Luckily, I’m old enough now to see most resolutions for what they are. When I was younger I would secretly resolve to be a better, nicer person. I would squeeze my eyes closed and think about being more pleasant. The problem with that? I was already a terribly compliant child. I lacked anything that would make me interesting, in fact. I was quiet, well-behaved, and always did what I was told. I’m not sure how I was supposed to be nicer. Maybe I was thinking of petty fights with my sisters or being less reluctant to help with housework, or maybe, just maybe, I was buying into societal ideas about what it meant to be a girl. Maybe I was pushing myself to be closer and closer to an unrealistic ideal — a smart, interesting, well-mannered, witty, and precocious in just the right way (ala Shirley Temple) little girl.

If I could talk to my 5, 10, or 15 year old self right now I would grab her round cheeks in my hands, look her square in the eyes, and tell her “Girl, that shit is impossible. Give it up. Be bad; be very bad. Fuck some shit up.” For once she’d be hearing the truth, that you can’t be interesting and well-behaved all of the time. You can’t be good and precocious. That only happens in the movies. You won’t be interesting by going along with everything you’re told to do. What makes you interesting is finding your own way, discovering who you actually are. No one told me that. What adults told me was that I should be good; being good would make people like me, and I understood, without them ever saying so explicitly, that being liked was the most important thing of all. So here I am at 35 wondering how to figure out who I really am, and it isn’t easy to find me because I’m buried under all these sickening layers of good behavior.

That, for me, is what resolutions are all about. They are about trying to mold ourselves into something that, ultimately, isn’t that interesting. Think about what seems to be the #1 New Year’s resolution: a diet: The point with this resolution is to make your body more closely approximate that which we find beautiful, and as much as people will say there are many kinds of beauty, we as a society really only have one model. Thus, everyone is trying to look exactly the same. It’s like those plastic surgery reality shows. People started out with bumpy noses or long chins. They looked interesting and different, and we could recognize them. After the surgery? They all looked the same.

And you know what? Few resolutions make lasting change in the world. We focus on changing things on such an individual level that we often fail to see connections to societal systems. Look at a few lists of the top resolutions, and you’ll see “quit smoking/drinking,” “reduce stress,” “address debt/save money.” Those all address the individual’s so-called problem, but they don’t do anything about the source of the issue. Why are so many people in debt? Why are we all stressed out by our work? Why are so many people addicted to smoking or alcohol? These are systemic problems that require wide reaching solutions. If I am a smoker, and I decide to quit the tobacco companies will never even know. They have, however, felt the sting of anti-smoking legislation and widespread anti-smoking campaigns.

For me, the real failure of New Year’s resolutions is that they are all too often either an attempt to be more like some fantasy of who we think we should be or an attempt to solve a problem on a personal level while remaining blissfully ignorant of the flaws of, say, capitalism (why are so many of us in debt? why do we hate our jobs?) or the prevalence of sexism in our everyday lives (what makes thin so beautiful? why do we so often and so readily dismiss scientific evidence that fat can be healthy?). We see ourselves as the problem rather than seeing the problem as the problem.

So my advice to myself and anyone else who happens to listen will be to fuck some shit up this year. Make some noise, crash some parties, and see what happens.

Check back tomorrow for my attempt to revise New Year’s resolutions for myself.

Seriously, I just want to start handing out big double deckers of shut the fuck up with extra cheese. That’s right. This isn’t one of those introspective, academic blog posts. This is my full fury distilled into a few shortish paragraphs with a dash (or a generous spoonful) of profanity thrown in for good measure and catharsis.

Simply put, I am sick to death already of hearing how FUN it is to exercise and go on a diet. That’s right, FUN. And that isn’t my word. Oh no, that is the word that keeps popping up in various announcements, in emails that come to my work email address about Weight Watchers (don’t get me started on the inappropriateness of that), and in Facebook status updates. The worst part is that I can’t do what I really want to do, which is to say wake up and stop being a prisoner in your own body. Stop using little mind tricks to convince yourself that intense, arduous exercise is actually fun. Stop using that word to describe what you really know is both tortuous and boring. Sure, you have an adrenaline rush after wards, but that doesn’t make the activity itself fun. Being in a near fatal plane crash would probably give me a wicked adrenaline rush, but that doesn’t mean I’m hoping it will happen! For fuck sake, stop being so stupid, and stop buying into the idea that your body is flawed and/or that fat is so goddamned horrible.

I suppose I could say those things, but no one wants to hear them. They certainly don’t want to hear them from someone who is fat because the assumption is that I’m just angry that I’m not thin. Everyone jumps to the conclusion that I am really just covering up for the fact that I want to be skinny like the rest of them do. My utter lack of authority reminds me of a documentary I watched recently. It was a filmed speech by Tim Wise about white privilege. In it he begins by telling the audience that he isn’t saying anything new; he isn’t telling them anything that hundreds of people of color haven’t been saying for years. He is, however, asked to speak about the topic all the time because he has earned the authority to talk about white privilege because he has it. It is one of the sad ironies of how oppression works. If you live it you can’t possibly be trusted to talk about it because you can’t see beyond that giant ax that you’re grinding. It’s the “special rights” argument. You know, the one that says, “You want special treatment just because we’ve oppressed and treated you and people like you like shit for the last several thousand, million years. That’s not fair that you want special treatment.” So here I am surrounded by all these supposedly progressive people unable to really examine in a public way things like fat and class oppression.

I just find it hilarious that, among other things,  people will buy hybrids and talk about the environment and then rush to a gym to use a treadmill, powered by electricity, to do what their legs are designed to do using only their own energy. Oh, and they are also watching tv and consuming bottled water.* The thing is, we can’t talk about those things; or at least I can’t. And I sure as hell can’t talk about the warped ideas that we have about health. I can’t ask why someone who looks like me is automagically assumed to be less healthy than someone who looks like me minus 100+ pounds. I can’t ask why it is considered healthy to injure yourself in the name of getting in shape. I can’t ask why we take something like yoga that is about being centered and in tune with the world and “powerize” it.

Well, I guess I can, but not without hearing the unspoken, “It’s just ’cause she’s fat.”

* I’m not pretending to be perfect. I’m far from it. I buy bottled water sometimes; I get fast food wrapped in paper from virgin southern U.S. forests; I use electricity. I hope, though, that by acknowledging those things I can come up with ways to address my own impact and/or hypocrisy.

It was a few days ago that I first heard about the new study that finds 1 in 4 teenage girls in the U.S. has a sexually transmitted disease. Since then it’s been 48 long hours of furrowed news anchor brows, smacking lips, and televised dismay at the filthy promiscuity among teenagers. Some of the discussion has focused on teenagers in general without separating out the sexual habits of either girls or boys, but that hasn’t done much to soothe me. I find it odd, no, wait; let me start over. I find it completely normal (which, by the way, is way worse than odd) that these findings would be couched in terms that put girls at the center of the discussion. Every report I’ve seen says that 1 in 4 GIRLS has an STD.

Now I suppose teenage girls could be infecting one another. I mean, technically women can transmit diseases to one another even though study after study finds that it is very difficult and highly unlikely with most STDs. Herpes is the exception and seems to be, according to everything I’ve read, the easiest to transmit in female-female sex. Of course, there are few studies that contrast sex between lesbians to heterosexual sex in terms of STD transmission. The truth is, we still know very little about lesbian sex except that it is cute and usually preceded by the use of cherry chapstick.*

So if girls aren’t giving each other STDs then there have to be some non-girls involved, and we all know that non-girls are actually, get this, boys! Why the hell aren’t all the media outlets telling us how many boys have STDs? You know the answer, and I know the answer, but humor me as I repeat it for what is surely the 1,548,394th time: women are nasty and men are victims of that nastiness. Even nature thinks so. Twice in the past year women close to me have contracted HPV. They were scared they’d get cancer; they had their insides examined, scraped, and cultured; and they were both told by doctors that it is impossible to know how they got it because men typically carry the disease without any signs that they have it. Both women also defended the men who very likely gave it to them by parroting to me what their doctors told them.

Excuse the lesbian while she spews expletives in frustration.

I could go on and on about how it defies any kind of logic that a woman would be HPV free for years and then sleep with a man (the only one she’d been with in a very long time) and suddenly have an abnormal pap result. On and on I could go, but my point is really that women shoulder the burden of this like so many other things including, but in no way limited to, birth control, child care, and domestic chores. Why, then, include boys in the X Number of Girls Are Infected With Y Diseases equation? I suppose if women are the ones who have to take care of it all then there is no reason to talk about men. That’s it!

It finally all makes sense. I’ve wasted so much time worrying about shared responsibility and logical explanations and it-takes-two-to-tango thinking. Now I can settle into the serenity of an explanation that puts the blame where it has always belonged — on dirty teenage girls.

* Tongue in cheek pop culture reference. If you don’t get it be very happy.

Excuses aside, I do think it is important to look at one of the reasons why I’ve been absent for so long. I am afraid of you, Gentle Reader. I know, it is absurd. You’ve never been anything but kind to me in both incarnations of my blog, yet I can’t help but worry. I suppose it stems from that goddamned need to be liked and to do what I’m supposed to do — the same one from which so many women struggle to free themselves. I imagine myself armed with all the feminist theory in the world, but it amounts to little more than a paper shield, cardboard at best, held up against the persistent onslaught of armored Angels in the House, dragging behind their horses the ragged corpses of all the other women who have unsuccessfully fought against the urge to be liked.

Being a feminist, and I mean actively resisting patriarchy, requires one to let go of the need to be liked. It’s that simple. So what do I do? How do I reconcile the two? How do I resist feminine martyrdom? I’ve trained for it my entire life, and I am pretty good at it. Heck, I’m being modest; I’m really good at it.

You may be wondering what this has to do with my blog exactly. Let me explain. I spend a lot of time talking about audience with my freshman composition students. I explain to them how important it is that they anticipate both positive and negative audience reactions. I urge them to think about what their audience wants and needs before they ever start writing. In short, I train them like the world trains little girls. I teach them to put aside their ideas until they can figure out how best to make their readers happy. What woman, with any ability for self-reflection at all, can say she hasn’t done that hundreds and thousands and millions of times? As Woolf puts it, the Angel “sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught, she sat in it.”

Now one part of me says that’s just good writing. How can you be expected to have an impact on anyone without figuring out what s/he needs? The other part of me wonders if, like so many other aspects of writing, this is yet another patriarchal idea that has become so ingrained in our consciousnesses that it just feels like fact. After all, there have been many women who have broken through the traditional “rules” of writing — women who say fuck it to a conflict-climax-resolution model of storytelling, for example. Why not, then, examine this other rhetorical strategy, this idea of reader as God? Oh, but it is scary.

This brings me back to my blogging. It is this anxiety about audience that makes blogging increasingly difficult for me. What do I have to say that is new? What can I say that is different? that matters? The very kinds of questions that I’m raising, though, remind me of something else. I am again prioritizing someone else over myself in my own life, a life of which I am the primary actor. I am the leading woman, not a character actor, not a supporting actor. Why, then, should it matter what a reader thinks? After all, this blog was a gift to myself.

For now that realization feels really helpful. Now I’ll just need to reread this post once a week.

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.

Take 2:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zyrc/2365244174/

So until my brain is back to full working capacity, go take a look at Destee Nation. They sell t-shirts advertising small, locally owned West Coast businesses. They favor the kind of places that you would normally only hear about if you spent a good deal of time in an area — greasy spoons, bowling alleys, taverns. I wish I’d seen their site before we went to Seattle last fall; we missed some neat looking places. Speaking of which, when I get a few extra dollars I’d like to get this t-shirt. I was so bummed that the streetcar wasn’t running when we were in town.

I found their website the other day by way of some Internet lounging. You know what I mean; you look at some website that sends you to another website and so on until 2 hours later you wake up from your clicking-induced fog and realize that you haven’t done a single piece of work. It’s wonderful really — somnambulism updated for the 21st century! Anyway, I seem to remember reading that they had been featured in the NY Times if you care about that kind of thing.

Here’s Luna at the beach back in May. She actually fell asleep face down in the sand. Weirdo.

1. A few days ago Piig read about that insane bill in Mississippi that would have restaurants refuse service to fat customers. I wish she hadn’t told me about it, but there has been enough press coverage (and subsequent yammering about the dum-duh-duuuuuh Obesity EPIDEMIC) that I would have heard about it no matter what. Have we seriously grown so afraid of fat that we would subject people to public weigh-ins or BMI calculations before letting them eat out? Oh wait, that’s what Weight Watchers did for us, it (and a host of other diet programs) normalized public shaming of fat people while glorifying the loss of even the smallest amount of weight. Lose a pound? Yay!!!! Congratulations on your hard work and dedication! Gain a pound or fail to lose any? Awwww. You’ve let us all down with your overindulgence and lack of willpower. Willpower builds character and proves that you deserve things — like the freedom to live in your own skin.
2. If you are able to rip yourself away from the Abercrombie and Fitch scandal you might have heard that 5 women were killed in a Lane Bryant store this weekend. Call me cynical, but I can’t help but wonder if we’d be hearing more, if the story would have been more than a blip on my local news, if a bunch of Victoria’s Secret shoppers had been killed. Just the opportunity to flash pink thongs on the news probably would have made that story too good to pass up. I can see it now. Anderson Cooper would be interviewing witnesses in front of the Valentine’s Day crotchless panties and feathered negligees.
3. The Fat Avenger, Oprah Winfrey, had yet another weight loss surgery show. Never one to rest on the success of previous episodes, she made this story exclusively about teenagers. Viewers just didn’t get enough of the adolescents on Oprah’s other weight loss surgery shows, so she put several former teenage fatties on all at once. They expounded on the wide and various health benefits of having their insides tied up or cut out, and one young girl returned to visit the clinic in Tijuana where she’d had her surgery at the age of 13. According to the girl and her mother, she just mysteriously started to put on huge, massive amounts of weight. Suddenly her body started to change and she couldn’t explain it. It’s called fucking puberty!That’s right, I watched it. I had to; I couldn’t stop myself. It was like some sick obsession. In the end all it did was infuriate me, of course. And if Oprah had overemphasized the words hundred or two or three (as in two hundred pounds or three hundredpounds) just a couple more times I would have barfed. I expected to see the self-hatred oozing out of my tv screen like the not so uncommon postoperative anal leakage.

And I’ll leave you with that pleasant thought.