Her Campus runs a story about the Healthy is the New Skinny program today: The Perfectly UnPerfected Program Gets Girls Feeling Good About Themselves! Check out the link to one of our new promo videos as well.
Lots of exciting announcements about this project coming soon!
My Thursday column at Healthy is the New Skinny looks at the impact of social media on young women’s body image; check out Status Updates and “Thinspo”. Excerpt:
How often do the people you know on Facebook “check in” at the gym? How often do they share how far they ran? Or how they’re doing on their diet, or on their “Insanity” workout plan? When I asked for stories on Facebook, dozens of young people wrote me to share their experiences reading their friends’ food-and-diet updates. Some wrote that seeing other people working out was “inspiring”, while others wrote it was “depressing” or “triggering”. One of my former students wrote “I can’t stand getting on Facebook in the morning and hearing about all the exercise my friends have already done before I’ve even brushed my teeth. It makes me feel like a failure.”
Several wrote of a common phenomenon: the girls who seemed most likely to update about the delicious, fattening foods that they’d eaten or were planning to eat were the girls whose bodies were already close to the idea. “Amber” wrote: “It seems like only skinny and pretty girls get to talk about the burgers and Pizookies they’ve eaten. It’s like they’re showing off that they can pig out and get away with it. They get all these comments that say things like ‘You’re so lucky to be able to eat like that and still look great.’ It’s like they’re fishing for compliments in a weird roundabout way. Amber, who has struggled with bulimia and describes herself as a size 14, remarks, “I’m not angry at the girls who write about food all the time. But it definitely bothers me, as I don’t think I could write about what I’ve eaten and get away with it.”
Others I heard from talked about the way in which positive reinforcement on photos or status updates could be triggering. “Mandy” said that when she lost a lot of weight and put up new, flattering photos, she got a huge outpouring of compliments. “Everytime someone told me how great I looked, it made me more fearful of gaining the weight back. Instead of making me feel good, the compliments pushed me to diet more to make sure I stayed skinny.” Mandy, like most young people, carefully chose flattering photos for Facebook. She got the praise she wanted, but instead of providing reassurance it just pushed her to more unhealthy dieting.
And check out a similar take from Rachel Simmons, author of “Odd Girl Out”.
I’ve got a short piece (a blog post rather than a more thoughtful column) at GMP today on the Sugar Daddy phenomenon: Buying ‘Sugar Daughters’: What’s Really Wrong With the Sugar Daddy Phenomenon. Riffing on this Amanda Fairbanks piece in the HuffPo, I note that I’ve known students who’ve sought out these “arrangements” with varied results. And I touch on why the Sugar Daddy phenomenon bothers me far more than traditional prostitution:
By blurring the lines between a genuine romance and prostitution, the sugar daddy relationship is more problematic than a traditional john/hooker encounter.
That pretense of intimacy is inherent in the term “sugar daddy” with its hint of the incestuous. While the term “john” (for a male client of a sex worker) suggests anonymity, “sugar daddy” reeks of emotional (as well as sexual) boundary violations. The implication is that the real fathers of these young women have failed to provide the right combination of emotional and financial support; the term reinforces the not-entirely inaccurate trope that younger women who seek older men have “daddy issues.” And it suggests that the older men who seek out “sugar babies” are looking for young women whom they can spoil and fuck, deliberately blurring the line between paternal indulgence and sexual objectification.
The real question is whether the term “sugar daddy” is an unfortunate misrepresentation of what’s going on, or an all-too-accurate description of something dark and especially ugly.
See also this terrific Alternet piece from Sarah Seltzer.
I’ll be traveling much of August, so my writing pace will slow down. My last column until the end of the month at Good Men Project runs today: May I Walk You To Your Car? Chivalry and its Contradictions. Inspired by an evening with my wife and our good friend Batsheva (who blogs here) it’s an attempt to distinguish between gender-based performance and gender-based obligations. Excerpt:
So when I walked Sheva to the car, I was performing a traditionally masculine role. I knew Sheva well enough to know that my escorting her would be appreciated; frankly, I enjoyed her appreciation. Playing that part didn’t undercut my contention that men and women are fundamentally equal with (a tiny number of biological limitations aside) essentially interchangeable roles. We all knew that if there had been a more serious danger, my delightful but potentially lethal wife would have made a far better escort for Sheva. If necessary, that would have been a subversion of traditional expectations. But it wasn’t necessary.
That little performance from our house to her car made me feel good. Because I know her well, I knew the gesture would be appreciated. If I hadn’t known Sheva as well as I do, I would have been far more cautious about the offer to escort her. We don’t get to play parts that make us feel good at the expense of others. A “gentleman” shouldn’t foist his manners on to others; to use another example, if a woman doesn’t want a man to race ahead and open doors for her, he shouldn’t be miffed if she doesn’t thank him profusely every time he does so. The performance of traditional roles is about mutual pleasure, not about mutual obligation.
From November 2009
Years ago, I wrote a brief post about feminism and language, but it didn’t go into very much detail. Here’s a new version, with a bit more detail.
One of the first gender studies courses I ever took at Berkeley was an upper-division anthropology course taught by the great Nancy Scheper-Hughes. It was in a class discussion one day (I think in the spring of ’87) that I heard something that rocked my world. We were discussing Andrea Dworkin’s novel “Ice and Fire” and her (then still-forthcoming, but already publicized) “Intercourse”. I hadn’t read the books at the time (they were optional for the class). One classmate made the case that on a biological level, all heterosexual sex was, if not rape, dangerously close to it. “Look at the language”, my classmate said; “penetrate, enter, and screw make it clear what’s really happening; women are being invaded by men’s penises.” Another classmate responded, “But that’s the fault of the language, not of the biology itself; we could just as easily use words like ‘envelop’, ‘engulf’, ‘surround’ and everything would be different.” The discussion raged enthusiastically until the next class irritably barged in and chucked us all out. I was electrified.
My classmates were having, as I came to discover, a classic intra-feminist argument: to what extent is the sexual domination of women by men part and parcel of our biology, and to what extent is it a construction maintained by language that deliberately disempowers women? The consensus seems to weigh more heavily to the latter position, particularly within the contemporary (so-called “Third Wave”) feminism which was very much still in its incubation when I was discovering Women’s Studies in the Reagan years.
In every women’s studies class I’ve taught here at PCC, and in many guest lectures about feminism I’ve given elsewhere, I use the “penetrate” versus “engulf” image to illustrate a basic point about the way in which our language constructs and maintains male aggression and female passivity. 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. Continue reading