Feminists Don’t Bake Bread

Every Friday on my LJ, I’ve been hosting a “Friday Discussion Question” to various levels of success. This is today’s.

Ah, yes. The age-old discussion about the beauty standard. Although this FDQ was not inspired by the whole Britney Spears thing (I meant to post it last week but got distracted), that mess is certainly very relevant to what I’d like to discuss today.

We live in a world where we constantly push the concept of “you can’t be too thin” on women. Advertising features slender models in come-hither poses. Major magazines take perfectly-normal looking women and photoshop the pounds off (to some frightening results: Hot but not hot enough - America Ferrera from Ugly Betty and Redbook Shatters our Faith… with the photoshop job done on Faith Hill [be sure to check out the animation at the bottom]). Dove does a series of ads with “real women” in them and men freak out and say they don’t want to see ‘that’ on their morning commute. (And that ads showing women in Size 6 and 8 are promoting the obesity epidemic in the US. O.o?)

AND YET.

In this post I talk about a woman on my flist who won’t eat in public because she’s slender and people make assumptions that she has an eating disorder based on what she eats. A Rabid Mouse talks about being invited to join a ‘Down with Size 0′ group - except she is a Size 0. When Britney Spears was on stage six years ago there were criticisms that she was too thin. Now, after having had two children, she’s apparently too fat.

It seems like the standards are setting women up to “fail”. If you’re thin, you’ve got an eating disorder. If you’re not thin enough, you’re too ugly to be seen in public in anything that shows some skin. If you’re a mom, you should only wear “appropriate” mom clothes. Don’t be sexy, unless you’re a Yummy Mummy, and even then, it’s not appropriate. How dare you, anyway? Women over 30 should be covered up anyway, because only the young should be showing off their legs, but please, let’s wring our hands over the sexualisation of our children.

[The late Dr Violet Socks has a very valid point to make about that in Like Lambs to the Slaughter - I really recommend you read it. It’s short. She makes her points faster than I do, probably because she is dead.]

I’ve read about female star after female star crashing herself against the Beauty Myth, and I’ve watched my friends and flist struggle with the same issues.

Too thin? Too fat? Not healthy? Should I do weight lifting or will I get ugly muscles? I need to lose 20 pounds before I can get married! My friends think I’m too thin and now I feel ugly. People tell me to stop losing weight, that I’m ‘thin enough’ - what should I do?

I’ve talked before about how I think advertising is a big factor in all of this, as is Hollywood and airbrushing and the general idea that women are “supposed” to be attractive - and thus anyone outside of that attractive is to be punished, but those who reach that attractive must have something wrong with them because the ideal is set so high.

What are your thoughts?

Important Note:
I usually am pretty okay with whatever people want to write in response to these posts, because they’re supposed to be general discussions and not ‘please toe party line’ things. However, I want to nip two things in the bud right now:
1. NO. It does not make me feel better that a small, but significant and growing, number of men also suffer from eating disorders. Don’t imply or state otherwise.
2. As fascinating as a discussion about what different people find attractive in women, varying from body size, hair colour, and personality, can be, this post isn’t really about that. It’s about society and pressure on women to appear in public looking a certain way and then punishing them when they don’t. It’s not about what you, I, or any other particular individual finds attractive or appealing. I don’t want to get bogged down in that.

Slightly less important note behind the cut:

(more…)

I have a confession to make: I’m not afraid to walk after dark.

I’ve read and participated in quite a few discussions about women and the sorts of things they do to protect themselves when they go out alone - clutching of the keys like claws, checking the backseat of a car before going in, never talking to anyone after dark - and I don’t do these things. It’s not that I think they’re being foolish, and it’s not that I’m unaware of what can happen if you’re caught unawares, but I just don’t fear things enough to do that. (I suspect this is because I grew up in smaller communities, and well, it’s not that violence doesn’t happen there, but there’s a different attitude about it overall that affects how I view it - I just don’t see myself as at that much risk.)

I really want to emphasize that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the women who do do these things. Just different ways of dealing with the world.

Because, see, I’m not afraid of walking after dark. What I am afraid of is, if something happens to me, I’m going to be taken to task by everyone I ever knew, including my mother, for not being “prepared” for some random act of violence to happen. Of being told I “shouldn’t have been there”. Of the questions about what I did to be attacked. Because heaven knows that I should know better than to go out after dark, by myself. Look at what could happen!

Amy and I were talking about this a few days ago, and she brought up a statistic that I can’t quite remember about the number of women in Perth who feel unsafe if they go out after dark. (I can’t find it; my google-fu skills are obviously unl33t, but I remember the number seeming unreasonably high to me.)

Because, you know, if a woman goes out after a certain time of night, or if she’s dressed a certain way, or if she just walks in the wrong way, she did the wrong thing. She shouldn’t have been there.

Walking While Female, as I said before.

So, where do we draw the line? At what point is the woman responsible for the violence that she suffers from when she goes out of her house? At what point does how she act or react make it her fault? Where do you think these attitudes come from?

[Do you notice that, despite the fact that most violence is done by men, I’ve managed to write this entire post so far without mentioning them? Passive Sentence Construction is actually a big part of the dialog around this stuff - “the violence she suffers from”. “A victim of male violence” sounds so accusatory to me, which is also very relevant to the discussion.]

Personally, I think walking after dark shouldn’t be something that automatically puts the onus on women to carry their keys like a weapon or to dress in a certain way or to risk being told that being attacked, robbed, raped or killed was her fault. And, as I alluded to, I think the way we talk about this stuff is what contributes to the culture of fear around it - women are raped, but apparently men do not rape? “A man raped a woman” sounds accusatory to me, and I wonder if it does to other people as well. “A man robbed a bank” does not - probably because I’ll hear that sentence construction quite often, and not the other.

The other thing I think contributes to this is that the Big Three Religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) have expectations of “modesty” that do affect the greater Western Culture, even those who aren’t religious. This recent Modesty Survey (where teen boys rated how much of a “stumbling block” to their salvation the clothing teen girls wore was for the boys) reflects the idea that it is Woman’s Job to keep Man’s thoughts pure. In Orthodox Judaism, like Orthodox Islam, women pray in a separate room from the men. I was told that this is to help keep men’s mind on God, and not on the bodies of the women in the room. Women are gatekeepers.

This again gets back into that idea that Men Are Children Or Monsters, and without womenfolk to care for them or keep them away from the “uncovered meat“, men will go crazy and be forced, forced against their will, to attack the women.

We have a responsibility, after all, to not go out after dark in a t-shirt and jeans but no bra where we could distract some man and drive him into a frenzy of lust and violence.

Thoughts?

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