What are we trying to accomplish?
Jonathan Dresner asks this question in response to my Monday rant on women and choice. Here’s his larger point:
…one of the things I think has been missing from the discussion is a sense of the direction in which this movement is pushing: what is the endgame, and how will we know if we are winning?
For example, I have never heard a colleague (male or female) comment on a students’ (male or female) attractiveness or lack thereof. Surely this represents progress, even if only within the oddities of academia. (On the other hand, I just heard of a colleague who recently married a student; I know, it may or may not be problematic, but it’s still questionable.) But ratemyprof.com includes a checkbox for “hot” profs.
(To pick up on Jonathan’s tangent, let me say parenthetically that the whole notion of evaluating professors on their “hotness” doesn’t strike me as problematic, largely because of the absence of a power dynamic. Perhaps I am naive, but I can’t imagine that students actually decide which courses to take based upon their professor’s looks, nor are they likely to de-legitimize what he or she is saying merely because he or she is “hot.” Honestly, I’ve always believed that those kids who thought I was “hot” were merely attracted to the fact that I was — and still am — relatively young. On the other hand, for a prof to comment on a student’s attractiveness — when the student is at a clear disadvantage — is inherently more problematic.)
But seriously, if we confine discussion of the “endgame” to the classroom, I’ll say that I long for an academic culture where women and men can come together and do their work in an atmosphere free from anxiety about their appearance. I wrote last week that “sisterhood is easier in winter“, because I noticed that the more clothes that my students wear, the more comfortable everyone seems to feel. When our bodies are more concealed, we are — perhaps paradoxically — liberated to focus on “what really matters”. What do I really want? I suppose I want the classroom to feel year-round the way it does when the weather is chilly (or as chilly as it gets in Pasadena): safe. How we do that without imposing impossible or absurd dress codes is beyond me, but I know it is, emotionally speaking, the “endgame” in terms of clothing in the classroom!
On the other hand, Christy (my twin) writes in a comment on today’s post:
Talk all we want - at the end of the day, nothing has changed. I don’t want to confine my choices to complying with or yelling about the system. I would rather work on creating alternatives - small spaces where we value interdependence, empathy, and justice, where we don’t talk or think about our clothes or body image that much because we’re too busy being something different to care.
It’s beautifully put. And it’s a nice reminder to me that part of my work as a feminist must be to help develop these alternatives. She’s right, too, that to build communities where men and women really can move beyond their own narcissistic issues will require that those communities be intently focused on a higher and more important cause. It’s important not merely to do something different; as Christy puts it, we must be something different. Trouble is, I’ve rarely seen that kind of intense community form and remain in place for long. The itinerant nature of our lives, where most of us expect to move away from families and friends, means that few of us will have sustained periods of living within those nurturing small spaces where our bodies are not our identities. Indeed, the less we remain connected to our families of origin, the greater the likelihood that we will spend a considerable part of our young — and not so young — adulthood immersed in the intense pressures of a “beauty culture” without a “safe place” to take refuge.
Honestly, from a Christian standpoint, it’s something we need to work on in the churches. We must ask, to what degree is our own church culture reinforcing insecurity and self-doubt and unrealistic perfectionism? To what degree does our church culture reflect rather than reject society’s larger obsession with appearance? Just because our churches frown on overtly sexualized self-expression does NOT mean that they are free from the very same ills that plague the larger culture! It’s something we need to work on in our small groups; it’s something I’m working very hard on with my teenagers at All Saints. And it’s gonna take a lot of work.
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