I have no doubt that long before my awakening to feminist consciousness, I encountered the term "a man's world." Likely, the refrain echoed in the background of tv commercials and sitcoms in the ever-present way that American idioms shape the soundtrack of our popular lives. I first confronted the fact that I had been educated, socialized and brought up in a man's world during college, and it wasn't until I possessed the tools of critical consciousness that the retrospective analysis of my life came to be shaped by an understanding of patriarchy and the value of masculine identity.
As I contemplate the foreboding future of what I can only describe as becoming a grown-up, I find myself frequently analyzing the potential changing nature of my gendered experience, particularly the dynamics that govern professional interaction. The professional sphere is a unique political space. It is one of those areas in our culture defined by assumed equity. The combined exposure of our education and socialization has created a myth of equal opportunity, treatment and respect in the workplace, courtesy of the women's movement, the civil rights acts and the combined accomplishments of a few powerful females and a prominent person of color or two. We more or less exist under the pretense that your race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. is absent in the workplace and that none of our defining characteristics of identity make a difference in our employment experience. Unfortunately, I beg to differ.
My position as an upper-middle class, hetero-sexual, white woman has made it incredibly easy for me to understand the language and behavior patterns of the elitist realms of affluent culture. I can remember being eleven years old and finding great ease and comfort in conversation with educated adults. The way I was socialized to communicate eloquently manifested itself at an early age, and I have since benefitted from the ability to negotiate just about any sphere of interaction. When I was twenty years old I had my first pivotal encounter with grown men in a professional environment. I was serving on the board of trustees for a non-profit organization and as I sat in my innaguaral meeting, an unfamiliar sensation crept over me. It was both subtle and palpable, an ambiguous combination of isolation and objectification. I would come to label it much later as the experience of a young woman amidst the distinctive (and exclusive) language and behavior patterns of the professional good-old-boys club, but in the moment of my first encounter, I could only describe it as uncomfortable and alienating.
In the spirit of white privilege and other social invisibilities, the rules of engagement that govern the good-old boys club are unspoken, unwritten and for all intents and purposes, unseen from the perspective of your average, every day participant. How does something so pervasive exist without any detection and analysis, let alone objection? It's a simple function of normative expectations and socialization. We come to regard certain practices and interactions as inevitable, natural or automatic and we are not equipped with the tools to deconstruct these elements of our existence. The gender dynamics of the workplace represent a classic example of this phenomenon.
It turns out that one of the worst things about the conclusion (or at least postponement) of my student lifestyle and my (somewhat delayed) entrance into the capitalist workforce is the drastic reduction in my leisure time. Given that I have a limited amount of it, I choose to spend it in ways that enrich my mind, restore my spirit and provide me clarity, stimulation and sanity. It just so happens that fantasy sports doesn't make the cut on my free-time priority list. And although I devote zero hours a week to the digital world of imaginary athletics, I find that they have crept into my life experience through some process of information diffusion that occurs as a product of a male-dominated employment environment.
I've been in more than one professional meeting in my life that has opened with and/or included a discussion of the following: collegiate athletics, fantasy football or last week's golf match. And while one could argue that these may be relevant or even significant topics of discussion for members of corporations and industries that depend on, include, or otherwise are associated with college sports, "fantasy" anything or your office co-worker's golf score, I assure you, I have yet to venture into any of those professions. I have, however, worked in and around men who perceive these aspects of their personal lives as somehow intersecting with their careers to such an extent that they are not only fodder for lunch hour banter, but practically woven into the fiber of the conference room agenda.
Occassionally, when my time is involuntarily consumed by such crucial elements of popular existence, I entertain myself with an intellectual visualization of a public discussion of culturally defined female pastimes. Perhaps I poll my co-workers about their asssesment of the underwear selection at the Victoria's Secret Semi-annual sale? Or maybe we could evaluate the latest evolutions in birth control, tampons or body lotion? I am certainly not an advocate of affirming, validating or participating in the construction of this type of gendered distinction, but for the sake of the argument I'm going to have to accept the social prescriptions of this particular case.
It's not so much that I feel offended or inconvenienced by the office banter that includes all sorts of characteristically masculine interests and hobbies, it's that this particular workplace phenomenon is representative of a more significant, broader, more insidious epidemic that both reflects and creates gender employment inequity. At the center of this issue is inclusivity. Anyone who has walked in the world of office politics know that being on the inside of everything from client relationships and committee meetings to office golf rounds and workplace scandal are crucial to securing a preeminent position in any company or organization. It is within these spaces and from these places that impressions, evaluations and decisions are ultimately made, and as result, it arguably becomes a better career investment to spend your weekends watching the boss' favorite football team than putting in extra hours at the office.
Language and behavior patterns are indisputably two of the most powerful elements of any cultural formation. It would follow then, that if the language and behavior patterns of a particular office culture favor certain interests or individuals, it is professionally advantageous to adhere to these prescriptions. Those of us who may not fit into this category of belonging are alienated, marginalized or otherwise disadvantaged. When the social atmosphere of a professional environment is outlined, defined and dominated by masculinity, divisive lines are drawn.
The truth is, if the great office equalizer rested in our ability to adapt to or adopt certain characteristics that ensured inclusive representation, most of us who are accustomed to making cultural adjustments based on the narrow normative expectations of the white-male- upper middle class- heterosexual world, would just shut up and do it, the same way we have our entire lives. Unfortunately, the nature and function of the good old boys club has a depth of greater subtlety that is much more difficult to infiltrate.
The first and most obvious barrier to membership in the good old boys club is, of course, appearance. There is a certain image that is remarkably prominent among those who gain admittance and/or acceptance into the club, and those of us who fail to visibly resemble the standard suffer from practically immediate and permanent exclusion. Perhaps you've seen them around your office: a middle-aged-middle to upper middle class white man who defines his personal style by a polo shirt and khaki slacks. Maybe you know him as the younger well dressed man who celebrates each casual friday with a backwards hat and some sort of athletic paraphanelia. The truth is, as much as I amuse myself with vivid, specific, narrow stereotypes, the image of the good-old-boys club spans the spectrum of white male normative appearances. Beyond that, an individual has to pursue all sorts of alternative avenues to both seek and obtain a sense of belonging, not to mention the benefits, that accompany the position. Among them, the type of solidarity and inclusive identity that produce a wide variety of favorable workplace results. With limited exposure, I have already witnessed the perils of exclusion and the rampant rewards of ranking highly in the good-old-boys' favor.
It had always been my assumption that a capitalist market that values, emphasizes and reproduces individual rigor and personal achievement would commend the accomplishments of over-achieving, ambitious and otherwise self-motivated young women. My real-life experience has served to contradict this assumption in about every way imaginable. So while myself and the women around me in the workplace set exceptional standards for ourselves and aspire to all sorts of professional greatness, the men I've worked with seem to skate by on charm, mediocrity and of course, membership. I have endured countless staff meetings characterized by the subtle exchange of winks, nudges and other affirmations of solidarity among the men in the room. In an almost equal percentage, I have glanced around the room at the responsive expressions men make to the assertion of a woman's voice or opinion. I certainly don't mean to suggest that women are the only individuals who are marginalized by the deprivation of the good old boy rewards card, but this observation serves to underscore the type of us/them dichotomy that so often develops in the workplace, as well as the consequences that emerge as a result.
For those of us who are consistently eluded by the covet of membership, the struggle to situate ourselves in the workplace becomes more than an issue of fitting in, and serves to produce a barrier to advancement, recognition and ultimately, equality. Despite having just about every imaginable social privilege available other than my gender, I have outperformed men in the same position only to be met with, at the very least, apathy and at its worst, scorn and discrimination. My best friend (who also happens to serve as my professional partner during the summer day camp season) and I have jokingly labeled ourselves the over-achieving- annoyances of our office. In an environment that relishes the status-quo and rejects such radical phenomena as overtime and innovation, we continue to put up with rolling eyes, sexist humor and blanket praise that reduces our superior quality performance to the category of acceptable that is occupied by our (athletic, good-looking, white, hetero-sexual) male counterparts.
I think I struggle most with the existence of the good-old boys' club because of what it means to people who suffer from all sorts of other sources of social and professional adversity. If I am consistently frustrated with the difficulties that emerge from trying to navigate "a man's world", what hope is there for people who aren't equipped automatically (as I more or less find myself to be) with the skills, identity and education to succeed in it? How will corporations, the government, academia, and all the other spheres of power and privilege that we have come to regard as prestigious and influential, ever look any different than they have for the last 300 years if there is no challenge to the systems that serve to maintain their image. Both for myself and others whose membership status remains "rejected," I represent solidarity, and a continued commitment to dismantling, and at the very least questioning, the good old boys club (and other mechanisms like it) in all the professional environments I encounter.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Just a Man on a Microphone
9 months ago I started the following blog:
On Monday night I had an epiphone. I experienced a moment in which something I had struggled with for many years without identification, revealed itself with such clarity that I could finally articulate it. Tim McGraw quieted an entire arena of screaming, drunk country music fans and every day of my life I battle to be heard among the murmurs of a man's world. I stand in front of my 40 person day camp staff whose average age is 16 and barely hold it together, while night after night, Tim Mcgraw comes to the point in the show where he raises and lowers the voices of his entire audience with a simple wave of his hands and thousands upon thousands of people respond without question.
I am a powerful woman. I am not a woman who holds leadership positions because I am organized and detail oriented, I hold them because I command attention, possess vision and communicate in the world the way I learned to by a socialization that favored men. I grew up in large groups of boisterous boys who talked over eachother and at eachother and fought for control of their audience by increasing the volume of their voices. At some point in my early adolescence, it occurred to me that the way to be recognized for your opinions and contributions was to be heard by others, and the way to be heard was to articulate yourself by a certain set of codes and mannerisms that govern the communicative male universe. In turn, i adopted these prescriptions and since then have experienced a measurable amount of success communicating in all sorts of social and professional circles. So as I proceed with this discussion, let it be clearly conveyed that I am not a woman unfamiliar with captivating an audience.
The Tim McGraw/Faith Hill Soul 2 Soul tour presented an interesting medium for an examination of gender roles and dynamics. Faith performed first, warming the crowd with professions of love, her beautiful smile and minimal talking between songs. Enter Tim, who I have seen in concert more than once, who is charming, sexy and engaging. And on this particular night, an exquisite image of the privileges of patriarchy.
About a week and a half after I finished that last sentence, I took a job that not only took up all of my time, but rendered my brain almost completely incapable of formulating coherent thoughts. The post remained un-finished, and eventually was lost in the shuffle of re-organizing my life. I sat down at my computer tonight to write about an experience I had recently (at my new, intellectually stimulating and emotionally fulfilling job), and as I pulled up the blogger interface, i was shocked to discover that the post I intended to write already existed.
I attended a "march for higher education" rally at the state capitol at the beginning of the week. Recent student fee surges and a looming state budget crisis are threatening public education access (what else is new) and (apparently) young Californian's are not going to take it anymore. So to kick off a spirited campaign to save their futures, an inspiring collection of diverse students from all over California gathered to tell it like it is to the decreasingly popular celebrity governor. I was impressed by the organization and attendance of the event. I went to college on a campus that was mostly divided between students obsessed with being fit, beautiful and well-hydrated and those preoccupied with their grade-point average and preparing for professional school entrance exams with a small smattering of diverse students who took on the responsibility of both going to college and paying for it (a concept those in the previous two categories couldn't even imagine).
As I stood in the crowd of impassioned young people (not quite sure where I fit on the spectrum of mostly student attendees) I watched one man after another take the microphone and deliver his message. The orations varied in strength and value, ranging from the barely comprehensible to the somewhat convincing. The speakers varied in class and occupation, ranging from outraged student leaders to righteous Sacramento politicians. The creativity of the speeches varied hardly at all, and the gender of the voices on the microphone remained constant. Speech, after speech, after speech.
I took a long walk back to my car, re-visiting what I had witnessed, and reflecting on the numerous images from both my memory and imagination of men on the microphone. I recall both the audio and visual footage from famous speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK recurring throughout the course of my education in "history" while I was growing up. I remember being so angry once or twice a year when my favorite tv sitcom was preempted by the President delivering the state of the union address. In high school, I was under the impression that our spirit rallys should be run by male students because "guys are just more engaging in front of an audience." Years and years and example upon example of the male voice have shaped my understanding of the world.
And here I am. Many years later and many milestones through my lifetime educational journey, being reminded once again of who belongs behind the podium, whom is capable of commanding the crowd and who deserves to have his opinion heard. He does. Whoever he is, wherever he is and whatever he is talking about, a man will speak loudly and the people will listen.
I marched for higher education with one of the students I work with. Tall, good-looking, white, articulate...... female. And the future student body President of the college where I work. I asked her if she noticed that the only speakers at the rally were men. She said, "that's a good point, I didn't even realize there were no girls." Of course she didn't. Why would she? We've all been more or less exposed to the same unilateral definition of what type of people belong in what type of roles in our culture. Why would anyone question an abundance of men speaking for any cause?
Because something isn't quite right. Women currently outnumber men in higher education, both in attendance and in achievement. And while I think the steady decline of academic success among young males is as tragic as it is systemic, the fact remains that although young women have worked themselves to the forefront of educational success, men are still speaking up on their behalf. The phenomenon of men on the microphone doesn't begin or end with higher education. It reaches far and wide to just about every imaginable aspect of our experience. Men who exercise their voices are heroic, labeled "experts" and are typically considered to be "standing up for what they believe in." Women with similar intentions are "bitching," labeled "whiny" and typically considered to be irrational and/or pre-menstrual.
How powerful and present can the female voice possibly be if it's taken until the current century to hear a woman speak on the presidential campaign trail and behind the desk on the network evening news? We witness men on television narrating the shows and moderating the conversations. Women accessorize our visual framework as they are relegated to objectification at worst and tokenism at best. Female co-anchors giggle and sigh as daytime tv hosts exchange gender-role reinforcing stereotypes: the man holding the newspaper and the woman telling highly scripted stories about her husband and kids.
Enter real life, a place where men's voices echo with emphatic opinions and incisive language through elementary school classrooms to university lecture halls; a place where women are charismatic, attractive, assertive and courageous and still struggle to be heard over the voices of men who are nothing more than accustomed to being listened to. It is a place where young girls with quiet hands and pretty handwriting are ignored in the presence of impetuous boys who shout out answers to command the attention and praise of their teachers who expect nothing else. It is a place where even decades after women organized the civil rights movement while men spoke for it, the impact of the female voice remains marginal compared to the resounding influence of its male counterpart.
It's hard for me to anticipate the future of the female voice. Whether or not my dedication to exercising my own opinion, advocating for myself and encouraging and empowering other women to do the same will ever make any real change in the world, I can't say. One thing I know for certain is: the next time Tim McGraw raises and lowers his hands to quiet an entire audience, I'll be screaming my head off to make sure he knows I don't have to respond to his presence. Afterall, he's just a man on a microphone.
On Monday night I had an epiphone. I experienced a moment in which something I had struggled with for many years without identification, revealed itself with such clarity that I could finally articulate it. Tim McGraw quieted an entire arena of screaming, drunk country music fans and every day of my life I battle to be heard among the murmurs of a man's world. I stand in front of my 40 person day camp staff whose average age is 16 and barely hold it together, while night after night, Tim Mcgraw comes to the point in the show where he raises and lowers the voices of his entire audience with a simple wave of his hands and thousands upon thousands of people respond without question.
I am a powerful woman. I am not a woman who holds leadership positions because I am organized and detail oriented, I hold them because I command attention, possess vision and communicate in the world the way I learned to by a socialization that favored men. I grew up in large groups of boisterous boys who talked over eachother and at eachother and fought for control of their audience by increasing the volume of their voices. At some point in my early adolescence, it occurred to me that the way to be recognized for your opinions and contributions was to be heard by others, and the way to be heard was to articulate yourself by a certain set of codes and mannerisms that govern the communicative male universe. In turn, i adopted these prescriptions and since then have experienced a measurable amount of success communicating in all sorts of social and professional circles. So as I proceed with this discussion, let it be clearly conveyed that I am not a woman unfamiliar with captivating an audience.
The Tim McGraw/Faith Hill Soul 2 Soul tour presented an interesting medium for an examination of gender roles and dynamics. Faith performed first, warming the crowd with professions of love, her beautiful smile and minimal talking between songs. Enter Tim, who I have seen in concert more than once, who is charming, sexy and engaging. And on this particular night, an exquisite image of the privileges of patriarchy.
About a week and a half after I finished that last sentence, I took a job that not only took up all of my time, but rendered my brain almost completely incapable of formulating coherent thoughts. The post remained un-finished, and eventually was lost in the shuffle of re-organizing my life. I sat down at my computer tonight to write about an experience I had recently (at my new, intellectually stimulating and emotionally fulfilling job), and as I pulled up the blogger interface, i was shocked to discover that the post I intended to write already existed.
I attended a "march for higher education" rally at the state capitol at the beginning of the week. Recent student fee surges and a looming state budget crisis are threatening public education access (what else is new) and (apparently) young Californian's are not going to take it anymore. So to kick off a spirited campaign to save their futures, an inspiring collection of diverse students from all over California gathered to tell it like it is to the decreasingly popular celebrity governor. I was impressed by the organization and attendance of the event. I went to college on a campus that was mostly divided between students obsessed with being fit, beautiful and well-hydrated and those preoccupied with their grade-point average and preparing for professional school entrance exams with a small smattering of diverse students who took on the responsibility of both going to college and paying for it (a concept those in the previous two categories couldn't even imagine).
As I stood in the crowd of impassioned young people (not quite sure where I fit on the spectrum of mostly student attendees) I watched one man after another take the microphone and deliver his message. The orations varied in strength and value, ranging from the barely comprehensible to the somewhat convincing. The speakers varied in class and occupation, ranging from outraged student leaders to righteous Sacramento politicians. The creativity of the speeches varied hardly at all, and the gender of the voices on the microphone remained constant. Speech, after speech, after speech.
I took a long walk back to my car, re-visiting what I had witnessed, and reflecting on the numerous images from both my memory and imagination of men on the microphone. I recall both the audio and visual footage from famous speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK recurring throughout the course of my education in "history" while I was growing up. I remember being so angry once or twice a year when my favorite tv sitcom was preempted by the President delivering the state of the union address. In high school, I was under the impression that our spirit rallys should be run by male students because "guys are just more engaging in front of an audience." Years and years and example upon example of the male voice have shaped my understanding of the world.
And here I am. Many years later and many milestones through my lifetime educational journey, being reminded once again of who belongs behind the podium, whom is capable of commanding the crowd and who deserves to have his opinion heard. He does. Whoever he is, wherever he is and whatever he is talking about, a man will speak loudly and the people will listen.
I marched for higher education with one of the students I work with. Tall, good-looking, white, articulate...... female. And the future student body President of the college where I work. I asked her if she noticed that the only speakers at the rally were men. She said, "that's a good point, I didn't even realize there were no girls." Of course she didn't. Why would she? We've all been more or less exposed to the same unilateral definition of what type of people belong in what type of roles in our culture. Why would anyone question an abundance of men speaking for any cause?
Because something isn't quite right. Women currently outnumber men in higher education, both in attendance and in achievement. And while I think the steady decline of academic success among young males is as tragic as it is systemic, the fact remains that although young women have worked themselves to the forefront of educational success, men are still speaking up on their behalf. The phenomenon of men on the microphone doesn't begin or end with higher education. It reaches far and wide to just about every imaginable aspect of our experience. Men who exercise their voices are heroic, labeled "experts" and are typically considered to be "standing up for what they believe in." Women with similar intentions are "bitching," labeled "whiny" and typically considered to be irrational and/or pre-menstrual.
How powerful and present can the female voice possibly be if it's taken until the current century to hear a woman speak on the presidential campaign trail and behind the desk on the network evening news? We witness men on television narrating the shows and moderating the conversations. Women accessorize our visual framework as they are relegated to objectification at worst and tokenism at best. Female co-anchors giggle and sigh as daytime tv hosts exchange gender-role reinforcing stereotypes: the man holding the newspaper and the woman telling highly scripted stories about her husband and kids.
Enter real life, a place where men's voices echo with emphatic opinions and incisive language through elementary school classrooms to university lecture halls; a place where women are charismatic, attractive, assertive and courageous and still struggle to be heard over the voices of men who are nothing more than accustomed to being listened to. It is a place where young girls with quiet hands and pretty handwriting are ignored in the presence of impetuous boys who shout out answers to command the attention and praise of their teachers who expect nothing else. It is a place where even decades after women organized the civil rights movement while men spoke for it, the impact of the female voice remains marginal compared to the resounding influence of its male counterpart.
It's hard for me to anticipate the future of the female voice. Whether or not my dedication to exercising my own opinion, advocating for myself and encouraging and empowering other women to do the same will ever make any real change in the world, I can't say. One thing I know for certain is: the next time Tim McGraw raises and lowers his hands to quiet an entire audience, I'll be screaming my head off to make sure he knows I don't have to respond to his presence. Afterall, he's just a man on a microphone.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Surrender
I spend most of my life pretending. Pretending to be happy, pretending to listen, pretending to be successful, ambitious and motivated. Infact, I'm so immersed in the grandeur of my life performance, that I'm actually a pretty happy, invested, successful and driven person. Yesterday I had a conversation with one of my employees that inspired a meditation about the authenticity of my existence. Infact, it launched an evaluation of the authenticity in all of us, and the quality of the world that we produce around us.
My employee had just returned from a challenging week serving as a counselor for a person with physical and intellectual disabilities. We were discovering the powerful, humbling, transformative process of it all as we reflected on the day-to-day of our lives that seem so vacant and insignificant in comparison. We spoke about honesty and open hearts, about innocence and lack of inhibition. We shared the so often unspoken secret of ourselves that in the everyday world we are only shadows and silhouettes of the beings we are inside. We maintain barriers and pretenses that protect us from our own identities, and preserve our anonymity in the world.
On those rare occassions when I've been moved out of my emotional shelter and into the elements of vulnerability and surrender, I have found my fullest and best self. I love stronger, I laugh harder and I understand and absorb the world in a purer and more beautiful way. It is only in that space that I appreciate the sound, smells and essence of the tangible environment. That space makes life palpable and immediate, and it gives me the rare opportunity to collide with the moment, to really live in it, experience it and thrive in it.
The last time I had that feeling was at the end of a four day backpacking trip with one of my closest female friends and 12 of the most dynamic young people I have ever encountered. It was one of those rare and spectacular life moments in which every single breathe creates a memory, the meaning of which you intend to hold on to for the rest of your life. That particular feeling is produced by the sensational collision of complete vulnerability and empowerment, and at the core of it, is the sanctity of surrender. That surrender is to something much greater than the force of all the elements of our lives that keep us from doing it in ordinary existence. That surrender occurs in the moment we stop pretending and give in to the weaknesses and intricacies of our most authentic selves.
I started wondering, what are the social and conditional causes of our failure to be authentic in the everyday world we live in. Is it capitalism, patriarchy or some other form of institutional oppression that I typically identify as the root cause of everything? Or is it a more complex combination of the expectations of our social culture and the limitations of the prescriptive norms we live by? And more importantly than its cause are the consequences of living by highly interpreted and transcribed versions of who we really are.
I've tried to envision a space in which we engage eachother in the purest form of our humanity. Where instead of operating under the demands of the defensive, we reveal compassion, vulnerability and unconditionality. I've also considered that the tools and awareness of critical consciousness would certainly be supported by the elimination of our own self-consciousness. I've grown up in a generation where all forms of communication and interaction are mediated by some form of electronic synthesis, and it seems that the further we get from eachother, the more and more we can occupy social existence without any identification or portrayal of ourselves.
I can't help but think that the further we are removed from eachother, the easier we can generate hate, anger and other destructive forces of difference and misunderstanding. The more we exist in a world dominated by constructed identities, false personas and other mutated forms of self, the more we are isolated from the enrichment and solidarity of the humanity that transcends so many of the barriers that produce ugliness, insecurity, racism, homophobia and the like. The more we see the world through the lens of television, myspace, the iphone and other co-opted tools of capitalism, the more we come to understand the world under the terms and conditions of a marketing license, and the less and less we understand about individual experiences, struggles, opinions and perspectives.
For me, surrender is a mechanism through which space is created. Surrender leads to the type of emotional evocation that spurs dialogue, and there is no doubt that dialogue is a source of hope, and a means by which hierarchies of all kinds are dismantled. There is tremendous power in that. My yoga instructor (whose wisdom I often use in my writing) often jokes about making her class incredibly difficult, with the objective of leaving "no fight left" in anybody so that "when we hit the mat, we will be left with unconditional surrender" When I hit the mat after having my ass thoroughly kicked by my yoga instructor, I am awakened with tremendous clarity and compassion and have the capacity for reflection that I rarely encounter in my everyday life. It is incredible how much energy it requires to relax in our culture, and I can only imagine the beauty that would emerge if we were far less consumed by our insecurity, boundaries and other forms of toxic mutation, and more invested in opening up our humanity to eachother.
Surrender. In a world where inequity, injustice and all sorts of heinousness run rampantly and perpetually beyond our control, it just may be a source of transformation. It may be the source of creative change and understanding, the power of which generates ideas that overcomes the boundaries that our failing to surrender have created. Surrender is access to ourselves and eachother, to solve problems and bridge boundaries on the simplest, most pure, most human level we can reach together.
My employee had just returned from a challenging week serving as a counselor for a person with physical and intellectual disabilities. We were discovering the powerful, humbling, transformative process of it all as we reflected on the day-to-day of our lives that seem so vacant and insignificant in comparison. We spoke about honesty and open hearts, about innocence and lack of inhibition. We shared the so often unspoken secret of ourselves that in the everyday world we are only shadows and silhouettes of the beings we are inside. We maintain barriers and pretenses that protect us from our own identities, and preserve our anonymity in the world.
On those rare occassions when I've been moved out of my emotional shelter and into the elements of vulnerability and surrender, I have found my fullest and best self. I love stronger, I laugh harder and I understand and absorb the world in a purer and more beautiful way. It is only in that space that I appreciate the sound, smells and essence of the tangible environment. That space makes life palpable and immediate, and it gives me the rare opportunity to collide with the moment, to really live in it, experience it and thrive in it.
The last time I had that feeling was at the end of a four day backpacking trip with one of my closest female friends and 12 of the most dynamic young people I have ever encountered. It was one of those rare and spectacular life moments in which every single breathe creates a memory, the meaning of which you intend to hold on to for the rest of your life. That particular feeling is produced by the sensational collision of complete vulnerability and empowerment, and at the core of it, is the sanctity of surrender. That surrender is to something much greater than the force of all the elements of our lives that keep us from doing it in ordinary existence. That surrender occurs in the moment we stop pretending and give in to the weaknesses and intricacies of our most authentic selves.
I started wondering, what are the social and conditional causes of our failure to be authentic in the everyday world we live in. Is it capitalism, patriarchy or some other form of institutional oppression that I typically identify as the root cause of everything? Or is it a more complex combination of the expectations of our social culture and the limitations of the prescriptive norms we live by? And more importantly than its cause are the consequences of living by highly interpreted and transcribed versions of who we really are.
I've tried to envision a space in which we engage eachother in the purest form of our humanity. Where instead of operating under the demands of the defensive, we reveal compassion, vulnerability and unconditionality. I've also considered that the tools and awareness of critical consciousness would certainly be supported by the elimination of our own self-consciousness. I've grown up in a generation where all forms of communication and interaction are mediated by some form of electronic synthesis, and it seems that the further we get from eachother, the more and more we can occupy social existence without any identification or portrayal of ourselves.
I can't help but think that the further we are removed from eachother, the easier we can generate hate, anger and other destructive forces of difference and misunderstanding. The more we exist in a world dominated by constructed identities, false personas and other mutated forms of self, the more we are isolated from the enrichment and solidarity of the humanity that transcends so many of the barriers that produce ugliness, insecurity, racism, homophobia and the like. The more we see the world through the lens of television, myspace, the iphone and other co-opted tools of capitalism, the more we come to understand the world under the terms and conditions of a marketing license, and the less and less we understand about individual experiences, struggles, opinions and perspectives.
For me, surrender is a mechanism through which space is created. Surrender leads to the type of emotional evocation that spurs dialogue, and there is no doubt that dialogue is a source of hope, and a means by which hierarchies of all kinds are dismantled. There is tremendous power in that. My yoga instructor (whose wisdom I often use in my writing) often jokes about making her class incredibly difficult, with the objective of leaving "no fight left" in anybody so that "when we hit the mat, we will be left with unconditional surrender" When I hit the mat after having my ass thoroughly kicked by my yoga instructor, I am awakened with tremendous clarity and compassion and have the capacity for reflection that I rarely encounter in my everyday life. It is incredible how much energy it requires to relax in our culture, and I can only imagine the beauty that would emerge if we were far less consumed by our insecurity, boundaries and other forms of toxic mutation, and more invested in opening up our humanity to eachother.
Surrender. In a world where inequity, injustice and all sorts of heinousness run rampantly and perpetually beyond our control, it just may be a source of transformation. It may be the source of creative change and understanding, the power of which generates ideas that overcomes the boundaries that our failing to surrender have created. Surrender is access to ourselves and eachother, to solve problems and bridge boundaries on the simplest, most pure, most human level we can reach together.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
"That's where the good stuff is"
About a month ago I made the epic pilgrimage home from west los angeles to spend the summer in the suburban paradise of Carmichael, California, population: mostly middle to upper middle class white people: claim to fame: the least known adjacent city to the illustrious state capital. Carmichael is one of those places that lingers three to five years behind the evolution of popular culture, marked by radio stations that play retired top 40 hits and clothing stores that market fashion trends featured four seasons ago on The Real World. Needless to say, my addiction to the southern california phenomenon of power yoga has remained unsatiated since my triumphant return to protected left turns, wide streets and well-defined sidewalks.
Eager to reimmerse myself in my workout ritual and desperate to find a substitute for the practice to which my devotion has become borderline religious, I fired up the stolen wireless internet (one of the privileges of a technologically underdeveloped society is the absence of password protected networks) and set out in the direction of a google search. Four rounds of word order manipulation revealed a vinyasa flow yoga studio in Sacramento's wanna-be-urban midtown district. I was sure my well-articulated, non-western prayers had been answered and Shiva had shined upon my pathetic hometown existence to reveal the source of my suburban salvation.
The good news is, the power yoga studio was not just a northern california urban legend, but rather a unique and inviting space owned and opertaed by an energetic yoga enthusiast slash large dog owner who seemed to be an ideal combination of down-to-earth sacramenton and experienced instructor. The bad news is: while both of those things may be true, the practice she led that evening became the inspiration for this entire entry, and if you read anything I've ever written you know that can't be good.
Somewhere between the intricate interpretations of the standard poses I know, love and count on for both challenge and familiarty; the yoga instructor launched into a predictable life lesson connecting the work on the mat to the work we do every day in the world beyond it. Somewhere between the fifth and sixth breathe of an unusual and awkward contortion, she began encouraging us to endure the pose through the pain. It's not an uncommon mantra to hear in a yoga studio, a spiritual space for opening your body, mind and heart which sometimes requires maintaining focus and serenity through discomfort; but the daily-life analogy that accompanied it nearly collapsed my down-dog.
"Yoga is just like a relationship, you have to stick it out through the pain and discomfort, because that's where the good stuff is." There she was. Not just a character in a poorly written sitcom or romantic comedy, but a real live, talking, walking, thinking woman, telling her captive audience of (primarily) female yogis to stay in relationships that are painful, destructive and/or dysfunctional; not just because she's optimistic or hopeful for improvement, but because that is where the greatest meaning and depth of it exist. Are you kidding me?
As I drove away from the studio that night (appalled and offended) it occured to me that the take home message of the evening was not just the advice of an overly-organic, new age, chanting pseudo-spiritual yoga instructor, but rather a legitimate product of the conglomerate image-ideal-belief system that women grow up with about their orientation to the people they are in relationships with and the relationships themselves. The values of patience and compassion are revered as virtues of women who are self-sacrificing, devoted and unconditionally loving. Women learn that their own worth is measured by what they contribute to the lives of others at an early age girls develop the impulse to put themselves at the bottom of their emotional investment hierarchy.
So here we are. Grown up women, products of exposure to fairy tales, disney movies and countless other academic and media-based lessons about the roles females play in all types of human interaction, who have been imprinted with the some interpretation of exactly what that yoga instructor was talking about: that while we may be exploited, disrespected, abandoned, cheated on, derided, marginalized and otherwise demoralized by the people we choose to be in relationships with, the appropriate, heroic, selfless response to all of it is to keep loving, keep working, keep adjusting because ultimately that is what makes the relationship worthwhile.
Being a daughter of this phenomenon, and a weathered soldier of far too many battles to save a relationship that wasn't working, I wonder how it is that although countless generations of women have undoubtedly endured painful relationships with fruitless results, we are still without a prevailing alternative wisdom that suggests relationships that are painful should be terminated immediately.
The most severe and haunting element of this entire discussion is the depth and breadth of the consequences that accompany relationship endurance. Aside from the (in some cases) permanent emotional scars, remnants of bad relationships leave traces of behavioral patterns, professional distractions, not to mention self-image and self-respect distortions that can potentially leave women hollow, defeated and emotionally raw. Even worse than any of this is the weight beared by women who refuse to give up on the pursuit of "the good stuff" even when what they see, feel and experience is unequivocally bad. These are the real victims of the ideology that emerges from the classic tale of Beauty and the Beast. Some women wait an entire lifetime to reveal their charming prince, with persistent devotion to both the idea of commitment and the person they are committed to.
It terrifies me to think that anyone is existing under the assumption that staying in a relationship through heartbreak and discomfort is not only one way, but the only way, to get to the place where the relationship really happens. I envision a world where women get into relationships because they are healthy and fulfilling and get out of them as soon as they fail to live up to that standard. I write fairy tales and children's books in my head that cast brilliant young women as heroines and detail stories of independence, self-respect and male characters who are unconditional, sacrificing and compassionate. Until we live in a world where narratives of this sort thrive in the media, I leave women with advice I got in a santa monica yoga class, from a woman who teaches yoga as well as she teaches life.
Ally told a story one night while we were sitting in a deep hip opener pose about leaving the man of her dreams after she witnessed him swipe a block of cheese from a whole foods without paying for it. She said, "the truth is, that was one of many red flags I didn't take heed of throughout our relationship" She continued, "the beauty of yoga is that you get to know yourself so well that you're capable of getting out of something at the first sign that it isn't working for you"
And Ally is most definitely right, your most intimate relationship is knowing the depths of yourself, because that's where the good stuff is
Eager to reimmerse myself in my workout ritual and desperate to find a substitute for the practice to which my devotion has become borderline religious, I fired up the stolen wireless internet (one of the privileges of a technologically underdeveloped society is the absence of password protected networks) and set out in the direction of a google search. Four rounds of word order manipulation revealed a vinyasa flow yoga studio in Sacramento's wanna-be-urban midtown district. I was sure my well-articulated, non-western prayers had been answered and Shiva had shined upon my pathetic hometown existence to reveal the source of my suburban salvation.
The good news is, the power yoga studio was not just a northern california urban legend, but rather a unique and inviting space owned and opertaed by an energetic yoga enthusiast slash large dog owner who seemed to be an ideal combination of down-to-earth sacramenton and experienced instructor. The bad news is: while both of those things may be true, the practice she led that evening became the inspiration for this entire entry, and if you read anything I've ever written you know that can't be good.
Somewhere between the intricate interpretations of the standard poses I know, love and count on for both challenge and familiarty; the yoga instructor launched into a predictable life lesson connecting the work on the mat to the work we do every day in the world beyond it. Somewhere between the fifth and sixth breathe of an unusual and awkward contortion, she began encouraging us to endure the pose through the pain. It's not an uncommon mantra to hear in a yoga studio, a spiritual space for opening your body, mind and heart which sometimes requires maintaining focus and serenity through discomfort; but the daily-life analogy that accompanied it nearly collapsed my down-dog.
"Yoga is just like a relationship, you have to stick it out through the pain and discomfort, because that's where the good stuff is." There she was. Not just a character in a poorly written sitcom or romantic comedy, but a real live, talking, walking, thinking woman, telling her captive audience of (primarily) female yogis to stay in relationships that are painful, destructive and/or dysfunctional; not just because she's optimistic or hopeful for improvement, but because that is where the greatest meaning and depth of it exist. Are you kidding me?
As I drove away from the studio that night (appalled and offended) it occured to me that the take home message of the evening was not just the advice of an overly-organic, new age, chanting pseudo-spiritual yoga instructor, but rather a legitimate product of the conglomerate image-ideal-belief system that women grow up with about their orientation to the people they are in relationships with and the relationships themselves. The values of patience and compassion are revered as virtues of women who are self-sacrificing, devoted and unconditionally loving. Women learn that their own worth is measured by what they contribute to the lives of others at an early age girls develop the impulse to put themselves at the bottom of their emotional investment hierarchy.
So here we are. Grown up women, products of exposure to fairy tales, disney movies and countless other academic and media-based lessons about the roles females play in all types of human interaction, who have been imprinted with the some interpretation of exactly what that yoga instructor was talking about: that while we may be exploited, disrespected, abandoned, cheated on, derided, marginalized and otherwise demoralized by the people we choose to be in relationships with, the appropriate, heroic, selfless response to all of it is to keep loving, keep working, keep adjusting because ultimately that is what makes the relationship worthwhile.
Being a daughter of this phenomenon, and a weathered soldier of far too many battles to save a relationship that wasn't working, I wonder how it is that although countless generations of women have undoubtedly endured painful relationships with fruitless results, we are still without a prevailing alternative wisdom that suggests relationships that are painful should be terminated immediately.
The most severe and haunting element of this entire discussion is the depth and breadth of the consequences that accompany relationship endurance. Aside from the (in some cases) permanent emotional scars, remnants of bad relationships leave traces of behavioral patterns, professional distractions, not to mention self-image and self-respect distortions that can potentially leave women hollow, defeated and emotionally raw. Even worse than any of this is the weight beared by women who refuse to give up on the pursuit of "the good stuff" even when what they see, feel and experience is unequivocally bad. These are the real victims of the ideology that emerges from the classic tale of Beauty and the Beast. Some women wait an entire lifetime to reveal their charming prince, with persistent devotion to both the idea of commitment and the person they are committed to.
It terrifies me to think that anyone is existing under the assumption that staying in a relationship through heartbreak and discomfort is not only one way, but the only way, to get to the place where the relationship really happens. I envision a world where women get into relationships because they are healthy and fulfilling and get out of them as soon as they fail to live up to that standard. I write fairy tales and children's books in my head that cast brilliant young women as heroines and detail stories of independence, self-respect and male characters who are unconditional, sacrificing and compassionate. Until we live in a world where narratives of this sort thrive in the media, I leave women with advice I got in a santa monica yoga class, from a woman who teaches yoga as well as she teaches life.
Ally told a story one night while we were sitting in a deep hip opener pose about leaving the man of her dreams after she witnessed him swipe a block of cheese from a whole foods without paying for it. She said, "the truth is, that was one of many red flags I didn't take heed of throughout our relationship" She continued, "the beauty of yoga is that you get to know yourself so well that you're capable of getting out of something at the first sign that it isn't working for you"
And Ally is most definitely right, your most intimate relationship is knowing the depths of yourself, because that's where the good stuff is
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
What are women waiting for?
When I was sixteen my parents split up. I had spent most of my young life wondering how they ever got married in the first place, and one of the strangest repercussions of their divorce was the unraveling of the 25 year web of matrimonial secrets that had been buried beneath my parents best efforts to keep their kids out of, what turns out, was a pretty disastrous relationship. Somewhere between my junior year of high school and my first encounter with adulthood, I asked my mom to tell me honestly how she ended up with my father. And of course, even when you know a relationship ends in the worst of ways, something about our romantic socialization suggests that every story has, at the very least, a happy beginning. I was struck by a moment of resolution and clarity when my mom finally admitted that more than anything else, my parent's marriage was a product of her resignation to his persistence. That's right ladies and gentlemen, my mom raised the white flag of surrender and my dad said I do. And perhaps the worst part of the entire story is that she actually used the phrase, "felt sorry for him" while explaining her justification for a union that never made sense in the first place.
I don't bring it up to shed light on my own personal and relational dysfunction, but rather to illuminate an example of a woman, not unlike many in this culture of young individualism and future two-somes, that got married for some reason outside the scope of passionate romance and life-long partnership that we have all come to regard as the beating heart of marital bliss. Whenever I think about all twenty-five years of my parent's marriage, I think about how many other people get into, and perhaps more importantly, stay involved in, marriages that are less than the living incarnations of our fairy tale expectations. Even more relevant to this particular moment of inquiry, is my investigation of the idea that while countless marriages end in some combination of divorce, heartache, infidelity and disappointment, young women in their years of prime fertility remain utterly consumed by the marriage manhunt.
I live in a world where women are educated, powerful and ambitious. My female friends and peers are products of revolution, feminism and decades of advocacy and sacrifice. We are the elite members of a unique sphere of privilege who comprise the poster image of the women's movement. Compared to the diverse political, economic and social struggles that confront women in so many different contexts worldwide, we seem to have unlimited access, resources and potential to become whomever we want. Without a doubt, our success represents the fusion of social reproduction and generations of heroine predecessors. And yet, at the point where I sit on the human-age number line, where two years behind me, young college women are still fascinated and liberated by the art of the one night stand, and two years in front of me, my older brother attends a wedding of a friend every other weekend, I seem to be surrounded by a culture of women obsessed.
Obsessed with their careers, their latest promotion or the workload of their professional schooling, you ask? I wish. These women are in hot pursuit of a husband, and nothing else taking place in their educational, personal or occupational lives seems to matter. Just outside of my immediate social network of women who are a rare hybrid of independent, cynical and ambitious, I have encountered innumerable young, intelligent women who seem preoccupied by either their current relationship or the prospect of securing one. I wonder if all of these women are products of parents who have beautiful, committed relationships shaped by partnership, trust and equity; or as I suspect, they are trapped by the delusion, either subconciously or otherwise, that marriage is a sign of success, desirability as well as a source of security, stability and validation. Why is it that the value of womanhood is determined by which man you marry and when? The shape of our lives is defined by the lines drawn from relationship to relationship, and of course the image is only completed when marked by an engagement ring and a wedding date.
As I finished my bachelor's degree, I had a righteous image of post-college women in their twenties taking on the world without reservation, bound only by self-limitation and financial obligation, concerned with the realm of holy matrimony only in terms of the rejection or avoidance of it. My disappointing post-college reality has revealed all sorts of variations on the age-old plight of the single woman. Most frequently, I listened to my older friends lament the fact that they " didn't find a husband" while they were in school and have been painfully confronted by the abyssmal selection of men in their off-campus lifestyles since then. Initially I was the first person to pass the information on to other women who were still in pursuit of higher education, warning them of the depths of despair that lingered just beyond the horizon-line of graduation.
When I took a step back for a minute (and re-examined the meaning of this wisdom), I wondered why anyone who had just been empowered by their entire future opening up in front of them, would be even remotely concerned with finding a mate. Of course a bachelor's degree doesn't exactly set you up with a one way ticket to the top of the world, but it certainly gives women, who in previous generations had no scope of a livlihood beyond their domestic identity, a broad spectrum of professional and personal opportunties that don't carry a husband-required clause. So why is it exactly that women are seeking the holy grail of matrimony? Why do women obsess about when, where and how to meet a husband so that they can go ahead and settle down before the rest of their life gets away from them? Aren't we getting it backwards? Shouldn't we be more concerned about our personally concieved and achieved happiness before we worry about identifying someone to share it with? Wouldn't it make more sense to pursue the goals that apply to us before we start incorporating the objectives of someone else's dreams?
Perhaps I'm the one who's looking at it all wrong. Maybe all of those personal ambitions I've been rambling about are tied to or (worse yet) defined by the men we hope to marry. The most disturbing and discouraging aspect of this observation is that the race down the proverbial alter is by no means a forum or space for gender equity. Most men of education and privilege remain devotedly on track to professional perfection while the women in their lives chase them from promotion to promotion, desperately clinging to the hope that they'll find a break between board meetings to return their phone call.
And all of this for what? When one out of ever two marriages end in divorce, and many people remain unhappily married for multiple decades without satisfaction or solace, why are women still in hot pursuit of the legal definition of heterosexual commitment? Last time I checked, the unemployment rate was lower than the divorce rate and we might all be better off taking a chance on our career investments than playing the fifty-fifty odds of marital bliss.
I don't intend to persuade women to avoid marriage, dating and heterosexual partnership altogether. I do however, encourage women to be critical of an institution created and perpetuated to serve the various means of capitalism, christianity and patriarchy. I also hope to witness a generation transformed by the power of their own potential and relishing the freedom of pursuing their own ambition. Rock on ladies, because while professional opportunities may come and go, the institution of marriage will likely always be around for you to fall back on.
I don't bring it up to shed light on my own personal and relational dysfunction, but rather to illuminate an example of a woman, not unlike many in this culture of young individualism and future two-somes, that got married for some reason outside the scope of passionate romance and life-long partnership that we have all come to regard as the beating heart of marital bliss. Whenever I think about all twenty-five years of my parent's marriage, I think about how many other people get into, and perhaps more importantly, stay involved in, marriages that are less than the living incarnations of our fairy tale expectations. Even more relevant to this particular moment of inquiry, is my investigation of the idea that while countless marriages end in some combination of divorce, heartache, infidelity and disappointment, young women in their years of prime fertility remain utterly consumed by the marriage manhunt.
I live in a world where women are educated, powerful and ambitious. My female friends and peers are products of revolution, feminism and decades of advocacy and sacrifice. We are the elite members of a unique sphere of privilege who comprise the poster image of the women's movement. Compared to the diverse political, economic and social struggles that confront women in so many different contexts worldwide, we seem to have unlimited access, resources and potential to become whomever we want. Without a doubt, our success represents the fusion of social reproduction and generations of heroine predecessors. And yet, at the point where I sit on the human-age number line, where two years behind me, young college women are still fascinated and liberated by the art of the one night stand, and two years in front of me, my older brother attends a wedding of a friend every other weekend, I seem to be surrounded by a culture of women obsessed.
Obsessed with their careers, their latest promotion or the workload of their professional schooling, you ask? I wish. These women are in hot pursuit of a husband, and nothing else taking place in their educational, personal or occupational lives seems to matter. Just outside of my immediate social network of women who are a rare hybrid of independent, cynical and ambitious, I have encountered innumerable young, intelligent women who seem preoccupied by either their current relationship or the prospect of securing one. I wonder if all of these women are products of parents who have beautiful, committed relationships shaped by partnership, trust and equity; or as I suspect, they are trapped by the delusion, either subconciously or otherwise, that marriage is a sign of success, desirability as well as a source of security, stability and validation. Why is it that the value of womanhood is determined by which man you marry and when? The shape of our lives is defined by the lines drawn from relationship to relationship, and of course the image is only completed when marked by an engagement ring and a wedding date.
As I finished my bachelor's degree, I had a righteous image of post-college women in their twenties taking on the world without reservation, bound only by self-limitation and financial obligation, concerned with the realm of holy matrimony only in terms of the rejection or avoidance of it. My disappointing post-college reality has revealed all sorts of variations on the age-old plight of the single woman. Most frequently, I listened to my older friends lament the fact that they " didn't find a husband" while they were in school and have been painfully confronted by the abyssmal selection of men in their off-campus lifestyles since then. Initially I was the first person to pass the information on to other women who were still in pursuit of higher education, warning them of the depths of despair that lingered just beyond the horizon-line of graduation.
When I took a step back for a minute (and re-examined the meaning of this wisdom), I wondered why anyone who had just been empowered by their entire future opening up in front of them, would be even remotely concerned with finding a mate. Of course a bachelor's degree doesn't exactly set you up with a one way ticket to the top of the world, but it certainly gives women, who in previous generations had no scope of a livlihood beyond their domestic identity, a broad spectrum of professional and personal opportunties that don't carry a husband-required clause. So why is it exactly that women are seeking the holy grail of matrimony? Why do women obsess about when, where and how to meet a husband so that they can go ahead and settle down before the rest of their life gets away from them? Aren't we getting it backwards? Shouldn't we be more concerned about our personally concieved and achieved happiness before we worry about identifying someone to share it with? Wouldn't it make more sense to pursue the goals that apply to us before we start incorporating the objectives of someone else's dreams?
Perhaps I'm the one who's looking at it all wrong. Maybe all of those personal ambitions I've been rambling about are tied to or (worse yet) defined by the men we hope to marry. The most disturbing and discouraging aspect of this observation is that the race down the proverbial alter is by no means a forum or space for gender equity. Most men of education and privilege remain devotedly on track to professional perfection while the women in their lives chase them from promotion to promotion, desperately clinging to the hope that they'll find a break between board meetings to return their phone call.
And all of this for what? When one out of ever two marriages end in divorce, and many people remain unhappily married for multiple decades without satisfaction or solace, why are women still in hot pursuit of the legal definition of heterosexual commitment? Last time I checked, the unemployment rate was lower than the divorce rate and we might all be better off taking a chance on our career investments than playing the fifty-fifty odds of marital bliss.
I don't intend to persuade women to avoid marriage, dating and heterosexual partnership altogether. I do however, encourage women to be critical of an institution created and perpetuated to serve the various means of capitalism, christianity and patriarchy. I also hope to witness a generation transformed by the power of their own potential and relishing the freedom of pursuing their own ambition. Rock on ladies, because while professional opportunities may come and go, the institution of marriage will likely always be around for you to fall back on.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
My beef with Borders: Part 2
I envisioned my previous entry as an essay on the conservative crisis in bookstore conglomerates, but somehow it mutated into a unilateral rant that barely scratched the surface of what I experienced on my last visit to Borders. I only wish it had started and ended with the Men's Studies encounter.
I've read alot of what Borders has to offer in the Women's Studies section, it has ranged from brilliant and relatable to obscure and unbelievable. On this particular day, I was scanning chapters and reading back-covers to find something intriguing. I came across one alarming thing after another: books about feminism written by men, a book about recapturing femininity and re-establishing traditional gender roles, and of course the text closest to my heart: the book about being a bitch. To those of us who cherish the subject, Women's Studies is a source of revolution, a space of meditation and a place where we come together in solidarity and support. It is sacred place where we transgress and transform and it is not to be reinterpreted and co-opted.
I had almost given up the hope of finding anything worth reading when an all black cover caught my attention. The author was a man, and because I had resigned myself to making my next Borders purchase from a different section of the store I took my time to investigate what the book was about. The book is written by a criminal justice attorney and contains detailed accounts of the ways in which "radical feminist thought is corrupting the national justice system." I can only imagine that radical feminist thought includes the ideology that shapes the pro-choice movement, promotes women's health issues and continually strives to obtain the social, political and economic equality of which women are still being deprived; but I'll leave the specific definition up to the author. The book focuses on a case in which an adult woman successfully testified against her father to convict him of acts of sexual abuse that occurred during her childhood. The chief complaint of the author? That the outcome of the ordeal ruined this man's life. Essentially the author set out to argue that the woman was, at the very least, an exaggerator, and that she used the "tools of radical feminism" to make her case believable. Are you kidding me?
What I find most appalling about this book is how deeply it reflects one of the most profound (but under-addressed) problems of inequity that women face in this culture. I call it: your word against his. The truth about sexual abuse and sexual violence is that it rarely occurs in a circumstance or surrounding that includes anyone other than the perpetrator and the victim. Complex forms of shame and embarassment are closely linked to the experience on both sides and it often leads the system of justice to make a determination based on one person's word over the other. And I guess we could all rest our faith in the purity of legal proceedings, the inevitable reign of good over evil or the intervention of a higher power to ensure that justice is served in all cases of sexual crimes. Unfortunately, the world of male-female power dynamics and the perceptions and expectations of each gender complicates and blurs the clarity of the entire situation.
Case Number 1: The too drunk to remember situation. How come it is socially acceptable to excuse rape when women are intoxicated? What about drunk women gives men the right to have sex with them without their consent? My favorite reason for why women aren't able to press charges against the men who sexually assault them is that there was alcohol involved. I wonder what the world would look like if we applied this contingency to the commission of other crimes? It's good to know I can steal my roommates' car without any consequence the next time she comes home after a few drinks. The next time I'm out at a bar I'll be sure to steal money from the people around me to save on the taxi ride home. And hell, if that's the case, the next man who dares to touch me while intoxicated better be careful because I clearly have the license to kill him if he's too drunk to tell me not to.
It paints a pretty bizarre picture, doesn't it? but you'd be surprised how many women are discouraged from and/or unsuccessful prosecuting men who have sexually assaulted them for that very reason. As if to suggest that a woman who has altered judgement (or is completely passed out) somehow transforms into an object of male desire. The implication is that it is a certain state of consciousness that makes women humans, not anything else. And ultimately the point is this: women are only entitled to control of their own bodies as long as they are alert and awake. There is a casual and subtle debate occurring on college campuses about who should be held responsible for women who are raped while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and although I do not condone the irresponsible use of any substance, I cannot even fathom how we can honor any discussion of the subject. It should be simple, it should be a fundamental rule of human behavior and certainly an entitlement that falls under the "democratic rights" of American women: our bodies belong to us and should not be subjected to even a touch that is uninvited and without consent, no matter what state of mind we are in.
Case Number Two: "She was asking for it". The phenomenon of female sexuality and the expression there of is very much a contested terrain in feminist politics. No one can come to a consensus about just how and to what degree women should be able to express their sexuality. For me, the problem is just that, no one has the right to determine, constrain or interpret the expression of female sexuality, because I can tell you for one thing, no one is making those choices or assumptions for (heterosexual) men. My point is that women should be able to dress, dance, behave, etc. in whatever manner they choose and none of it should be construed as an invitation, to any man, to exploit her sexuality. Somehow our culture has managed to construct women in such a way that certain manifestations of expression become dehumanizing and hypersexualizing. Although I have my own set of opinions about the elements that function in producing the type of dress and behavior that some women choose to exhibit, the fact remains that there is no situation in which either of those things can justify sexual aggression, assault or exploitation. Simply put, a woman should be able to walk around completely naked and no man should touch her.
Every two and a half minutes in this country a woman is sexually assaulted. That means that while so many of the women in this country zone out during a single episode of grey's anatomy, approximately thirty other women have become victims of sexual violence. Most women my age have either experienced sexual violence themselves, or have some sort of friend or friend of a friend relationship with someone who has. I am 23 years old, and that is staggering.
Case #3: Shame and Silence.
59% of rape goes unreported, typically because women feel ashamed, at fault or otherwise silenced by a culture that tells women at an early age about the dynamics of male-female sexual relations; More specifically: that men's sexuality is imminent and that it is a woman's responsibility (obligation) to control and constrain it. The translation for many women who have been raped is that it is their fault because they should have been able to stop it. For a variety of cultural and social reasons, women do not have space to talk about being raped and choose, instead, to carry the burden themselves. In many cases, this phenomenon is particularly relevant and dangerous for young women.
This brings me back to my original observation about the book I discovered at borders: An adult woman finally seeks retribution and resolution for crimes committed agains her in childhood and some man has a problem with the legality and justice of it all. There are an overwhelming number of reasons why young women do not speak out about the sexual harm that is done to them, particularly when the perpetrator is a family member. Among these reasons are shame, guilt, fear of the consequences, not to mention the fact that the person who is doing these things has often convinced the young person that there is nothing wrong; kids learn to trust adults who are close to them, believe them to be infallible, well-meaning and harmless. Meanwhile, here is a book that reinforces the idea that women who have been victims of rape, molestation or other acts of sexual violence are dishonest, dilluded or otherwise misdirected about the harm they have endured. As if the severity and longevity of impact created by the experience of sexual assault is not haunting and intense enough, we have created a social culture that discourages women from finding healing in speaking out, confronting their assailants and utilizing other forms of expression to seek resolution. The criminal justice attorney writes about how it is absolutely ludicrous that an adult woman could prove the guilt of her father in a crime that occurred so many years ago and how the process has destroyed his life. But what about the young girl who carried the weight of something absolutely incomprehensible well into her adulthood, before finally having space to confront her abuser. I wonder, who's writing that story?
I can't even imagine raising a daughter in a culture that allows any of this to go on, and I certainly hope the author of the book I found isn't the parent of one. It is interesting how so many men who have mothers, daughters and sisters can continue to see and treat women as objects of their own desire. In addition, it is hard for me to imagine that while we teach and preach about gender equality in this country, women continue to face obstacles, the significance of which most men (the white one's in particular) can't even fathom. Anytime issues of gender arise in mixed company I try to pose this question to my male friends, "when was the last time you walked alone in the dark and worried about being raped." If I have the chance, I ask the women the same question, and typically let the respective responses speak for themselves.
I've read alot of what Borders has to offer in the Women's Studies section, it has ranged from brilliant and relatable to obscure and unbelievable. On this particular day, I was scanning chapters and reading back-covers to find something intriguing. I came across one alarming thing after another: books about feminism written by men, a book about recapturing femininity and re-establishing traditional gender roles, and of course the text closest to my heart: the book about being a bitch. To those of us who cherish the subject, Women's Studies is a source of revolution, a space of meditation and a place where we come together in solidarity and support. It is sacred place where we transgress and transform and it is not to be reinterpreted and co-opted.
I had almost given up the hope of finding anything worth reading when an all black cover caught my attention. The author was a man, and because I had resigned myself to making my next Borders purchase from a different section of the store I took my time to investigate what the book was about. The book is written by a criminal justice attorney and contains detailed accounts of the ways in which "radical feminist thought is corrupting the national justice system." I can only imagine that radical feminist thought includes the ideology that shapes the pro-choice movement, promotes women's health issues and continually strives to obtain the social, political and economic equality of which women are still being deprived; but I'll leave the specific definition up to the author. The book focuses on a case in which an adult woman successfully testified against her father to convict him of acts of sexual abuse that occurred during her childhood. The chief complaint of the author? That the outcome of the ordeal ruined this man's life. Essentially the author set out to argue that the woman was, at the very least, an exaggerator, and that she used the "tools of radical feminism" to make her case believable. Are you kidding me?
What I find most appalling about this book is how deeply it reflects one of the most profound (but under-addressed) problems of inequity that women face in this culture. I call it: your word against his. The truth about sexual abuse and sexual violence is that it rarely occurs in a circumstance or surrounding that includes anyone other than the perpetrator and the victim. Complex forms of shame and embarassment are closely linked to the experience on both sides and it often leads the system of justice to make a determination based on one person's word over the other. And I guess we could all rest our faith in the purity of legal proceedings, the inevitable reign of good over evil or the intervention of a higher power to ensure that justice is served in all cases of sexual crimes. Unfortunately, the world of male-female power dynamics and the perceptions and expectations of each gender complicates and blurs the clarity of the entire situation.
Case Number 1: The too drunk to remember situation. How come it is socially acceptable to excuse rape when women are intoxicated? What about drunk women gives men the right to have sex with them without their consent? My favorite reason for why women aren't able to press charges against the men who sexually assault them is that there was alcohol involved. I wonder what the world would look like if we applied this contingency to the commission of other crimes? It's good to know I can steal my roommates' car without any consequence the next time she comes home after a few drinks. The next time I'm out at a bar I'll be sure to steal money from the people around me to save on the taxi ride home. And hell, if that's the case, the next man who dares to touch me while intoxicated better be careful because I clearly have the license to kill him if he's too drunk to tell me not to.
It paints a pretty bizarre picture, doesn't it? but you'd be surprised how many women are discouraged from and/or unsuccessful prosecuting men who have sexually assaulted them for that very reason. As if to suggest that a woman who has altered judgement (or is completely passed out) somehow transforms into an object of male desire. The implication is that it is a certain state of consciousness that makes women humans, not anything else. And ultimately the point is this: women are only entitled to control of their own bodies as long as they are alert and awake. There is a casual and subtle debate occurring on college campuses about who should be held responsible for women who are raped while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and although I do not condone the irresponsible use of any substance, I cannot even fathom how we can honor any discussion of the subject. It should be simple, it should be a fundamental rule of human behavior and certainly an entitlement that falls under the "democratic rights" of American women: our bodies belong to us and should not be subjected to even a touch that is uninvited and without consent, no matter what state of mind we are in.
Case Number Two: "She was asking for it". The phenomenon of female sexuality and the expression there of is very much a contested terrain in feminist politics. No one can come to a consensus about just how and to what degree women should be able to express their sexuality. For me, the problem is just that, no one has the right to determine, constrain or interpret the expression of female sexuality, because I can tell you for one thing, no one is making those choices or assumptions for (heterosexual) men. My point is that women should be able to dress, dance, behave, etc. in whatever manner they choose and none of it should be construed as an invitation, to any man, to exploit her sexuality. Somehow our culture has managed to construct women in such a way that certain manifestations of expression become dehumanizing and hypersexualizing. Although I have my own set of opinions about the elements that function in producing the type of dress and behavior that some women choose to exhibit, the fact remains that there is no situation in which either of those things can justify sexual aggression, assault or exploitation. Simply put, a woman should be able to walk around completely naked and no man should touch her.
Every two and a half minutes in this country a woman is sexually assaulted. That means that while so many of the women in this country zone out during a single episode of grey's anatomy, approximately thirty other women have become victims of sexual violence. Most women my age have either experienced sexual violence themselves, or have some sort of friend or friend of a friend relationship with someone who has. I am 23 years old, and that is staggering.
Case #3: Shame and Silence.
59% of rape goes unreported, typically because women feel ashamed, at fault or otherwise silenced by a culture that tells women at an early age about the dynamics of male-female sexual relations; More specifically: that men's sexuality is imminent and that it is a woman's responsibility (obligation) to control and constrain it. The translation for many women who have been raped is that it is their fault because they should have been able to stop it. For a variety of cultural and social reasons, women do not have space to talk about being raped and choose, instead, to carry the burden themselves. In many cases, this phenomenon is particularly relevant and dangerous for young women.
This brings me back to my original observation about the book I discovered at borders: An adult woman finally seeks retribution and resolution for crimes committed agains her in childhood and some man has a problem with the legality and justice of it all. There are an overwhelming number of reasons why young women do not speak out about the sexual harm that is done to them, particularly when the perpetrator is a family member. Among these reasons are shame, guilt, fear of the consequences, not to mention the fact that the person who is doing these things has often convinced the young person that there is nothing wrong; kids learn to trust adults who are close to them, believe them to be infallible, well-meaning and harmless. Meanwhile, here is a book that reinforces the idea that women who have been victims of rape, molestation or other acts of sexual violence are dishonest, dilluded or otherwise misdirected about the harm they have endured. As if the severity and longevity of impact created by the experience of sexual assault is not haunting and intense enough, we have created a social culture that discourages women from finding healing in speaking out, confronting their assailants and utilizing other forms of expression to seek resolution. The criminal justice attorney writes about how it is absolutely ludicrous that an adult woman could prove the guilt of her father in a crime that occurred so many years ago and how the process has destroyed his life. But what about the young girl who carried the weight of something absolutely incomprehensible well into her adulthood, before finally having space to confront her abuser. I wonder, who's writing that story?
I can't even imagine raising a daughter in a culture that allows any of this to go on, and I certainly hope the author of the book I found isn't the parent of one. It is interesting how so many men who have mothers, daughters and sisters can continue to see and treat women as objects of their own desire. In addition, it is hard for me to imagine that while we teach and preach about gender equality in this country, women continue to face obstacles, the significance of which most men (the white one's in particular) can't even fathom. Anytime issues of gender arise in mixed company I try to pose this question to my male friends, "when was the last time you walked alone in the dark and worried about being raped." If I have the chance, I ask the women the same question, and typically let the respective responses speak for themselves.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Someone conservative is stacking the borders bookshelves
I've heard my share of idiotic things from UCLA undergraduates. They've ranged from racist and ignorant to just plain moronic and thoughtless. Occasionally, they provoke an impulsive response (which I typically regret), but most frequently, I acknowledge them with an internal meditation on the millions of California young people who will never receive a degree from UCLA who are infinitely more brilliant, insightful and critical. In any case, one of my recurring favorites is typically uttered by a taller Caucasian gentlemen wearing Greek letters plastered across his chest and/or some sort of shirt displaying an obnoxious clichéd phrase that he undoubtedly thinks is irresistibly clever. My roommate's favorite example? "trust me, I'm a doctor." The statement I speak of comes seldom as a surprise and rarely from a source I can't anticipate. Infact, I've encountered it more from my colleagues in political science than from anyone else on campus, "women's studies, that's ridiculous, why isn't there a men's studies, that's prejudiced against men." And why wouldn't they think that? Afterall, I certainly didn't get anything from my degree in political science that taught me to think critically about the white male lens through which the field is examined.
Unfortunately, I'm far from making my point. There is nothing particularly provocative about an uncritical UCLA student or someone in their young adulthood making a unoriginal joke about the ever marginalized and unappreciated field of women's studies. Up until recently, I had safely assumed that the "educated" population accepted the idea of "men's studies" as just about as preposterous as a proposed University course on the white christian interpretation of U.S. history. About a week ago when I was shopping for some righteous feminist literature at my neighborhood Borders bookstore, while perusing in "women's studies" I glanced up to see what the third from the top shelf had to offer (no I could not see beyond it, and no I don't intend to make this a discussion of the way that stores such as Borders are designed and by and for who they are structured). At the highest level, all I could make out was a plaque labeling a category section change: Men's Studies.
No that wasn't a typo. The Borders in Westwood is now stocking books in Men's Studies, and judgement has been passed.
I was pretty young when the politically correct revolution changed the standard language labels of just about everything, but I still remember a mildly persuasive backlash indicating that the ideology that shaped the politically correct movement would someday come back to bite everyone in the ass. Enter Men's Studies, no doubt a political correction made by white men who couldn't stand the idea that there was a section in most major bookstores devoted to the study of women and no corresponding label for literature devoted to men. Even some of the most uncritical people on the planet can at least acknowledge that the evolution of women's studies, ethnic studies, LGBT studies, etc. emerged from challenges to the white male norm that comprised every other single field of study that existed in bookstores, universities and library catalogues. If you've ever sat through a lecture on anything from psychology to art history to music theory you might have noticed that the information and perspective is overwhelmingly dominated by men. Men write about men doing psychology, creating art and music and everything in between, and the margins remain reserved for the rest of us.
Instead of creating curriculums that incorporated women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, Gays and Lesbians in both perspective and practice in all subjects, the world of academia (or the people who control it) decided it would be more appropriate to isolate these people/groups into their own programs of study. With this structure in place people have to actively choose to study non-white people and women, because god forbid the entire academic population learns about oppression, especially on accident. The other by-product of this over-simplified solution to underrepresentation is the argument of "reverse discrimination" a ludicrous notion put forth originally by opponents to affirmative action, that essentially demands protection of the privileged classes. Afterall, we musn't disrupt the balance of power in favor of white male heterosexuals, it just might be the impetus to apocalypse. In this case, the idea of Women's Studies, African-American Studies or departments otherwise concerned with people and projects not closely associated with power in this country, have obviously sparked concern among white male academics, who have apparently used all of their extra time, funding and resources to devise a plan to intervene in the world of critical theory and put a stop to the one-sided perspective of the underclassed.
The addition of Men's Studies to my local Borders Bookstore is not only a development that has occurred just in the last year, it is a dangerous and haunting indicator of the shifting ideology of the time and the waning power of the American progressive. I for one, am terrified. It's bad enough I was educated by a system controlled and constructed by a finite set of values and ideas that exist to reproduce power dynamics, economic hierarchies and dominant social norms, now I have to be concerned about challenges to the challenges of the status quo. Holy backlash batman, what are we going to do?
In an era when most people know nothing and the people in power seem to know even less, it is alarming to think about how young people of future generations are going to be equipped with the tools to even acknowledge growing social problems, let alone attempt to solve them. As the Men's Studies Section widens and examining the social movements of the sixties feels like the equivalent of studying ancient history, I wonder just how limited access to methods of change and mobilization will seem ten or twenty years from now. More importantly, I wonder how the voice of anyone who doesn't have White Anglo Saxon parents, a penis and a Harvard degree will be heard through the echos of evangelicalism, neo-conservatives and libertarian economics. Hey, but what do I know, anything I've written since I came out of the womb would be filed under Women's Studies, and clearly isn't relevant to the mainstream academic population anyway.
Unfortunately, I'm far from making my point. There is nothing particularly provocative about an uncritical UCLA student or someone in their young adulthood making a unoriginal joke about the ever marginalized and unappreciated field of women's studies. Up until recently, I had safely assumed that the "educated" population accepted the idea of "men's studies" as just about as preposterous as a proposed University course on the white christian interpretation of U.S. history. About a week ago when I was shopping for some righteous feminist literature at my neighborhood Borders bookstore, while perusing in "women's studies" I glanced up to see what the third from the top shelf had to offer (no I could not see beyond it, and no I don't intend to make this a discussion of the way that stores such as Borders are designed and by and for who they are structured). At the highest level, all I could make out was a plaque labeling a category section change: Men's Studies.
No that wasn't a typo. The Borders in Westwood is now stocking books in Men's Studies, and judgement has been passed.
I was pretty young when the politically correct revolution changed the standard language labels of just about everything, but I still remember a mildly persuasive backlash indicating that the ideology that shaped the politically correct movement would someday come back to bite everyone in the ass. Enter Men's Studies, no doubt a political correction made by white men who couldn't stand the idea that there was a section in most major bookstores devoted to the study of women and no corresponding label for literature devoted to men. Even some of the most uncritical people on the planet can at least acknowledge that the evolution of women's studies, ethnic studies, LGBT studies, etc. emerged from challenges to the white male norm that comprised every other single field of study that existed in bookstores, universities and library catalogues. If you've ever sat through a lecture on anything from psychology to art history to music theory you might have noticed that the information and perspective is overwhelmingly dominated by men. Men write about men doing psychology, creating art and music and everything in between, and the margins remain reserved for the rest of us.
Instead of creating curriculums that incorporated women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, Gays and Lesbians in both perspective and practice in all subjects, the world of academia (or the people who control it) decided it would be more appropriate to isolate these people/groups into their own programs of study. With this structure in place people have to actively choose to study non-white people and women, because god forbid the entire academic population learns about oppression, especially on accident. The other by-product of this over-simplified solution to underrepresentation is the argument of "reverse discrimination" a ludicrous notion put forth originally by opponents to affirmative action, that essentially demands protection of the privileged classes. Afterall, we musn't disrupt the balance of power in favor of white male heterosexuals, it just might be the impetus to apocalypse. In this case, the idea of Women's Studies, African-American Studies or departments otherwise concerned with people and projects not closely associated with power in this country, have obviously sparked concern among white male academics, who have apparently used all of their extra time, funding and resources to devise a plan to intervene in the world of critical theory and put a stop to the one-sided perspective of the underclassed.
The addition of Men's Studies to my local Borders Bookstore is not only a development that has occurred just in the last year, it is a dangerous and haunting indicator of the shifting ideology of the time and the waning power of the American progressive. I for one, am terrified. It's bad enough I was educated by a system controlled and constructed by a finite set of values and ideas that exist to reproduce power dynamics, economic hierarchies and dominant social norms, now I have to be concerned about challenges to the challenges of the status quo. Holy backlash batman, what are we going to do?
In an era when most people know nothing and the people in power seem to know even less, it is alarming to think about how young people of future generations are going to be equipped with the tools to even acknowledge growing social problems, let alone attempt to solve them. As the Men's Studies Section widens and examining the social movements of the sixties feels like the equivalent of studying ancient history, I wonder just how limited access to methods of change and mobilization will seem ten or twenty years from now. More importantly, I wonder how the voice of anyone who doesn't have White Anglo Saxon parents, a penis and a Harvard degree will be heard through the echos of evangelicalism, neo-conservatives and libertarian economics. Hey, but what do I know, anything I've written since I came out of the womb would be filed under Women's Studies, and clearly isn't relevant to the mainstream academic population anyway.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Blown Away
When I was sixteen I was consumed by the idea that my life was excruciating, miserable and otherwise unlivable because my parents "forced" me to drive a 1983 toyota cressida station wagon (turquoise, with turquoise interior). Other concerns included never having a homecoming date, being too intelligent/mature (as far as I could tell) for my high school classes and wondering if I'd ever get asked out by one of the senior boys that only talked to my more beautiful (but obviously less entertaining) friends.
Meet Marina. A sixteen year-old woman that even with a college degree and seven or eight years of life experience on her, makes me feel humble, reverential, awestruck and inspired. Marina lives in a "low-income" community in a tiny apartment with her younger brother and mother. She is brilliant and articulate in two languages and manages to be as vulnerable and insecure in her adolescence as she is confident and assertive in her womanhood. She is remarkable. She is the type of young
woman that reminds me how lucky I have been to always have had a voice in the world. She also reminds me
that so many women like her, who could change the world with their insight and observation, don't have such a voice, and in her case, even if they have one, they don't have the space to express it.
While filming a movie about the invisibility of Latina women in the media I interviewed Marina. The interview itself was an afterthought, she wasn't even on the list of people to talk to because she didn't represent the type of image I was targeting. In all of my righteous attempts to unveil the stereotypes and marginalization of Latina women in the media, there I was, stereotyping, essentializing. Assuming that I wouldn't get a usable response, half-paying attention and mostly rushed, I asked Marina what she thought about latinas in the media. My writing could never do justice to the subsequent five hours or so, but it should serve as sufficient to say that Marina's testimony formed the entire framework for the film, and in its early stages of exhibition, has been its most influential aspect. Even those that have been most critical of the film's character and composition, have wondered, who is that girl, and where and how did she become so intelligent, well-spoken, inspiring, perceptive and so on.
Marina is exceptional. But in the weeks since the completion of the movie I have thought alot about her voice on camera and her perspective in real life, and have wondered how many other young women are waking up every day with similar ideas, critiques and analyses and are walking through their lives without a single place or person in which or with which to express them. At some intersection of my culture and privilege is the space where my opinion and insight have always mattered. I learned at a very early age that what I had to say was important and that there was always going to be someone around
to listen to it, validate it, and confirm that my process of thought and interpretation was legitimate. And
although I've spent alot of time feeling guilty and ashamed of what all of that amounts to, I have come to consider that my time might be better spent trying to pass that on to the women in my life who haven't had this type of fortune.
I have this image in my mind of a transformative space, of a forum that is so real to me I can see and experience it. I see groups of young women, getting together and talking about the things that are meaningful in their everyday experience. It is not particularly academic or formalized, simply just an environment in which young women can say what it is that's occupying their minds in those spaces that have been preserved from the influx and influence of Laguna Beach marathons, American Idol and every fashion magazine on the planet telling them that they how to look, think and behave.
I think it would be earth shattering to give young women an oppurtunity to express how they feel, who they are and what they see in the world. Maybe it's with words, or artwork or a videocamera, or maybe it's in a way I don't even understand, but I think there is something incredibly powerful in Marina's voice that undoubtedly resonates in the hearts of all sorts of other young women. I think it is incredibly valuable and significant because it is the truth. It is a truth we can't deny or shy away from. It's a truth that isn't coming from a source we can easily discredit and fail to confront, it's a truth that is coming from experience, emotion and authenticity and I think it is the type of truth that has the potential to change the world.
Starting today I am making a vow to myself and the young women in my life that if they have something to say I will listen, and that I will do my best in my life to create pathways through which they can navigate their thoughts to keep the conversation going. I have no doubt that in whatever emerges from these conversations I will be nothing less than blown away.
Meet Marina. A sixteen year-old woman that even with a college degree and seven or eight years of life experience on her, makes me feel humble, reverential, awestruck and inspired. Marina lives in a "low-income" community in a tiny apartment with her younger brother and mother. She is brilliant and articulate in two languages and manages to be as vulnerable and insecure in her adolescence as she is confident and assertive in her womanhood. She is remarkable. She is the type of young
woman that reminds me how lucky I have been to always have had a voice in the world. She also reminds me
that so many women like her, who could change the world with their insight and observation, don't have such a voice, and in her case, even if they have one, they don't have the space to express it.
While filming a movie about the invisibility of Latina women in the media I interviewed Marina. The interview itself was an afterthought, she wasn't even on the list of people to talk to because she didn't represent the type of image I was targeting. In all of my righteous attempts to unveil the stereotypes and marginalization of Latina women in the media, there I was, stereotyping, essentializing. Assuming that I wouldn't get a usable response, half-paying attention and mostly rushed, I asked Marina what she thought about latinas in the media. My writing could never do justice to the subsequent five hours or so, but it should serve as sufficient to say that Marina's testimony formed the entire framework for the film, and in its early stages of exhibition, has been its most influential aspect. Even those that have been most critical of the film's character and composition, have wondered, who is that girl, and where and how did she become so intelligent, well-spoken, inspiring, perceptive and so on.
Marina is exceptional. But in the weeks since the completion of the movie I have thought alot about her voice on camera and her perspective in real life, and have wondered how many other young women are waking up every day with similar ideas, critiques and analyses and are walking through their lives without a single place or person in which or with which to express them. At some intersection of my culture and privilege is the space where my opinion and insight have always mattered. I learned at a very early age that what I had to say was important and that there was always going to be someone around
to listen to it, validate it, and confirm that my process of thought and interpretation was legitimate. And
although I've spent alot of time feeling guilty and ashamed of what all of that amounts to, I have come to consider that my time might be better spent trying to pass that on to the women in my life who haven't had this type of fortune.
I have this image in my mind of a transformative space, of a forum that is so real to me I can see and experience it. I see groups of young women, getting together and talking about the things that are meaningful in their everyday experience. It is not particularly academic or formalized, simply just an environment in which young women can say what it is that's occupying their minds in those spaces that have been preserved from the influx and influence of Laguna Beach marathons, American Idol and every fashion magazine on the planet telling them that they how to look, think and behave.
I think it would be earth shattering to give young women an oppurtunity to express how they feel, who they are and what they see in the world. Maybe it's with words, or artwork or a videocamera, or maybe it's in a way I don't even understand, but I think there is something incredibly powerful in Marina's voice that undoubtedly resonates in the hearts of all sorts of other young women. I think it is incredibly valuable and significant because it is the truth. It is a truth we can't deny or shy away from. It's a truth that isn't coming from a source we can easily discredit and fail to confront, it's a truth that is coming from experience, emotion and authenticity and I think it is the type of truth that has the potential to change the world.
Starting today I am making a vow to myself and the young women in my life that if they have something to say I will listen, and that I will do my best in my life to create pathways through which they can navigate their thoughts to keep the conversation going. I have no doubt that in whatever emerges from these conversations I will be nothing less than blown away.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
A word on Courageous Women
Last week I went to my Monday morning yoga class. The instructor has recently become the only woman on the planet from whom I want to learn yoga and more and more is a source for an incredible amount of insight into my life experience as a female. This woman has courageously transformed her rigorous, emotionally/spiritually challenging yoga practice into a ninety-minute family experience. I came across this class by accident and have definite plans to include it as a permanent aspect of my yoga ritual. The room echoed with the sound and smell of babies. A woman next to me struggled to hold her down-dog while her six year old daughter attached herself to her mother's torso. The only man in the class left early (no, I wasnt surprised) and the women that remained sweat through all the distractions and obligations of motherhood and emerged triumphant, simply, in yoga (it means unity).
My experience on this particular day launched a week long meditation on the under-valued courage of women that is in so many ways invisible and silent in our social culture. Even for me, righteous aspiring feminist scholar that I am, I find myself hung up on all of the things that are disabling and debilitating that exist as barriers for women in all aspects of our lives. And yet all around me, everyday, are incredible examples of female courage that shine much more brightly than the glimmer of patriarchal oppression that creeps through the cracks of our self-determined strength.
My yoga instructor is courageous. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening she faces 100 fit-conscious west los angeles fanatics with a four month old baby in her arms. She breaks down barriers, builds energy and fosters the most enriching hour and a half we have all week. She does this for people who seek yoga as their only source of self-reflection and spirituality. She is powerful, graceful and now she has completely re-framed Santa Monica Power Yoga as a space for people to simultaneously connect with, and escape the most demanding people in their lives. Women confront and engage motherhood, while they explore deeply, themselves. There are far too many fine lines women must walk as mothers- Don't bring your work home, don't bring your home-life to work. Ally Hamilton has created a space where women can be both humans and mothers within the same body and mind, and as far as I can tell, that is a rare and extraordinary gift.
My mom is courageous. When I left for college my mom was 52. After being married for 25 years, she was recently divorced, and had devoted the last 21 years to raising children, and I must say, did so heroically and with exceptional grace. My older brother was still using at the time and was effectively out of the emotional reach of maternal influence. So there she was, middle-aged and essentially abandoned and she did what can only be done (at any age and under any circumstance) with tremendous courage; she started her life over. Having endured more as a mother than I would expect all of the women I know to survive collectively, she dug to the depth of herself and made her own life. She learned: to live for herself, on her own terms, and I'll tell you, the woman I owe everything to learned (at a time when most adults are ready to resign themselves to whatever form of insurance agent they've become), that she deserves it, and that she's not going to take shit from anyone.
My roommates are courageous. Every day my apartment is empty, not particularly grown-up and sometimes downright messy. But when the sun goes down and it comes alive with its inhabitants, it might as well be a Tibetan Buddhist Temple. My roommates are challenging and engaging the world in thought and action. They are determined to preserve their undergradaute optimism and destined to change the world. They (we) are women of different backgrounds, experiences and lifestyles and yet they have developed a unity that transcends all boundaries of love and relationships. They have the courage to know the world for its injustice but to pursue the goodness it has the potential to unveil. My roommates take risks, love unconditionally and believe in eachother in such a way that if their energy could be harnessed and redistributed, it would change the world. Each one of them is strong and resilient and have overcome themselves to bring humanity to the lives of others. They are not afraid to lead, to make decisions, to be opinionated, to take on the unknown, to do the right thing, to do the wrong thing and above all, they know what it means to love; and for me, there is no courage without love existing first.
My friend Amy is courageous. Last weekend my brother used the term "self-made man" about one of his close friends. It occured to me, that as far as the American vocabulary is concerned, there is no such thing as a self-made woman. I certainly believe that there are many females who fit into this category, and Amy is the living embodiment. She has confronted the world head-on, head-strong, and although she is an important part of many communities of people, in many ways she has done it all on her own. She is capable and aware of her strengths and she was one of the first people who taught me what it meant to be a woman walking in a man's world. Not only is Amy a courageous young professional and a dynamic leader, she is a mentor to women of all ages, and a source of wisdom for everyone she encounters in every aspect of her life. She is a heroine of ordinary existence and as one of her young proteges once said, "proof that women can be 'as good' as men."
I invite the world to acknowledge and experience women of courage. They are in every aspect of ourselves and woven into the emotional and experential fabric with which we are all created. Courage has not been culturally constructed as a feminine characteristic. The term conjures vivid imagery of trojan warriors and Mel Gibson's blue-painted face. But for me, courage is more than a vision of masculinity, it is a trait of the rare people in the world who use the best part of themselves to make other people better. Courage is the source from which change emerges and the place in which adversity is overcome; and there is no question, that in my life, the greatest examples of all of this, are women.
My experience on this particular day launched a week long meditation on the under-valued courage of women that is in so many ways invisible and silent in our social culture. Even for me, righteous aspiring feminist scholar that I am, I find myself hung up on all of the things that are disabling and debilitating that exist as barriers for women in all aspects of our lives. And yet all around me, everyday, are incredible examples of female courage that shine much more brightly than the glimmer of patriarchal oppression that creeps through the cracks of our self-determined strength.
My yoga instructor is courageous. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening she faces 100 fit-conscious west los angeles fanatics with a four month old baby in her arms. She breaks down barriers, builds energy and fosters the most enriching hour and a half we have all week. She does this for people who seek yoga as their only source of self-reflection and spirituality. She is powerful, graceful and now she has completely re-framed Santa Monica Power Yoga as a space for people to simultaneously connect with, and escape the most demanding people in their lives. Women confront and engage motherhood, while they explore deeply, themselves. There are far too many fine lines women must walk as mothers- Don't bring your work home, don't bring your home-life to work. Ally Hamilton has created a space where women can be both humans and mothers within the same body and mind, and as far as I can tell, that is a rare and extraordinary gift.
My mom is courageous. When I left for college my mom was 52. After being married for 25 years, she was recently divorced, and had devoted the last 21 years to raising children, and I must say, did so heroically and with exceptional grace. My older brother was still using at the time and was effectively out of the emotional reach of maternal influence. So there she was, middle-aged and essentially abandoned and she did what can only be done (at any age and under any circumstance) with tremendous courage; she started her life over. Having endured more as a mother than I would expect all of the women I know to survive collectively, she dug to the depth of herself and made her own life. She learned: to live for herself, on her own terms, and I'll tell you, the woman I owe everything to learned (at a time when most adults are ready to resign themselves to whatever form of insurance agent they've become), that she deserves it, and that she's not going to take shit from anyone.
My roommates are courageous. Every day my apartment is empty, not particularly grown-up and sometimes downright messy. But when the sun goes down and it comes alive with its inhabitants, it might as well be a Tibetan Buddhist Temple. My roommates are challenging and engaging the world in thought and action. They are determined to preserve their undergradaute optimism and destined to change the world. They (we) are women of different backgrounds, experiences and lifestyles and yet they have developed a unity that transcends all boundaries of love and relationships. They have the courage to know the world for its injustice but to pursue the goodness it has the potential to unveil. My roommates take risks, love unconditionally and believe in eachother in such a way that if their energy could be harnessed and redistributed, it would change the world. Each one of them is strong and resilient and have overcome themselves to bring humanity to the lives of others. They are not afraid to lead, to make decisions, to be opinionated, to take on the unknown, to do the right thing, to do the wrong thing and above all, they know what it means to love; and for me, there is no courage without love existing first.
My friend Amy is courageous. Last weekend my brother used the term "self-made man" about one of his close friends. It occured to me, that as far as the American vocabulary is concerned, there is no such thing as a self-made woman. I certainly believe that there are many females who fit into this category, and Amy is the living embodiment. She has confronted the world head-on, head-strong, and although she is an important part of many communities of people, in many ways she has done it all on her own. She is capable and aware of her strengths and she was one of the first people who taught me what it meant to be a woman walking in a man's world. Not only is Amy a courageous young professional and a dynamic leader, she is a mentor to women of all ages, and a source of wisdom for everyone she encounters in every aspect of her life. She is a heroine of ordinary existence and as one of her young proteges once said, "proof that women can be 'as good' as men."
I invite the world to acknowledge and experience women of courage. They are in every aspect of ourselves and woven into the emotional and experential fabric with which we are all created. Courage has not been culturally constructed as a feminine characteristic. The term conjures vivid imagery of trojan warriors and Mel Gibson's blue-painted face. But for me, courage is more than a vision of masculinity, it is a trait of the rare people in the world who use the best part of themselves to make other people better. Courage is the source from which change emerges and the place in which adversity is overcome; and there is no question, that in my life, the greatest examples of all of this, are women.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Spring Sing and the Politics of Amador County
I've made a point of surrounding myself with people who see the world through a similar lens as my own. This practice has resulted in my opinons and life perspective being spread over a broader range of experiental terrain. So even though I haven't had the occassion to visit Amador county since my last backcountry mother's day celebration (an alarming proportion of my maternal relatives live there), the source of my inspiration for the current musings is an experience one of my satelite sensors had while dining at a local restaurant in the illustrious Amador county.
She was reading a newsletter detailing the regional happenings for the month of February. She was immediately drawn to a section called "marriage advice from children." A young girl, age ten advises, "You don't pick who you marry, God picks who you marry and eventually you just end up with them." A young boy, age ten advises, "It's important to pick someone who likes the same things as you. If you like sports she should like that you like sports, and keep the chips and dips coming." Oh man, where do I begin?
Let's start with the implications of the young female perspective. Not only does it reflect the deeply rooted conditional experience of girls who learn to be complacent, resigned, and complicit in their gendered role and identity; it speaks to the dangerous orientation women have to relationships, marriage and men. I think that one of the most beautiful things about children is that they see and interpret the world in incredibly honest and candid terms. The fact that this young girl has articulated marriage in terms of "who you end up with" is an authentic translation of how she has experienced life. Even at ten years old she has learned acceptance, how to take the prescriptions she's given without protest because resistance is either unrealistic, unavailable or impossible. Her statement reflects the social identification of women, and perhaps even more so young women, as obedient, pious and complicit with the roles and characteristics that are outlined for them overwhelmingly of course, by standards and representations that are created by men. Even more interesting for me is that while it is perfectly acceptable for young boys and men to imagine themselves as escaping marriage forever, girls and women percieve it as a part of their natural destiny. Certainly we all know that men who are single are "bachelors" at any age while women who remain unmarried are "old maids", "spinsters", or simply crazy, unmarriable or otherwise undesirable. It's funny how language works like that. So whether you believe God, your mother, your best friend or your eventual spouse picks who you marry, it's inevitable and unavoidable. I guess like with everything else that "just comes with being a woman" we should just get on board and over it, right?
I imagine whoever was in charge of publishing "marriage advice from children" thought that what the ten year old boy had to say was adorable, hilarious and irresistable. I can also imagine that many of the people reading "marriage advice from children" had a similar reaction. And that's fine, I guess. Except I'm horrified that a male as young as ten has already inherited the value system and perspective that his statement represents. Not only does it imply a gendered hierarchy in which his interests and identity are superior in caliber and significance, it suggests that women don't, can't or shouldn't have an identity that is seperate from their male counterpart. Of course we can't discount the resonance of women's service, and with that, subservience, to men that echos in the end of the statement. I'm sure the likely interpretations would be that he's just a kid and it's just a joke, or he's probably just reiterating and reflecting what he sees in his own family. And although it all might be true, it nonetheless speaks to the power of socialization and reproduction. This ten-year old certainly wasn't born with these attitudes, and printing them only validates, confirms and reaffirms them. And as with many things that are taken as "just a joke" it reenforces stereotypes, preserve norms and prevents critical observation from developing. Ok, ok, so Amador county isn't exactly the progressive political capital of the northwest and it is certainly understandable how these issues could wind up undetected in the Northern California foothills. Unfortunately, youthful incarnations of gender inequality is not limited to conserative voting districts.
The private catholic school where I work holds an annual concert called "spring sing," and from what I've gathered each class picks and practices a song to perform. Recently, a girl in third grade was complaining to me about the song her class had been chosen to sing. The title? "Guys say cool and girls say gross." Yes, that's right, almost a decade into the twenty-first century, in west los angeles(considered liberal, no?), a third grade class will be divided along gendered lines to sing a song that not only suggests, but demands that children experience the world in certain ways based on being a boy or girl. So what if you're a girl who doesn't think it's gross (I think the song is about somebody's loose tooth), what does that say to you about yourself? Here's some hints: abnormal, weird, strange, unusual. I imagine the experience for boys who do think it's gross is similar and equally uncomfortable. Beyond this, and perhaps what I find to be most interesting, is how this song conjures up the image of young boys pushing eachother out of the way to check out how "cool" "it" is while the girls recoil in horror and try to get out of the way. Does anyone else see the males moving to the foreground (where the action is) while the females are shoved into the background in observation? And this is just one of the ways that girls learn how to react while they passively watch the boys interact with whatever environment they're in.
I am 23 years old and have spent my entire life playing with boys. And even though I'm nearly a foot taller, more athletic and faster than your average 8 year old, the boys at this very same school refuse to throw to me on the football field. I catch every pass my adult co-worker throws me and I can launch a perfect spiral as far as anyone else I've seen throw, yet after every snap I stand un-guarded in the end-zone and no one even looks my way. Somewhere in the course of their relatively new school career, these boys have learned that women are either untrustworthy or incapable on the football field and I imagine have absorbed this same information about other spheres of their daily life. These boys have a female P.E. coach, in fact all but one teacher at the entire school are women, and all but one of their day care counselors are women. They are overwhelmingly picked up from school (and you can infer raised primarily) by women and yet somehow they have learned that in some places women just don't belong....hm...interesting, I wonder how that happened?
The truth is the messages about gender roles and identity are everywhere for these kids and it is no surprise that their understanding of gender difference develops before their awareness of just about any other aspect of identity (race, sexuality, etc.). If in an age where women are presumed to have achieved equality in so many ways, education, career, etc, why are young people still learning these lessons about their respective places in the world? Probably because as much as we'd all like to point to the Clinton '08 presidential campaign and say, here's living proof that women have made it in this world, we can all go on with our lives, the reality is they (we) haven't. And we certainly won't as long as we (womena and men) remain complacent and uncritical about media, curriculum and implicit stereotype-reenforcement that teaches both males and females where we belong.
Yesterday I saw a white t-shirt hanging in a girl's clothing store window. In pink writing the shirt said: "I'm too pretty to do math" For those who believe that I'm full of unnecessary, righteous, feminist bullshit.....I rest my case.
She was reading a newsletter detailing the regional happenings for the month of February. She was immediately drawn to a section called "marriage advice from children." A young girl, age ten advises, "You don't pick who you marry, God picks who you marry and eventually you just end up with them." A young boy, age ten advises, "It's important to pick someone who likes the same things as you. If you like sports she should like that you like sports, and keep the chips and dips coming." Oh man, where do I begin?
Let's start with the implications of the young female perspective. Not only does it reflect the deeply rooted conditional experience of girls who learn to be complacent, resigned, and complicit in their gendered role and identity; it speaks to the dangerous orientation women have to relationships, marriage and men. I think that one of the most beautiful things about children is that they see and interpret the world in incredibly honest and candid terms. The fact that this young girl has articulated marriage in terms of "who you end up with" is an authentic translation of how she has experienced life. Even at ten years old she has learned acceptance, how to take the prescriptions she's given without protest because resistance is either unrealistic, unavailable or impossible. Her statement reflects the social identification of women, and perhaps even more so young women, as obedient, pious and complicit with the roles and characteristics that are outlined for them overwhelmingly of course, by standards and representations that are created by men. Even more interesting for me is that while it is perfectly acceptable for young boys and men to imagine themselves as escaping marriage forever, girls and women percieve it as a part of their natural destiny. Certainly we all know that men who are single are "bachelors" at any age while women who remain unmarried are "old maids", "spinsters", or simply crazy, unmarriable or otherwise undesirable. It's funny how language works like that. So whether you believe God, your mother, your best friend or your eventual spouse picks who you marry, it's inevitable and unavoidable. I guess like with everything else that "just comes with being a woman" we should just get on board and over it, right?
I imagine whoever was in charge of publishing "marriage advice from children" thought that what the ten year old boy had to say was adorable, hilarious and irresistable. I can also imagine that many of the people reading "marriage advice from children" had a similar reaction. And that's fine, I guess. Except I'm horrified that a male as young as ten has already inherited the value system and perspective that his statement represents. Not only does it imply a gendered hierarchy in which his interests and identity are superior in caliber and significance, it suggests that women don't, can't or shouldn't have an identity that is seperate from their male counterpart. Of course we can't discount the resonance of women's service, and with that, subservience, to men that echos in the end of the statement. I'm sure the likely interpretations would be that he's just a kid and it's just a joke, or he's probably just reiterating and reflecting what he sees in his own family. And although it all might be true, it nonetheless speaks to the power of socialization and reproduction. This ten-year old certainly wasn't born with these attitudes, and printing them only validates, confirms and reaffirms them. And as with many things that are taken as "just a joke" it reenforces stereotypes, preserve norms and prevents critical observation from developing. Ok, ok, so Amador county isn't exactly the progressive political capital of the northwest and it is certainly understandable how these issues could wind up undetected in the Northern California foothills. Unfortunately, youthful incarnations of gender inequality is not limited to conserative voting districts.
The private catholic school where I work holds an annual concert called "spring sing," and from what I've gathered each class picks and practices a song to perform. Recently, a girl in third grade was complaining to me about the song her class had been chosen to sing. The title? "Guys say cool and girls say gross." Yes, that's right, almost a decade into the twenty-first century, in west los angeles(considered liberal, no?), a third grade class will be divided along gendered lines to sing a song that not only suggests, but demands that children experience the world in certain ways based on being a boy or girl. So what if you're a girl who doesn't think it's gross (I think the song is about somebody's loose tooth), what does that say to you about yourself? Here's some hints: abnormal, weird, strange, unusual. I imagine the experience for boys who do think it's gross is similar and equally uncomfortable. Beyond this, and perhaps what I find to be most interesting, is how this song conjures up the image of young boys pushing eachother out of the way to check out how "cool" "it" is while the girls recoil in horror and try to get out of the way. Does anyone else see the males moving to the foreground (where the action is) while the females are shoved into the background in observation? And this is just one of the ways that girls learn how to react while they passively watch the boys interact with whatever environment they're in.
I am 23 years old and have spent my entire life playing with boys. And even though I'm nearly a foot taller, more athletic and faster than your average 8 year old, the boys at this very same school refuse to throw to me on the football field. I catch every pass my adult co-worker throws me and I can launch a perfect spiral as far as anyone else I've seen throw, yet after every snap I stand un-guarded in the end-zone and no one even looks my way. Somewhere in the course of their relatively new school career, these boys have learned that women are either untrustworthy or incapable on the football field and I imagine have absorbed this same information about other spheres of their daily life. These boys have a female P.E. coach, in fact all but one teacher at the entire school are women, and all but one of their day care counselors are women. They are overwhelmingly picked up from school (and you can infer raised primarily) by women and yet somehow they have learned that in some places women just don't belong....hm...interesting, I wonder how that happened?
The truth is the messages about gender roles and identity are everywhere for these kids and it is no surprise that their understanding of gender difference develops before their awareness of just about any other aspect of identity (race, sexuality, etc.). If in an age where women are presumed to have achieved equality in so many ways, education, career, etc, why are young people still learning these lessons about their respective places in the world? Probably because as much as we'd all like to point to the Clinton '08 presidential campaign and say, here's living proof that women have made it in this world, we can all go on with our lives, the reality is they (we) haven't. And we certainly won't as long as we (womena and men) remain complacent and uncritical about media, curriculum and implicit stereotype-reenforcement that teaches both males and females where we belong.
Yesterday I saw a white t-shirt hanging in a girl's clothing store window. In pink writing the shirt said: "I'm too pretty to do math" For those who believe that I'm full of unnecessary, righteous, feminist bullshit.....I rest my case.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Sex and the City, Women and Relationship Reality
I hate to think what empirical evidence would emerge from a statistical comparison of the time I spent studying in college versus the time I've spent consumed by relationships. Talking about them, investing in them, recovering from them, hypothetically creating them in my mind through the lens of other women's experiences and opinions. The most frightening part of this experiment would be a comparable analysis of one of my male counterparts. I hate to imagine the gross disparaties between how men and women spend their post-secondary education, and perhaps even more discouraging is how these same men occupy their time once they're out of college.
I was reminded of this by a conversation I had with one of my intelligent, talented, beautiful, recently graduated friends. She was telling me about her abysmal experiences meeting men since she's been out of college. It's been a mixture of immaturity, dishonesty, indecision and my personal favorite: a grown man in his late twenties who is incapable of communicating on the phone or in person and instead pursues my friend through a variety of disrespectful text messages. Really? Is this what we spend our youth obsessing over? Men who can't or don't want to commit, who are preoccupied, unwilling or incapable of growing up and/or, as I imagine is the source of most of this, who have no semblance of respect for women. It makes me think about all the movies and tv I grew up with that define women's happiness in terms of their attachment to, or relationship with, men. I attempted to brainstorm examples or images of men who are completely consumed/defined by their pursuit of the utlimate relationship. I'm sure if you try the same exercise, you would reach the same conclusion: there just aren't any. So as I reflect on owning and watching the entire series of sex and the city (more times than I'd like to admit), I think about how real/sureal/unreal it is. How just like most media, it reflects and creates reality all at once. How it is both representative and constructive of the way that women think about and experience relationships. Even if we are educated, insightful, creative and capable, for some reason there is some societal or personal vacancy that exists in the absence of a relationship. Not only are these ideas conservative, hetero-normative and dangerously invisible for most women, they are woven into the fabric of how we see, understand and value ourselves.
I remember first hearing about Sex and the City, and since then Desperate Housewives and others, being praised as a source for female empowerment. All female leads, liberal sexual values and women so-called taking control over their lives on-screen for everyone to see and learn from. After hours and hours of immersion in the upper middle-class white world of carrie bradshaw, it's become incredibly apparent to me that Sex and the City (and other manifestations of the same concept) continues to reinforce the idea that women are somehow incomplete, empty or unfulfilled without at least the pursuit of a relationship with a man. So while women are learning important lessons about the relative significance of defining a self and finding a relationship, men operate under the assumption that women will just come along, take care of them, and ultimately marry them, becoming an accessory in their otherwise complete lives.
The other day my rooommate and I found ourselves trapped in the obligatory, "what are you up to right now slash in the near future" conversation with a female acquintance of ours, and as we both tried desperately to feign interest in an entire monologue of information that was neither significant nor relevant to either of us, we were both struck by something: This woman, who is graduating from UCLA in the spring, and has secured a job with one of the most competitive consulting firms in the country, expressed a deep concern about not having enough time to spend with her boyfriend over the summer. Among her explanation of Europe travel plans and job training obligations, she made it clear that her primary investment was in her relationship. Man, even when women manage to escape marginalization and discrimination, we are still preoccupied with finding, keeping or analyzing the men in our lives. That is de-pressing.
I guess the real question is, how do women overcome this phenomenon? Or is it even something that women consider worth overcoming? Or perhaps more realistically, is this something other women have even considered at all? It is especially hard to imagine a change in relationship equity between men and women when there is so much information naturalizing and normalizing the behaviors and attitudes I have addressed. If you turn on the tv, glance through a "women's" magazine or check out most of mainstream American cinema, advertising and education, you will undoubtedly be inundated with constructed ideals of romance, instructions on how to become more desirable (for men), and list after list of things women can alter or enhance in order to be more equipped for a long-term relationship. The consequences of this inundation range from psychological and emotional to societal and incorporate just about everything in between. It affects the way women are educated, how they experience employment and pursue their careers. It affects self-perception, self-esteem and identity and can be potentially damaging and destructive in many ways I haven't even thought about.
Ironically, there's an episode of Sex and the City in which Miranda (the high-powered attorney, single-mother, and chronic relationship misfit) dramatically leaves a table of her three other friends in protest of how "intelligent and interesting women" can find nothing else to talk about but men and relationships. I hope that women everywhere take a similar stand in their own lives, not just in conversation with their intimate female friends, but in the depths of their own mind as well. Here's hoping that someday there's a popular tv character who makes her mark on history by being an incredible mother, powerful human being and/or meaningful contributor to society....now that would be something to talk about.
I was reminded of this by a conversation I had with one of my intelligent, talented, beautiful, recently graduated friends. She was telling me about her abysmal experiences meeting men since she's been out of college. It's been a mixture of immaturity, dishonesty, indecision and my personal favorite: a grown man in his late twenties who is incapable of communicating on the phone or in person and instead pursues my friend through a variety of disrespectful text messages. Really? Is this what we spend our youth obsessing over? Men who can't or don't want to commit, who are preoccupied, unwilling or incapable of growing up and/or, as I imagine is the source of most of this, who have no semblance of respect for women. It makes me think about all the movies and tv I grew up with that define women's happiness in terms of their attachment to, or relationship with, men. I attempted to brainstorm examples or images of men who are completely consumed/defined by their pursuit of the utlimate relationship. I'm sure if you try the same exercise, you would reach the same conclusion: there just aren't any. So as I reflect on owning and watching the entire series of sex and the city (more times than I'd like to admit), I think about how real/sureal/unreal it is. How just like most media, it reflects and creates reality all at once. How it is both representative and constructive of the way that women think about and experience relationships. Even if we are educated, insightful, creative and capable, for some reason there is some societal or personal vacancy that exists in the absence of a relationship. Not only are these ideas conservative, hetero-normative and dangerously invisible for most women, they are woven into the fabric of how we see, understand and value ourselves.
I remember first hearing about Sex and the City, and since then Desperate Housewives and others, being praised as a source for female empowerment. All female leads, liberal sexual values and women so-called taking control over their lives on-screen for everyone to see and learn from. After hours and hours of immersion in the upper middle-class white world of carrie bradshaw, it's become incredibly apparent to me that Sex and the City (and other manifestations of the same concept) continues to reinforce the idea that women are somehow incomplete, empty or unfulfilled without at least the pursuit of a relationship with a man. So while women are learning important lessons about the relative significance of defining a self and finding a relationship, men operate under the assumption that women will just come along, take care of them, and ultimately marry them, becoming an accessory in their otherwise complete lives.
The other day my rooommate and I found ourselves trapped in the obligatory, "what are you up to right now slash in the near future" conversation with a female acquintance of ours, and as we both tried desperately to feign interest in an entire monologue of information that was neither significant nor relevant to either of us, we were both struck by something: This woman, who is graduating from UCLA in the spring, and has secured a job with one of the most competitive consulting firms in the country, expressed a deep concern about not having enough time to spend with her boyfriend over the summer. Among her explanation of Europe travel plans and job training obligations, she made it clear that her primary investment was in her relationship. Man, even when women manage to escape marginalization and discrimination, we are still preoccupied with finding, keeping or analyzing the men in our lives. That is de-pressing.
I guess the real question is, how do women overcome this phenomenon? Or is it even something that women consider worth overcoming? Or perhaps more realistically, is this something other women have even considered at all? It is especially hard to imagine a change in relationship equity between men and women when there is so much information naturalizing and normalizing the behaviors and attitudes I have addressed. If you turn on the tv, glance through a "women's" magazine or check out most of mainstream American cinema, advertising and education, you will undoubtedly be inundated with constructed ideals of romance, instructions on how to become more desirable (for men), and list after list of things women can alter or enhance in order to be more equipped for a long-term relationship. The consequences of this inundation range from psychological and emotional to societal and incorporate just about everything in between. It affects the way women are educated, how they experience employment and pursue their careers. It affects self-perception, self-esteem and identity and can be potentially damaging and destructive in many ways I haven't even thought about.
Ironically, there's an episode of Sex and the City in which Miranda (the high-powered attorney, single-mother, and chronic relationship misfit) dramatically leaves a table of her three other friends in protest of how "intelligent and interesting women" can find nothing else to talk about but men and relationships. I hope that women everywhere take a similar stand in their own lives, not just in conversation with their intimate female friends, but in the depths of their own mind as well. Here's hoping that someday there's a popular tv character who makes her mark on history by being an incredible mother, powerful human being and/or meaningful contributor to society....now that would be something to talk about.
Friday, February 9, 2007
Black History Month, Fortune Cookies and essentialized education
Yesterday I helped out in a kindergarten class that was "learning" about Chinese New Year. The class was making fortunes (as in the kind you might find in a cookie from panda express), decorating fireworks, and reading some story about a dragon. On top of that, they were copying words on a handout about "chinese counting," and although all the numbers were written out in Chinese, the teacher couldn't pronounce the words and the pictures that went with the numbers included things like chopsticks, lanterns and of course....fortune cookies. Man, I thought: Here is this class of all white kids, attending this school filled exclusively with other white kids, in a neighborhood where only white people live, and they are learning about "Chinese" culture and traditions from a white teacher, using a work sheet designed by (no doubt) a company dominated by, you guessed it, more white people. And I can only imagine that this is the only lesson they get about anything Chinese for the rest of the year.
It all made me wonder about the danger of so-called multi-cultural education. What are the repercussions of creating and facilitating essentialized lessons about non-white (as in non-western non european, not anglo/North American, other, them, etc.) people places and traditions through a narrow lens of appropriated whiteness. In my entire elementary and secondary education I probably had this same lesson about "Chinese New Year" in a variety of different forms each year, and in the absence of having a personal relationship or any exposure to actual Chinese people, how could I help but understand them in any way other than in terms of chow mein, fortune cookies and red envelopes. Not only that, what about the one or two chinese kids in my school and the thousands of chinese kids in other schools who every year listen attentively while their culture is reduced to a one day lesson about food and fireworks.
Can anyone realistically argue that this doesn't have some sort of greater social consequence? As far as I can tell, one of the problems with "multi-cultural" education is that even the name itself is a misrepresentation. This type of education is derived from the cultural perspective, bias and understanding of one culture and one culture only: European-descended white Americans. The education kids receive in public school is about as authentically chinese as I am. It does nothing to challenge the infectious white normalcy that characterizes not only education but just about every other aspect of American social space and public life. So while Chinese kids learn that the significance of their ethnic identity ranks with groundhog day and St. Valentine, white kids are reinforced over and over again with the idea that the way they look, feel, act, behave, eat, dance, write, talk and breathe is normal, significant and correct, they are also learning that everything else is just a token leftover from immigration and the American melting pot. It appears that there's even more to educational equity than resources and standardized tests.
As I sat and contemplated this idea of co-opted, pre-packaged, whitened-out culture as the only source for multi-culturalism in the public school system, I thought about my all time favorite aspect of public schooling: Black History Month. Oh black history month, the time when: prime time television airs thirty second clips of well-dressed African-Americans achieving greatness, daytime and evening talk shows interview prominent black entertainers and celebrities and we all take a moment to praise the cultural, athletic and historic accomplishments of African-Americans. If it can even be imagined, the study of black history in the public school classroom is even more ridiculous and contrived. Students learn about "I Have A Dream" and Martin Luther King Jr. when they celebrate his birthday in January so teachers have to get really creative when February rolls around and its black history month again.
Oh you know, there's the Rosa Parks anecdote (which is always a watered-down version of an incredible struggle for freedom that doesn't even validate the intricate tactical organization and community mobilization that surrounded the bus incident-much of which was done by women); not to mention a brief overview of significant black athletes and entertainers: arthur ashe, magic johnson, jackie robinson, maybe even flo jo if you're lucky; in particularly progressive cases you might hear about the Harlem Rennaissance, freedom marches or the first black person to (insert significant political office and/or leadership position here); and in some classes students even learn about things like the underground railroad (which in reality is no more than a valorization of the benevolent white folk that guided the black people from slavery) or maybe read uncle tom's cabin or a speech by Frederick Douglas. Man, that's a whole lot more than fortune cookies and fireworks isn't it?
As it turns out, it isn't. The truth of the matter is that while the expression is different, the message is the same: Black people and black culture are represented as static fixtures, historical, political and social entities that exist in isolation (and clear distinction) from the white American norm.
When kids sit in classrooms year after year, and read the same speech by Martin Luther King, Jr, what are they really learning about African-Americans? Are they learning about the complexity of diasporic culture and the diversity of African-American identities? Are they learning about historical, institutional and systemic racism and discrimination? Of course not. They are learning a token or two about a couple of important events or individuals, the significance of which, even if they are exposed to, they will unlikely ever learn to situate in the greater context of African-American identity and experience.
Most of the people I grew up going to school with now hold college degrees and are currently pursuing advanced education and/or have joined the capitalist work force. And as they all sit at the brink of the adult stage of their lives in which they will raise their own children (who will do the same projects and read the same books as they always did during February) I can almost guarantee that none of them know anything more about African-American history than they did in the first grade. The worst part is, these kids received some of the best public elementary and secondary education in the country AND made it through higher education. What does that suggest about what the rest of the nation's children are learning about black history, or anything else for that matter? How can we claim to live in a world of equality, or even envision one, when the very substance of what we are teaching focuses on, benefits and reproduces a single, dominant group. What's more, Black history month probably does more justice to black culture than any other study of history does to any other marginalized group in the entire scope of public education curriculum. What are the consequences for all the kids who belong to these groups who are educated by this system? One can only imagine. I know that I grew up in a world where (aside from the fact that I'm a woman), most everything I learned about validated my entire identity and existence. I also know that there are social, psychological and academic advantages that came with that type of education, and that in contrast, there are serious consequences for those who are not receiving it.
I hope to be an educator myself someday. I hope to conceive of and create a curriculum in which the story of history is told through the voices of the people I am teaching. I hope to create a space in which the cultural and ethnic history of each individual is validated, spread and understood for its unique complexity, and that no one group is valorized over another. I've often been told that, in terms of my professional dreams I'm incredibly unrealistic. And although this may be the truth, I can ensure my future students of one thing, there will be no fortune cookies on Chinese New Year, No latkes during Hannukah and no posters of famous black athletes hanging on the walls during black history month.
It all made me wonder about the danger of so-called multi-cultural education. What are the repercussions of creating and facilitating essentialized lessons about non-white (as in non-western non european, not anglo/North American, other, them, etc.) people places and traditions through a narrow lens of appropriated whiteness. In my entire elementary and secondary education I probably had this same lesson about "Chinese New Year" in a variety of different forms each year, and in the absence of having a personal relationship or any exposure to actual Chinese people, how could I help but understand them in any way other than in terms of chow mein, fortune cookies and red envelopes. Not only that, what about the one or two chinese kids in my school and the thousands of chinese kids in other schools who every year listen attentively while their culture is reduced to a one day lesson about food and fireworks.
Can anyone realistically argue that this doesn't have some sort of greater social consequence? As far as I can tell, one of the problems with "multi-cultural" education is that even the name itself is a misrepresentation. This type of education is derived from the cultural perspective, bias and understanding of one culture and one culture only: European-descended white Americans. The education kids receive in public school is about as authentically chinese as I am. It does nothing to challenge the infectious white normalcy that characterizes not only education but just about every other aspect of American social space and public life. So while Chinese kids learn that the significance of their ethnic identity ranks with groundhog day and St. Valentine, white kids are reinforced over and over again with the idea that the way they look, feel, act, behave, eat, dance, write, talk and breathe is normal, significant and correct, they are also learning that everything else is just a token leftover from immigration and the American melting pot. It appears that there's even more to educational equity than resources and standardized tests.
As I sat and contemplated this idea of co-opted, pre-packaged, whitened-out culture as the only source for multi-culturalism in the public school system, I thought about my all time favorite aspect of public schooling: Black History Month. Oh black history month, the time when: prime time television airs thirty second clips of well-dressed African-Americans achieving greatness, daytime and evening talk shows interview prominent black entertainers and celebrities and we all take a moment to praise the cultural, athletic and historic accomplishments of African-Americans. If it can even be imagined, the study of black history in the public school classroom is even more ridiculous and contrived. Students learn about "I Have A Dream" and Martin Luther King Jr. when they celebrate his birthday in January so teachers have to get really creative when February rolls around and its black history month again.
Oh you know, there's the Rosa Parks anecdote (which is always a watered-down version of an incredible struggle for freedom that doesn't even validate the intricate tactical organization and community mobilization that surrounded the bus incident-much of which was done by women); not to mention a brief overview of significant black athletes and entertainers: arthur ashe, magic johnson, jackie robinson, maybe even flo jo if you're lucky; in particularly progressive cases you might hear about the Harlem Rennaissance, freedom marches or the first black person to (insert significant political office and/or leadership position here); and in some classes students even learn about things like the underground railroad (which in reality is no more than a valorization of the benevolent white folk that guided the black people from slavery) or maybe read uncle tom's cabin or a speech by Frederick Douglas. Man, that's a whole lot more than fortune cookies and fireworks isn't it?
As it turns out, it isn't. The truth of the matter is that while the expression is different, the message is the same: Black people and black culture are represented as static fixtures, historical, political and social entities that exist in isolation (and clear distinction) from the white American norm.
When kids sit in classrooms year after year, and read the same speech by Martin Luther King, Jr, what are they really learning about African-Americans? Are they learning about the complexity of diasporic culture and the diversity of African-American identities? Are they learning about historical, institutional and systemic racism and discrimination? Of course not. They are learning a token or two about a couple of important events or individuals, the significance of which, even if they are exposed to, they will unlikely ever learn to situate in the greater context of African-American identity and experience.
Most of the people I grew up going to school with now hold college degrees and are currently pursuing advanced education and/or have joined the capitalist work force. And as they all sit at the brink of the adult stage of their lives in which they will raise their own children (who will do the same projects and read the same books as they always did during February) I can almost guarantee that none of them know anything more about African-American history than they did in the first grade. The worst part is, these kids received some of the best public elementary and secondary education in the country AND made it through higher education. What does that suggest about what the rest of the nation's children are learning about black history, or anything else for that matter? How can we claim to live in a world of equality, or even envision one, when the very substance of what we are teaching focuses on, benefits and reproduces a single, dominant group. What's more, Black history month probably does more justice to black culture than any other study of history does to any other marginalized group in the entire scope of public education curriculum. What are the consequences for all the kids who belong to these groups who are educated by this system? One can only imagine. I know that I grew up in a world where (aside from the fact that I'm a woman), most everything I learned about validated my entire identity and existence. I also know that there are social, psychological and academic advantages that came with that type of education, and that in contrast, there are serious consequences for those who are not receiving it.
I hope to be an educator myself someday. I hope to conceive of and create a curriculum in which the story of history is told through the voices of the people I am teaching. I hope to create a space in which the cultural and ethnic history of each individual is validated, spread and understood for its unique complexity, and that no one group is valorized over another. I've often been told that, in terms of my professional dreams I'm incredibly unrealistic. And although this may be the truth, I can ensure my future students of one thing, there will be no fortune cookies on Chinese New Year, No latkes during Hannukah and no posters of famous black athletes hanging on the walls during black history month.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
No cell phone, no mentorship...hella time to think, obsess, talk to my roommates...et cetera
Today I spent three hours in a lecture on internet access, activism, social networking, surveillance, security and other elements of the evolving internet subculture that for the most part I've remained alien to. Aside from an obligatory facebook page, emailing the people I live with and the occassional google search, I pretty much avoid the realm altogether. When things like xanga and myspace first became popular I was more creeped out than anything else. Not to mention that these innovations led way too many people I went to high school with to become unneccessarily involved in eachother's lives without even speaking. It's a surreality more than anything else. Where people can exist in imaginary spaces with made up identities and create friendships that would never materialize in any full-contact social space.
But whatever, lord knows that my inner-stalker has thrived on many a facebook search since then, and I no longer judge those who use this bizarre internet universe to complicate and dramatize their otherwise mundane existence. It's all good for me.
One thing I certainly never thought to do was create an online journal. I'm pretty much the most righteous and self-important person I know in real life and still I don't think anything i think or say or write about means anything to anyone but my mom (who is genetically obligated to appreciate and validate everything I do) and my roommates (who are pretty much just multi-cultural expressions of me). So in any case, I don't expect anyone to ever read this, and if they do, I certainly don't expect anyone to understand it. But the truth is, in the absence of unicamp politics and drama and control over the best thing that has ever happened to UCLA student organizations (aka Mentorship), I have way too much time on my hands, and I can tell that some people in my apartment are sick of me sitting on the couch watching 90210 slash in their bedroom when they're trying to go to sleep... so we'll see, who knows, maybe through my brilliant ramblings I'll end up on Oprah afterall, condemning Wally Wirick and sending many a los angeles youth to Disneyland on the house. Cross your fingers.
But whatever, lord knows that my inner-stalker has thrived on many a facebook search since then, and I no longer judge those who use this bizarre internet universe to complicate and dramatize their otherwise mundane existence. It's all good for me.
One thing I certainly never thought to do was create an online journal. I'm pretty much the most righteous and self-important person I know in real life and still I don't think anything i think or say or write about means anything to anyone but my mom (who is genetically obligated to appreciate and validate everything I do) and my roommates (who are pretty much just multi-cultural expressions of me). So in any case, I don't expect anyone to ever read this, and if they do, I certainly don't expect anyone to understand it. But the truth is, in the absence of unicamp politics and drama and control over the best thing that has ever happened to UCLA student organizations (aka Mentorship), I have way too much time on my hands, and I can tell that some people in my apartment are sick of me sitting on the couch watching 90210 slash in their bedroom when they're trying to go to sleep... so we'll see, who knows, maybe through my brilliant ramblings I'll end up on Oprah afterall, condemning Wally Wirick and sending many a los angeles youth to Disneyland on the house. Cross your fingers.
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