New Year’s Resolutions (because everyone else is doing it)

Usually, I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. I could never keep them, and I’ve yet to meet anyone else who could. That and they never really seemed that special to me.

But this year, I am making a New Year’s resolution. I’m resolving not to think about the future any farther ahead than this summer. Beyond that, I’m not going to think about it.

This might seem like a really irresponsible resolution, but I really think that it’s for the good of my sanity. As a junior in college, I’m constantly being asked what I want to do when I graduate. Professors ask me about it all the time. My friends are always talking about looking for jobs next year or applying to graduate school. They all seem to have their lives figured out, and I really don’t, and it drives me nuts.

I could go to graduate school, and in many ways, that’s what I’d really like to do. I always feel lame when I say this, but I love learning things. I love researching. And then I love writing about what I’ve learned. Sure, it’s grueling. Sometimes it can be tedious. But in the end, it also feels very satisfying. In many ways, I could see myself as a professor somewhere teaching classes and writing books and never leaving the safe haven of a university. Of course, this is a very idealized vision of a professor’s life. In reality, I know that I’d spend a lot of my time fighting for funding and lecturing to students who really don’t give a damn about the cultural significance of literature or the meaning of poetry. I also know that a lot of what I wrote would be read by other academics…and it wouldn’t go much further than that. In the end, I sometimes wonder if I would have just amassed immense quanities of knowledge for myself without doing anything useful or beneficial with that knowledge. Still, I’ve only got one life to live, and if learning makes me happy, I might as well spend my life doing just that. After all, there are certainly worse things that I could do with my existence.

On the other hand, I’d really like financial independence. I love my family, I really do, but I’ve been mooching off them long enough, and I feel embarassed whenever I have to ask for money. If I got a job right out of college, I could (hopefully) get my own place and a car. I could also get a guinea pig. (It sounds like an absurd dream, owning a guinea pig, but I’ve had three of the little furballs ever since I was five, and my last guinea pig died about a year ago. I haven’t bothered to replace him because, being a college student, I’m not in a good position to have pets, but I’m so used to having a guinea pig that I miss my old one.) I also want to have some fun with my life, though I’m not exactly sure what that means. I guess it means not coming home and breaking out the books for the rest of the evening and spending the night curled up with some sort of Norton Anthology of Literature. I guess it means being able to go out and have a few drinks without thinking, “Shouldn’t I be drafting a paper right now?” I guess it means having time to get involved in things that aren’t related to homework. If I got a job right out of college, I could do these things. If I went to graduate school, I’d come out with mountains of debt. Of course, I’d like to get a job that I would enjoy and find meaningful too.

So, right now, I’m stuck between wanting to go to graduate school and wanting to get a job as soon as I get my B. A., and I can’t make up my mind. Most of the time, I just end up feeling worthless and depressed because, unlike my peers, I don’t seem to have any pratical and useful plan that will guide the course of my life. And this is where this summer comes in. This summer, I’d like to get some sort of writing internship. It’s a good plan either way, because it will give me some praticial experience in the job world and it will also look good on a grad school application. Also, if I spend the summer interning and find out that I like it, I’ll probably end up deciding to work right out of college. If I hate interning and spend the entire summer wishing I was back at school, then I’ll know that I’ll probably be better off going to grad school. But until then, there’s really no point in making up my mind one way or the other.

So, New Year’s Resolution: Prepare for this summer, but don’t worry about what’s going to come after it.

Off With Her Head!

This post is a response to The ‘Fat’ Female Body by Samantha Murray, which I will shortly be adding to my Book List. The book is divided into two parts. The first part discusses the history of obesity and its perception as pathological in the medical field. It also discusses the fact that doctors are not as objective as our society presents them to be and that they are just as much influenced by bias and societal values as the rest of us are. The second section of the book discusses the fat acceptance movement. I’ll be discussing that aspect of the book in a later post.

What I’d like to discuss right now is one of the central arguments in Murray’s book. In her book, she rejects the typical Western view of the mind and body, which sees the two as separate entities, for a philosophy that sees the mind and body as the same thing. I have to admit that in her final chapters, when she described this philosophy of the mind and body as one, I was a little bit confused. I found the idea appealing, but it is something so foreign to our mainstream Western way of thinking that it was a little bit difficult for me to grasp. I liked it, but I’m not yet sure if I get it.

Essentially, the Western way of thinking goes like this: the body is a house for the mind, which is the true essence of the self, the identity. Who You Are is in your mind and it has nothing to do with your body. Perhaps, one could compare the body and mind to a hermit crab’s shell. The human body is like a hermit crab’s shell–it is something that can change, it houses and protects the mind/hermit crab, but it is not truly a part of the self. There are contradictions to this way of thinking, and Murray points many of them out. For instance, even though we do not believe that the body is part of the self, we believe that the body reflects the nature of the self. And this is why we have stereotypes about fat people like, Fat people are lazy or Fat people have no self control. We make these judgements about the self based on what we see when we look at the body…and yet we don’t believe that the body is really a part of the self.

The alternative to this view that Murray offers is a view of the body and self as one. After all, we live our lives through our body. Our brain, which is really what our mind is, is part of our body. We experience the world through our body. We shape our world through our body. Instead of alienating ourselves from our bodies, we should be living in our bodies. As I said, I don’t quite understand this concept fully, but I’d like to learn more about it.

I could go into a history of Western ideologies now. I could discuss how Greek culture and philosophy, especially combined with Christianity’s distain for the material world, created this disunity between the mind and body. I could discuss how a basic human fear of death could be associated with the desire to see the self as something that is not attached to the mortal body. I could give a list of reasons why Western society has separated the mind and body.

But I’m not going to. Sorry. Instead, I’m going to discuss how I personally can relate to this distinction between mind and body. It reminds me of a line from Eve Ensler’s The Good Body: “You better work on a brain… or no man will want to fuck you.” Four years ago, when I read that line for the first time, I instantly understood it. Fat girls, ugly girls, girls whose bodies for whatever reason didn’t fit societal standards for beauty were supposed to live outside of their bodies. They were supposed to have good personalities. They were supposed to be funny or smart. They were supposed to have some sort of talent that didn’t involve using their bodies, like painting or writing. In other words, their bodies were seen as useless, but their minds still had a chance, so they were encouraged to reject their bodies and cultivate their minds.

They were also expected to use that personality to attract a significant other, but they were never to expect that someone might be interested in them physicially. I’ve heard so many girls bemoan, “If only he could see past my [insert undesirably body part here]!” In high school, I thought that it would be impossible for a guy to find me physically attractive. And this frustrated me. Despite my very low opinion of myself in my high school years, some deep part of me that knew better longed to have someone find me attractive not just for who I was but how I looked. I wanted someone who would find me beautiful mentally and physically.

But I didn’t believe that I would ever find a person who would be physically interested in me, so I spent most of my time building up my brains. I studied. I got good grades. I learned a lot. When I wasn’t studying, I was reading. When I was reading, I learned a lot. When I wasn’t reading, I was writing. I was one of the best writers in my high school. While other kids whined about trying to come up with enough to write about for a five page paper, I was cranking out thoughtful, insightful, well-researched ten page papers, on top of writing about two-thirds of a novel and filling up journals full of my random (and often angsty) thoughts and poems. Basically, I was smart. But that’s all I was.

Physically, in high school, I didn’t pay too much attention to how I looked. I dressed to make myself invisible–lots of plain t-shirts and jeans, lots of black. I wore my hair long so that it fell in my eyes, as though I was trying to hide my face. I never wore short skirts or shorts. I was terrified of showing my legs to anyone. During summer marching band practices, when the weather was 80 or 90 degrees, I would wear jeans and baggy t-shirts. I wanted to hide my body as much as possible. In gym class, when we had to wear shorts, I wanted to disappear completely. I wanted to disappear even more when we had to do things–running tests, sit up tests, jump rope tests…I always did worse on these tests than everyone else in the class, and I felt humiliated when I saw the tight, smooth legs of the cheerleaders running ahead of me and I felt my own jiggling thighs. In gym class especially my body felt like something worthless to me. I wanted to divorce myself from my body.

My experiences that centered around my body and around my mind were completely different. Whenever I had to do something that required me to use my body, I felt ashamed. I felt like a failure. Whenever I had to do something that required me to use my mind, I felt proud. I felt like a success. My body felt incompetent, but my mind felt competent and capable. To me, my body and mind were opposite poles, disengaged entities. I loved my mind and hated my body. I saw them as two separate things. My body was this fat, flabby, ugly Thing that housed my mind, and my mind was what was really Me.

I often felt like a floating head, because all of the things about me that were important were in my mind. My body was just a machine that kept my mind functioning. My body served the will of my mind. My fingers typed or wrote down my thoughts. My hands held my clarinet in band while my mind read and interpreted the music. My arms carried loads of books from the library, and these books were, of course, meant only for the education or entertainment of my mind.

…Except my body had needs and desires of its own, and it often refused to let my mind ignore them. While I was playing the clarinet, my stomach would be so hungry that I felt like a little person inside my belly was sticking my stomach with pins. (I would skip lunch to go to band.) Sometimes, while I was reading a book about Christian theology or a textbook, I would gradually become aware of warm, tingling sensations between my legs, and those feelings were especially bad. (Eating was okay, but wanting sex was a sin.) There would be days when I would come home from school determined to finish my homework in just a couple hours so that I could spend the rest of the evening working on my novel, but my body would be so exhausted that I would fall asleep, sometimes for hours. (I didn’t sleep well in high school.) My body was always wanting things, always needing things, and my body’s wants and needs almost always seemed to conflict with the wants and needs of my mind.

But then, in college, something in my thinking started to change. I started learning more about feminist theory, which said that the body wasn’t so bad, which encouraged women to get back into their bodies. I discovered the Fat Acceptance movement, which told women to listen to their bodies and stop fighting what their bodies wanted and needed. I started questioning Christianity and learned that this idea of the body as material and therefore sinful was a cultural construction and not an absolute. I also learned a lot of things about myself. I danced for the first time in my life. Also for the first time in my life, I was in a romantic relationship. I started to see my body as a good thing. I started listening to my body and trying not to begrudge it the things that it wanted and needed. I also found myself in a position where, instead of contradicting and opposing each other, my mind and body were complimenting each other. My mind was learning things, things about societal constructs and feminism, that didn’t tell me to alienate my body and see myself as just a floating head. I was also learning things through my body itself, which was a new experience for me.

But, obviously, even that experience hasn’t completely harmonized my mind and body. I’ve spent so much time living through my mind at the expense of my body, that sometimes it’s hard to see myself as a body. It’s hard for me to experience my sense of self through my body. Also, in an academic setting, it’s often easy for me to focus just on my mind and neglect my body. After all, the majority of my experiences in college involve me relating to people on a mental level. My professors care about my mind; not my body. And while I do a lot of physical activities with my friends, we spend most of our time talking, usually about ideas that stem from classes (yes, I’m a nerd). Most of the time, I feel like my mind is more important than my body and the only thing people really care about is my mind. Especially lately, I’ve begun feeling like a floating head again.

And I’ve been wondering about ways that I can begin living through my body again. Some of these are simple, like dressing in ways that are more, well, feminine and that show off my body. However, whenever I dress up, even a little bit, I tend to feel more self-conscious than confident because looking nice is just so different compared to how I normally dress. Other ways that I’ve thought about living through my body again are by starting to exercise more often, although this is also complicated (in ways that I’ll discuss in my next post).

However, from the way Murray seems to discuss living through our bodies (if I’m reading her book correctly), living through our bodies is something that we already do. We are our bodies. We are what our bodies do and what our bodies are. We aren’t disembodied minds that hover inside of our bodies and must somehow merge with the bodies that surround them. We already are our bodies. So, maybe all I have to do is just become more aware of the fact that I am my body and my body is me. I am not a disembodied head.

Church and Agnosticism Revisited

So, I’ve been to church twice this week, once on Christmas eve and again today, and it’s the first time I’ve been since…wow, I can’t remember. Probably sometime in June?

Both experiences were rather tedious. There was nothing that motivated me to return a theistic worldview but there was also nothing that made me incredibly outraged. It was kind of ridiculous in the pastor’s Christmas eve sermon when he spent the first five minutes of the sermon telling us that no one could possibly know what the end of the world was going to be like and then spent the next five minutes of the sermon explaining exactly what the end of the world was going to be like. (I wondered if anyone else in the congregation picked up on that little inconsistency?) I was also a little bit annoyed by a video that he showed during the Christmas eve service. The video was montage of people answering questions about what Christmas meant to them. The implication was that the poor, ignorant souls who gave less spiritual answers like, “Christmas means being together with the family,” or “Christmas means being generous to those around you” were worse off than the righteous souls who gave answers like, “It’s about Jesus’ birth.” Really, what’s wrong with getting meaning out taking time to be with your family or being generous? If that’s all the meaning that some people need to get out of the holiday, what’s wrong with that? That’s certainly all the meaning I got out of it this year, and I must say, it was very fulfilling. It was much more fulfilling than past Christmases, which were often guilt-filled affiars in which everyone around me seemed to be deeply contemplating and appreciating the great sacrifice that God made to come down to earth as a baby. Meanwhile, I felt guilty for not having the happy-fuzzy faith feelings that everyone around me seemed to be getting. Also, the pastor at my church liked to draw parallels between Advent and the end of the world, so Sunday sermons often didn’t focus on the cute image of the coming Nativity scene so much as they were warnings about the end of the world. (Because I used to be a Lutheran, these warnings of the end of the world weren’t nearly as terrifying as the fire-and-brimestone apocalyses that awaited those left behind after the rapture that you hear about in fundementalist churches, but to me, who already spent a good portion of my time worrying about sin and damnation and whether or not Iwas a good person, these warnings about the end of the world really weren’t what I needed to hear.)

The service today also wasn’t spectacular. The sermon was something about trusting God to be compassionate, and this was somehow related to God’s killing of the first born in Egypt so that the Hebrew people could be free from slavery. (Killing an entire nation’s firstborn sons is compassionate?) Obviously, I didn’t pay much attention. I did, however, like the excuse to sing Christmas carols. Even though I don’t believe in their message anymore, I’m so used to hearing them at Christmas time that it just wouldn’t be Christmas without them. I also liked the chance to see people that I’d grown up with, since my family has been attending this church since before I was born. I also enjoyed seeing relatives again. Even if I don’t miss the worldview or the theology, I do sometimes miss the community of church.

Going to church also showed me how much I’ve changed since coming out as a nonChristian this summer. For a while, even though I knew that logically there probably is no God and if there is then this God would not be so petty as to need my eternal devotion to feed his ego, I still felt guilty whenever I went to church (or watched my parents getting ready for church while I stayed at home and read PostSecret on Sunday mornings). I wondered if maybe there was something wrong with me because I’d left the church. I wondered if maybe there was something I wasn’t getting. I felt guilty for hurting my mom for not going to church. I felt guilty for being there and not believing what everyone else there believed. Now, I don’t really care. I went. I sat in a pew. I stood up. I sat down again. I said some words. It didn’t mean much to me, but it was excuse to spend time with my family and that’s what really matters.

I also just realized that it was about a year ago that I became an agnostic. Ironically, it was reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion that pushed me from a vague sort of Universalism to agnosticism, even though Dawkins claims that his book is supposed to convince agnostics to become atheists. I guess I just wasn’t ready for atheism. But this year, I wonder if I might be. Lately, I’ve started thinking of myself as atheist instead of agnostic. Which makes me wonder, where do you draw the line? Where does agnosticism end and atheism begin?

If someone asked me, Is there a god? I’d answer, Probably not. I certainly don’t feel like I need God. I see no evidence to believe in God. Sure, there might be a God, and if I had to guess the nature of this God, I might say that God is comprised of the Universe and Universal laws. But that would be a very materialistic God that’s nothing like the spiritual overlord that so many people see God as. If there is a God, I might also say that it’s something like the Tao, as I understand it, in that it’s not something you can explain but in some ways, it’s better left alone because it’s going to do it’s own thing, so you might as well do yours.

So, where does this answer put me? Am I an atheist or an agnostic? I feel like right now I exist in some sort of grey area between the two, but increasingly, I’ve been feeling as though the label “atheist” is closer to what I am than the label “agnostic.”

Twitards and Fat Cows: What Criticisms of Twilight Reveal About our Society’s Views of Women

First of all, let me make one thing clear: I can’t stand Twilight or the subsequent books that were written by Stephenie Meyer after the success of Twilight. I have not seen the movies, but I hate them too because, if not for them, this fad might have died out sooner, and I wouldn’t have to listen to people gush over going to see the midnight showing of New Moon. But, as I can’t really criticize the movies because I haven’t seen them, I’m going to criticize the books. The books are demeaning to women by telling them that they should lose their sense of self and sacrifice their future for a man. They are also beyond horribly written because they lack the two most basic elements need to create a story–plot and characterization. This isn’t to mention all of the other just plain weird stuff that goes on in them, like all the sexual frustration and borderline pedophilia. I also have nothing against Mormon writers, as I think Orson Scott Card is pretty good, though I disagree with his politics, but Stephenie Meyer goes too far. Or rather, she doesn’t go far enough. There are a few intriguing questions raised in Twilight about vampires’ souls or lackthereof, and even though I don’t believe in souls, for purely philosophical reasons, I would have enjoyed that discussion much more than several hundred pages of: “Edward, I love you! I can’t live without you!” “No, Bella, I love you more! I can’t live without you!” “Have sex with me!” “No! Marry me!” “No!” Instead of using religion to ask some good questions and come up with some at least thought-provoking answers, Meyer decided to reduce religion to an abstinence-only message and a mutual distrust on the part of the Cullen coven (the Mormons) and the Volturi (the Catholic Church).

But there are hundreds of sites out there that will tell you the same thing that I’ve just told you about Twilight. Some will go into a lot more depth and demystify exactly why these plot-less, insipid books are so popular. I actually want to take a critical look at the criticisms of Twilight, and to do so, I would like to direct your attention here. If you haven’t read any such criticisms of Twilight, I recommend Cracked.com’s analysis of it simply because it’s brief, amusing, and says pretty much the same things that other people who don’t like Twilight have said. If you’re already familiar with criticisms of Twilight, you’ll probably enjoy it anyway.

What a lot of criticisms of Twilight claim about the books is that they are the result of one of Stephenie Meyer’s sex dreams and are meant to be a form of soft-core porn for sexually repressed young women and housewives, as well as a “safe” outlook on sexuality for tween girls who are just starting to have exhilerating but also confusing and scary urges of their own while being the objects of equally scary tween boys’ urges. This all makes a lot of sense, especially if you read the books and count how many times Edward’s Adonis-like physical appearance is mentioned (and then lose count of how many times Edward’s Adonis-like physical apperance is mentioned because it is mentioned too many times to count). It also makes sense if you look at the women and girls who are fans of the series, and I’m sure we all know at least one of them, if not more. The criticism seems to be accurate, and the consensus of the critics is that these books are nothing more than outlets for sexually frustrated and/or repressed women/girls. Some people even go so far as to say that Stephenie Meyer herself is sexually frustrated. I can’t remember where, but on one anti-Twilight forum, I read a comment that told Stephenie Meyer that if she lost some weight, she might actually get some and spare the world her pathetic attempts at writing. (I didn’t approve of this comment on two grounds: one, I happen to think that Stephenie Meyer, for all her horrible writing, is actually a very attractive woman, and two, it’s the straw man fallacyand heaven knows you don’t need it because there is plenty to tear apart in those books.)

At the core of this criticism lies a lot of assumptions that our society has about women and their sexuality. The first is the comparisons between Twilight and porn that claim that Twilight is porn because it merely acts as escapism into an unrealistic sexual fantasy. Yeah, that description does fit Twilight. So, what we have here are a bunch of female fans being criticized for enjoying porn. Okay, I really don’t like porn as I think it’s demeaning to women, and that’s a post for another day, but I am sensing a double standard here. I couldn’t find a good statistic on the number of Twilight fans in the Western world, but I’m guessing there are plenty of women out there who aren’t fans of the books or haven’t read them. However, this study shows that there are pratically no men who have not viewed pornography. Female Twilight fans are ridiculed for being turned on by lengthy descriptions of unrealistically perfect Edward Cullen and his stony, cold body. Meanwhile, men everywhere are being turned on by digitally altered and enhanced pictures/videos of models’ enormous breasts and pouty lips, and no one is criticizing these men. No one is calling these men shallow or sexually repressed for watching porn. No one is writing articles or blog posts about how ridiculous or underdeveloped the plots and characters of porn films are. No one is saying that the porn industry in the US does not deserve to make $10 billion dollars a year, while critics begrudge Stephenie Meyer the $5 million dollars that the first Twilight movie made her. (I don’t have any stats on how much she’s made from the books. Sorry.)  Why? Because being turned on by unrealistic fantasies is something that men are allowed to do but women are not.

The criticisms of Twilight also often highlight our society’s taboo on female masturbation. Lots of critics say that the books are nothing more than a masturbatory aid for women or that Stephenie Meyer was fingering herself the whole time she wrote them. This may or may not be the case, I really don’t know, but the fact is that women are being criticized for masturbating. Men masturbating, however, is considered a fact of life–something normal and natural and expected. When women masturbate, however, people think that there is something wrong with them. For instance, to reference the straw man argument about Stephenie Meyer’s weight earlier, one assumes that she is so fat that she can’t get anyone to sleep with her, so she has been reduced to jerking off to her own books. Men are never critcized like this, at least not that I’m aware. If a man masturbates, no one assumes that there is something wrong with him and that he can’t get anyone to sleep with him. He’s just a man being a man. When women masturbate, it’s because they’re desperate.

So, while the criticisms of Twilight go a long way in explaining just everything that is wrong with this series, they also reveal our society’s double standards for men and women’s sexualities. Mainly, if Twilight is porn, then when women like porn, they are stupid and silly and the porn that they are enjoying is criticized for its lack of plot and characterization. When men like porn, however, they are, well, just men, and if the porn video that they are watching happens to have a bad plot and bad characterization, they weren’t watching it for those things to begin with. If a woman masturbates, then she must be doing so because there is something wrong with her that keeps her from getting a sexual partner. If a man masturbates, however, he is just being a normal, healthy man. And I think that these double standards might give us yet another clue as to why the Twilight books have become so popular.  

In our society, women are constantly being judged by men. Even when men aren’t around, women wonder what men think of them. They look in the mirror and view their bodies through the lens of the internalized male gaze. They view their behavior through the lens of patriarchal myths of who and what women should be. They put on masks to make themselves more acceptable in the male institutions of out society, be they coroporate or religious or governmental institutions. Women, whether they are conscious of it are not, are living in a man’s world, and rarely do they find a man who sees them as a human being and who lets them be who they are outside of society’s expectations for them. Rarely do they find a man who loves them instead of judging them, who is gentle to them instead of critical of them. Rarely do they find a man who wants the best for them instead of insisting that they be at their best for him.

And then, these women find Twilight on their bookstore and library shelves. They take it home for a bit of light reading, and suddenly they can’t put it down because here is Edward Cullen, who isn’t like all the other men. Edward Cullen tells them that they are beautiful, even though they’re sure that they’re plain and unattractive. Edward Cullen tells them that he loves them for who they are. Edward Cullen finds their weaknesses adorable and doesn’t expect them to always be strong and stoic.

Granted, Edward Cullen is also something of a stalker, who will climb up to your window and watch you sleep. He will want to suck your blood until you die. He will treat you like a pet at best and like a member of his own personal cult at worst, because he likes to control where you go and who you see. He will deny you your own sexuality. He will whine and pout when you don’t do what he wants. And he will tell you that he knows better than you how to run your life and your decisions. He’s not at all empowering to women. He’s pretty terrible, but at face value and through Bella’s eyes, he is wonderful, and this is only as far as most women go with the series. When it comes to fulfilling immediate needs for acceptance, belonging, and love, a lot of women are willing to take the chilling comfort of Edward Cullen’s arms over the difficult and often exhausting struggle for empowerment.

I’m not saying that Twilight fans are stupid for wanting a little comfort. I’m saying that it’s understandable why they would want that comfort and be willing to take it from an obsessive control-freak, who at least on the surface seems nice. The reason that Twilight fans fall under Edward’s spell is one of the same reasons why many women fall under the spell of abusive men–low self-esteem. In a society that is critical of them because they are women, that constantly measures them against all the ideas of what they should be and does not allow them to freely be who they are, a lot of women are insecure. They want someone special, they want a special, sparkling superman (who, because of his superhuman strength is a man above all other men and therefore the most qualified to judge and whose judgements must be respected by other men) to tell them that their insecurities are silly, that they are loveable just the way they are, and that they are physically gorgeous. Society never tells them this. Patriarchy ideology never tells them this. But Edward Cullen does, and for a moment they feel confident, loved, and beautiful…until they remember that he’s just a boy in a book.

While Edward might be a band-aid that covers up the problems of women’s insecurities, he is hardly the cure. Overall, he does more damage than he does good, by giving young women unrealistic and undesirable aspirations for their (future) boyfriends. (One could argue that porn does the same thing for young men and their girlfriends.) What we need are messages for young women that tell them to feel confident in who they are as they are. We need messages that affirm them as human beings who deserve to be loved and respected instead of needing to grovel to the dictates of Edward Cullen in order to be rewarded with love and respect. We need to teach girls that telling themselves that they are beautiful is as affirming or even more affirming than having a boy tell them that they’re beautiful. And we also need to help these girls come into their own as sexual beings free from double standards and without the repressive messages (“your sexuality is bad and wrong and you need me to control it for you”) from Edward Cullen. If we are ever able to overcome these problems in society, we will no longer need Twilight.

A Nonreligious Hymn for Materialists!

One of the things that I miss about Christianity (or just being religious in general) is the symbolism and ritual. I miss looking at a cross and getting that warm fuzzy feeling. I miss going to church and feeling connected to everyone in the congregation as we all recited the same liturgy, even though when the service was over, I really had no deep emotional or mental meaningful connections to the majority of the people in the congregation. I miss the comfort that cames with the recitation of prayers, even if I didn’t always feel like someone was listening to those prayers. I miss the little reminders everyday that seemed special and made me think about the “deeper” meanings of life (which really weren’t all that deep, in retrospect, but they seemed deep and meaningful at the time). I miss the reminders that I was a special person with a Big Daddy and Big Brother up in heaven looking down on me. While I feel that by giving those things up, I have gained so much more–the ability to see the world as it really is and shape my worldviews accordingly, the freedom to choose my own morality based on what I believe to be true and right and not based on a book written thousands of years ago that is, mostly, no longer applicable to contemporary life, and the ability to see myself as a human being who has worth simply because I am alive and part of the universe and whose worth is not dependent on the whims of a petty diety–there are still times when I miss the simplicity and connection that Christianity gave me.

One of the things that I miss are the hymns. I was never terribly crazy about a lot of the old hymns or the contemporary worship songs that sounded like mediocre pop love songs written to Jesus, but there were a few songs that really grabbed me. Music has always been something that gets me through the day. It can completely transform my mood with just a few chords. It can alter my perspective on bad situations and make me reconsider things that I would never rethink otherwise. It can encourage me to continue overcoming my struggles. It can build my self-esteem and remind me to love myself, even when I don’t feel so loveable. There were a few hymns and worship songs that did that for me, and though the meaning behind them was significant to me, the act of singing them was even more significant. I’ve found that simply singing, of feeling the emotions in a song in my diaphragm, lungs, and vocal chords, can allow me to release or change my emotions. It’s quite a powerful experience. And I also like songs because they let me know that I am not the only one who has felt these emotions and struggled with them. So, I liked singing in church. I liked singing Christian songs even when I wasn’t in church. I liked replaying their lyrics and chords and melodies in my mind when I needed them.

And for the most part, now, those songs just don’t have the same meanings to me and they don’t have the same emotional effects. I listen to them, and instead of being overcome by their beauty or meaning, I just think about how I don’t agree with their worldview and why I don’t agree with their worldview. Instead of being a part of them, I argue with them. I don’t mean to think this way about them, but I do. And I have yet to find a nonreligious counterpart to hymns and worship songs that I can connect to in the same way that I used to connect to Christian music. There are a few songs that sort of fill the gap, like Sting’s “All This Time” and  Ani DiFranco’s “What if No One’s Watching?” but those songs don’t seem to be quite the same.

However, last night at a Philosophy Club meeting, I heard a song  that sounds like the sort of thing I’ve been looking for. It’s called “We Are All Connected,” and it electronically turns scientists’ marvelings about the universe into a song. It’s quite beautiful, and you can check it out here. They also has the upperhand on “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” or “God of Grace and God of Glory” in that they have a good beat and you can probably dance to them. Listening to this song last night gave me the warm and yet wonderous feeling that I used to get in church while singing with the congregation and listening to the organ.

Really, I think atheists, agnostics, and de-converts need some sort of system of ritual and symbolism. Unfortunately, when most of us think “ritual” and “symbolism,” we think organized religion and all of the problems that come with it. But a little ritual and symbolism, as long as it is never seen an unchangeable and absolute, isn’t a bad thing. And while personal rituals and sign systems can be fulfilling, personally, I like feeling connected to other people through shared beliefs, understandings, and actions. Knowing that someone out there put together a song that reflects a worldview that most of us share is comforting and encouraging.

PS I’ve updated my Book List, if you care to check it out!

Speaking Up

I am not, by nature, a shy person. I love to talk. I especially love to voice my opinions. I also love picking apart other people’s arguments and criticizing them. This usually serves me pretty well, especially in classes based on theory.

However, last quarter, I found myself in a theory class that was unexpectedly difficult. It was Classical Social Theory, it was an upper level class, and I, a newly declared sociology minor, had found myself surrounded by seasoned seniors who had four years of sociology training and were ready to go on to graduate school. It was more than a little overwhelming. For the first time in my life, I thought about dropping a class. I wasn’t sure I could handle it.

Fortunately, the professor of the class encouraged me to try it at least until the first exam, on which I did very well. That should have been encouragement to me, as I’m willing to bet that I did better on the exams than some of the seniors and the majors. I’m also willing to bet that I put more thought into the material than some of them (to keep up with them, I had to). However, the fact that they were seniors, that they’d taken more classes than I had, and that I was outside of my comfort zone, made me freeze up in class. Usually, in discussion-based classes, I don’t shut up. In this class, I hardly said anything.

And I regret that now, because in retrospect, I had a lot of good observations and opinions. I also shouldn’t have been afraid of speak up, even if what I said was wrong, because at least I would have learned something. I should have had more confidence in myself.

Moral of the story: don’t be afraid to say what you think, even if you don’t feel qualified. As long as you’re humble enough to listen to what other people say too and accept constructive criticism, you can’t say anything wrong.

Long Time, No Blogging

Wow! I can’t believe how long it’s been since I last posted. I blame my disappearance on an insanely busy quarter, in which I had to write several rather long papers (one of which is about women’s body image. I may be posting that one in installments). However, this quarter appears to be less busy, and I’m hoping to get back to posting on a somewhat regular basis. I’m also taking a nonfiction writing class, which I’m hoping will motivate me to post more often.