Archive for the 'women' Category

Getting Us Here

scrappybadger August 30th, 2008

Lots of things have been trying to get me back to this blog lately — the Democratic Convention, thoughts about how to sort out my hectic life, a friend’s blog. It took a piece of sad news to make it happen, though. Piig emailed me a very short news clip about Del Martin’s death this past week. I did a quick Google search, and to my surprise, lots of news outlets had picked up the story. Few of them, however, said anything more about her than that she married her longtime partner Phyllis Lyon this year and that together they had formed the Daughters of Bilitis. That hardly sums up the life of a woman who came to mean so much to so many lesbians.

Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon - 1999

Both Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon worked tirelessly for lesbians specifically and women in general. What started as a small social network called the DOB became a national effort to link together lesbians who found themselves isolated by a sexist and lesbophobic society. Martin, Lyon, and women who worked with them insisted that lesbians be visible, that our histories be uncovered, and that we be able to form strong social connections with one another. The Ladder, the print periodical developed by the DOB and initially edited by Lyon, did just that.

Perhaps the most important, or the most visible, aspect of Martin’s and Lyon’s lives for lesbians of my generation is their more than half century long relationship. Indeed, their relationship itself is iconic. Many lesbians and gay men have looked to Martin and Lyon as an example of the lifelong bonds that same sex partners can have. Sexism, homophobia, and the kind of poverty experienced by many lesbians (and, to a lesser extent, gay men) all contribute to making decades-long relationships even rarer for lgbt people than they are for our heterosexual counterparts. The not-so-cynical part of me has always found some happiness in the idea that patriarchy, and all of its accompanying garbage, couldn’t destroy something that was good.

In one of my Women’s Studies classes this week my students read the essay “A Day Without Feminism,” and we talked about how many things we owed to feminists. I am thankful for the many things they did to make my life easier, and I am particularly thankful to lesbian feminists who made the world better for me in a multitude of ways. Their work is neither underappreciated nor forgotten.

Notes:
1. Photos stolen from various websites that stole them from various other websites, etc.
2. I couldn’t find any pictures of one woman without the other.
3. Equality California has done a nice job of detailing Del Martin’s activist contributions.

Oh, Queen Latifah, Not You Too

scrappybadger January 26th, 2008

Don’t do it; don’t buy into the idea that your body is still imperfect. Please, don’t hide the difficulty of being fat and the obvious pressure you feel to conform in euphemisms about “getting healthy.” Don’t pretend you are our friend, looking out for our “health,” when really you are peddling a diet program.

It was bad enough that they started covering your real beauty with make-up. It’s been hard to watch your demons manifest themselves in fluctuating weight as you try to make your body do and be something that it constantly feels the need to buck against. Now we have to watch you work for Jenny Craig.

Resist. Your fat is beautiful, and you know it. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

Don’t let them tell me otherwise.

Star Lite, Star Bright

scrappybadger July 31st, 2007

My first reaction when I saw the news stories this morning about Star Jones was, “No shit, Star.” I mean, really, who just drops half her body weight in such a relatively short period of time through diet and exercise? Drastic, sustained weight loss without surgery is extremely rare - more so than most people want to admit. So I wasn’t surprised, as I’m sure most people aren’t. After reading the AP story I found her full Glamour article online.

I’m not a fan. I tried to like her. I remember the first few times I saw her as a legal correspondent on TV. It was nice to see a fat woman looking back at me. She knew the law and she wasn’t demure like most of the other women on the news. On The View she usually talked about fat women in positive ways, but she also acquiesced to patriarchal norms. Her views about women were often dated and over the years she became increasingly conservative and spoke disparagingly of women, the poor, and racial minorities. She also seemed to settle into some kind of caricature of blackness, one that was largely created and supported by her white co-hosts. I didn’t enjoy watching her perform her blackness for a predominantly white cast, crew, and audience. I also didn’t enjoy her ever prevalent self-hatred. She didn’t have to verbalize “I hate my fat body” because nearly everything she did said it for her.

Remembering all of that, my initial reaction this morning was one of disgust. I didn’t want to hear her fat bashing anymore, and I certainly didn’t want to hear one more person heralding gastric bypass surgery. Nevertheless, like a rubbernecker at the scene of an accident, I followed a link to the article she wrote for the August issue of Glamour, and I’m glad I did because it humanized her for me. It reminded me, as she talked about her “out-of-control behavior,” that her struggle and the path she has taken to deal with it are constructed by a patriarchal system that demands ownership over women’s bodies. I remembered the Saturday Night Live skits, comments by the (male) late night talk show hosts, and the incessant buzz about Star Jones’s body. Anyone and everyone felt the right to talk about her body, and that hasn’t changed any since she’s lost the weight. We are still talking about her body; we are still claiming ownership over that which should be hers alone. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the comments to the AP story. Some people were overjoyed that she was, in their estimation, healthy now, others urged her to gain back the weight, and still others are still blaming her for her former fat body - a body that doesn’t even exist anymore.

It sickens me really. None of this is about Star Jones and her health. Commenters don’t really care whether she is happy or not. What people want, what society demands, is that she be pretty, that she be consumable by and, more importantly, acceptable to the male gaze. Her femaleness made her into a commodity, but her fatness negatively impacted that commodity’s value. She was doubly, triply ours in the collective sense. Our patriarchal society owned her femininity and her blackness and got to determine how much physical space she should, and ultimately will, take up in the world.

I wish she hadn’t had the surgery. I wish she had felt good in her own body and that it, and not society, had been able to dictate its rightful size. I wish those things for her, for others, and for myself. I wish, too, that my first reaction wasn’t anger with Star Jones but with the real roots of the problem - the isms. Sure, I took a step back and reminded myself that blaming her didn’t really make sense, but that first reaction, the one that immediately rose to the surface was the patriarchally programmed one, and that pisses me off.

Ultimately, Jones missed the opportunity to talk about some really important issues. She mentioned that she “wish[ed] someone had shouted: ‘Put that fork down and get active!’” when she was younger, but she never connected her body and the way she felt about it to the relative poverty in which she grew up. She never analyzed why her mother worked so hard to make large, good tasting meals even when they had very little money. She didn’t connect her loneliness to the way the world disappears fat people and how, the larger you are, the less likely you are to be seen. She didn’t wonder how her fatness and people’s reactions to it were connected to misogyny.

Maybe it isn’t fair for me to take her inventory, but it would have been nice, in an article that purports to be about her mental growth, to see a few of these things. Instead, it was a series of missed opportunities with her body laid out once again for public consumption and ridicule.

More Medicalizing of the Female Body

scrappybadger May 1st, 2007

If the incredibly bad acting and even worse writing doesn’t instantly jiggle the mute button under your forefinger when the newest Yaz commercials come on, then you will have the opportunity to witness the medical industry’s latest attempts to regulate women’s feelings about their bodies. Doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and medical researchers have a long history of bullying women. They have successfully convinced most people in the U.S. that babies can only be born safely in hospitals, that menstruation should occur at the same time in the same way for every woman, and that, in many cases, women neither understand nor correctly interpret physical reactions in their own bodies.

My favorite part of the Yaz commercial is when the robot-Doctor, adept at reciting prescription inserts, differentiates between PMS and PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder) by saying something along the lines of, “unlike PMS, PMDD can interfere with your everyday life.” Those few words say a lot. They say that only the medical profession can tell a woman when her pain or level of discomfort is enough to interfere with other things in her life. Only a doctor or a pharmacist or a lab-coated researcher can determine how severe is severe enough. Left to our own devices, women are incapable of quantifying our own pain. Well, thank goodness someone is there to do it for us. Luckily for us, there are a select few who can tell us when our pain, emotional or physical, is mild, severe, or simply not there at all. And even better, they’ve named those stages for us. So women, I urge you, run to your doctor. Get an official diagnosis because for crying out loud, you are in no way qualified to determine what you are feeling.