Contradictions: Feminism, Philosophy, and Fat Acceptance

This is my second post dealing with Samantha Murray’s The ‘Fat’ Female body. In my previous post, I discussed Murray’s assertion that instead of seeing ourselves as two separate parts: a body and a mind (our true selves) that exists inside that body, we need to see ourselves as our bodies. And it is in this assertion that Murray brings up some important contradictions in the Fat Acceptance movement. Now, I want to start off by saying that I think the Fat Acceptance movement is great. It’s done a lot for me and for women (and men) everywhere. It’s given fat people a sense of community and pride and a reason to love ourselves, and heaven knows we need that.

But, the Fat Acceptance movement isn’t perfect, and I could help responding with, “Yes! This is what I’ve been thinking!” whenever I came across certain passages of Murray’s book that note contradictions in the Fat Acceptance movement. I don’t think that Murray sees the Fat Acceptance movement as negative and unredeemable because of these contradictions. I think she’s merely pointing out some inconsistencies in the movement, though she admits that she’s unsure as to how they should be addressed.

The first relates to the idea that we are our bodies and not minds that are merely housed in our bodies. This is an idea that the Fat Acceptance movement attempts to promote. It encourages women to live in their bodies, to embrace and celebrate their bodies exactly as they are. And this is a good thing. The contradiction arises in how women are encouraged to live in their bodies–they are encouraged to change their minds about their bodies. They are encouraged to (to the best of their abilities, anyway) throw off all societal and cultural judgements of their bodies and love their bodies exactly as they are. Thus, the self is seen as a mind that operates independently of society and the body, and yet the self is also portrayed as a part of the body.

This leads to another inconsistency between the Fat Acceptance movement and society, and my pointing out this inconsistency will undoubtably surprise no one. Here it is: our society doesn’t like fat people. It looks down on them. It especially looks down on fat women. You all already knew that. But the fact is, we are products of our society. Sure, we can also have an effect on society, but it’s impossible for us to completely extract ourselves from society and society’s values. Think about it in terms of race for a moment. It’s been centuries since we did away with slavery in America. It’s been decades since we outlawed segregation. Yet racism still persists. People are still prejudiced and they still discriminate. We are all taught that we should accept everyone, yet we don’t. We’re all a little bit racist, even though we wish we weren’t. This doesn’t mean that we are just powerless creations of our society. We can change these values, but at the same time, we can’t escape them.

And just as a person in a racial minority can’t escape our societal values that see white as good and nonwhite as bad, so fat people can’t escape the societal values that see fat as bad and thin as good. We can’t escape our own society, and we also can’t escape the socialization that teaches us, from a very young age, that fat is bad and thin is good. So, while we might decide to change our minds about our bodies and love them as they are, the wider society is not going to change its mind about fat bodies anytime soon. And, honestly, neither are we. We’re always going to be stuck with the socialization that tells us that fat is bad and thin is good. This idea is always going to be in our minds. We might be able to contradict it. We might be able to try to relearn new ideas about our bodies. We might get close, but we’re never going to completely free ourselves from the wider values of society.

This doesn’t mean that we should completely give up. Just as society affects us, we also affect society, and we can change the way society views fat people, but this change is going to be gradual. It’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s probably not going to happen in our lifetime, unfortunately. In the meantime, the contradiction between the Fat Acceptance movement’s dictum to love your body exactly as it is and society’ dictum to have a thin, acceptable, “healthy” body is going to be in conflict not just between the Fat Acceptance movement and society but also within the individuals who subscribe to the Fat Acceptance movement.

The third contradiction is between Fat Acceptance and feminism. Now, I would certainly agree that fat is a feminist issue. How our society feels towards fat women says a lot about how our society views women’s desires and appetites and needs and bodies and sexualities. It says a lot. And the Fat Acceptance movement attempts to empower women. But empower them to do what? To wear tight dresses and mini-skirts? To flirt and dance? To see themselves as attractive before the ever-present male gaze? Okay, those aren’t the only things that the Fat Acceptance movement is about, but you’re got to admit that those things are all part of Fat Acceptance. And, personally, I think they’re a great part of Fat Acceptance. As a girl who spent the better part of puberty wishing she could wear shorts and mini-skirts, when someone came along and told me that it was okay for me to show off my legs or wear thongs, I certainly felt empowered. I felt like my deepest Christmas wish was being granted. But who was the intended viewer of those legs that I was now free to show off? Men. In many ways, the Fat Acceptance movement is encouraging women to subject themselves to the male gaze. It’s encouraging women to dress to attract men. It’s encouraging women to see themselves as incomplete unless they have a man.

Obviously, there are answers to these contradictions. And I’m going to address those answers in the opposite order in which I raised the contradictions. And I also want to point out that, while I’m answering these contradictions, I don’t think that my answers completely erase these contradictions.

The easiest contradiction to deal with is that of the contradiction between Fat Acceptance and Feminism. First of all, I would point out that Fat Acceptance isn’t just about telling fat girls to wear sexy clothes. But even if it were, society sees fat girls as asexual. In fact, I would argue that society sees fat girls as unworthy of having sexual desires. Society sees fat girls who are “foolish” enough to have sexual desires, to expect men (or other women) to see them as sexual women, are ridiculous. They are objects of ridicule and comedy. So, in giving women back their sexuality, the Fat Acceptance movement is empowering them. I would also argue that just because a woman allows herself to be the object of a man’s sexual desire does not mean that she’s subjecting herself to the patriarchal heirarchy that commands her to submit to the male gaze. Everyone, at some point, wants to be the object of someone else’s sexual desire. This goes for men and women. However, if in submitting to being the object of someone else’s sexual desire, a woman is entering into a relationship that is based on equality and mutual respect, if the desire is to discover the other person as a sexual being and not to dominate the other person, then there is nothing wrong with a woman being the object of a man’s sexual desire. I would also point out that the Fat Acceptance movement is not constrained to straight women but also extends to lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered women. In helping fat women see themselves as sexual beings, the Fat Acceptance movement is empowering women, because if women cannot see themselves as sexual beings, then they cannot truly be themselves. I would also argue that the Fat Acceptance movement is not so much trying to reverse the societal value of fat equals bad, thin equals good to fat equals good, thin equals bad, so much as the Fat Acceptance movement is trying to make our society see all bodies of every size as acceptable and beautiful. I have my doubts as to whether or not our society is able and ready to accept a plurality of things as good and step outside of the binaries that it’s so entrenched in, but the goal is admirable. So, in many ways, the Fat Acceptance movement is compatible with feminist values.

Secondly, there is the contradiction between the Fat Acceptance movement and the wider society. I honestly don’t know a way around this one, I’m sorry. I struggle with it constantly when I hear my friends talk about losing weight, when I hear people making fatophobic comments, when I hear men putting down fat women…It’s hard. There are lots of times when I just want to borrow some friends’ diet books and stop eating for a while. There are lots of times when I want to buy into the diet industry’s promise of a thinner, healthier, more beautiful me. There are times when I want to just give up on the FA movement. There are days when I look in the mirror and recoil at what I see, and even though I try to tell myself that I’m beautiful, a little voice in the back of my head snorts, “Huh. Yeah right!” There are even days when I just don’t bother looking in the mirror because I don’t want to see myself. Those are the days when I give in to what society says about fat people and I end up hating my body and feeling miserable. Even on the days when I feel great about myself and I feel like I look wonderful, I know that most of the people around probably aren’t going to share that perception of my body.

However, while there is a great disparity between the views of the Fat Acceptance movement and the views of society at large, the Fat Acceptance movement is trying to change those views. Just like racial minorities can internalize the prejudice that society has for them, just like homosexuals can internalize homophobia, so fat people can and often do internalize the fat hatred that society has for us. Maybe a part of us will always wish to be skinny, but that doesn’t mean that it is also impossible for us to love our bodies. For all the days there are when I look in the mirror and think that I’m hideous, there are also days when I look in the mirror and think I look pretty damn good. I’m able to reconceptualized fat because the Fat Acceptance movement is attempting to promote a new way of seeing fat bodies.

And it is this word “reconceptualize” that leads me to address the final contradiction that Murray addresses. There is a contradiction in the Fat Acceptance movement between living in and through our bodies and in telling women that they must change their minds about their bodies. And in many ways, this is how the fat acceptance movement takes hold in women’s lives. Maybe a fat woman happens upon a blog post or a book that tells her that when she looks in the mirror, instead of thinking, “Fat, ugly!” she should think, “Beautiful.” Maybe she tries it a few times and feels silly. Maybe, as she keeps trying it, she begins to feel better about herself. As she begins to accept her body mentally, she can also begin to move into her body physically. When women feel as though their bodies are wrong or bad or ugly or undesirable, they are not going to be able to live in their bodies. When they think of themselves, they will always think of a thinner version of themselves, as though that is their real self. But when they are able to accept their bodies, to reconceptualize them as beautiful and good and desirable, they are able to see themselves as they are in their body right now. Yes, I will admit that changing one’s mind about one’s body is not the same as living in and through one’s body, but it opens up the possibility of living in and through one’s body, which one cannot do if one’s body is reduced to an object of repulsion. Yes, this view still upholds the idea that the mind and body are separate, but in an almost paradoxal way, this view also attempts to unite the mind and the body.

As I said, in answering these contradictions, I’m not saying that I’m trying to deny that they’re there or that my arguments will make them go away. They are still there and they still need to be considered. But, regardless of these contradictions, the fat acceptance movement, I believe, still needs to keep doing what it’s doing. It’s trying to undermine stereotypes about fat people. It’s trying to empower fat people. It’s trying to make our society see fat in new ways. Sure, maybe the movement isn’t perfect, but no movement for social change is. Samantha Murray’s book, then, gives fat activists some food for thought–some things to consider about the movement that can make it stronger and very well might need to be changed. But in the meantime, I don’t think that Murray is trying to discourage the fat acceptance movement. It has its flaws, but that does not mean that still isn’t a force for empowering fat people and changing the ways in which our society views fat.

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.

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!

Flying Pink Elephants and the Church of Good Music

So, where I last left my de-conversion story, I explained how learning about other religions made me seriously doubt that Christianity could contain the entire truth. I felt as though religion was culturally constructed and not something that was absolute. At that point in my life, though, I wasn’t ready to give up the idea of God. For a while, I was a universalist. I believed that all religions were just ways of people getting in touch with what was essentially the same deity. This deity went by different names, but I believed that all religions were just human constructs to allow people to have access to the same God.

There are some people who can just stop there. Universalism works fine for them and they are happy believing that all Gods are more or less the same. My problem with universalism was that it is very difficult to put a face on such a transcendent God. Think about it: if all of the gods from an incredibly diverse array of religions are really all just manifestations of the same God, then that God has got to be able to transcend all of the millions (billions?) of religions in the world. This God has also got to be able to transcend pretty much all of human understanding. I didn’t feel like I could grasp that kind of God. How could I pray to such a God? How could I possibly know what such a God was like?

Because knowing this God was so difficult for me, I slowly stopped praying. I went through my days and realized that I could actually get along just fine without God. And this is how I came to be an agnostic. I felt like God was the pink elephant thought experiment I’d done in a philosophy class.

The thought experiment goes like this: Suppose that there is a tiny pink elephant flying in your room. This elephant is invisible. It cannot be detected by the senses in any way. You can’t smell it, see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or measure it. How do you know that the elephant is there? How can you interact with the elephant? You can’t. You really can’t even know that the elephant is there at all. You can’t prove the elephant’s existence, but conversely, you can’t prove its nonexistence. What do you do? Well, the practical thing to do would be to go about your life as if there were no elephant.

This is sort of the way that I feel about a transcendent God. If God transcends all human understanding, then how exactly can we interact with this God? How would we even know that this God exists? We don’t. We can’t prove this God’s existence, but we can’t prove this God’s nonexistence either. However, it seems to me that the practical thing to do is to go about life as if there were no God.

And yet, sometimes I wonder if it would have been easier for my friends and family if I would have stopped at universalism. I probably would have been more open to going to a Unitarian Universalist church, and I feel like my parents would be a bit happier if I were attending some sort of church. I’m also surrounded by a culture that declares that everyone must believe in something, even if that something isn’t the Christian God. I also feel like it would easier to break the news that I’m not a Christian to my friends. I could have told them that I at least believed in God.

I’m also wondering if I missed out on something by giving up on the Christian God and just God in general. I know that it probably has more to do with the fact that I want to make my parents happy than my actually feeling discontented with life as an agnostic. I feel like a girl who has broken up with her boyfriend and now that she’s not with him anymore, she’s remembering all of the good times and forgetting all of the bad times, which were why she broke up with him in the first place. Inevitably, I know that if I started going back to church, I’d end up just as disgusted with Christianity’s intolerance as I was before. Still, I feel like I ought to believe in something.

I was thinking about this in my car today, and I realized that I do believe in something. I am a firm believer that, no matter how bad I feel, if I listen to a good CD while I’m driving and sing along to it, I will feel better. Perhaps I could make a religion out of this belief. It chief deities will be a trinity of my three favorite singers. Since two of those three singers are women, I guess it will be a matriarchal religion. Under these three singers will be a series of lesser gods and goddesses, who are all of the others artists whose music I enjoy. This religion’s canon will be compiled of all of the songs that these artists have written. It will state that the human condition is one of joy, love, frustration, and sadness, and whatever the situation, there is a song by one of these gods or goddesses that will express exactly what the adherent is feeling.

These facetious thoughts cheered me up, but they also reminded me of something that I once wondered about religions. I once had the thought that the reason that there are so many religions might be because each individual person has their own needs and different religions fulfill different needs. Perhaps this is why Christianity works so well for some people, but Buddhism or Islam is a better fit for other people. Perhaps this is why no religion at all suits some people just fine. Just like not everyone will like the same singers that I do, not everyone is going to like the same religions and worldviews that other people share. This is why I think that it’s ridiculous to take an exclusivist view of religion. (Exclusivism is the view that only one religion has the absolute truth and that all other religions are completely false. Only adherents of the one true religion will be rewarded by God in the afterlife, and everyone else, no matter who they are or how they have lived their lives, will suffer eternal punishment.) Considering all of the different kinds of people that there are in this world, all with their individual needs and hopes and desires, there is no way that just one religion can satisfy every single person in the world.

At the same time, however, nonreligious people can’t expect that no religion will be a good fit for everybody. Some people need religion. Some people don’t. And there has to be a way for these different kinds of people to somehow get along with each other. As I said in my last post, I’d like to be part of the force that helps these people get into dialogue with each other. I’m just not sure how to do it, but any suggestions would be welcome.

A Deconstructive Reclamation of the Postmodern Paradigm from Richard Dawkins’s “Postmodernism Disrobed” (Or, to put it without the jargon, “My Response to Richard Dawkins’s ‘Postmodernism Disrobed'”)

Okay, I will agree with Dawkins that people do like to throw the word “postmodernism” around a lot these days, especially in stuffy academic circles. Had I never traversed outside the walls of my own university, I would say that this is not true, but unfortunately I have met such people who love to throw the world “postmodern” around without the slightest interest in what it actually means. (At the Associated Writing Programs Conference in Chicago this year, I went to a panel discussion entitle “The Postmodern Poetics of Form” and heard all of the academics on the panel discuss poetic form in a way that was the complete opposite of postmodern.) And these people are giving the rest of us postmodernists a bad name. And, just to show that I do actually know what I’m talking about when I use the term “postmodern,” because I’ve done it quite a bit already, I feel like I ought to explain it right now.  

 However, I can understand why Dawkins and many other people think that postmodernism is utter nonsense. For instance, I completely agree with Dawkins that people who go around claiming that scientific formulas are inherently patriarchal have no idea what they’re talking about. Scientific formulas, I will be the first to say, are not inherently feminist or patriarchal. They simply are what they are. Now, the field of science, I would argue, is patriarchal. Any sociologist will tell you that though there is no reason why girls should not be as adept at science and math as boys, girls are given disadvantages if they want to go into a science or math related field. However, this has to do with society’s view of girls and boys and it has nothing to do with the scientific theories themselves. There has been a lot of pseudoscience that has, in the past, been propagated in order to uphold the patriarchy, but objective science has actually done feminism a favor by disproving these theories. (For instance, people actually used to believe that the uterus floated around a woman’s body and, when it reached her brain, caused her to go into hysterical fits. This was why women were seen as unable to be as rational or smart as men. Fortunately thanks to science, we now have a much more accurate view of the female anatomy and we can throw out that absurd idea.)

 Finally, I will also agree with Dawkins that people who try to make postmodernism into a science by applying mathematical equations to it are completely out of their league. Postmodernism belongs in the fields of literary studies, philosophy, art, religion and the social sciences. It is not a mathematical principle. I can’t even begin to fathom how anyone could even think of turning it into one, but, according to Dawkins, someone has. I can only say that that is completely impossible. You simply cannot do it and hope to come up with something that actually makes sense. In this understanding, Dawkins and I are in agreement.

 Okay, so now that I’ve said what postmodernism is not, let’s look at what it is. I won’t lie, it is kind of complicated, but I’ll try to break it down as best I can.

 I’ll start out with a definition. Postmodernism, as defined to me by several of my professors, is a way of viewing the world in which we admit that we cannot know the entire Truth because of the perspectives of ideologies that surround us. Miriam-Webster’s Dictionary puts it more simply by saying that it is “a theory that involves radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language.”

 Now, I’d better define truth. Yes, according to postmodernism, there is no one absolute Truth. Instead, the world is made up of various truths that are largely influenced by our ideologies. (And according to Wikipedia, an ideology is defined as “a set of beliefs, aims and ideas… a comprehensive vision, a way of looking at things, as in common sense…”.) These truths, though, are not scientific truths. Scientific truths are in a completely different category than the truths that postmodernism is concerned with. The truths that postmodernism is interested in are cultural or societal truths, in ideologies. (The reason that scientific truths do not fall into this category is because they are true, no matter what culture you might be a part of. The Earth rotates around the sun whether you were raised in medieval English culture, contemporary American culture, or ancient Mayan culture.) For instance, in a patriarchal society such as our own, it would be “true” that women are naturally meant to be housewives and mothers and men are naturally meant to be breadwinners and the heads of households.

 This is not to say that postmodernism throws rationality out the window. After all, if that were the case, then there would be no point in my being a feminist. Postmodernism does not say that all truths are equally valid. (In fact, it makes no judgment at all about which truths are better than others. According to postmodernism, these truth just are, and the ideologies that one ascribes to assign value to these truths.) You can still be a postmodernist and argue that your truth is the better truth. However, as a postmodernist, you would recognize that just because you might see women as equal to men to be true does not mean that everyone would agree with you that it is true.

 Postmodernism also sees these truths as human constructs. In other words, these truths are not true because they are “natural” or because some superior being, like God, decreed that they were true. They are true because humans decided that they were true. But, if humans changed their minds and decided that something different were true, well, that would become the new truth. Yes, in this sense, truth is relative. Yes, it also sounds a bit like Orwell’s 1984. But I’ll try to explain it with an example:

 In the Middle Ages, women were viewed as inferior to men. There were economic, social, and religious reasons for this and they were all relative. However, people didn’t admit that these reasons were relative. Instead, they tried to pass them off as absolute. Women were inferior because God said so. Women were inferior for some natural reason. Because women were viewed as inferior, they were treated as inferior. And, really, for all intents and purposed, they were inferior to men. Fast forward several hundred years to the feminist movement, which realized that there is nothing inherently inferior about women. Women are not inferior because God says so. There is no natural reason why women should be regarded as inferior to men. The only reason that they are seen as inferior is because people have decided that they should be. If we get people to view women as equal to men, then they will be treated as equal to men. And, for all intents and purposes, they will be equal to men. And, yes, when we change our ideological perspectives, we do have a habit of changing our histories, just like 1984. Think about history books. Just a few decades ago, the idea of including things like women who dressed up as men and joined the army during the American Civil war would have been preposterous. However, more recent history books tend to have sections about women’s roles and contributions to certain historical eras.

 So, yes, we do change things like history. However, we don’t change it in quite the same way that Orwell’s Party does. The Party completely rewrites history to suit itself. However, including, for example, a section in a history book about women’s roles during the American Civil War is not completely rewriting history. Instead, it is expanding the focus of the history textbook to include aspects of history that a more patriarchal society might have ignored. Postmodern feminists who want such perspectives included in history books are not saying that we should just invent stories about women who have made contributions to history in order to make women seem equal to men. (This is what an Orwellian Party would do.) Instead, they are arguing that women have made very important contributions to history and these contributions should be included in history books because women’s contributions to history are just as important as men’s.

 If you’ve followed me thus far and don’t have a headache yet, you’re probably wondering, What is the practical value of postmodernism? So what if truth is just a collection of whatever ideologies happen to be in vogue? Well, the practical value of postmodernism is that when we realize that many of the truths that we take for granted to be universal are, in fact, subjective, we can examine them and try to make them better. (Again, this is not to say that we completely discard logic, reason, rationality and ethics.)

 From postmodernism, we get ideas like religious pluralism, and if the religions of the world want to stop fighting with each other and regain some respect, then religious pluralism is the only route, that I can see, to accomplish this. Religious pluralism’s goal is not to assert that its doctrines are true or right. It is not concerned with absolute religious truth. Instead, its goal is understanding. For example, a Christian religious pluralist would not meet a Muslim and immediately think, “A nonbeliever! I must convert him/her! My religion is the only true religion!” The Christian religious pluralist’s goal would instead be to understand Islam, to understand why the Muslim practiced Islam, to understand the tenants of Islam, and to see the world from the Muslim’s point of view. In this sense, I would argue that religious pluralism attempts to create a feeling of empathy between people of different religions. And empathy is something that is greatly needed between religious people in the world today.

 This is only one example of the practicality of postmodernism. My feminist examples throughout have, I hope, provided another example. Queer theory and the GBLTA movement would be another instance in which postmodernism would have a practical application. Postcolonialism is another. In fact, postmodernism, with its emphases on reevaluating truths and on understanding, is applicable in just about any situation in which one comes into contact with people who are different in some way.

 What I’ve written here only skims the surface of postmodernism. People have written books on the subject and, fortunately, not all of those books are as ridiculous as some of the postmodern essays that Richard Dawkins has encountered. I haven’t even begun to describe postmodernism’s contributions to language, literature, politics, religion, and society. If you are interested in finding out more, I would recommend these websites as a start:

 http://telnet.uregina.ca/~gingrich/a400.htm

 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism