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.

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.

The Beauty of Serenity

Even though I’ve just completed my first day of classes for this year and have a lot of homework that I could be working on, I chose to write. I’ve also just started an ESL tutoring job, and as I was waiting in the library for students to show up (if they feel the need to, and I doubted that they would on the first day of classes), I was overcome by the silence of it. Usually this silence makes me melancholy, but tonight it seems peaceful. I found myself writing about it in a creative and all-consuming way that I haven’t experienced for a while. I’m not sure if the silence helped me do that or the fact that I feel like I have enough distance on some things to be honest about them now. Anyway, I felt like posting what I came up with:

The Beauty of Serenity

There’s something about being alone in a library. Nothing rivals the total silence of it. It puts one in mind of graveyards and catacombs. It’s a sad silence. The sort of silence that lets you know that there is no one else there except the dusty books, some of which have not been checked out in decades and have become prey to the silverfish and dust mites. But it’s a peaceful silence too. While it’s infinitely sad, it’s also infinitely peaceful. There is nothing that needs to be done. One can be totally alone and absorbed in one’s thoughts or one can absorb one’s self in the thoughts of some of history’s greatest thinkers.

I have connections with this library that I never imagined, and yet the memories rush back to me as I sit here. I remember wandering the floors and shelves as a freshman, just because I wanted to get to know this place—get lost in it. I didn’t want to have someone show me where everything was or look up the books on the computer’s catalogue. I wanted to discover them! By the time my freshman orientation class took a tour of the library, I already knew it.

 And now it knows me, too. It knows my past.  The room diagonal from the one in which I now sit is where R___ and J___ and I worked on our modern poetry project. I remember discovering the feminist theory section upstairs and reveling in it. I remember feeling lost and heartbroken this time last year as I wandered the humor section and hoped to find something that would make me laugh myself to sleep instead of cry. I remember searching the shelves desperately for anything that would help me with my medieval literature project. I checked out over a dozen books, hoping that at least one of them would help me create a thesis. I remember A__ teaching C___, S____, and I how to do somersaults up on the third floor. I remember when I broke my laptop and the computer lab became my haven. And even when I got a new laptop, my printer still didn’t work, so I rushed to the lab at least once every week, before classes started, so I could print out my religion seminar papers.

 I remember slogging through a project on Shaw with E____ and N___ and L____ and I can’t remember who else. I remember desperately wanting to leave, to be done. I thought Shaw was sort of nuts, but he was crazy in a way that occasionally made sense. I remember a quote from Major Barbara, “You have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion that doesn’t fit the facts. Well scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit.” That quote terrified me when I heard it because I knew that it was true. The deepest part of my being knew that my religion was a lie, and yet my mind trembled at the thought of a life without Christ. On these library shelves, in the theology section, I searched in vain for a book that would reveal a goddess in Christianity for me, a book that would redeem Christianity for me. I found nothing. Later, when I was no longer afraid, I found answers in the atheist section, right next to the books on theology. This was the library that gave me Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, which I devoured at the expense of homework and sleep.

 This is the library that gave me a reason to hold my head up high. It gave me the works of Naomi Wolf, whose writing seemed to justify my existence. Her books made me feel human and explained the world to me in a way that I had never dared imagine. The Beauty Myth made me feel vindicated in my own skin. Promiscuity validated my sexuality.

It was here that I also found entertainment—The Forty Year Old Virgin, Superbad, on DVD and free for the taking. It was here that I made my boyfriend swear to watch Lord of the Rings for the first time with me. He never kept that promise, and sitting here, remembering his arm around my waist that night, I know that it was right that he never kept that promise. I am not the same girl who asked him to make that promise. I am at peace, as peaceful as the stillness that surrounds me now in the silence of the library.

 The gentle chirping of cicadas and other night insects is only a background humming in tune with my computer and the clicking of the keyboard. There is an emptiness here. I feel as though the walls are longing to vibrate with a silent echo. Ever since my freshman year, I have vowed, on the last day of my senior year, to run through the halls of this building as I scream like a woman running from the reaper. When my mind is full of worries, the silence suffocates me. It forces me to be alone with myself, when I most need the connection, the comfort, of another human voice.

 And yet tonight, the silence is exquisite. It is a rare gem that has always lain at my feet, yet this is the first time I have paused to examine it. It is beautiful, so beautiful that it makes me sad, yes, but sadness is a gentle one. Soon it will pass. Soon I will be outside again, with the buzzing cicadas and the shouts and laughter of friends around a bonfire. Then, I will relish the crackling branches and rumble of voices. But right now, I will sit in the quiet. Alone and content, I will contemplate the beauty of serenity.