"Puffy Face Moments" II - Self-Reflections (Still Inspired by Ashley Judd)

Okay, it's barely past noon, and I am exhausted. Why is that, you might ask? Well, I decided, after writing my post yesterday about the conversation regarding the objectification of women and our own complicity in perpetuating it, to watch myself closely. I decided to find out just how much I - unconsciously, and certainly unintentionally - participate  - still! - in this pervasive and destructive system. I vowed to monitor my thoughts and call myself out every time I participate. I wanted to consciously take not of every time I objectify, disassemble and judge myself (or other women) based on physical appearance over the course of a regular day. And I decided today would be the day to do it.

6:30 - The Mirror

The first time I caught myself doing it was when I first looked in the mirror. I had just forcibly removed myself from bed and made it to the bathroom, and I caught my reflection in the mirror. My first thought was something like: "God, I look especially bad this morning!" The next time I looked in the mirror, after showering, to apply my make-up, I caught myself disapproving of my nose and spending some time wondering about potential first signs of wrinkles around my mouth. 

7:30 - Breakfast

I actually did waste time and thoughts on the calorie content of potential breakfast items. Not more than a few seconds, but those seconds are lost forever, and I could and should have spent them more productively.

9:25 - On the Bus

It took real effort to keep myself from comparing myself to every woman getting on the bus. "She's skinnier than I am". "I am skinnier than her".

9:50 - Walking

On my walk to campus, the same thing happened. There's this trend among female college students to wear leggings, so I noticed how much attention I was paying specifically to the legs of these other women.

As you can see, I was wasting a lot of time on these things. I spent this time thinking about entirely irrelevant stuff, instead of concerning myself with worthwhile thoughts instead. And not only could these things be classified as a complete and utter waste of my time, they are also destructive, negative actions. What good could possibly come from focusing on or thinking about the relative attractiveness of myself and other women? All it is doing is tearing somebody down, creating this competition and divisions, contributing to the fact that women see other women as opponents too often - because that is what we are taught to do. We reduce this person to a body - a collection of body parts, to be more specific - and after having compartmentalized, mentally disassembled them, we move on to passing judgement on this object we have just created. And by doing so, we open ourselves up to being treated the same way. This is the insidious brilliance of patriarchy: by suggesting that individual women can gain something - approval, attention, worth - by being better than other women, it attempts to give us the impression that we can be successful, liked and loved in this system, all we have to do is show that we are not "like them". And so we do.

I consider myself a feminist. I have read many books and articles, and taken classes, dealing with sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy. I am aware of how these things work. I make a conscious effort, every day, not to say mean, ugly, and destructive things about others, about other women based on physical attributes, not to attack them as women or because they are women, I refrain from using gendered slurs and insults. And yet, within only a short period of time, on a single, fairly average day, I have caught myself participating in, contributing to, the objectification of women, the reduction of persons to bodily attributes, and a spirit of competition. The next  -  and equally difficult step - for me was to try and figure out why I was doing this.

So far, I have reached the following conclusions, though I don't claim to have found the ultimate answer. I think that I, like so many of us, am still struggling to "un-learn" a lesson I have been taught all my life: that a woman's ultimate goal is to attract a man's attention and make him interested enough to stick around, and that the only way to reach this goal is through physical beauty, and sex. Face it, even today, the only real success a woman can have is getting married. No matter how much she achieves in her profession, how talented, successful and skilled she might be at what she does, how much good she brings to the world, if she's over 35 and unmarried, she's considered a failure. I know that this mindset is certainly pervasive enough to have imprinted itself deeply within me. I know I disagree with it. I know I am opposed to everything it stands for, everything it tries to teach me about myself, my worth and my role in life. And yet I still find myself worrying about it. My grandfather passed away when I was ten years old, and I do not have a ton of memories of him. But the one thing that has been burned into my soul is one of his preferred "jokes" (notice how these things are always packaged as jokes, in order to portray those expressing their disagreement as a bunch of humorless, over-sensitive "chicks"): "What do women and tin cans have in common? Once they've been opened, they both become worthless". So much about the way women are valued, are taught to value themselves, is encapsulated in this one line. Attractiveness and "purity". We are taught to dress in alluring, sexually revealing ways to get men interested, but not to engage in actual sexual activity, because once we do, we lose what little value we might have had.

My grandmother (and I do not hold these things against her, as she is over 80 years old, and grew up in a totally different world, where the things she was taught were even more extreme and containing than they are today) asks me, every time she sees me, whether I have "found someone". She is extremely unsettled by the fact that her 29-year-old granddaughter is single. At my age, she (and she's not the only one!) tells me, I should be married and have kids, because soon I will be too old to ever be able to make a man permanently interested in me. My worth is negatively correlated with my age, and I am, or so I am told, rapidly approaching a point at which it will decrease with increasing speed. I know that these things are cultural norms with which I don't agree, and I know that I wouldn't want to spend my life with a  man who only values me for my looks. But I still catch myself thinking about these things. A few months ago, I had a conversation with my grandmother about my relationship status. I told her that I would rather remain single, and be happy, than spend my life with a man who makes me unhappy, and that, therefore, I will remain on my own until I find someone I truly want to be with. She looked at me, thought for a moment, and replied: "You know, you are probably right!". That really made my day, because it means a lot for her to be able to see the world this way.

I have never been physically abused or assaulted - sadly, that is not the norm for women around the world, or even in this country. What I have done, though, is consented to sexual activity out of fear of being rejected or abandoned otherwise. I recall numerous occasions, in my past relationships, where, though I had no desire whatsoever and was not in "the mood", I consciously made the decision that I couldn't say no, because, by saying no too many times, I risked my current boyfriend losing interest in me. Though I am confident that I would not make these choices again today, I shudder at the thought of what that says about my self-image, my perception of my relationship, and my impression of why exactly this guy was spending time with me, why he remained interested. I might have been unfair to him - I never felt comfortable talking to him about this, and this perception of not being able to share the things I worried about, out of a fear of making myself vulnerable and giving him something to use against me, is probably part of the reason why it did not work out for us after all. But this behavior does exemplify something about me, and about the lessons I have internalized, and that I, even after years of trying to "un-learn" them, have still not been able to remove entirely.

I hate gossip. I try not to pay attention to it, and I try not to participate in it. I think it creates unnecessary negativity in this world, and this negative energy will create nothing but bad consequences for the one gossiping, and the one being gossiped about. And believe me, it is not the case that only women gossip. Nonetheless, I have participated. I have been party to conversations about someone else's physical appearance - usually the subject of these conversations are women, and more often than not they are famous women - politicians, actresses, models, singers. I believe that we focus on these women to teach other women a lesson. The lesson we are meant to take away from mean-spirited comments about the bodies of powerful women is: Be careful, if you go too far, you will have to pay a price! We might be taught that power makes men attractive, but that surely is not the message we receive about powerful women. The other message is this: Even when we build you up, when we applaud you for your attractiveness, when you are one of the women who actually comes close to this standard of beauty we have set up, we can tear you down, and we will, as soon as you do the unforgivable: age, even slightly! We learn that we need to be attractive and non-threatening, and that, to be attractive, somebody else has to be painted as unattractive. There might be some truth to the fact that "ordinary" women participate so willingly in the tearing-down of "famous" women because they view these women as representing the standard of beauty they will never attain, and are thus glad to find flaws, and to see them fall of this pedestal, because they are viewed as symbols of all most women will never be. But just as we are all perpetrators in this, we are also all victims - and ridiculing actresses for "puffy faces" just helps to upholds the standards, the system that is at the hear of all of this.

I have been thinking about these things a lot over the last week or so, and I do think that I have grown, that I have become more aware of the ways patriarchy works within us and through us - and awareness, consciousness, is our most powerful weapon in this fight. I am extremely grateful to humanitarian advocate/activist and actress Ashley Judd for having the courage to start this conversation, for choosing to fight back instead of letting herself be silenced, shamed and humiliated by this attempt to objectify her and "put her in her place". I have certainly gained new admiration for her.