Tag: women’s empowerment

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.

Naked Empowerment: Why redefining beauty doesn’t go far enough

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The Huffington Post reported Sunday morning on a photographer who is fundraising for “A Beautiful Body Project” to show real women’s bodies—nude or nearly nude—along with inspiring stories about their bodies and their lives, in order to encourage healthy self-esteem. I understand the benefits of women getting to see what other normal, un-photoshopped bodies look like so that they have realistic expectations for their own. I understand the danger of being exposed to countless images of flawless models who embody cultural ideals and who exercise/starve themselves for a living. Most of the time, we don’t see bodies that we can relate to: the bodies of other women working, studying, raising kids, or generally just living life without the supervision of a personal trainer and a nutritionist, or the “luxury” of working out during half of their waking hours. I remember a very liberating and helpful experience during university when the primitive village stay conditions during our semester abroad meant that many of my female friends and I had to live in very close quarters and take “bucket” showers in the same room together. Seeing each other naked resulted in all of us becoming a little less self-conscious and little more accepting of our own bodies as we saw a broad range of body types and physical quirks that were apparently normal, despite never being featured in mainstream media.Still, I have my doubts about this photography project. There’s a big difference between private, interpersonal interactions and public, impersonal displays.

The intentions behind it are good, but after looking through some of the photos, I thought, “This is still women putting themselves on display for the public to scrutinize and discuss. It still feels like female bodies being treated like public property.” Men don’t have to pose naked for photo projects in order to be seen as more than just sex objects, or to have their worth affirmed to them by others’ approving gaze. Maybe trying to reclaim our portrayal in media—by replicating the very kinds of images which have exploited us all along—is not an effective tactic. Maybe the problem with how women are treated in our culture goes deeper than redefining beauty—it goes right down to questioning why it is so important for women to be beautiful in the first place.

There have been photography projects depicting breast cancer survivors (naked), and mothers with their post-partum bodies (naked), but my question is why any of these women need to take off their clothes and have the public declare their bodies beautiful in order for them to feel valued, or in order to be able to accept themselves? Ironically, these campaigns seem to reinforce that the most essential part of one’s being—or of a female’s being, at any rate—is her body. Can we not recognize and honor the whole person without seeing them naked? Does seeing them naked bring us any closer to seeing the most unique and intimate parts of who they are? I’m not convinced that the fascinating complexity of a woman’s mind and heart, all of the experiences and decisions and determination and courage and vulnerability and creativity and whatever else makes her who she is, can be captured in a photo—with or without clothes. I worry that these photo shoots are not empowering enough because they do not question the socially-constructed idea that women must be physically attractive to be happy.

I’m still waiting to see the naked photo shoots of men who have survived prostate cancer, or dads whose bodies have changed due to stress, sleep-deprivation, and missing their morning workouts because they’re busy being parents. Actually, I have no desire to see those photos, but the point is this: I highly doubt that any of these campaigns are forthcoming, because men don’t have to be deemed physically attractive (within a narrow, cultural definition or otherwise) in order to be taken seriously in society. No one assumes that a man will have lower self-esteem because of his sagging chest or pot belly or graying hair or wrinkled jowls. Though I realize that many men do struggle with physical insecurities in the hyper-sexualized advertising wasteland we all inhabit, they do not face the same blunt message that women do of needing to be physically attractive to matter.

That is why, although I applaud the spirit behind what this photographer is doing, these bare-all campaigns to redefine beauty will ultimately fall short of garnering respect for women as whole people. They fail to bring us closer to gender equality because they play along with the unchallenged assumptions that physical beauty is a prerequisite for female self-esteem, and that it’s the most important aspect of a woman’s identity.

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?