feminism

Ben and I attended our first wedding since getting hitched ourselves. It was really, really nice - one of those weddings where, as I’m taking my third coconut shrimp from a gloved waiter with one hand and sipping from my ice cold vodka tonic with the other hand, I can’t help but think of African children squatting with flies on their lips. But then the guy with the mini quiches comes around and the image leaves me.

At the wedding, I had to confront one new difference in my life: that I will be, for the rest of my days or at least until the impending divorce, politely correcting people about what my name is. Since it’s never bothered me, I didn’t realize that it’s kind of a touchy point with some people, especially women who have changed their own name. And perhaps especially with women who have changed their names on that very day. I think the only thing that actually gets under my skin is when people say, “Mrs. Ben Fowlkes,” as if I have completely disappeared altogether.

I admit, I learned a lot about how not to let someone know you’re not Mrs. [husband’s full name]. For one, don’t say that you’ve kept your name because you are a writer and couldn’t change your last name due to your career - that’s kind of like saying that the other person’s identity/career didn’t really matter enough for them to keep their name. Secondly, stay away from the phrase, “I kept my name” - it sounds like you’re implying that the other person threw theirs away like a dirty tissue. Thirdly, don’t imply that you are a liberated, independent feminist, while the person who changed their name is living in the archaic past, where they might as well be wearing whalebone corsets and taking her husband’s muddy boots off when he comes home from work. I would especially stay away from the phrase, “Honestly, I think it’s a pretty retarded tradition that when a couple gets married they both take the name of the one with the penis. Seriously - go ask your husband if he’d ever change his name out of love for you. He’ll get a good laugh out of it.”

After talking with some friends, it seems like the best thing to say is, simply, “My name is still Sarah Aswell,” and to ignore all the stuff that they may or not be implying with their own comment - that I don’t respect tradition or that I’m obviously not ready for marriage or that I’m selfish or that I obviously don’t love Ben enough.

Ben thinks that whenever anyone asks me about it, I should simply explain that I married for nothing except the green card. This is why I love Ben. He doesn’t care what my last name is, as long as I continue to alienate strangers as a hobby.

In the end, I’d like to make it clear to everyone that I don’t really care whether you personally change your name at all - even if I have trouble telling you in person. It sure does seem simpler and it probably saves people a lot of time when addressing Christmas card envelopes. All I want is for people not to care what I do, either. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just stand drinking silently in groups and wait for the waiter with the scallops wrapped in bacon to come around again?

I was watching some makeover show last night (I know, I know) and the activity that the makeover woman chose to help her loose weight was cardio stripping.

Now, before I become completely enraged, let me say that I’d heard of cardio stripping before and thought that it made at least a little sense. The first time I saw it, there was a pole that the class utilized to promote upper body strength. But in this women’s class, there was no pole! As far as I could see, everyone in the class stood in one place, swung their hips around a little, and pretended to unbutton imaginary shirts. I read online later that this is par for the course - there is no real, actual stripping in cardio stripping (that might make people uncomfortable) just as there seems to be no real cardio in cardio stripping (that also might make people uncomfortable).

In my mind, then, cardio stripping lets women live two fantasies at one time: 1) that they are sexy women who are edgy enough to strip and 2) that they enjoy going to the gym and exercising. Cardio stripping allows them to strip without actually stripping and take an exercise class without breaking into a sweat.

Let’s talk about stripping first: stripping is something that you traditionally get paid to do and not the other way around. Why is this so? Because as much as we all enjoyed that scene from True Lies, we all understand that stripping is not fun. In fact, it’s kind of icky, which is why it pays well and why your dad doesn’t want you to do it. Sure, stripping can be fun and empowering if a long-term partner was involved and if it took place the privacy of your own home, but could it possibly be fun in a Lucille Roberts with 20 strangers? Do you really think that any real, actual strippers would ever take a cardio stripping class for fun? Of course not. They are too busy crying softly, dating the wrong men, and doing coke.

And if stripping really were a fun activity, why are they not really, actually stripping during the class instead of miming it? If you were really edgy, wouldn’t you be doing the real thing?

What’s next on the cardio [blank] trend of women’s fantasies? Cardio two firefighters in love with you at once? Cardio kidnapped baby that is eventually returned to you after a blitz of media attention? Cardio eat the whole gallon of ice cream? (Don’t worry, you don’t actually eat the whole carton of ice cream, you just pretend to.)

The second part of the problem seems to be that we as a country are trying way too hard to make going to the gym really fun. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love going to the gym - it improves my mood, it motivates me, it relaxes me, it empowers me, it energizes me, and it gives me an awesome sense of accomplishment. Even with all of these positive feelings, though, I wouldn’t call going to the gym fun, just as I wouldn’t call my job fun even though I love it.

But it seems that, mostly due to advertising and the media, that people are demanding that their gym experience be nothing but good times - like a Friday night or a birthday party. They don’t seem to realize the sad fact that really fun things usually aren’t good for you, and that the most rewarding things that you can accomplish aren’t as simple as a cakewalk or a series of hip gyrations. Pushing yourself at the gym can be fun, but it will never be fun in the same way that the fantasy of stripping will be.

Cardio stripping has given me a great idea for a business, though. It will make DOUBLE the money of any gym or strip club because it will be both. Women pay me to come in and cardio strip and men pay me to come in to leer at them! Everybody wins! I’m taking suggestions for names.

My friend Nora Rocket brought the following article from Philadelphia Magazine to my attention: Pretty Babies by Carrie Denny - a report on a new trend that is honestly terrifying to me. Like, worse than puppy mills.

The article focuses on the new phenomenon of pre-pubescent girls - some as young as eight - showing up with their moms at the spa for treatments ranging from manicures to eyebrow plucking to Botox treatments to dye jobs to bikini waxes. These girls may never see their awkward stage, may never understand that not being perfect is okay, and may never feel comfortable in their bodies unless they are tanned, waxed, and made up.

Now, I don’t want to sound like a grandmother here, inching along in her walker and commenting on kids these days, but I’m pretty sure this is a serious problem for women. I’m not going to quote from the article - it’s too quotable for that - but you should read it, especially if you have kids or are even considering reproducing.

I’ve seen the same types of things in New York, which is probably the world’s motherhive of utterly ridiculous consumerist culture. Just last weekend, as Ben and I were eating at a restaurant, a girl at the table next to us threw a temper tantrum about getting her “mani and pedi.” I’m guessing this girl was seven. And although I know I’m not supposed to judge people or tell people how to raise their kids, but that ain’t right. At seven, your kids should only be throwing temper tantrums for popsicles.

I’m not sure what is worse about the scenario: the fact that these girls are learning to be utterly self-involved and self-conscious or that these treatments are so out-of-this-world expensive that they are learning pampered lifestyles that they won’t be able to support if mom and dad ever disappear. We might be raising a generation of girls that will continue to be dependent on their parents far after they should be and perhaps until they can find another viable source of income to pay for their spray-on tans.

Of course, I’m not exactly a poster child for “taking care of myself.” I don’t wax or pluck or dye, but on the other hand, I don’t brush my hair or require a bra. I might do more if I had the cash, but I’m guessing I wouldn’t do much. I think my awkward phase was an important if not pleasant time in my life when I learned that you should work on being things other than pretty, because pretty doesn’t always show up when you need it. And I think that altering our bodies to look like an airbrushed magazine covergirl and consuming expensive things as a major facet of entertainment in our lives is a slippery slope of emotional and financial troubles that won’t disappear with an hour-long massage.

I know these are old ideas and I know I’m preaching to the choir, but damn. What is even the point of giving an eight year old a bikini wax? The only thing that will accomplish is fucking that girl up for life.

Here’s what I hope: I hope that like all the generations that have come before us, these girls will rebel when they hit 18. That they might realize that looking natural and aging naturally is pretty great (and easy) and that there are scientific and evolutionary reasons that we have hair where we do. They might also realize that they are drowning in spa bills and wasting hours a week on the state of their blonde highlights. They might run rampant in the streets with no eyeliner and no bras, without blow-drying their hair or pumicing their feet, like a new generation of hippies.

And their mothers, who tried so hard to train them to be beautiful, will be horrified - only no one will be able to tell from their faces because of the Botox treatments.

I watched snippets of Superman Returns tonight on HBO, after having seen it in the theater last summer. I’m not going to waste your time by pointing out the terrible special effects, the gaping plot holes, and the baffling ending that I am sure cannot be explained to me logically by anyone.

But I do want to talk about this one thing, because I’ve seen it a lot lately and it is driving me crazy: why are female love interests today getting younger and younger while the male leads stay the same age?

I think Superman Returns is the best example of this phenomenon, since this movie supposedly takes place five years after the original Superman movie (which was released in 1978. Now, in the original movie, Lois Lane is painted as a no-nonsense career women - a reporter high up on the ladder at a big city paper. Margot Kidder (below left), who plays the original Lois Lane, was 30 when the movie was made and might even look a bit older than that in the movie. It might be a stretch, but it’s somewhat believable that she could be writing big articles for the paper at that time.

Now let’s fast forward to Kate Bosworth (above right), who plays Lois Lane in Superman Returns thirty years later. She was around 23 when the movie was made, and she looks around that age in the movie. But she’s got a five-year-old kid and it’s been five years since Superman was around - this should land her in her mid-thirties, at least. Instead, she looks a solid ten or fifteen years younger than she should.

I might be able to suspend my disbelief that some 23-year-old has landed a huge job at a city paper, but now I’m supposed to believe that she got five years younger instead of five years older during a five-year span of time? Is she also from a different planet? And am I also supposed to believe that, if she’s 23 now, that she was 18 when she got the job at the paper and originally met Superman? That’s harder for me to accept than a guy who wears a cape and blue tights and carries around commercial jets.

Even more than that, am I supposed to believe that she’s gotten more glamorous, less charmingly odd, and less practical after the birth of her bastard child and as time passed?

Who knows, maybe this has to do with the fact that I’m a brunette. Who tends to photograph weird. Or that I am not nearly as skinny as either Bosworth or Kidder. But seriously, I think it might be a scary sign of our times. For a long time we’ve know that actresses tend to “lose their value” as they age much faster than their male counterparts, but this is getting ridiculous.

I mean, we’re getting a strong, quirky, smart, career-minded character in Lois Lane, but in today’s standards we have to also make her barely legal? What do we tell the girls in this country, who are going to think that they and their aspirations expire right before they’re old enough to rent a car? That they should hurry up and get married before they become invisible at 25? That they should skip college and get to man-finding?

And don’t be that one guy who mentions that Juliet was 12, because I don’t want to hear it. Juliet might have been 12, but she was also dumb and immature enough to kill herself over a dude when she should have been pursuing her own dreams, taking guitar lessons and gossiping on the phone, had phones been invented.

Reading your comments yesterday about my less-than-awesome New Year’s Eve party got me thinking about what bothers me (and perhaps many of us) about the holiday and about general trends in how people perceive fun.

Based on your comments, it seems like most people have a better time staying in with a few friends, eating food and watching movies. And my night definitely improved upon ordering a pizza and sitting on the couch.  So here’s the question: are all people like this, or just people like us? Does anyone have fun in a crowded bar where you can’t move or hear anyone say anything?

I think part of the problem is with the holiday in particular. There’s too much pressure to have fun. You have to have plans, you have to drink champagne, you have to find someone - anyone! - to kiss at midnight. If you’re not having the best night ever, then it’s the worst night ever.

But - back to Anchor Bar in New York City, the worst place ever. It seemed to me that people were trying very, very hard to look like things were going well for them.

The first, most obvious example of this is what women wear out on New Years - out come the mini-dresses, sequins, strapless things, strappy things, short things, sheer things, high-heeled things. And I suppose I would be fine with that if it weren’t the dead of winter and if you weren’t expected to stand and dance all night. I don’t know - maybe I’m just making myself feel better about having a sweater on instead of my A-game when everyone else did, but I can’t see how being freezing and constantly adjusting the three yards of fabric that you are wearing so that it covers your ass and your boobs at the same time could actually contribute to your having a good time.

The second thing I noticed was the number of pictures being taken by the girls at the bar. Of each other. It’s happened at many of the parties I’ve been to recently - pictures of the girls with their tongues out, pictures of the girls sexily sipping their drinks, pictures of the girls kissing in front of their boyfriends. Then, inevitably, when I shamefully log into Facebook the next day, I get to wade through dozens of pictures of my friends and my friends’ friends and read about how much fun they had the night before. Don’t worry, these pictures seem to say, we weren’t sitting and eating pizza and drinking beer with a few friends last night! We were living! With our tongues out!

Talking about the phenomenon with Ben the next day, we came up with some interesting ideas about the rise in and strangeness of “fun documentation”. Ben compared it to the modern-day wish to become a celebrity, even if you aren’t famous for anything good. Facebook, in this instance, becomes a sort of US Weekly among a circle of friends - you get to see who was out with whom doing what - with your friends acting as the fake paparazzi. All the pictures are “tagged” with the names of who was there - and everyone is dressed up and having a great time!

I think fun documentation can also be linked to reality television - the pictures the girls were taking in the bar actually happened and they are documents of that moment in time, much like the footage shot for reality shows. However, looking at how the pictures are taken and presented, they are often staged and posed. The small fact that everyone knows pictures are being taken changes what is happening. Although the pictures are meant to be action shots, they are taken deliberately, like portraits.

For example, very early in the night on NYE, these three girls were about to take a totally cute picture of themselves grinding on each other on the dance floor. They weren’t drunk (yet) and the place wasn’t crowded (yet) but they were dancing close and, right before the pictures were taken, each girl froze in the sexiest of positions. After a few were taken, one of the girls stopped the “shoot” to run over and get NYE crowns for everyone in the take to wear. After the crowns were put on (and their hair fixed) the dancing and picture taking continued. It was basically a fabricated moment of fun that would look totally great on the social networking sites in the morning. Look how much fun we had! We didn’t even notice the camera!

I’m not against taking pictures when you are out or documenting an event - but it seems like digital cameras and the internet have not only given us the chance to easily record our day-to-day lives, but it has given us the opportunity to mold our lives into a social fantasy world. If women today want to be like celebrities, and if all we know about celebrities is what we see in pictures in magazines and on the internet, shouldn’t it follow that women create these fabricated moments to shoot of themselves?

Ugh, I suddenly feel very old. I’m going to reread this and make sure I never say the phrase “kids these days.” I suppose that to make up for my stuffiness and inability to embrace modern culture, I’ll post my favorite fun documentation picture, of me, Ben, and some friends at a posh party… with a celebrity! I am SO living the life!

Over the last few months I’ve been interested in street harassment in New York - how I and other women react to being bothered, catcalled, and touched by men. It all started with this post and continued with this post, where I decided to respond aggressively to harassment.The biggest conclusion I came to, I think, was that you have to be ready for these incidents and have a response ready - if you don’t you’ll be too shocked to do anything (and also, don’t respond aggressively if you are not in a safe position to do so). Of course, I still have a lot of questions - what is the best way to react to someone so that they might understand how they are making you feel? What’s the best way to react to someone so that they might decide not to do it again? What doesn’t egg them on? Why do they do it in the first place?

In any case, on the way home from work on the subway on Friday, I saw something totally new: a drunk woman harassing and inappropriately touching men.  I was sitting directly across from her and got to see her interact with four different men during the ride and it was absolutely fascinating - like a mini-experiment in how men react to street harassment.  

It happened the same way each time a man sat next to her: she started by resting her head on their shoulder. All four men allowed this to happen and didn’t react except to look a bit uncomfortable and confused. Just like I feel when it happens to me, they seemed to be working out in their heads what was happening - was there some other explanation for how the woman was acting?

After this, though, the woman would touch their legs and crotches and make comments about how much they wanted her and what kind of men they were. I won’t go into her colorful language except to say that it was extremely creative and effective and that I might have noted several of her imaginative phrases for utilization my fiction, if I ever decide on a drunk crazy person character.

Two of the men (the two older ones) put up with this behavior longer than I would have guessed - again, maybe they, too were in shock? But, eventually, all four men yelled something loud enough for the entire subway car to hear (these statements varied from “Chill, lady!” to “What the fuck is your problem?” to “Do not touch me or speak to me again!”

Two of the men used physical force - pushing the woman away from them - and, most surprisingly, all four of them stood their ground. No one left the space that they were originally occupying until their stop came. It seemed almost territorial - whereas the first thing I think of doing when someone is bothering me is to get away from their area as soon as possible, the men opted to push her out of their area instead.

The drunk lady, as one might guess, wasn’t especially affected by any of the men’s defenses (the yelling, the pushing, the retorts). Once the man got off the train, she started the whole cycle over with whoever sat next to her. No one else on the train jumped up to help either the men or to confront the woman, but a lot of sudoku puzzles were completed and a lot of paperbacks were read. Although I stopped reading my paperback, I had no idea what to do.

I don’t think we can draw any solid conclusions from what I saw since it was such a small sampling of people - but, as evil as it may be, it sure was interesting to see the tables turned for once.

Although we could make some guesses about men being more apt to aggressively confront something like this (and I should mention that three out of four of the men were bigger than the woman) or about how they are more likely to cause a scene or stand their ground, the thing I was weirdly comforted to see was how bothered they were about being touched and called names. Nobody likes to be treated like that, from the tiniest meekest woman to the burliest, most aggressive dude.

But as far as I can tell, all the efforts I’ve seen from both men and women haven’t really worked. I still think doing something is better than doing nothing, but is anything effective in the long term? The heart of the problem seems to be that you can’t reason with a drunk crazy person. Is anyone who would openly harass a stranger on the subway, man or woman, capable of understanding how they are making other feel? Perhaps not. Is reacting to these people and stadning up for ourselves more for us than for them? I’m not sure. Back to the drawing board, I suppose.

Ever since I posted about a guy bothering me on the train a couple of weeks ago, I have been patiently waiting for my chance to yell at the next guy who bothered me. My chance came yesterday afternoon on my way home from the gym.

The guy who bothered me looked the part - he was wearing a tacky leather jacket, cheap sunglasses, and was about two inches shorter than me. As he walked toward me, he stepped into my path, said, “Hot hot hot!” and then did a thing with his tongue that I think you can only learn at a special school for harassing women on the street.

Unfortunately for this guy, I was ready this time. It took me a couple of seconds to process everything (yes, he was being inappropriate, yes I would indeed do something about it), then I turned around and yelled “HEY!” and walked back up to him and got in his face. “YOU DO NOT DO THAT TO WOMEN. ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT?”

Somewhere between HEY and YOU the guy’s entire body language and expression changed. He actually put up his hands  and started slowly walking backwards. Somewhere between FUCKING and IDIOT he turned around and ran.

It was about the most awesome thing ever. It felt great to raise my voice, which I realized was something I simply never do as soon as I did it. It also felt great to utterly shatter this guy’s confidence, at least in relation to doing weird tongue things to women in the street.

I wouldn’t do it in just any circumstances, though: in this case, I was on my very safe and familiar block, 100 yards from my apartment, in the middle of the day. And, as I mentioned, the guy was shorter than me. He also might not have spoken any English besides “Hot hot hot!” But even if that was the case, I think I stated my point in a way that crossed language barriers.

I also wonder if I’m not really just making things worse in the world - is harassing someone who is harassing you solving any problems? Or is it more like a messed up version of Pay It Forward, where every time someone is a jerk to you, you go out of your way to be a jerk to someone else? Should I have just gone all Ghandi on the guy and used more noble tactics than he did to prove my point? I’m not sure what that interaction would even look like, but it might involve fasting.

I think I am convinced, though, that not doing anything is the wrong thing to do. Just as I’ve been thinking a lot about how I am too passive at work, I think that I (and perhaps other women) would rather not cause a fuss than speak up about not being comfortable in more general situations.

Mostly, though, I wish I had said something wittier and more demeaning. Maybe next time.