Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt

"If your date won't listen to reason, try a Velvet Hammer."
"Apply generously to your neck so he can smell the scent as you shake your head 'no.'"

Are there really so many advertisements like this out there?
I don't read any magazines.
I don't know what kinds of messages are being sent and how often they are being sent.

But this is just ridiculous. I -hope- the author of this article was overexaggerating the prevalence of these kinds of ads just to prove her point.

All of the ads displayed alongside this article made me angry.
At the same time, I felt like the article lost a lot of impact because the writing was very redundant, and the organization was all over the place.
For a huge portion of the article, she is speaking about advertisements. Suddenly, she transfers over to statistics about brutality, sexual assault, and rape. Then, she talks about gender expectation some more, follows it up with anecdotes about sexual assault, and then ends with addiction.
I feel this article would be a lot stronger if she would stop repeating herself and get to the point.
I liked the overall message I took from the article, which is that the media and gender roles are having negative effects on our society, however the way in which these ideas were presented didn't sound quite credible. It was almost like an angry rant, where she randomly spliced in facts to try to sound more intelligent.

I think this piece would have been stronger if it focused solely on advertising and its relationship to violence. The anecdotes were there to try to support her theory and show it's actually reality, but the part about addiction came out of nowhere.

Those Unnerving Ads Using "Real" Women

I disliked this article, mainly because I don't agree with the point of view of the writer.
"Dove is sounding the trumpets of body acceptance while also selling woebegone 'real women' a cure for their realness."
Okay. Let's talk about being real, or realistic.
Dove is a beauty product company. Of course they are selling "cures for realness."
The point is, they are selling something. And they can't sell realness. I don't know anyone who would buy cellulite anti-firming cream.
Even then, the end result wouldn't be "real" because it came about with the use of a product.
This is advertising.
Women complain for years about the bad messages we send to adolescent girls when we show ads featuring anorexic-appearing models.
Now that a company has chosen to try using "real women," women complain some more.
The one thing the article did have right is that a woman is never fully happy with what she has.
The grass is always greener.
We can't have unreal models, but we can't have real models.
So what do we have?
We will never be happy with our bodies due to advertising and social pressure,
but when I first saw that Dove commercial I liked it because I thought the women were really pretty and healthy looking for once, and it was interesting how they used all different shapes and sizes and colors of women.
I don't buy Dove products. I don't really care what brands I have based on the advertising or name.
But it was refreshing to see a cousin, or sister, or the girl from the coffee shop in those ads who I could relate to. It was nice to see a bigger woman proud of her body.
I don't find the familiarity daunting like showing off a private bedroom.
I find it comforting.

If I Were a Bag

My favorite part of Zora Neale Hurston's How It Feels to Be Colored Me was the end.
She compares herself, and others, to bags. Paper bags of different colors with a mish mash of contents.
That got me thinking about how I would be, if I were a bag. Here's what I've decided:

If I were a bag, I'd be creamy colored and smooth papered. Not the rough texture of your average lunch sack, but rather the plasticy coated feeling of expensive wrapping paper.
I'd have a large amount of contents. I'd also have to be like Mary Poppins' tote to fit them all.
For example, I'd have a tree.

I'd also have a fake sterling silver ring with the varnish wearing off and the copper showing through.
I'd be full of glitter.
And cupcake tins.
I'd have two brightly colored paper clips.
A strawberry.
A small figurine of a bullfrog named Jeremiah.
A knee-high sock with alternating stripes.
A pair of broken sunglasses.
A blue button.
Pieces of green thread.
A toy army soldier.
A polly pocket.
A brooch of a butterfly.
A miniature origami crane.
An orange highlighter.
Bits of glass.
Tinkly glass beads.
A paintbrush.
A piece of silky fabric.
A book with all the pages ripped out.

There's more, I'm sure.

But it's an interesting thought, isn't it?
Try looking at someone, a stranger, and try to figure out what the contents of their bag would be.

Rebellion

It's funny how many different forms of rebellion there are.
This is probably a result of the plethora of authority figures that crop up during our lives that we can rebel against.

One of my largest acts of rebellion so far in my life was, in fact, completely pointless.
I rebelled by secretly meeting up with boys.
In retrospect, I don't think my parents would have minded letting me hang out with these boys. But for some reason, I felt like I had to lie at the time in order to keep my friends.
I was in the sixth grade. On the weekends, I would go roller skating with my girl friends and we'd meet up with my best friend Colby and his brother. Colby didn't go to our school, I met him through a neighborhood friend.
We'd just hang out and roller skate, but I lied to my parents about it. I lied about who I was on the phone with all of the time.
I thought they wouldn't let me hang out with him. When I finally did and told them about it, I had to create another lie about how long I'd known him.

This experience of rebellion hasn't really affected me much, except at the time it taught me how to lie to my parents, and gave excessive amounts on unnecessary guilt.

The next time I rebel, I'm going to think more first if it's worth it.
My parents don't know I broke their trust, but I do. And it wasn't worth it to go roller skating.

Familiar Strangers

In response to Dana's blog, writing this essay also helped me sort out memories from a long time ago. I hadn't realized how much I'd forgotten about grade school during high school, or how much I'd forgotten about certain relationships. It's strange, but thinking about that time makes me feel really different. It makes me feel almost how I did back then.
It was really awkward to write about such a personal part of my body, but not in the way I originally expected. I didn't mind talking about that part of my body so much as I minded sharing memories of mine with readers I don't know. It feels weird to know someone will be reading something personal of yours, and you don't know a thing about them.
I've done journalism before, I've blogged, and clearly I've written papers for school. But with journalism, you don't write about yourself. Normal academic essays do not focus on personal aspects of the writer's life. With blogging, you expect strangers to read it when you write it, but you don't really care because it's the internet and they could live on the other side of the world.
But when it's a stranger you see every other day, sitting a long ways down at the other end of the table during class, it's weird.
They're a stranger, but they're not.
Another point Dana made is to appreciate what we have.
I wrote about my hips for this essay.
The other day, I was walking to class and I (oddly enough) noticed that the girl walking a few feet in front of me was absolutely tiny. I could pick this girl up like a baby and carry her around. I remember looking at HER hips and thinking "If she has kids that is going to hurt SO bad."
All of this because of a doctor telling me I have a nice wide pelvis for having babies.
I may not appreciate the baby-having potential right now, but maybe years down the line if I ever have kids, I'll feel a lot more grateful for my pelvis.

adolescent hips

My hips are too big.
My school uniform skirt is larger than everyone else's.
You can tell when we have to take them off for gym.
We step out of our skirts and go to gym in our school shirts and whatever shorts we happen to be wearing that day.
We put our jewelry and skirts on the desks of the classroom before we leave.
My skirt is the biggest out of every row of desks.

My hips can't play sports.
They don't do well in gym class.
They dig into the ground when we lay down to start push-ups.

My hips don't fit into pretty jeans with decorative back pockets that the other girls wear on dress down days.
I wear boring jeans. Or chord pants.
They're my favorite pair of pants, navy blue with orange chords and trim.
They match perfectly with my long-sleeved monkey shirt.
Even more importantly, they match the colossal size of my hips. Adjustable.
Like my fluctuating weight.

My hips are the twin of Erin's.
Erin is the beautiful version of me.
She is my best friend, and it isn't fair.
She is blond, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned with rosy cheeks.

Erin and my hips play together at recess.
We stand in a circle with our friends.
Our hips can't play sports, so we talk.
We sway as we talk and bump our hips together.
Like a really cheesy old dance move.

If our hips are twins, why aren't hers too big?

On Stuttering

Children have an interesting view of the world, often not clearly understood due to limited vocabulary and imaginative barriers between children and adults.
Children then become adults and often can no longer remember how they once thought as children, so it is up to the adults who are around them when they are young to catalog their surprising moments of brilliance, despite communication barriers.

Alice Walker was afraid of how her daughter might react to her eye. Would she be ashamed?
And yet her daughter tells her she has a world in her eye.

Similarly, Edward Hoagland mentions his child in his piece on stuttering.
As she was learning to talk, she briefly thought she was supposed to stutter like her father. He lists it as one of the top 3 scariest moments as a stutterer.

So why is it adults are so afraid of being different, whereas children don't seem to mind? Clearly social expectations come into play.
However, it raises the question: is it really that important?

Walker's child saw a beautiful world in her mother's eye.
Hoagland's daughter wanted to talk like her father.
Are these not heart-warming expressions of love and admiration between parent and child?

A trivial difference can become the world to the bearer of the difference.
The difference can become a beautiful world to a small child.
While physical deformity, diseases, and difficulties are hard to live with
these moments show just how much emphasis we put on such silly "normalcies."

I'm not at all trivializing the emotional hardship these authors went through,
but as a generalization, this link between the pieces made me think of how often we take something that isn't a problem, and make it a problem.

If the world were a nicer place, these slight differences wouldn't matter. People wouldn't stare, be cruel, or react with impatience to those around them who are different in some way, slight or large.

Truth comes from the mouth of babes because they haven't been confused yet by the complications that arise as we grow up. Politics, religion, social standards, bullies, sex, etc all come forth to confuse us. While these issues have helped us all to grow to be the people who we are today, they sometimes skew us. Without this skewed sense of the world, I believe children just might have a better view.

Free Union

Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger
Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow
Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass
Whose eyebrows are nests of swallows
Whose fingers are fresh cut hay
That are hedges of privet and nesting places for sea snails
My wife whose calves are sweet with the sap of elders
My wife whose breasts are haunted by the ghosts of dew-moistened roses
Whose belly is a fan unfolded in the sunlight
Is a giant talon
My wife with the back of a bird in vertical flight
My wife whose nape is of smooth worn stone and wet chalk
That are lustrous and feathered like arrows
A mine and a platypus
With eyes full of water to drink in prisons
My wife with eyes that are forests forever under the ax


These are my favorite lines from Free Union.

My reaction to this poem surprised me, but only days after I had read it for the first time.
I am, on most occasions, extremely feminist.
And by calling myself a feminist, I mean my guy friends make fun of me and call me that.
I mean I don't like words such as "cunt" or "pussy."
And I find the emphasis on physical form and characteristics quite annoying, from both male and female spectators.
I don't personally consider myself a "feminist," I consider myself a "personist."
But, the point is, I liked this poem.
This did not surprise me until class, when someone brought up how it bothered them that the speaker is only praising the physical.
I was shocked. I like a poem, where a man loves his wife, but only due to her physical attributes? This is quite unlike me. Such behavior normally enrages me. Disgusts me. Basically, I get very upset when people only care about looks etc.

So...why did I like this poem?
I thought about it, and came to the conclusion that I like this poem because it is, in fact, NOT just about the physical.

How did I determine that?
This man is praising his wife for her physical attributes, sure, but the metaphors he chose to use also reflect her character.
"My wife whose hair is a brush fire" makes me imagine a woman who has a fiery attitude.
"Whose thoughts are summer lightning" clearly isn't about the physical.
"Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first magnitude" does not make me think of the fragrance of her breath, but rather the sweetness of her words.
The poem leaves me with the impression of a man in love with his wife, a woman of slight, yet womanly build, who has a personality almost too large for her physical frame.
In order to express how wonderful he thinks she is, he cannot simply say it in a sentence or a paragraph, but he has to list her physical attributes, and he relates them back to her personality.

I also like how he used repetition with "my wife."
He keeps saying it over and over again, and I imagine him saying it with pride.
"My wife..."
It's almost as if he's amazed she is his wife, and has to keep reminding himself of it before it can sink in.

One last idea that intrigued me in class was if the wife would like the poem if she read it.
The question was asked by a boy, and the professor asked the girls to answer it.
As a girl, I have to say this: if I had a husband who wrote a poem for me like that, I would be speechlessly happy. This poem shows how much he appreciates her and is in awe of her inner and outer beauty. How could a wife not be glad about that?

body

A list of body parts:
toenails, toes, ball of my foot, arch of my foot, heel, ankles, calf, knee, thigh, legs, pelvis, vagina, hips, butt, torso, waist, belly button, ribcage, breasts, collarbone, neck, shoulders, armpits, elbows, arms, forearms, wrists, hands, palms, fingers, fingertips, fingernails, knuckles, back, skull, hair, face, forehead, temples, cheeks, eyes, eyebrows, eyelashes, nose, mouth, chin, lips, tongue, teeth, ears, esophagus, trachea, lungs, sternum, heart, stomach, brain, muscles, bones, skin, freckles, moles, birth mark, blood

Word association:
thigh - tree trunks
pelvis - wide
hips - move
butt - big
breasts - smooth
forearms - fish
back - arch
hair - pepsi cola
eyes - plain
teeth - trauma
sternum - push
heart - pain
skin - sheath

Brief memory
thigh - riding my bike, muscles flexing as I race up a hill
hating myself in swimsuits
wondering why mitch put his hand there, i'm not julia
painting designs on my legs
pulling my school skirt down in the wind

hips/pelvis - getting x-rayed for arthritis
standing at recess swaying and hitting hips with my friends as we talk
dancing with Erin at Christmas dance
dancing with Bri in La Guacamaya
bruising my pelvis when falling downstairs
belts never working
mom designing dresses to fit over my hips
learning that biologically, wide hips are actually supposed to be attractive
being told my hips were beautiful, made me a real woman

butt - not being able to fit into jeans, on most occasions
constant self-scrutiny
underwear lines
being sexually harassed

breasts - getting my first sports bra at age 11
spilling water on my white shirt
not finding my size in victoria's secret
being taught how to do a cancer screening
never wearing bikinis for fear of them falling off
telling the boy from camp "i'm up here"

forearms - scratching
fishing with my dad and he explains the belly of a catfish
shaving my legs for the first time and then freaking out because my arms looked disgusting

back - learning to do a bridge
being told my back was beautiful, muscular
4 years of abuse from my backpack
scoliosis
showing off the matrix thing
bending back from alex until he gave me my first kiss

hair - getting it cut from my waist to my chin
being told I had the hairstyle of my boyfriend's dad when he was young
getting rats' nests brushed out by my babysitter
getting my haircut for senior pictures and freaking out
cutting my own bangs
dying my hair at home with kaley
constant struggle to make a color decision
doing my hair for prom
throwing my braid over my shoulder and my dog chasing it

eyes - almost losing my vision
seeing trees for the first time after getting glasses
spotting animals no one else can see
scratching my cornea and wearing an eye patch
not being able to read the board in my biology class
getting glasses on the last day of school and telling ms. ford
wearing sunglasses at night and being treated like I was blind
laying in my backyard and closing my eyes for a long time so when I'd open them everything would be blue
seeing the scary green tornado
crying - many reasons
learning how to change the emotions in my eyes to fit acting
learning how to apply eyeliner for the plays

teeth - gap
braces
tooth fairy
"saving teeth" in blue clay
forgetting retainers when I went to Detroit
thinking I had double sets of teeth
learning my mother has similar teeth
being so proud of no cavities
pain from trying to whiten
biting alex when he wouldn't believe me
biting abby when i was young and she wanted to drown the ants
chewy sushi experience

sternum - squeezing a stuffed animal to my sternum after my parents fought
being hit in the sternum with a book

heart - having a panic attack about stu, feeling like a heart attack
different memories associated with love
different memories associated with loss
putting my cell phone on my stomach and watching it move with my heart beat after coming up the stairs
lou listening to my heart and tapping out the rhythm

skin - accidentally cutting myself with scissors, having the wound glued back together
being told someone missed my skin
fishing with dad and he explained the underbelly of a catfish
laying skin to skin to feel close
hands cracking and bleeding
getting a huge cut falling out of a wagon
finding random bruises in the shower and not knowing where they came from

Emotion association:
thigh - depending - self-loathing due to feeling fat or disgusting
happy due to a sense of womanhood and healthy robustness

pelvis - pride due to "excellent child-bearing skills"

hips - depending - insecurity due to feeling fat or not being able to find clothes that fit
happy due to a sense of womanhood, sensuality, and self expression with dancing

butt - depending - shame due to feeling fat
pride in being a woman who actually has a backside

breasts - shame due to a sense of modesty
anger because sometimes it seems to be all people care about
pride because it's a part of my womanhood

forearms - sad because of their history
happy because they are smooth and happy and pale like the belly of a fish

back - pride because I'm flexible and strong

hair - frustration because I don't know if I want to change it
happy because it's one of my favorite features

eyes - disappointed because they're boring
frustrated because they ache a lot
apprehensive because you never know when they will cry

teeth - dissatisfaction because they are not perfect
happy because my smile is inviting
mad because I didn't take care of them

sternum - apprehensive and worrying

heart - sad about loss and missing
nervous about panic attacks
happy about emotional bonds

skin - dissatisfaction because it's not perfect
happy because it holds me together, is smooth, and healthy