Tag: sexism

Today I wear shorts: A poem written in anger

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Sometimes  when I experience street harassment, I confront the inappropriate words or behavior right there in the moment. But much more often, I am so taken off  guard–or uncomfortable, or even afraid–that I either find myself unable to meaningfully respond at all, or I make a calculated decision to exit the situation as soon as possible instead of reacting, for my own safety. In such instances, rage or disgust tends to start welling up inside me as soon as I walk away. These emotions are directed towards the person who violated or intimidated me, and also–unfairly, I know–at myself, for my own silence and passivity, or for not thinking quickly enough to find the words or the action that I needed in the moment.

map

In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes that “anger is a map” that “shows us where our boundaries are,” what is important to us, and “where we want to go.” When respected and “acted upon” instead of “acted out,” Cameron says, anger helps us find a way forward. So today, instead of stewing powerlessly on my anger and replaying this infuriating episode over and over again in my head, I’ve decided to write it out–what happened, and what I wish I had been able to say at the time. What I still want to say to the world.

Here it is, a poem mapping out my anger to put it to use:

Today I wear shorts

Today I wear shorts
Because the weather is warm.
Because I want to be free.
Because I have not felt the pleasure
of a temperate breeze
against my bare legs
since I bundled up last October.

And yes, because my legs are beautiful.
Because I am not ashamed of my body,
and because I have no reason
to hide my God-given limbs
from you or from anyone else.

And no, I do not owe you any explanation
for the shorts I wear today.
But it would appear that I do
need to explain the self-evident fact
that I am not wearing shorts
for you to take pictures of my ass
on your cellphone
while you wait in line for the bus
while my head is turned the other way
while another man loudly announces to me,
and to others,
what you are doing.

Perhaps, in the privacy of your addiction
you have seen so many women on the screen—
performing a false intimacy,
giving you something for nothing,
posing and moving as though they belong to you—
that you have forgotten:
we all belong to ourselves,
and you are not entitled
to my body or to anyone else’s.

Or perhaps, you have learned
to treat people like things
because this is the cycle
your own experience brings.

I’m sure that there are reasons,
but whatever they are,
none could constitute an excuse.
So stop.

Sidewalk Battlegrounds and Breakthroughs

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sidewalk

“You’re very beautiful,” the man on the corner commented as I walked by.

His voice was calm; he might not have meant any harm. But he was just one of many men to have offered their unsolicited opinions on my appearance over the past week, one of whom had stepped into my path and gotten in my face as he delivered his creepy line. I had had enough.

I turned toward him, furrowed my brow and said with irritation, “I don’t want your opinion.”

“Oh, okay,” I heard him say in a sarcastic voice as I turned around. “Well, then have a nice day!” he yelled after me as I started to cross the street. His voice grew louder as I got further away. “Actually, don’t have a nice day! Also, YOU’RE UGLY!”

I stared straight ahead and walked resolutely toward the elevated rail station, but my heart rate was up. What I was hearing was a five-year-old’s tantrum coming out of a grown man’s body—and that made me scared. He sounded unstable, and his disproportionate fury told me that this was not a person in control of himself. I didn’t want to become the target of his pent-up aggression about who knows what—stress at work? Rejection from an ex or from womankind in general?

As I sat down on the train, I took a few deep breaths to calm myself down, but I couldn’t help replaying the scene in my mind, thinking of what I would have liked to say to him.

“Listen,” I should have told him. “I am a human being, and I have the right to walk around my own neighborhood and go about my business without having my sex appeal appraised by random men who have appointed themselves judges in some kind of 24-hour beauty pageant! If you just wanted to brighten my day with a genuine, no-strings-attached compliment, then you need to realize that those “compliments” more often feel demeaning— or even threatening—than warm and fuzzy. And if you don’t care how your words make me feel, then it’s not a compliment. So shut up!”

Earlier in the week, I had beaten myself up over remaining passive when I was harassed on the street. I kept my eyes straight ahead, pretended like the guy wasn’t there, just kept walking. You should have said something! My mind screamed. You shouldn’t just let him get away with that!

But of course, now I had been reminded of why I rarely did respond—because these were unpredictable strangers, and it wasn’t worth putting myself in further danger in order to speak my mind. Realistically, a short, reactive confrontation like that was unlikely to change deep-seated patterns of sexist behavior or a man’s lack of respect for women. And if men twice my age really thought that their lascivious stares or pronouncements were doing me a favor, then there was more confusion there than I usually had time to sort out on my sidewalk commute to somewhere else.

Still, it doesn’t always happen like that. Days later, just a couple blocks away from Tantrum Man, an older man weighed in on my appearance as I made my way home from the grocery store.

I could feel his eyes on me as he began: “What a lovely, beautiful—”

“I’m not interested in your opinion. Thanks.” This time I smiled calmly and said this in a neutral voice.

“Well you should be,” I heard him say behind me in an equally casual tone, “‘cause I’m a fashion designer, and you would enjoy it.”

I had to laugh to myself at the absurdity of this reply. But a block later, I was not amused to find that he was still walking behind me. He caught up to me as I was waiting to cross a busy intersection.

“Here it is a lovely, beautiful day, and you got your panties in a wad for no good reason,” he said as he walked up to stand beside me on the curb. His tone wasn’t hostile, but the words were demeaning. (Basic human respect tip: conjecturing on the state of a stranger’s underwear is NEVER an appropriate conversation opener.)

I inhaled slowly. “The reason I’m upset,” I told him, “Is because I can’t walk around here a single day without some guy commenting on my appearance, and I just want—”

“I was just trying to say hi.”

“Well then just say hi. That would be fine.” I explained that “compliments” like his were threatening because I never knew where they were headed or what he might say next. Plenty of guys went beyond “friendly” behavior.

“Like what do they say?” he asked as the light changed. “How unfriendly can they be?”

More insensitive questions—I wasn’t about to go into the details of the times I had been groped, or propositioned by strangers—but he seemed genuinely perplexed by my concerns.

In the time it took us to cross the street, I told him how some of the men who have taken an interest in me on the street have been intimidating, or even violent. “You need to be aware of how some women are going to feel about your comments.”

“Well, I appreciate that,” he said as we stepped back onto the sidewalk. “Lesson learned. Have a nice day!” He turned to walk away with a genuinely friendly wave.

I continued down the sidewalk with a bemused smile, taken aback that he had listened respectfully and apparently been able to receive my point of view.

My experiences with street harassment have taught me two things. First, I am not responsible for controlling men’s behavior. In any given situation, it is completely legitimate for me to prioritize my personal safety and emotional well-being over trying to help men understand the destructive results of their behavior. Often, getting out the situation as fast as possible is the best thing for me to do.

And second, men are unique individuals and human beings who are capable of change. Despite the prevalence of “rape culture” and the many negatives experiences I and other women have had, conversations like this one give me hope for a society in which men and women treat one another with dignity and respect as equals, and in which we are able to empathize with one another’s experiences.

Ultimately, we are all looking for love and respect. I believe that one or both of these unmet needs have been at the root of every negative experience I have ever had with a stranger. Many of the men who catcall women on the street don’t have any social skills in their repertoire for engaging with the opposite sex in a healthy way, and they act (or react) out of their own loneliness and pain. This doesn’t excuse the behavior, or make it any easier to deal with when I’m the target of their dysfunctional efforts at connection, but it does help me to understand it.

Working towards justice and speaking the truth are things that I am still learning to do in love. It’s easier to do when I remember that my enemies are not other human beings, but destructive behaviors and the belief systems that drive them. Behaviors, beliefs, and people can change.

sidewalk1street harassment stories

 

The Ugly Truth About The Beauty Myth

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          A few months ago, I read Naomi Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth and it felt like a missing piece sliding into place, naming that vast and vague sense of unfairness that I have instinctively felt since childhood. It’s the reason that as long as I can remember, I have been surrounded by private and public conversation that centers on the pitiless appraisal of women’s bodies. The reason I was able to so easily detach from my real appetite for several years in order to hinge my hunger instead on whether or not the reflection in the mirror deserved food or not. The reason why I have so often fallen into the catch-22 of aching to hear that I was beautiful, only to find that the judgment, having been passed, reaffirms my precarious position more than my personhood, and that I feel resentful towards the man who has power to pass such a judgment in the first place without needing mine in return.

If you’re a woman, you can probably relate to these kinds of experiences. If you’re not a woman, ask one who’s close to you about this and she can probably tell you how this same undercurrent has pulled at her throughout her life. ­But I have hope that if this thing has a name—if it is a man-made construction rather than simply “the way things are” or, worse, “the way God designed things to be”—well, then it’s a system we can climb out of to claim our freedom.

The book explains the myth that our society has constructed: that beauty is a universal, eternal, and unchanging quality, and that possessing it is the only way for women to obtain worth, love, or power in society. Any cross-cultural experience or historical research quickly reveals that standards of beauty are diverse and contradictory throughout time and across the globe. While I grew up always trying to get a tan in the summer, my Chinese friends were horrified at the idea of ruining pale skin with sunlight, and while women in the U.S. diet to stay slim, my Indian friends tell me I’m too skinny and encourage me to get “nice and fat.” Think of foot binding and corsets and all the other strange things women have done over the centuries in pursuit of “beauty”. Nonetheless, the current beauty myth has been retold with such an alloy of fervor and monotony in advertisements, literature, film, popular culture, and even scientific journals that it has convinced most women, either consciously or unconsciously, that their worth lies in their sex appeal.  With that in mind, women are essentially doomed to an endless treadmill of buying products and disciplining their bodies as they strive toward an ideal of “beauty” which, with the advent of photoshop, airbrushing, and mass media, is based less on the human form than on the humanoid creations of advertisers and pornographers.

The belief system inspired by the myth explains why, despite the fact that women are more educated, enjoy better health, and have more legal rights, professional opportunities, and influence in wider society than at any other time in history, we’re in a worse state than any previous generation of women “in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically.”  Writing in the early ‘90s (and all of these trends have surely intensified since then), Wolf points out that over the last few years, “eating disorders rose exponentially… cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing medical specialty… pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal.”

Wolf maintains that this unrealistic ideal and the unhealthy lengths women go to in order to achieve it have not come about accidentally. This situation has been invented—by advertisers, among others—in order to keep women more concerned with maintaining their appearance than with bringing the full power of their energy and intellect to bear on the world. Who knows what kind of upheaval might result in society from women collectively unleashing their full talents for the first time, after centuries of restrictive roles and separate spheres that have prevented them from participating fully in human history?

The beauty myth creates a caste system which offers social rewards sporadically and temporarily, but playing by its rules, even the most beautiful woman ultimately loses (it’s no coincidence that to be a model, an eating disorder is basically a prerequisite). Whatever fleeting admiration she gains through the system feels like love, but it blocks the real thing by never allowing a woman’s true self to be recognized and loved for who she is. And eventually she will grow older, the lines and marks of lived experience on her body disqualifying her for “beauty” and taking away all her power and worth in society. Wolf suggests that the way out of this mess is not to scramble towards the top of the heap, but to refuse to be locked inside of a caste system at all.

How have we bought into this lie and perpetuated its power in our own lives and the lives of others? What does it look like to break free and to help others do the same?

Source: New feed

Taking to the streets

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          As we pulled up in the autorickshaw to the crowd of women waiting on the sidewalk, the clouds looked heavy with rain. I had come to this hastily-arranged rally with an Indian acquaintance of mine who organizes women’s groups in slums around the city, educating them about the resources available to them when they face violence in their homes and communities, and training them to work together to advocate for their rights and to support each other in making their communities an environment where women are respected, and where they are safe. She’s confident, well-spoken, and an abuse survivor herself—all of which makes her extremely good at what she does.

As the rain began to drizzle and then pour down on us, I looked around the crowd: some women in saris, others in salwar kameez suits, and a lot of women in full burqa—faces covered, but voices raised. Their courage was expressed in their presence at the rally in the pouring rain, some of them with babies and small children in tow. Their demands were written on the placards and banners they were going to carry through the flooded streets of downtown, all the way to the front gates of the parliament building. The rally was a protest against a slew of recent cases of violent rape across our city and our state in recent months, and the way that government and police alike were complicit in the terror by not only refusing to enforce laws to hold perpetrators responsible, but refusing to investigate cases and even refusing to file police reports when victims or their families turned up at police stations to seek help in the aftermath of these violent crimes.

In the height of the monsoon deluge, the group of protestors—mostly women and girls, but a handful of men and boys, too—stepped off the curb into the water and began their march. Our clothes were soaked, but everyone marched enthusiastically forward, lifting their arms and shouting together. As we neared our destination, a clutch of news photographers and cameramen appeared to snap photos and shoot footage of the event. Not far beyond them, however, the police also appeared in front of the crowd of protestors. I could see one officer alternately shouting something to the women at the front of the column, and then speaking into his walkie-talkie when those women defiantly shouted their slogans and continued moving forward. We soon saw what he must have been radioing about. Ahead of us, a larger group of police was barricading off the entire road. They were pushing the last section of metal fencing into place when the protesters reached them, grabbed the fence, and shoved it backward into the officers. Everyone poured in through the hole, and more of the barricade was knocked aside as we all made our way through. The police scrambled ahead to make their last-ditch attempt at keeping the women from reaching the parliament building. When we arrived, there was already a line of policemen blocking the gates, but that didn’t discourage the protestors from marching right up to them. Someone passed forward a microphone and a speaker which was held aloft as one woman announced why we were here and described the terrible situation of women in our society who can’t count on the protection of either their government or their police force.

A delegation of eight was allowed inside the building to present their demands (including a proposed amendment) to the chief minister; meanwhile, the rest of us waited outside. Police reinforcements had arrived and begun to surround the group. Then the army also arrived, and soon our group was surrounded on all sides by mustachioed men with bamboo sticks and guns. There were roughly a hundred protestors and a hundred police and army personnel, but this didn’t discourage many of the women from turning toward the men in uniform to talk about specific unresolved rape and murder cases over the microphone or to register their anger over police corruption and inaction.

I was impressed by the courage these women displayed, and by their solidarity with one another. The police and the army had been called up to intimidate them, to stop them… and yet here they were, facing off with power and holding their ground. Only time will tell what is to become of the demands the delegation presented to the government that day, but one thing is sure: that kind of courage and willingness to speak out about the violence against women that is routinely swept under the rug, ignored, or denied as something shameful or insignificant is definitely evidence that the tide is changing, however slowly.

Source: New feed

Toxicity

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          Andy and I just returned from a two-week trip to Los Angeles to visit friends from Pepperdine, our “family” in Watts, and some biological family. We graduated from Pepperdine two years ago, so the people we knew as freshmen and sophomores when we left are now juniors and seniors about to graduate! It felt good to be able to return to a place that had been so meaningful to us in a formative time of life, and to still run across so many familiar faces. We were even able to meet up with some of our mentors, people who taught us about marriage and Following and have therefore shaped our lives forever. And it was good for our spirits to get to spend time with so many of the close friends that we graduated with, who are still living and working in the L.A. area. Thanks to them, we traveled all over L.A. county without once having to rent a car or even use public transit, and we always had a place to stay. Thank you Christine, Dave, Thomas, Becca, Lauren, D’Esta, Stuart, Grant, Paul, Jen, Bryan, Steph, Michael, Gary, Adam, Daniel, Genieve, Brittany, Shelby, Dusty, Cecily, Jon, Rose, and everyone else whose hospitality fed, sheltered, and transported us during our stay! There are even more people whose conversation fed our souls with good questions and insights and stories. Now add perfect Southern California weather to all of that and you can see just how good we had it.
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an aerial view of Pepperdine’s campus
           At the same time, however, there was one aspect of the trip that was discouraging. For several years now, an injustice that has weighed heavily on my heart is the way that our culture objectifies people, particularly women. I would venture to say that this plague is nowhere more evident than in Los Angeles, where a lot of trends begin and a lot of destructive mass media is produced. Pepperdine’s campus is a microcosm of it, and you can tell by the way that a lot of female students dress (or don’t get dressed) that they have completely bought into our society’s lie: that women are primarily sexual objects who exist to meet others’ needs and whose value and worth depends on their sex appeal. Now some may think I’m being dramatic, until they see a lecture hall emptying out and find themselves wondering whether students forgot to change out of their clubbing outfits from the night before, or whether some of them might have lost their pants while walking to class.          But I can’t rag on them too much, because I know the positive reinforcement they get from the guys around them, and I know the unhealthy lengths that I and other women I know and love have gone to in order to meet those same unreasonable standards of beauty. It’s easier in the short-term to deprecate the women who annoy the rest of us by putting themselves on display, but when I recognize my own weaknesses and fears in them, I can empathize with them and feel the compassion that their situation ought to evoke in us. It makes sense to try emulating air-brushed, soft-porn advertising perfection, if you believe that your identity and the security of your relationships depend on it.

But the truth is that we women don’t have to get on that exhausting hamster wheel of comparison, jealousy, and insecurity, and that we don’t have to devalue as we age. The truth is that our dignity has nothing to do with our sex appeal and everything to do with the Image that we bear and the Love that created us. And the truth is that men don’t have to chase the phantom promises of lust and dehumanize themselves by cultivating selfish and distorted appetites.

In a culture as toxic as the one we live in, that kind of radical message needs some reinforcement– because the opposing lie will be reinforced with every billboard, commercial, and magazine we see. Its important for brothers and sisters  to look out for each other’s spiritual and emotional well-being, and to protect each other from the lust and the insecurity that have become so normal and accepted in our society. I really believe that viewing other people (and ourselves) as objects to be consumed is the root of so many other, more obvious evils: eating disorders, pornography and other sexual addictions, prostitution, human trafficking. All of these big things begin with a small, personal belief that is based on a lie, so the best way to start addressing any of them is to pull out that lie by the root. So men and women, knowing that our struggles fuel one another’s struggles, how can we stand out from the world by treating ourselves and one another differently? How are we reinforcing or challenging the sin in each other’s lives, and how can we draw each other toward wholeness?