I would travel back to biblical times, to early civilizations. I’m not nostalgic about it, but I think I could learn from it. For the most part, life would be hard. And I have no romantic notions of what it was like for women: to own no real property of your own, to have to be completely subservient to the men of the household, to face the threat of ostracism or death for displeasing the wrong person. And everyone faced harsher times, greater threat of starvation, and greater chances of succumbing to disease.
But, for a short period, it would also be refreshing to go somewhere where we’re not surrounded by things. We live surrounded by so much abundance, but we (or I, at least) almost never see it. If I were to sit down and try to count every little item that I own personally, it would probably take days. Yet, I don’t feel I have that much – certainly less than others. And when I go shopping, there are always things I can find to desire.
It just makes me wonder: what would it be like to look around me and see that all the items I own were ones I made with my own hands? What would it be like if I had only one, or at most, two outfits to wear, instead of changing clothes every day? (I’d certainly spend less time in front of the mirror trying to decide what to wear.) What would it be like to grow my own food, raise my own cattle, harvest and slaughter and cook, with my own two hands? (True, I don’t necessarily need to go back in time to do that…but I would, to enter a state where there were no other options.)
And I think, what would it be like to have family not only be the center but also be your entire universe? To have your days filled with common chores. To have all your aunts and sisters and cousins around you working together to make things. What would it be like to create everything we consume?
In part, I think it would be powerful, empowering, humbling, and lovely. But I also think it would really make me appreciate what I do have when I came back to this time and this place. I do appreciate what I have on some levels, but this would add a whole new dimension.
Maybe we can no longer really live in a place where we create everything we consume. But it might be worthwhile to try to create more than we consume. Or, at the very least, be more mindful of how much we consume versus how much we create. I hope when I do leave this earth, I’ll not have just used, but I’ll also have given. I hope, when I leave, I leave behind something worth the space I have taken.
What would you do, if you could travel in time?
The Rules You can respond in any way you choose. You can give a fictional response or a true one. You can use words, sentences, and/or photographs. If you have a blog, you can link it with Mr. Linky below. Please be sure to include “Tell It To Me Tuesdays” in the post, and link back to this post. Feel free to use the “Tell It To Me Tuesday” button available to the right. If you don’t have a blog, but want to join in, you can just leave a comment. Please follow the rules. I don’t want to have to delete links. I like links! Don’t make me delete them.
Next week’s challenge: My worst fear and its consequences FOR A MILLION EXTRA BONUS POINTS:If you want to take on an extra challenge, try to write a story in which you don’t tell us explicitly what your worst fear is, but you play out in your head and through words what would happen if your worst fear was realized. We just might surprise ourselves with what we find here.
The biological clock is ticking and my hubby and I are thinking we’re getting close to being ready to try for kids soon (by soon, I mean probably sometime next year – after we get settled, organized, gather our wits about us, etc.). However, given our plans to move and everything, there is a very distinct possibility that our first child will be born in Thailand (but, through us, can still have US citizenship). Since I have an anal tendency to obsessively research everything, naturally I’ve already looked into this.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time already looking into childbirth and care in the U.S., reading up on how there are some very important hormonal and developmental things that happen between mother and child during the birthing process and cesareans hijack and prohibit them from occurring. Of course cesareans are a godsend in times of need, but there’s growing evidence that a whole slew of unnecessary interventions occur because the mother isn’t going through labor “fast enough” for hospital desires and wishes. There are a lot of decisions to make and options to learn about, but I think one thing is clear for me and that is I want to avoid a cesarean as much as possible (you know, assuming everything goes along as it should).
Thailand is known for having top-quality care available, at rates much more affordable than the U.S. Many of the top doctors in Thailand trained at top medical universities like Johns Hopkins in the U.S., and then go back to Thailand and work there. (Even the King of Thailand was actually born in Cambridge because his father, Prince Mahidol, studied medicine at Harvard – and later became a figure revolutionizing health practices in Thailand.) We hear a lot of stories about people from western countries flying to Thailand for surgeries, with great success, and – flight included – still end up paying less than they would here. My hubby’s even planning to have lasik surgery done while we’re there. So my initial reaction was not to worry about my ability to find good care in Thailand – especially since, in Thailand, for the right price you can basically get whatever you want.
But then I found out something that freaked me the eff out. So, as a reference, the WHO puts a healthy national cesarean rate around 5-10%. There has been a movement to raise awareness and concern about the U.S.’s cesarean rates that are skyrocketing upward from about 4.5% in the mid-1960′s when it was first measured to a high of about 32% in 2007. In Thailand, that rate is around 34% nationwide, and as high as 51% in private hospitals.
I started to worry that it would be difficult to find a doctor who would present me with clear information about my options. I started to fear that I would get pressured into something because it was better for the hospital, but that I’d be too far in pain to think clearly about it. I started to worry about all the precautions and extra arrangements I’d have to make to come back to the U.S….flying while pregnant, staying with parents, possibly being separated from my husband, the extra costs…let the panic attacks commence.
But then I talked to my mom (who was born, raised, and well-educated in Thailand) about my concerns. And she laughed. She said the reason cesareans are so high in Thailand is because women ask for them. They want cesareans so they can plan their child’s birth to fall on a “lucky” day, astrologically. Or, like even some members of my own dear family, they opt for them to keep their special woman parts looking pretty(!).
Oh, said I.
Well, in that case, I think I can stop panicking. I’m pretty sure a “honeymoon” va-jay-jay is not at the top of the list of my concerns.
“The quality and longevity of a marriage could be measured by the number of bite marks on a woman’s tongue.” – Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain
For the longest time, I’ve always thought I had a personal deficiency when it came to arguing with others. When someone says something offensive or something that makes me hurt or angry, I have a tendency to shut down. I would love to be able to defend myself or to call them out on the hurtful or undermining comment they made, but I am often physically incapable of doing so. My body shuts down on me and I am unable to process. And it often isn’t until hours – or even days – later that I figure out precisely why I was so angry and how I would have like to have responded.
Turns out, the female brain is hardwired this way. As Brizendine explains, “even if a woman wanted to express her anger right away, often her brain circuits would attempt to hijack the response, to reflect on it first out of fear and anticipation of retaliation.” The female brain is extremely averse to conflict, due to fear of angering others and losing relationships. Though women may be slower to act out of anger than are men, once aroused, they can “unleash a barrage of angry words that a man can’t match.”
This little tidbit is but one morsel of fascinating information I’ve come across in reading these two books: The Male Brain and The Female Brain. In both books, the author culls together analysis from all kinds of neuropsychiatry, biology, and cognitive psychology to explain what it is scientists have learned about the human brain – all in language that is witty, fun, and easy accessible to anyone who isn’t familiar with big scientific words (my hand is in the air). In a lot of ways, these books begin to answer the nature versus nurture questions…but often we discover it works in ways we didn’t quite expect.
I think, a lot more than we anticipate, human behavior begins with our hormones and chemicals in the brain. And more often than not, our behavior and how we even perceive the world is gender specific. Plus it changes as we go through different parts of our life cycle.
Here are just a few other interesting morsels to whet your appetite:
- By seven months, a boy can tell by his mother’s face when she’s angry or afraid, but by 12 months, he becomes so immune to them, he can easily ignore her expressions. But a subtle expression of fear on a mother’s face would stop a baby girl in her tracks.
- There is a gene called the vasopressin receptor gene. In men, a longer version of this gene tends to produce monogamy, whereas shorter versions of this gene produce philanderers. So when it comes to fidelity, longer actually is better – at least if you’re talking about the vasopressin receptor gene!
- Apparently, the way that daddies play with their children tends to be more creative and unpredictable – and thus more stimulating, making their kids more curious and improving their ability to learn. Children whose fathers play more roughly with them tend to be the most self-confident by adolescence. But the sweet spot: dads bond with daughters by helping to solve their problems – and this is true whether the daughter is 4 or 44, whether the problem is a broken doll or a financial portfolio.
- Girls are years ahead of boys in their ability to observe and mirror gestures, expressions, postures, gazes, and breathing rates as a way of intuiting how others are feeling. This is the secret of female intuition or a woman’s ability to read others’ minds. Imagining another’s emotional state actually triggers similar brain patterns in the observer and females are really good at this kind of emotional mirroring. They are sometimes able to intuit how a man is feeling before the man himself is able to figure it out.
- Women’s brains are smaller than men’s in size, but they have the same number of brain cells. When women become pregnant, their brain size actually shrinks more as the brain circuitry rewires itself for motherhood and some country roads in the brain become superhighways. But by six months after childbirth, the brain returns to its usual size. The sweet smell of a baby’s head carries pheremones that stimulate a deep hunger to have a child. The pheremones produced by a pregnant woman may actually cause neurochemical changes in her mate, preparing him to be a doting father and equipping him – through smell! – with some of the special nurturing mechanisms of the mommy brain.
- Dads might be slower to figure out how to respond to their baby’s cries, but the ways that they interact and bond with their children is vital – and different – from mothers. Having daily hands-on contact is critical in developing parent-child synchrony AND when moms encourage the dad’s interactions with the child, it actually tends to strengthen the marriage.
So really, a lot of male and female behavior we might think are due to personality differences or societal influences actually have at least some basis in the makeup of our brains. However, a lot of these things are probably natural tendencies, but like anything else you learn in life, practice and repetition is important too. So, even though girls may be hardwired to act like girls and boys will be boys (sometimes regardless of socialization), certain traits are enforced and reinforced through parenting and practice.
If you ever feel there is something you just don’t understand about yourself or about the other sex, chances are, you’ll find an answer within these pages. These books are a must-read for, well…everybody!
I’ve been reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a book that is credited with launching the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and I must confess I’m having difficulty really identifying with many of her claims. It might not be surprising, given we are of different generations, but on the other hand, a lot of the starting points and issues she draws attention to are still relevant today. She just takes them in a completely different direction than I would go. But I think that will be the subject of another post.
However, there is one point Friedan touched on and I wish she had developed it more: and that is the role of the men. The edition I have is an updated one with a couple of added introductions. The chapter I found most intriguing was one of these introductions, where she reflects back, two generations later and assesses the change. What I love about this chapter is that she doesn’t just focus on what changes have occurred for women, but also the impact on society as a whole. And as Friedan observes, the truth is, changing a woman’s world means changing the world of men too and a lot of the feminist movement does not really address that. Meanwhile, books that take on the masculine mystique and focus on the “men’s movement” have largely been copies in reverse of women’s lib and are thus inauthentic. Or they are an outmoded brand of machismo that reflects only an obsolete form of masculinity.
I believe the problem is that such a paradigm shift does alter the identity of men, but somehow they’ve never really had a larger cultural conversation about where to go and how to change in positive ways along with women. What the women’s movement has focused on is the reactionary man who bemoans the loss of job and income and retaliates through sexual harassment and violence. What it neglects to consider is the larger proportion of men who do have a desire to be positive contributors to society, but who have along the way lost a clear role model and are left to fend for themselves in navigating personal ethics.
My husband and I have been watching a lot of Mad Men lately and it occurs to me that Don Draper is a portrait of the all-American male: the man every other man wished he was. He has a lot of charm, smooth power, wealth, looks. He’s got a beautiful wife and family, home and car. When it comes to office politics, he exercises a lot of power and control, but he does it with finesse. He keeps underlings in their place, but he also does not resort to cheap jokes at the expense of others. He remains quiet – or occasionally puts others in check – when they smear another man’s honor.
But for the modern man, the old paradigm doesn’t quite work anymore for today’s society. Man’s relationship to women has to change as he shares earning power and household politics with her, as he shares more household duties and the gender lines become blurred. Blurring these lines necessarily call masculinity into question, asking society to redefine what being male truly means. Fathers have also become problematic role models because through problems caused by divorce or changing societal values in a whole slew of issues, men often face disillusionment with their fathers. Many have difficult relationships with their fathers in which they either become so disillusioned they draw away from them or they have to suffer through a period in which they try to renegotiate a new relationship with their fathers. A relationship in which they reconcile themselves to the notion that their father may not be the hero they once thought their father should be, but at least they can accept him for who he is.
Among friends, role models become even harder to find. Susan Walsh has an excellent blog on today’s hookup culture, and what I draw from it is that there is often an identity schism for male friends as well. In the past, men would have looked up to and admired the alpha males, the Don Drapers of society. But today’s alpha male often comes across as…well, kind of a dick. The beta males might wish they had some of the things alpha males have…but they don’t really want to actually be who the alpha male is. They have to compete with them, but they don’t admire them anymore. Likewise, women might fall head over heels for the Don Draper type in the past. But today many women feel they have to choose. They choose the alpha male to have sex with, but when it comes to marriage, they want the beta males – because the alphas are all just misogynist a-holes. (Actually, increasingly women seem to be more attracted to men with more feminine features!) Women sometimes do fall in love with the alpha males, but they often want to change them, redeem them, tame them – thus turning them into more of a beta male. In which case, they don’t love the alpha male at all. Rather they love just an idea of him. And the guys who are really great guys often end up feeling like they finish last.
Without clear role models, the result is many men are left suffering an identity crisis – one that seems to last longer and longer. And we have movies like Up In The Air and Greenberg about men well into their 40′s, still struggling to figure out what they want from life and who they want to be.
The thing is, many men do want to be good fathers, good husbands, and positive contributors to their work place and community. They do want wives they can talk to and respect. Ethics are important to them, but they have discovered they must figure out for themselves what those ethics are. Measures of success are personal – not compared to the Jones’s. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, as long as it authentic and they can respect themselves as individuals, it is a good thing. But it is problematic when 62% of men say they miss the day when a person’s word and a handshake meant something. It is a problem when men report feeling lost, confused, left behind. It is a problem when men begin to fall behind women in school, dropping out at higher rates and performing poorly in classes.
Women’s liberation does not work if it comes at the expense of their husbands, friends, and sons. We haven’t changed societal mores if we repress or scoff at honest fears and concerns, when men feel they are muzzled by political correctness. We shouldn’t accept misogyny, but that doesn’t give us license to repress men either: that merely reverses the roles, but keeps us locked in obsolete rituals of power. What I love from Friedan’s chapter is that, even though she did not delve into the intricacies of the role of man today, she did end with a beautiful summation of what we should be trying to achieve: “Grown-up men and women….become more and more authentically themselves. And they do not pretend that men are from Mars or women are from Venus. They even share each other’s interests, talk a common shorthand of work, love, play, kids, politics. We may now begin to glimpse the new human possibilities when women and men are finally free to be themselves, know each other for who they really are, and define the terms and measures of success, failure, joy, triumph, power, and the common good, together.”
In short: equal, but in a way that simultaneously celebrates individuality, personality, and working together for the common good. What she doesn’t say, but what I think underlines her words is the necessity for mutual respect and open curiosity to engage each other.
What I’m about to say might seem counter-intuitive. And it might seem like I’m making something big out of something that should come naturally. But I’m pretty sure it doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people.
Learning to love yourself is one of the hardest and most important things you can do in this life. Loving yourself doesn’t mean being selfish. It doesn’t mean putting your needs before someone else’s. And it doesn’t mean doing whatever you think is fun just for the sake of it.
Loving yourself means figuring out who you really are – a process that takes time, if for no other reason than the fact that you change over time. It means self-reflection. Repeatedly. Sometimes you like what you see, sometimes you don’t. And so you have to acknowledge that and figure out what parts you’re okay with and what parts you want to strive to change and make better. All of that takes time.
Loving yourself means respecting yourself. So you won’t put up with the BS of a hookup culture when what you really want is love. You won’t believe the lies of selfish men because you know what the actions of a worthwhile man look like. You’ll stand up for yourself when others put you down, but in ways that treat them with respect regardless.
Loving yourself means figuring out what would make you deep in your bones happy and reaching for it, even when others say you can’t have it. It means ignoring yourself when you say you can’t have it. Especially because you realize that happiness is not in the attainment of things or of money. It is in the stuff you cannot see.
It is a lie that you cannot love others when you don’t love yourself. You can indeed love others even without self-love. But you can love others better and more freely when you love yourself. When you don’t, there is too much need tangled up in the love and it is difficult to see which is which. There are more rules and obligations and less trust. Not so when you love yourself first.
There is more freedom in the space of love when you first love yourself.
All of this I say to you. With love,
Jade
What would you tell our nation’s daughters?
The Rules You can respond in any way you choose. You can give a fictional response or a true one. You can use words, sentences, and/or photographs. If you have a blog, you can link it with Mr. Linky below. Please be sure to include “Tell It To Me Tuesdays” in the post, and link back to this post. Feel free to use the “Tell It To Me Tuesday” button available to the right. If you don’t have a blog, but want to join in, you can just leave a comment. Please follow the rules. I don’t want to have to delete links. I like links! Don’t make me delete them.
I am so bloody tired of the public political discourse in this country. I’m so tired of the shrill, piercing screams so loud no one can hear what anyone is saying. I’m so bloody tired of people acting like the other side is full of deranged, uneducated, depraved and unconscionable lunatics. I’m guilty of it too. {Totally guilty.} But I want to make an honest effort to not do that. To not assume and not judge. Those who know me well enough probably know (or at least have an idea) what my general position is on some current issues. They probably know what I would say. So I’m not going to beat a dead horse.
But I’m so tired of all the yelling and the screaming and the fighting and the LACK OF INFORMATION. On both sides now.
I want to punch the reset button.
I used to pride myself on tolerance, but I’ve plum run out. I’ve run out of tolerance for the name-calling, hyperbole, and the media feeding on it like maggots in the muck.
I’m pretty certain both sides are operating on a totally different set of facts. But it’s nigh impossible to get to the facts through all the effing ideology-driven drivel. I’m pretty certain we DO have common goals. But it would take a miracle to find them under all the derision.
I’m pretty dang firm in my ideology.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear information that might suggest that, hey, maybe I’m wrong and that there is a whole other set of facts to consider.
If you tell me my values are wrong, I’m gonna get pissed off. Just like I’m sure everyone else would. But, dangit. Why is it so hard now to put that aside and look at facts?
I’m pretty sure other people must be frustrated when they look at the other side and think: why can’t they see they’re being lied to? If they just knew {insert favorite bit of information here}, they would totally see things differently!
Truth? There’s so much lying and covering up, misrepresenting, and misunderstanding going on these days that yeah. We’ve probably all been lied to. The question is: can we uphold ourselves to a standard that the media seem to have forgotten? Maybe we can’t be objective, but can we learn to share information without a dose of vitriol on the side?
{Irony of ironies: some of the same quotes Democrats used to scream upon the lead up to the War in Iraq are now being screamed by Republicans over health care reform. Lesson? We do have shared values – we just apply them in different contexts.}
At the end of the day, I don’t expect us all to agree. At the end of the day, I’m actually quite sure we’d still vote differently from each other.
But maybe, just maybe…we’d understand each other a little bit better.
Maybe we’d have a little more respect for each other. Love thy neighbor.
(Even when thy neighbor is of a different political party. Right?)
And maybe we would be a little less angry when we didn’t get our way. We might actually like living in a democracy and feel represented, even when we are in the minority.
Maybe we can start with this: we all are patriots. We get so angry because we all care about our country.
A few days ago, I wrote a blog post expressing my deep sense of helplessness and futility when I look at the government and prominent leaders who are so completely out of touch with the reality of life their people face every day. And I expressed my sense that the real movement is the movement of people. Ordinary citizens started making statements with their words, their actions, and often their dollars, either through donations or financial endorsements. They are choosing to live a different way and reclaiming their right to do so. This was my sense in just looking at the world around me in communities supporting local or urban farming, women reaching out and reinvesting in midwives, mothers deciding to home school, neighbors donating their meager wages to Haiti relief, or people turning away from corporate greed and choosing instead to run their own businesses. My sense was people were taking a moment to look at their lives and ask: what is my legacy? What will I contribute to this world? And in multitudes of different ways, they were choosing a road of progress. This was my sense.
This weekend, I found proof. In New York City this weekend, the Women In the World Conference harnessed the power of women the likes of Sec. Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Queen Rania of Jordan, Meryl Streep, Christiane Amanpour, Barbara Walters, Christine Lagarde…and oh God, so many more. CEOs and top managers of companies like Morgan Stanley and HP, and so many amazing and inspiring women activists from all around the world who have made enormous contributions ranging from sex strikes to protest civil war and the use of rape as a weapon of war (in countries where 92% of women had been raped or sexually abused), raiding brothels to rescue sex slaves, organizing women’s prisons as sanctuaries from prostitution and gendercide, educating and organizing African villages against the practice of female genital mutilation, and doing everything they can to provide women and communities with the resources they need to gain access to knowledge, information and power. These words have become so cliché to our ears, but when you hear their stories you feel how real this is. How millions of women are gang raped, mutilated, and oppressed every day, often multiple and multiple times a day.
But what came out of the conference is not a sense of powerlessness. These women were living proof that it is possible to reach out to the powerless and emancipate them. And not only could they do it, but we here in the U.S. can too. What came from this conference was the message over and over again that government-to-government solutions are not always the most effective way. Yes, government solutions, laws, and enforcement of those laws help. But often times it is the most simple of ideas and tiniest of investments that reap the biggest dividends.
The Girl Effect
Economists worldwide are finding more and more evidence everywhere they look that educating women has such far-reaching implications as to be the literal saving grace of a state. Indeed, educating women has been the linchpin, the key to East Asia’s most recent economic successes and development. It not only hugely increases the labor force, it also delays marriage and reduces childbearing. The women finance the education of younger relatives (and future generations) and save enough to boost national savings rates. Not only does it combat poverty and reduce instances that come along with poverty (like families selling their children into slavery – a $36 billion a year black market, second only to weapons and drugs), it helps reduce infant mortality, improves societal health and nutrition. And security experts now are suggesting that empowering girls disempowers terrorists. Educating women, helping them participate more, enables them to be a more powerful voice in their households and in their countries. For we find that the countries that nurture terrorism are disproportionately those that marginalize women. (Half the Sky, Kristof and WuDunn)
And the saddest part is that it is often the girls who dreamed, who dreamed they could have a job, bring money home to the family, who had goals in the name of love and marriage and family, who often have that dream betrayed. They are sold, beaten, drugged and pushed into a four-walled room with no doors. When asked what they wanted to do, if they could leave the brothels, if they could do anything else, what would they do…they respond, “Madam, how can we use these hands for something else?” (Kiran Bedi) For if they did leave, they would be so shamed and reviled by their families and communities. They carry such burdens of shame and guilt they DO NOT DESERVE, it often leads to suicide or return to the brothels.
So what are these simple solutions? For one, we can invest in these girls, in their rehabilitation and help them become entrepreneurial members of society. Many have dreams to open shops or salons or to turn a craft skill into a business. Micro-lending and other forms of support – $100 to us, the price of a couple of dinners out or a day shopping, except it gets paid back with interest – can literally be the difference between life and death for these women. Some women are talking about programs in countries life Afghanistan and Pakistan to help women work from home, sewing or doing whatever, but that allows them to support their families both by being home with the kids and bring home money and by keeping them safe from the deadly violence of the streets of Kabul. It also changes the power dynamic in the household, for once a woman starts contributing financially to the household she begins to gain the respect of the men in the home. Individuals and corporations can also make small investments in infrastructure like wells, bus routes, and bathrooms in schools that suddenly make education for girls possible where it was not possible before.
But above all the answer is education. Here the work of so many NGOs provides powerful relief and access to education (though we should be reminded that NGOs cannot be the substitute actors of government – they can help where governments fail, but we must still pressure government into action where we can). And volunteering for or donating to NGOs can be a powerful way to help. But education is critical because it gives women and girls knowledge and know-how for careers, yes. But it also allows them to even just know what their rights are and to learn how to speak up against practices like female genital mutilation and how and why to say no when there is talk of sending their children away to “work”, because sending children away often leads condemns them to abduction into slavery.
This is not just political. This IS personal. In a globalized world such as ours has become, we can no longer pretend that the problems of these women are not our problems. We can no longer pretend that our actions – both the ones we take and the ones we don’t – do not have massive repercussions in the lives of so many people who live on under $2 a day. When the CIA estimates 50,000 slaves are trafficked into the U.S. annually, we cannot pretend the problem is not here at our doorstep.
The question isn’t “Can we afford to help?” or “Do they deserve it?” The question is “In what ways can we innovate to engineer other simple solutions?” If you don’t think the victims of oppression living and dying every day deserve our attention, then at least realize we owe it to the victims and families of victims of 9/11 and troops fighting terrorists every day.
“I realized the price of being silent is higher than the price of doing something.”
– Leymah Gbowee, the woman who organized a sex strike to bring an end to civil war in Liberia, Women in the World Conference 2010
Here are a couple of powerful clips. Click here to see more memorable moments.
“But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it’s wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them….Even a language won’t stand still. A territory is only possessed for a moment in time. They stake everything on that moment, posing for photographs while planting the flag, casting themselves in bronze. Washington crossing the Delaware. The capture of Okinawa. They’re desperate to hang on.
But they can’t. Even before the flagpole begins to peel and splinter, the ground underneath arches and slides forward into its own new destiny. It may bear the marks of boots on its back, but those marks become the possessions of the land. What does Okinawa remember of its fall? Forbidden to make engines of war, Japan made automobiles instead, and won the world. It all moves on.”
– The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver, p. 384.
Our politics today make me tired. I’m so bloody tired of hearing the same old diatribes repeated ad nauseam, over and over like wheels on a tired, creaky, aged wagon. They talk and talk and it’s like buzzing in my ears. For they say nothing new and none of it even applies anymore. It feels like they’re talking about Spaceman Spiff, when the rest of us are staring at moldy cheese in an empty refrigerator. They talk in the language of the Cold War, and the rest of us are sharing DVDs with the Japanese and watching You Tube videos coming out of Iran.
We have real problems and real concerns. And they’re still talking ideology. The world doesn’t operate on ideology. It operates in the handshake between neighbors, the crops grown by farmers, and the earthquakes and hurricanes that steal our homes away. Who cares about ideology when you’re staring down the barrel of a gun?
I hear the noise and it makes me tired. I hear the lies and it makes my bones melt. I hear the anger and I feel sorrow.
But when I turn off the noise and look at people, I see a different story. I see people buying produce from local farmers. I see people biking to work. I see people wringing their empty pockets to give to others in need. I see people ignoring corporations, eschewing industry and taking the path less walked. Home schooling. Midwives. Etsy. Blogs. Project 3/50. Interracial marriage. News, products, food, and information home grown and shared neighbor to neighbor.
We throw the pills that cause atrocious side-effects down the drain and we eat better food. This is not a revolution. This is not the masses rising up in revolt. This is the world moving on, like ants marching steadily out from under the boot through the gaps in the platform of the sole.
So you can have your soapbox. Let the potentates feed the lie. Let the corporations write our politicians’ speeches. We’re not listening anymore. Because while you sit there spouting and playing your chess games and lining your pockets while everyone else suffers, one by one, we take the road less traveled by.
For this challenge, I had the idea to go and take lovely, flattering pictures of women of all shapes and sizes to show beauty comes from within, not from squeezing into size 00 jeans and filling out a 32D bra. It was to be a beautiful f— you to corporations pushing on us an industry standard “ideal” that does not reflect reality and only makes us feel bad about ourselves so we buy more products. It was to show that all bodies can be beautiful: round cut or pear shaped, athletic, lanky or motherly, there is beauty in every shape, if only we look for it. And refuse to allow our minds to be boxed in by corporate dictates.
So I set out to take such pictures. I started with my beautiful friend, who is expecting. And, oh my, she’s just gorgeous and glowing!
Then I started approaching women of all kinds, targeting every shape and size I could find, with only a mind for possible compositions and workable lighting. But my job quickly became more and more difficult. The rounder a woman was, the less likely it was that I could get her to volunteer for a photo. If she was older than 25 or 30, then it got even more difficult. One woman, who had some facial scarring I hadn’t noticed until after I approached her, positively shooed me off. I began to suspect that the less comfortable a woman was with her body image for not fitting in the “norm”, the less willing she would be to let me photograph her.
I began to fret, wondering if I should just scrap the idea altogether and just go with pictures of circular and rectangular shapes and whatnot in still life form. But then I got mad. No! I would not cave in. This is exactly my point!
All shapes and ages are beautiful, each in their own way. Beauty comes not in shapes but in how we carry ourselves and from loving our own bodies. A woman could have the “ideal body”, but if she hunches over and shrinks back, you’d never notice it. When a woman is truly comfortable in her own skin and carries herself like she means it, then others will find her attractive. And having the “ideal” body doesn’t ensure you love your body and are comfortable in it. That is just a lie we tell ourselves when we want to lose those extra pounds. Perhaps if it comes fairly naturally to you, it might. But if you have to fight for it tooth and nail, and every day you’re weighing this and scrutinizing that, you might easily hate your body, no matter how well you look doing it.
(You might think I’m being hippy-dippy, oh, everyone is beautiful…and I’m not. In all honesty, not everyone is a beautiful person. But I’ve thought a lot about this and I do truly believe beauty can be found in a variety of different shapes, of which the “ideal” is only one. Yes, health might be a factor…but I’ve seen healthy, round people and nonhealthy skinny people and every version in between. While there is a correlation between health and weight, they are not one and the same. Shape aside, the key issue is whether you’re eating and moving in ways that are healthy – mentally, physically, and emotionally – for your body and its peccadilloes. Because physical health is only one dimension. Mental and emotional health are equally important. But physical health is just happens to be the one that’s easier for others to see.)
So I reiterate: all shapes are beautiful. Skinny, square, or short, luxuriously curvy or lanky and lean. All shapes are beautiful. If only we can allow ourselves to believe it too.
I would travel back to biblical times, to early civilizations. I’m not nostalgic about it, but I think I could learn from it. For the most part, life would be hard. And I have no romantic notions of what it was like for women: to own no real property of your own, to have to be completely subservient to the men of the household, to face the threat of ostracism or death for displeasing the wrong person. And everyone faced harsher times, greater threat of starvation, and greater chances of succumbing to disease.
The Rules
