stay away. But societies are changing all the time. And we can and do help to change them. So then I’m thinking that the problem is that many of us (women, but men too) have a problem with internalizing metaphors and treating them as real.
And then I think, nm, that’s absolutely incoherent, and possibly something that is so difficult for me to articulate is something I really haven’t thought through properly. But I do think that Rachel’s comment also suggests from another direction that the problem is in recognizing reality, and not substituting metaphor for it.
the problem is in recognizing reality, and not substituting metaphor for it.
I agree, nm - definitely don’t support internalized oppression, but am also aware that (trained-in) internalized oppression happens in response to real consequences for not conforming - consequences not metaphoric at all.
Maybe I’m not getting what you mean by ‘metaphor’ in this context, though?
Well, I grew up in an abusive household. And I can see that the (for instance) body-image pressures that ’society’ puts on women are like abuse. But they aren’t abuse. They don’t actually come around and hit people. They aren’t the same thing, and shouldn’t have the same impact. Unless a person internalizes them and says, “yeah, that’s not a metaphoric pressure on me to look like X, it’s as real as if someone was actually threatening to hit me over my looks.” If that same person says, “thank goodness all those images being flung in my face can’t actually force me to conform to them,” and refuses to conform, they remain a metaphor for how society treats women.
Moreover, all that can be done with a real abuser, in most cases, is to endure and get away. Whereas there is, I think, a real possibility that if enough individuals ignore or defy social pressures, the pressures themselves change. Not that societies will stop having expectations of their members — that would kind of make them not societies — but that the expectations will become different.
I don’t think I can be more coherent than that. I’m not certain, since I can’t express it coherently, that I have a point worth defending here. But I do have a gut reaction that our social patterns for employer/employee relations, or for physical appearance, or whatever, aren’t abusive in the concrete sense that living in an abusive household is (although individual instances of those patterns may be).
No, nm, I think you have the right point, if I see what you’re getting at here. I’m not saying, or at least, I’m not trying to say that how women are treated by society is literally abusive all the time. To me, it’s more like what Rachel is saying, that there are certain ways we’re conditioned to behave and unless we stop and look around and say “Hey, wait a second, the fact that I’m doing this or that I believe this or that I’m playing into this dynamic is fucked up,” we just keep on keeping on in ways that make us miserable.
Does that make sense?
I feel like I want to be talking specifically about the dynamic, because, from where I’m sitting, it’s the dynamic that’s the same, even if what comes after it is as specific as abuse or as diffuse as the general cloud of misogyny we all walk through.
So how does one avoid this particular pitfall? Or, since I suspect it can’t be avoided, how does one mitigate the damage on an individual basis?
That’s one thing I’ve been considering on my daughter’s behalf. She’s only 4 months old, but I’m the plan ahead type.
W., I don’t know. I’d be interested to hear what other people think. And I’ll think on it some, too.
B, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m not equating feeling pressure to look skinny with actual physical abuse, but pointing out that in both situations a person may feel pressure to act/look/be certain ways for another person/society, and it’s important to recognize that that other person/perspective may just be wrong. For example, I knew a woman with a very verbally abusive spouse - she was convinced for the longest time that if she just did everything “right,” the verbal abuse would stop - she was convinced that it was something she was doing wrong (rather than that her spouse was wrong), just as our other example is letting external pressures make her think there is something wrong with her body rather than with our expectations of and claims on women’s bodies. Is that clearer?
For the most part, turn off your TV. A lot of weird messages come in through children’s shows; remember that they are building consumers and consumers need to be made anxious about themselves. Gently teach critical thinking. Love them as they are; tell them that you delight in their talents, their kindness, their leadership. Listen to their thoughts and their fears — have real conversations, because parents are the people who are shaping their sense of self and developing their ethics. Demonstrate what you value by what you say and what you do, in how you spend your money and where you spend your leisure time. Encourage children to be multi-dimensional and resist when others try to pigeonhole them as a “jock” or a “smart kid” or “the pretty girl.” Expose them to different ways of thinking about what is beautiful. Walk the walk.
I don’t know…sounds more complicated than it is. It just boils down to love and attention and making mistakes, pretty much like all parenting.
B, so what you’re saying is “let’s look at the dynamic that makes us turn metaphors into internalized realities”? OK, I can see that.
W, give your daughter good metaphors to internalize. Let her (within the limits of common sense) be strong and assertive instead of trying to protect and cushion her. And absolutely don’t let her watch TV until she’s old enough to understand how it tries to manipulate her. Or alternatively, you could abuse her until she’s so angry that her anger makes her strong enough to fight back against it all, but I don’t think that’s your personal style, really.
Dicks are made to plow vagina. Vagina needs to get plowed. Women are happier when there vaginas are plowed!
I hesitate to correct a stranger, but don’t you mean “them there vaginas”?
Oh, NM, you’re probably right, but I’ve been reading that as “Women are happier when, (over) there (far away from me), vaginas are plowed.” Which is true, I must say.
On a different note, it has been brought to my attention that the mixed feelings I expressed about the original post might be interpreted as suggesting that the post or the commenters were not treating physical abuse as sufficiently dreadful, or were trivializing it in some way. And that isn’t in any way what I meant; I think everyone involved in the discussion were quite clear about abuse and the sorts of reactions it can provoke. I was just trying to work out why I couldn’t say a wholehearted “yes, that’s right.” Believe me, if I had thought anyone was being dismissive of abuse, my reaction would have been very different indeed.
Nm, I don’t think anyone took it that way. No worries. You know how it is around here. I’ll try this out for a while and if it doesn’t quite work, I’ll try something else out.
Just out of curiousity, is anonymous implying that the plural of vagina is vagina, or that all dicks are made to plow one vagina?
Perhaps anonymous is using the term as a Platonic Ideal, which by definition is singular. Sort of the way Lawrence uses “cunt” in Lady Chatterly’s Lover.