Last week, I offered the posts I’ve ranked 10 to 6 of my top ten in 2007; today I offer my top five. I might well decide on another day that these belong in a different order, or another post belongs instead — but I’m ready to commit this list to posterity, whatever that may mean. The other finalists can be found here.
5. What’s in it for men? (June 21) Key excerpt:
I’m a feminist because I want to create a world where men and women alike can realize their potential; I’m a feminist because I believe that our potential is not directed or confined by our chromosomes or our secondary sex organs. My penis and my Y chromosome do not destine me to be unreliable, predatory, and emotionally inarticulate. My wife’s uterus and her estrogen do not limit the horizons of her professional or athletic ambition. Feminism is, as we’ve all heard, the radical notion that women are people. But it’s also the radical notion that men are people too, complete human beings, with the same range of emotions and the same capacity for empathy and self-control as any woman.
4. “Fat”, “Slut”, “Selfish”: a note on the three great fears (June 7) Key excerpt:
The epithets “fat” and “slut” have great power to wound. They sting young women when another person slaps them on, but they do far greater damage once they worm their way into one’s own internal conversation. But as awful as these words are when they are used to hurt another, or when they are used in relentless, ugly self-deprecation, they aren’t as debilitating as “selfish.” When it comes to what incapacitates (or at the least, handicaps) so many of the girls and women with whom I work, it’s the tremendous fear that by following their own bliss, by carving out space for themselves, by seeing their own happiness as a fundamental good, they are disappointing others and thinking too much about themselves.
3. Not just consent but enthusiasm: some notes on college sex workshops and stoplights (July 19) Key excerpt:
A dangerous line I sometimes use: “The opposite of rape is not consent. The opposite of rape is enthusiasm”. It’s dangerous because it’s shocking, and of course, it’s dangerous because it twists the purely legal meaning of the term “rape.” But from the standpoint of one who cares desperately about the well-being of young people, my goal in offering workshops like these is not merely to prevent sexual assault that meets the legal standard of a criminal act. My goal is to prevent that, of course, but to also offer shy and uncertain young people tools to prevent them from having bad sex characterized by obligation, confusion, and detached resignation. I always argue that anything short of an authentic, honest, uncoerced, aroused and sober “Hell, yes!” is, in the end, just a “no” in another form.
2. Against predatory evangelism: thinking about Chris Clarke, the life to come, and how we share our faith (February 8) Key excerpt:
Chris and I both love the rolling hills of the San Francisco Bay Area. He hikes them with what seems like reverence; I tend to attack them with hyper tenacity, measuring my fitness on their slopes. We both love animals, and we’ve both lost creatures whom we adored within the past year. And when it comes to the great questions, the ones about life and death and the possibility that our souls endure, sentient and unique, beyond this world — Chris and I have different answers.
And because I know he and I have different answers, I don’t try and comfort him in his vulnerabilty with my answers. Authentic Christian evangelism is not predatory. Authentic Christian evangelism doesn’t see the grief of those who don’t share our faith as a “special opportunity” to do some witnessin’! And far too many of my brothers and sisters in Christ make this obnoxious error.
1. Fourteen Marthas, not one Mary: a retreat report and a long meditation on girls, pressure, parents, and people-pleasing (March 12)
Key excerpt:
Thanks to the remarkable success of several waves of American feminism, the girls I work with today have more opportunities than virtually any generation before them. Though they have to confront a misogynistic backlash that has taken root in many aspects of our dominant culture, they have the chance to achieve more and do more and enjoy more than their mothers and grandmothers. But we’ve made the terrible mistake of turning opportunity into obligation. We’ve sucked the joy right out of their over-programmed, over-monitored, over-achieving little lives. True feminism and true Christian faith are absolutely congruent in their mutual opposition to the idea that young women ought to live up to an ever-more demanding set of duties and commitments.
I totally agree that the Martha post is your best post of the year, hands down. It’s gotten me to rethink a lot about my life. I’m definitely a Martha, and it’s hard to let that go.
I’m glad it resonated with you, Meredith. It is hard to let go, I know. You know the old bumper sticker about committing “random acts of kindness”? Some Marthas need to “commit random acts of self-indulgence”.
Wanted to make some comments on the top five…
5. One of the things I like best about this post was how it addressed the way men sometimes blame women when they don’t feel trusted just because of their sex. I’m very guilty of this. I’ve been told by those close to me that for several years until recently, I went around with a sort of “screw off” sign tattooed on my forehead. I didn’t look people in the eye or talk to anyone I didn’t know. I knew I had a fear of people, but the extent of its outward manifestation in me wasn’t clear until I had these conversations. I’ve worked and gotten better since last summer, joined a church and made new friends for the first time in years.
Except, I still act almost the same way toward males. I’ve made one male friend, but I was first friendly with his female partner of 9 years, so he is “safe”. I give reflexive cold shoulders to almost all men who approach me socially. I know all men aren’t trying to get to know me with sinister or exploitive motives, but I don’t want to be given the chance to be wrong…again. Basically, everyone I’ve given the chance turned out to be acting under one of the two motives. When I give these cold shoulders I feel guilty, like what a “bitch” I must seem to them, but it’s all I can do at this point in my life. Indeed, this is one of the things I find most poignant about the “feminism is for everyone” argument. Even if you’re the most egalitarian, pro-feminist, evolved man on the planet, there will still be inequality because many women will fear you for the sins of your brothers. It’s not just about you, it’s about all of you, and that means calling out others on their behavior and not tolerating it. Until the silent complicity ends, many will always assume you’re all in on it!
3. Yes, yes, yes, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!! Every time I hear a man take this position on consent as opposed to say, the exact opposite, I feel less like I’m the crazy person in the room. Consent is more than just “yes” and “no” and rape is more than just physical force. No one wants to talk about this because then that implicates a lot of people who wouldn’t like to think of themselves as having raped or been raped. I liked Jensen’s bit about how when he’s asked what kind of men do these kinds of things, he says men like him, like all men. The patriarchal culture teaches men to impose their rights, grease the wheels with drink, compel sex through pressure or making women feel indebted, so of course so many can’t relate to rape, the stranger in the bushes with the knife, the only accepted version of rape. To correlate rape with their father or big brother’s dating or marriage tips would be too terrible a thing to look at, or give up. Blaming women for feeling victimized because they were not “clear enough” or some other nonsense is only creating a scapegoat for men’s responsibility in the act. Women usually only accept the above version of rape, too. It leads too internalized guilt and depression for not being able to say no when sex was unwanted, feeling like a whore for “giving it up” out of pressure or coercion, or being compelled to submit to unwanted sexual activity out of perceived duty. Instead of putting any blame on the man for putting them in that position, the rock and the hard place, women often put the blame on themselves, since that’s just boys being boys, right? How can anyone blame them for that?
In therapy last week, I was talking about Jensen’s list of things men can do to make a difference, about how “we must examine our behavior for more subtle attempts at controlling the behavior of a partner, such as insulting self esteem, withholding affection to again a desired result, or demanding sexual activity in the face of resistance” (181). I said, “yeah when [this] happens, or [this] happens, that’s rape and it’s not right”. I said it like I’d been seeing something I wasn’t sure was really there, then had someone come along and say they saw it, too. It seems like a constant struggle to remind myself that these things are wrong, too, and that’s very sad.
5. I read the Martha bit and it made me think of Marthas in The Handmaid’s Tale, which I’m reading right now, hehe.
I wanted to reference a couple other things I’ve read lately in relation to this:
In my Southern Literature class Florence King was quoted as giving this definition of a Southern Lady as portrayed in American literature:
“The cult of Southern womanhood endowed [the southern woman] with at least five totally different images and asked her to be good enough to adopt all of them. She is required to be frigid, passionate, sweet, bitchy, and scatterbrained—all at the same time. Her problem springs from the fact that she succeeds.”
This reminds me of the over achiever of today. They are supposed to be a child with all the virtues of children—asexuality, innocence, obedience—while at the same time being adults—working toward a career, taking on and managing major responsibilities, being self-sufficient. The whole point of adolescence is being neither child nor adult and here they are being expected to encapsulate both! By demanding that diametrically opposed extremes be achieved at the same time often seems to stunt the ability to develop individually and encourages dysfunction in order to function, which seems to be the same fate accorded to the Southern Lady of old. Well, we have all seen how great these kinds of expectations turn out for people (cue the Varsouvian polka)…
Second was a recent article about Katherine’s Heigl’s post-production comments on Knocked Up being “a little sexist”. The article was Katherine Heigl’s Knocked Up: The demise of the female slacker.
It talks about the trend in Hollywood in recent years that shows men as loose free agents who choose to be irresponsible slackers or responsible adults, but shows women as straight-laced control freaks bound to their role by an inherent neurosis.
“Knocked Up made time for men to explore their choices on-screen in almost existential ways; they ask themselves whom they want to be, they joke around, they assume the right to experiment. Women, by contrast, are entirely concerned with pragmatic issues. We never see Alison or her older sister, Debbie, pursue or express her own creative impulses, sense of humor, independent interests; their rather instrumental concerns lie squarely in managing to balance the domestic with the professional. It’s as if women’s inner worlds are entirely functional rather than playful and open. Knocked Up was, as David Denby put it in The New Yorker, the culminating artifact in what had become “the dominant romantic-comedy trend of the past several years—the slovenly hipster and the female straight arrow.””
This plays into #4, too, I suppose. Part of being a healthy human being is being selfish, sometimes, if you want to call it that. Building your life around the expectations of others robs you of your own personal identity and humanity. (Side note: also important to recognize how those expectations have incorporated themselves into your own personal standards before claiming you impose those expectations on yourself.) You can help others more by being a whole person yourself. Doing so, one’s life will be more satisfying once all the hustle and bustle of people pleasing dies down. Spending all this time pleasing others, have you pleased yourself? I know I have a crying fit about once a month about all the things I’m “not doing” which results in asking myself these questions over and over.
This post also made me thing of my high school. There were a handful of these sorts of over-achievers. Most of them were the few of us with successful parents like the sons and daughters of the local doctors, lawyers, dentists and other professionals. I wasn’t offspring of such and neither were some of the other over achievers. However, I found the difference was often in our parents. It seemed the economically disadvantaged of us who strove to do well were the ones who were always told we could go to college after we graduated, when in reality our parents knew there was no way in hell they could afford to send us. They just hoped giving us the hope we could would make us succeed enough to get scholarships, and we did. The poor kids who were told not to think about college because they couldn’t afford it often became the C students going through the motions until they could attempt one of the few labor or retail jobs left and then settle down with a family just above or below the poverty line. I was glad to be an exhausted over achiever because I wouldn’t have gotten this far, where I come from. It just reminds me how important it is to let kids know they have a wide range of choices, not to just do everything or nothing, no matter where you come from.
I know this was extremely long, but I had all of it say. Indeed, “putting my words down on paper is the single best way to figure out what it really is I think, feel, and believe” (#4). Maybe I’m also withdrawing from all the very long paper writing I had been doing during the past month. Either way, I figured it was okay to be a little long winded.
Jennyfields, I’m deeply touched by how much my words connected with you and your life. Thank you for writing in, and for saying so much that is validating for me as a blogger.