Monthly Archives: December 2010

The Beauty Spectrum: changing how we talk about the body ideal

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I wrote last week about my work with Natural Models LA, Healthy is the New Skinny, and the Perfectly Unperfected Project. We debuted our PUP program at Placer High School up north last Wednesday morning. Featuring stories and images designed to inspire young people to think differently about beauty and the body, it was very well-received by the students on the Auburn, California campus.

In the comments below last week’s post, and in feedback I’ve had from many quarters since coming on board with the PUP Project and Natural Models, there’s been concern that we’re simply reinforcing beauty culture rather than dismantling it. There are echoes of an old argument in this, one that continues to rage in feminist circles even now. How should we talk to girls about their appearance? Should we who care deeply about young women’s self-worth encourage them to resist beauty culture entirely? Ask them to turn off “America’s Next Top Model” and throw away their subscriptions to Vogue and In Style? Should we make the case that the pursuit of beauty is guaranteed to end in tears, and redirect that energy towards worthwhile pursuits? Or should we recognize that like it or not, we live in a culture where appearance matters deeply to young women? Shouldn’t we be working to expand and broaden the understanding of what beauty is — and can be — rather than simply dissuading young people from doing what we know damn well most of them will do anyway?

I’ve chosen to work with an industry about which I have many deep and well-founded misgivings. But I’m doing so because I believe that fashion models are role models to millions of young women, and that it is through models themselves that we have a unique opportunity to reach girls with a message of self-acceptance. When you’re working with teens, credibility is everything; deservedly or not, models have a powerful credibility with that audience. Models tell us what beauty looks like, they tell us how beauty stands and walks and dresses and speaks. The obsession with thinness grows ever more extreme, and the bodies of models today ever more at odds with the reality of women’s frames. (Cindy Crawford, one of the iconic faces of the supermodel era, recently mused that she would never have been able to be a top model had the standards in place today been around in the 1980s.) But while some of us are deeply concerned by the emaciated images we see, a generation of young women is coming of age longing for the very bodies we find repulsive. (We did our own survey at Placer High School in advance of our visit. At this “average American” semi-rural high school, 80% of the female students expressed a desire to lose weight, and almost all rated the “ideal size” for a girl as between 0 and 4. Other studies show similar results).

In the face of this, we need models with counter-stories and counter-images. And we need a counter-language to go with it. Continue reading →

The Price of Perfection: on double binds, obsession, absent men, and the triumph of “Black Swan”

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I don’t often write movie reviews. Usually, whatever I have to say has been said first — and much better — by someone else. The last time I was provoked into a serious post by a film was nearly two years ago, when I wrote rhapsodically about The Wrestler. And it is another Darren Aronofsky film that has me writing about a movie again. I saw Black Swan on Friday and was shaken, stimulated, and moved. Featuring a staggering and deservedly-celebrated performance from Natalie Portman, Black Swan struck me as a searing and quasi-feminist commentary on the 21st century cult of perfectionism which does so much damage to so many young women.

I urge you to see this movie.

Because the film is not yet in wide release, and because there are spoilers ahead, everything else is below the fold. Continue reading →

Ten firsts for women in 2010

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Continuing a tradition from the last two Decembers, let me offer a list of ten “firsts” for women this year.

In 2010:

Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar for “Hurt Locker”

Sgt. Sherri Gallagher becomes the first woman ever to win the US Army’s celebrated “Best Warrior” award

Brazil, a future superpower, elected its first woman president, Dilma Rousseff

Costa Rica elected its first woman president, Laura Chinchilla (how much do we love the name?)

Carolyn Bertozzi becomes the first woman to win the Lemelson-MIT prize, given to mid-career inventors and one of the most prestigious awards in American science

16 year-old Elena Myers became the first woman ever to win an AMA (American Motorcycle Association) racing event when she won a supersport race in Sonoma.

Kelly Kulick becomes the first women ever to win a Professional Bowling Association event in January, when she wins the Las Vegas Tournament of Champions.

Switzerland, one of the last countries in Europe to grant women suffrage, now has for the first time a governing cabinet in which women are the majority.

The US Supreme Court, for the first time, now has three women (Elena Kagan joining Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor)

New Mexico and South Carolina elected the first two women-of-color ever to hold governorships

Progress, not perfection.

Add other firsts in the comments if you like.

“I’m not faithful because I love my wife. I’m faithful because I love myself.”

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You’re working in the modeling industry now? Good thing your wife is both beautiful and tough; that must help you stay faithful.

– a (now deleted) Facebook comment that appeared yesterday on my link to my post about the Perfectly Unperfected Project.

I got that comment just as I read an email from a good friend of mine, who wrote:

I saw Geraldo (Rivera) on Oprah talking about his past as a playboy. He is now married for the fifth time to a gorgeous woman at least 30 years younger than him. He says that he has put an end to his womanizing because she is “all the woman he needs” and that he no longer “needs” to look anywhere else. I’m sure, at least on the surface, his wife takes this as a compliment. But I was disturbed by it. The obvious implication is that his affairs were due at least in part to his previous wives not being “enough” for him

This isn’t a post about Geraldo, or about my new work within the modeling industry. It’s about fidelity.

I am not faithful to my wife merely because she is beautiful. I am not faithful to my wife because I am afraid that she will beat me up (she is a kickboxer) if I cheat. I am not faithful to my wife because I have a reputation to uphold, and I know that my career(s) depend on my living out my professed values in my private life. Make no mistake, I am in awe of my wife’s enduring loveliness; I am keenly aware of her physical strength, and the thought of a divorce makes me shudder. And of course, I know damn well that my work as a mentor, a writer, a public speaker on issues of gender, relationships, sexuality and self-image hinges on my ability to be whom I claim to be. But none of these things are the real reason I’m faithful.

Like Geraldo, I’ve been married several times. Like Geraldo, I was a cheat, chronically unfaithful for many years. My cheating, however, never had anything to do with the beauty or the personalities of the women with whom I was in what was supposed to be a monogamous relationship. I cheated for other reasons, many of them: I cheated because I wanted validation, I cheated because I liked “new skin” (the chimera of everlasting novelty), I cheated because I wanted to prove that I wasn’t the dorky awkward kid I had once been (see Mick Hucknall, whose story reads very familiar to me), I cheated because cheating kept me safe from becoming too dependent on one relationship. I cheated because I was afraid. I cheated because I could.

My infidelity and promiscuity were not the fault of the women to whom I was committed. I didn’t cheat because they were insufficiently beautiful, or because we didn’t have sex often enough (or the right kind of sex.) Nothing — nothing that they did or didn’t do could have kept me from cheating because I was in the throes of a compulsion that I alone had the responsibility to solve.

I learned how to be faithful from my late mentor and Twelve Step sponsor, Jack. Jack had been unfaithful to his wife in his drinking days before coming to AA. In AA, his sponsor told him “You need to start being faithful to your wife.” Jack complained, “But how can I be faithful? I don’t even think I love her!” His sponsor snorted. “Of course you don’t love her. You don’t know what love is yet. But the reason to be faithful isn’t because of her. It’s because you made a promise. You owe it to yourself to be the kind of man who keeps his promises. If you cheat, you cheat on yourself first. And if you know you’re a cheater, you set yourself up to drink.”

“Oh”, Jack said. He told that story to me and to countless other sponsees over the course of his nearly four decades of working a program. And he learned to be faithful to — and to love — that same wife.

Jack’s story and mine were different in many ways. But what he impressed upon me all those years ago has stuck with me ever since. When we make a promise to someone, we make a statement about ourselves. We’re saying that we’re the sort of people who can make promises — and keep them. So when we cheat on a spouse or anyone else with whom we’re in a monogamous relationship, we’re breaking the promise we made to ourselves. As I wrote in another post, we become what we pledged not to be. And we don’t become what we pledged not to be — a liar and a cheater — without doing serious harm to our own self-worth. (Aristotle pointed this out, back in the day.)

I don’t stay faithful to Eira because I love her. I stay faithful because I love myself. That doesn’t mean I don’t love my wife: I do, with all my heart. But the feeling of love waxes and wanes in any marriage. If I am faithful out of love for her, I do what Geraldo did in his Oprah interview: I shift responsibility for my own actions away from myself and on to my wife. It’s not her job to keep me faithful, either by being lovable or by being sexy. If another woman tries to seduce me, that’s poor behavior on her part– but another’s enticement doesn’t absolve an adult man from responsibility for his actions. Men are not so vulnerable individually and collectively that the very fabric of society can only be held together through women’s sexual self-control. That’s the myth of male weakness: the false notion that women are biologically “stronger” than men when it comes to the capacity to resist sexual temptation.

All of my sexual and romantic energy flows towards my wife, not simply because I love her (which I do) but because I believe in what it is that we are accomplishing together. I believe in our partnership, but I also believe in myself. I know myself well enough to know that I am a man of great passion, but also a man who thrives best in a committed, monogamous relationship. (Hence the penchant for marrying early and often.) But I couldn’t really bring what I needed to bring to a monogamous relationship until I grasped that it wasn’t the job of love, or desire, or a woman to keep me faithful. Fidelity was and is all about me, not because I’m a narcissist, but because my capacity to love my wife and my daughter and my students and my business partners and my friends and my family and the whole damn world rests on my capacity to love myself. And if I love myself, I will be the sort of man who honors his commitments when it’s easy, and when it’s tough. I know how painful it is to be a liar and a fraud; that awareness more than anything else drove me to the point of suicide. And I’ve come to know how good it is to live a congruent life, where my words and actions cohere.

I love my wife. But that love is not what keeps me faithful. The love that keeps me faithful is the love for the man whom I was called to be.

Thursday Short Poem: Lerman’s “Starfish”

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Jendi Reiter sent me this poem by Eleanor Lerman; it originally appeared here.

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, “Last night
the channel was full of starfish.” And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you were born at a good time. Because you were able to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

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The “Perfectly Unperfected Project” comes to Placer

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I’m in a Holiday Inn Express in Roseville, California, a few miles outside of Sacramento. It’s almost 11:00PM, and I’m getting up in five hours to get myself to Sacramento airport, catch the first flight down to Burbank, and get to my 9:00AM conference time at Pasadena City College. I got three hours of sleep last night and three hours the night before. I’ll be catching up this weekend!

I’ve been up here for the last 36 hours to participate in the exciting launch of Healthy is the New Skinny, the latest initiative to take on the enduring (and worsening) problem of young women’s poor self-image. What makes HITNS unusual is that it’s a program that comes from within the modeling industry itself, growing out of a brand-new Southern California agency, Natural Models LA. The first program to come out of Natural Models and HITNS is the Perfectly Unperfected Project (PUP), which carries to high school students a powerful and inspirational message of hope, transformation, and practical tools for combatting the culture of destructive perfectionism.

I am a co-founder and co-director of PUP, and also serve as a professional consultant to both Natural Models and HITNS.

One of the co-owners of Natural Models, Katie Halchishick (herself a successful plus-sized model) was contacted a few months ago by a student at Placer High School in Auburn, California. This student, Kristin Close, wanted to bring Katie to come and talk about her experiences as a model and as an advocate for body acceptance. Katie, her boyfriend and business partner Brad, and I were working on other projects together, and we realized that the Placer invitation represented an opportunity to design a multi-media, multi-platform program to reach out to young people — but to do it from within an industry that holds such great sway over their lives. From that, PUP was born.

Today, our team of 18 — models, consultants, musicians — held two assemblies on the Placer High campus. We did separate presentations for the boys and for the girls, sharing with them stories and images of strength and hope and offering them a “counter-story.” Counter-stories are stories that run against the grain of pop culture and received wisdom; our chief counter-story is not just that “healthy is the new skinny”, but that with effort and partnership and courage, we can fight against oppressive perfectionism and the tyranny of unattainable thinness. Katie and Bradford shared their stories and their wisdom, as did a wonderfully talented plus-size model (and mother of two) from Seattle, Angela Jones. I served as emcee of the event, framing what was happening for the two enthusiastic (indeed exuberant) audiences, and other models from Natural Models interacted with the Hillmen (Placer’s mascot here in the Sierra foothills), answering questions and engaging with the students. A great new group — Coleman and Chris, whose first record is on its way out in 2011 — performed. Tears, cheers, and all that you would expect.

I’ll have more to say about Healthy is the New Skinny and the Perfectly Unperfected Project in the near future. For now, please check out our websites, and if you’re interested in what we’re up to, follow us on Facebook and Twitter as well. And if you want to see reactions from some of the Placer students, check out this Twitter hashtag: #healthynewskinny.

It’s a big week for high schools: tomorrow afternoon at 3:00PM, I’m talking about young women, perfectionism, and body image at Arcadia High School.

Top Ten in ’10: the bottom half

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For the sixth consecutive year, I’m ranking my ten favorite posts of the year, an idea originally conceived by blogger Bob Carlton. The posts are ranked in ascending order, and the “bottom half of the top ten” appear today. The top five will come up next week.

10. Contra Arizona: in defense of ethnic and gender studies, and in defense of resentment (May 16) Excerpt:

If we Americans are who we say we are, we are surely secure enough to lay open the books and tell the darker aspects of the national story with the same rousing passion with which we tell of our triumphs. And if we do that, there will be a great deal of resentment on the part of those who identify with the abused, the victimized, and the ignored. That is exactly as it should be.

I’m a history and gender studies professor. I stir up resentment. The day that stops happening is the day I’ve begun to fail at my job.

9. Intercourse, suffering, pleasure, and feminism: more on “envelop” v. “penetrate” (August 31)

Even those who haven’t had heterosexual intercourse can, with only a small degree of imagination required, see how “envelop” might be just as accurate as “enter”. “A woman’s vagina engulfs a man’s penis during intercourse” captures reality as well as “A man’s penis penetrates a woman’s vagina.” Of course, most het folks who have intercourse are well aware that power is fluid; each partner can temporarily assert a more active role (frequently by being on top) — as a result, the language used to describe what’s actually happening could shift.

8. Spared from relapse: of divorce, sex addiction, and angels in hoodies (March 4)

…it was nearly absurd: what young lesbian in her right mind would ask me to help her sexually addicted bisexual girlfriend, knowing my past? How much trust could Katie possibly have in me? A lot, apparently. And my desire to be worthy of that trust trumped the longing to go back to old and selfish behavior.

7. Don’t presume the Designer’s intent from the design: a long post on abortion, sexual ethics, and contraception in response to Jonalyn (June 8)
The purpose of lovemaking is not to make babies. Pregnancy is simply an ancillary and occasional consequence of one particular kind of sex. Folks who say that procreation and sex can never be separated are like those who say that the primary function of the tongue is to prevent us from choking on our food. It is true that one function of the tongue is to protect large chunks of dinner from being lodged in our throats. But our tongues are there to taste, and we taste both to discern what is rancid and to delight in what is pleasurable. Our tongues are also necessary for speech. And sexually, tongues can bring delight to others. The tongue has many uses, many purposes, all important, all wonderful. We cannot discern a single purpose behind the Designer’s design. It is hubris — poltiicised and pleasure-hating hubris — to suggest that we can.

6. Of burqas, mini-skirts, and whopping presumption (February 22)

One of the hallmarks of an illiberal, anti-feminist society is that it sees women’s bodies as threats. A society horrified by a display of self-confident sexuality is no better and no worse than one scandalized by the equally public display of deep piety. Religious feeling, like sexual feeling, is in some sense private — but it also is so much a part of us that it is unreasonable and bigoted to ask us to conceal it entirely when we come into the public square.

New project launching

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Posting will be reduced for the remainder of the week. I’m traveling up to Northern California to help launch a new project I’m very excited about. Hint: it involves fashion, the modeling industry, and transforming young people’s self-image.

More details to come.

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The Montreal Massacre: 21 years on

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Today, the feast of St. Nicholas, marks the 21st anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, when fourteen young female students were murdered by a misogynist named Marc Lépine. Lépine’s suicide note included a long diatribe against feminists:

Please note that if I am committing suicide today … it is not for economic reasons … but for political reasons. For I have decided to send Ad Patres [Latin: "to the fathers"] the feminists who have ruined my life. … The feminists always have a talent for enraging me. They want to retain the advantages of being women … while trying to grab those of men. … They are so opportunistic that they neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men throughout the ages. They always try to misrepresent them every time they can.

The vast majority of anti-feminist men do not, presumably, sympathize with Marc Lépine. But this male rage against women for daring to usurp traditionally male prerogatives wasn’t– and isn’t — limited to a few deranged mass murderers, either. Those who repudiate Lépine’s actions might want to be sure that they also repudiate his rhetoric.

For more on what happened that terrible day and on the lives so cruelly snuffed out, see Clarissa’s blog and Womanist Musings.

And this thread is open only for feminist-friendly comments.

The witness v. the rescuer

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One of the questions I get frequently from young people who have started to think differently about their bodies and their lives is “How can I help my friend (sibling, parent, lover, etc.) who is still really hurting?” High school and college-aged students all have friends who are in unhealthy relationships, struggling with depression or addictions, fighting a dreadful eating disorder. When these young people get inspired by a class or a book, when they begin their own journey of transformation, they want to be evangelicals for the cause. Many have missionary hearts, longing to spread the good news of self-acceptance and empowerment far and wide. I encourage this in my classes, often using the term “Great Commission” to refer not to winning the world for Christ, but to living out one’s egalitarian and inclusive values in a way that inspires others.

But as we all find sooner or later (usually sooner), there are friends and loved ones who don’t want to hear what we have to say. Or perhaps they do want to hear it, but they lack the courage (or more likely, the resources) to extricate themselves from the painful circumstances that they’re in. Preaching at someone who’s “stuck” doesn’t do a lot of good — indeed, it tends to be counterproductive. Rather, we help best through two things: being a role model for the kind of change we want to see, and by accepting a role as a witness rather than a rescuer. The first of these is fairly universal advice, though it bears repeating. The second point is equally important, however.

Most of us have a hard time figuring out who we are and who we aren’t capable of helping. We raise our daughters to be veritable Florence Nightingales, caring for their dollies and, later, their pets. Less overtly, we raise many of our sons to be “knights in shining armor” who can rescue damsels in distress. This has some stereotypical manifestations: the fourteen year-old girl who becomes involved in the animal rights movement and her twin brother who plays “Call of Duty” all day long are both following a very old and gendered script that plays on this tremendous desire to rescue, to save, to be a hero. (I can’t get over the title “Call of Duty” for a video game. Don’t video games call people away from their duties? Isn’t it delightful to have recreation recast as responsibility?)

It’s true that the animals of the world need our help, as do many others. But when faced with the sheer overwhelm of seemingly intractable social problems, a lot of young people — especially but not exclusively women — start to shift that desire to rescue towards something, or someone, more immediate. Trying to change a friend or a boyfriend seems to have a greater chance of success, they imagine. (The reverse is actually true. It’s easier to get legislation passed than it is to solve another adult’s problems for them.) This isn’t just the root of the “bad boy” or “manic pixie girl” syndromes so well known in our culture — it’s the source of tremendous frustration and pain in a wide variety of relationships.

You can’t be an advocate for real change if you have a messiah complex. Too often, the rescuer rescues less out of altruism and more out of a frantic desire to feel worthy. The person you’re trying to save almost always catches on to this, and becomes resentful. The rescuer then charges ingratitude, and either moves on to a more promising target or chooses to suffer in wasted and tiresome martyrdom. This is not activism — this is parasitism masquerading as love.

The alternative, of course, is to embrace the role of the witness. The witness gives information; the witness offers support, but the witness doesn’t try to do for another what that other must do for herself or himself. The witness doesn’t lead the proverbial horse to water, but notes that if the horse is feeling thirsty, a nearby trough is available. The witness may even amble over to the trough alongside the horse, but won’t beg the horse to dip its head into the water. A witness owns his or her own decision to stay and participate in another person’s life. A witness doesn’t buy the flattering line that he or she is all that stands between a loved one and oblivion. But he or she is there, watching, ready to talk — or to point the way when asked.

I challenge my students to ask themselves: am I a rescuer or a witness? Am I modeling in my own life what I want for others, or am I distracting myself from my own pain by focusing on someone who seems even worse off than me? To be part of the solution, rather than just a different manifestation of the problem, requires that we ask and answer these questions.