Hillary Clinton’s speech in Beijing at the UN Women’s Conference in 1995. It gives me that righteous quiver.
10/24/10
I am hooked on Willow Smith’s first single, “Whip My Hair”. Because in a country where black women are pretty much the bottom of the totem pole, it’s thrilling to see a black girl rocking a “I <3 ME” t-shirt and exuding mega-confidence and ferocity. Yeah, she’s celebuspawn and privileged in a lot of ways, but she’s still going to face the challenges of living in a racist patriarchy.
And it’s heartening to see a girl being confident and feeling powerful and it’s not through being sexy. I’m all for feeling powerful and confident about and through sexuality, but the problem is that it seems to be the main and sometimes the only way women have visibility and are allowed access to power in popular culture, and, hell, even in our own private social circles. It feels like pretty is a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”, and if you don’t pay it–which ironically includes you paying for the right make-up, the right clothes, the right conditioner and/or hair straightener, the right surgeon if you can afford it, et cetera–well, you shouldn’t take up the sliver of space allowed for a woman’s body. I’m not commenting on Willow being pretty or not–but that’s the point. The video doesn’t feature her as pretty or not. She’s not sexualized. She’s not even very gendered; a lot of her outfits and hairstyles could be just as easily and acceptably worn by male- or female-identified kids. It’s about her voice, her shine.
Also: notice the varied racial/ apparent ethnic background of the people in the video. The main dancers she’s featured with also have varied body types. And I managed to pause it on the close-up of the blackboard (2:29):
I pledge to be brave
I pledge to always give my best
I pledge to respect myself and those around me
I pledge to be willing to learn and experience new things
I pledge to not be afraid to dream big and go for it
I pledge to warriorette/ warrior
It’s really the confidence, the power, the sense of self that mesmerizes me. It also reminds me of work done by Carol Gilligan, Peggy Orenstein, and the like about girls’ psychosocial development. Girls, their research shows, tend to be, as a group, much louder, much bolder, much confident, much more spoken and outspoken, when they are young. Around puberty, they start to lose that confidence. And, unlike boys who might also have a rough time of puberty, it never comes back up to pre-puberty levels. They get quieter. They start getting judged more by their appearance, their attractiveness to boys. They try to please. Their role as the guardians of relationships kicks in. Their role as caretakers. And their selves go underground. Adulthood, for many women, requires a laborious work of excavating pieces of the former self, learning to cherish them again, going against the stream. To have adult selfhood for a woman in our culture is necessarily countercultural.
To put it more simply, Willow fascinates me because she is pre-subterfuge. In my own life, my childhood was pretty quiet. Secretive. I tried not to make noise, literally or figuratively. It’s probably not a surprise that I was anorexic later–it’s an extension of the same idea. And so the bursts of confidence I had often came from connection with other people because those connections made me feel, for once, effective (this dynamic–needing to be needed–is the root of a lot of female “codependence”.) Sometimes they came from achievement in school. They came from sex and ability to attract people. But that coveted thing, that thing that Ms. Smith so flaunts, that sense of inherent worth or value–this is only coming in small pieces, with a lot of work. I’m reminded of June Jordan:
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect. It means I must everlastingly seek to cleanse my self of the hatred and contempt that surrounds and permeates my identity… It means that the acheivement of self-love and self-respect will take inordinate, hourly vigilance…
I am an emotional creature. I love that I do not take things lightly. everything is intense to me. The way I walk in the street, the way my mama wakes me up, the way it is unbearable when I lose, the way I hear bad news. I am an emotional creature, I am connected to everything and everyone, I was born like that. Don’t you say all negative that it’s only only a teenage thing or it’s only because I’m a girl. These feeings make me better, they make me present, they make me ready, they make me strong…
This is not extreme, it’s a girl thing, what we would all be if the big door inside of us few open. Don’t tell me not to cry, to calm it down, not to be so extreme, to be reasonable… You don’t tell the atlantic ocean to behave. I am emotional creature, why would you want to shut me down or turn me off? I am your remaining memory. I can take you back. Nothing’s been diluted, nothing’s leaked out.
I love this defense of emotion. I love that she reminds us that to have integrity–literally, to be whole–includes being open to emotion and intuition, and respecting them as important sources of information. She also reminds us that empathy is the basis of felt ethical responsibility, the motivation for this responsibility. Most major religious traditions talk about this, i.e. the Judeo-Christian “golden rule”. Eve (Ensler) says:
I love, hear me, I love that I can feel the feelings inside you, even if they stop my life, even if they break my heart, even if they take me off track, they make me responsible.
To the extent that women may be, in certain circumstances, more “ethical” or less violent than men, I think it has to do with the way boys are trained to murder their emotional selves (this is good preparation for being a soldier) and girls are allowed to keep (more of) theirs.
h/t Nick
Habits are moneymakers for the people who make things we find comforting: iPhones, Blackberries, laptops that stay connected to the internet on remote islands, McDonalds in every city and so many countries, Europeans knowing enough English that your trip to Spain won’t mean speaking any Spanish. You can get rich making a portable life for people so that they can take their lives with them.
Beckett said, “habit is a great deadener.” Not to be outdone by Samuel Beckett, Ze Frank weighs in on the value of breaking habits, or “busting your cycle”:
Busting your cycle is where you take one aspect of your life that’s more or less constant and you purposely bust it. By temporarily breaking a routine you can often experience the world in a very different way. If you bust the right cycle, this shift in perspective can often lead to elation and a sense of possibility.
By going to the dentist, I was trying to bust the cycle of not having people fuck with my mouth. That turned out to be the wrong cycle to bust, and it just plain sucked. Busting some other cycles has worked out for me though. I find that the best routines to bust are the ones that you spend the most energy trying to maintain. For example, sometimes I get anxious about sleeping. I get all worked up about falling asleep and not getting back to sleep if I wake up in the middle of the night. So I bust that cycle by purposely setting my alarm and starting my day at an ungodly hour. When you walk around the streets at five in the morning you realize that some people do it every day. And as you go through your day you realize that you can still function even though you’re really tired. And instead of being stressful that tired giddiness can make the world a little bit fun.
So, yeah: change doesn’t always have to be dramatic or scary. Jad and Robert (and another Robert) talk, in the Radiolab on Stress, about stress in lab rats related to whether or not they will receive electric shocks:
Robert Sapolsky: If the rat thinks it has control, it’s not going to get a stress-related disease. Let it press a lever; it’s been trained to press this lever to decrease the chances of a shock. The lever is doing squat today, it’s a placebo, it’s disconnected, but the rat’s pounding away on the lever thinking, “This is great! Imagine how many shocks I’d be getting otherwise!” It has a sense of control.
Control makes stressors less stressful.
Maybe the most stressful thing in my life is when I feel out of control. And maybe the reason I get stressed about change is because the world is always changing, and while I can find some freshness from it, while I can maybe find some wonder in looking at the world in a new light because something in me is different, it’s still scary as shit to feel it’s going on without my input.
Exercising a modicum of control can make change that much less scary. Sometimes just remembering what little control you have: how you react to things.
And as long a we’re mentioning the iPhone, check out Ze’s free app:
This is going to be a blatant case of fishing for information. I don’t have any insight into this, but I was hoping the occasional reader might have anecdotes or links to more articles on the topic. “The topic” being the G-spot.
Basically, a lot of people, some very learned scientists, still think it doesn’t exist. It’s a weird mixture of the limits of observation and persistent sexism holding over from before women’s lib. The penis is fairly easy to study: whatever variance there is in penis size, shape, dimension, stimulation, what have you, it’s right there. You can look at it by virtue of it being external. Vaginas (oddly my spellchecker insists on “vaginae” but I won’t be using that, thanks) are a lot harder to study, exceptionally so to study them while aroused. Scientific study and arousal are strange and rare bedfellows.
On top of that, Freud believed that becoming feminine meant moving from clitoral orgasm to vaginal, because femininity means being passive, and any woman who masturbates or requests clitoral stimulation is a stunted adolescent. This is the thinking that has led many cultures to pervasive use of clitoridectomy. A “move” of this kind would leave many women unable to climax at all, which never seemed to be a concern of Freud’s.
What we do know is that only about 25% of women are able to have an orgasm from sexual intercourse alone, with no added clitoral stimulation. I’ve personally met some that are incredibly skeptical of any women claiming to have had an orgasm from anything but clitoral stimulation.
In Mary Roach’s Bonk: The Curious Coupling Of Science And Sex, she enumerates the histories of G-spot study (FYI, the G stands for Grafenberg, Ernst Grafenberg specifically, who did the first studies on the G-spot… oddly, the history of sexual science is littered with people named Ernst). There are correlations between penetration-only orgasms and the proximity of the clitoris (specifically the visible bit under the hood, really the tip of the iceberg, called the “neoclitoris”) to the vagina. Marie Bonaparte’s studies implied that vaginal orgasm simply comes from having a close clitoris and getting some pressure on it during sex, and the numbers do correlate. Roy Levin believes that the periurethral glans directly around the urethra are an erogenous zone (it’s analogous to the very tip of the penis), and they this area gets pulled inside the vagina during sex for some women.
These are all ways of explaining how the G-spot doesn’t actually exist, and it’s starting to sound like the scientific community thinks the G-spot is some kind of spook story, a “God of the gaps” that will eventually be summarily disproven.
But these are all older studies than one that Roach mentions taking place in the mid-80′s in Colombia, where two researchers, Heli Alzate and Maria Ladi Londoño, to put it bluntly, finger-banged 16 Colombian prostitutes and 32 Colombian feminists to test for their sweet spots.
When Alzate or Londoño located a subject’s sweet spot – which for most was on the front wall, but for some, the lower back wall – the spot was simultaneously pressed and stroked (a maneuver I have seen elsewhere described as a “come here” motion). More than three-quarters of the prostitutes Alzate “frictioned” in this manner had a vaginal orgasm. (Londoño brought no subjects to climax; the women said that this was because she wasn’t pressing as hard as Alzate.) Only four of the feminists, though aroused, reached orgasm. Perhaps they were feeling uncomfortable with what many feminists might perceive to be an exploitative scenario. Or perhaps they were simply less accustomed to sexual encounters with strangers.
-Mary Roach, Bonk, p.49-50
If I may get anecdotal for a moment: I’ve had four sexual partners. One has never had an orgasm in her life, and the other three have at least once had a vaginal orgasm. Of those three, all of them have had a vaginal orgasm from exactly that “come here” motion of fingers, a motion with bent fingers that pull the hands and fingers away from both the clitoris and the periurethral glans.
If there’s no such thing as a G-spot than I have known three exquisite fakers, and I need to reassess my value as a sexual partner.
So what do we think? I’m fully convinced that the G-spot exists, but I can’t tell you what it is or how it works, or why it’s so variable from one woman to the next. Dan Savage stresses that the clitoris is more than just the neoclitoris, that the analogous “shaft” of the clitoris is inside a woman’s body, and that the G-spot is simply what occurs in the women who are lucky enough to have this shaft extend low enough into their bodies to be touchable from inside the vagina. But I’m not sure where that study is, and it doesn’t explain the “lower wall” orgasms that Alzate achieved with (and within) some of his prostitutes.
Now, while I’ve been graciously granted some free access to vaginas at different points in my life, I haven’t got one of my own. I sure would love it if some people with more firsthand (or both-hands) experience(s) or someone with a link to some more articles on the subject would pass them along.
Anyway, here’s Dan in his own, inimitable words:
Throw me links and/or stories in the comments, or shoot me a line privately at mejicaboom (at) gmail (dot) com.
So says Don Hertzfeldt, animating is “like writing a novel by etching into a rock one letter at a time with your fingernails.” Sometimes art goes so slowly one wonders if it’s going at all anymore.
After a day like today, I wonder: was this a bad day? Or did I lose the project entirely?
And I would think after having asked that question several times and found myself, a year later, still working away, that I would know the answer this time. But I don’t.
I never do.
Sorry for the low-quality video.
Yeah, I’m a little behind the times, but I finally got my hands on some music by Lily Allen. This song is catchy, and I admit I’m a sucker for her accent. But it’s got the same old themes: nice guys finish last, nice guys are no good in bed, the total cultural sexualization of domination and oppression that makes some women think that only guys who treat them like shit can be good lovers…
bell hooks writes about the need to decolonize our minds–to get out of this attraction dynamic that she admits to being stuck in for a long time. In “Seduced by Violence No More” she writes:
…the courageous brothers who do, who rethink masculinity, who reject patriarchy and rape culture, often find that they cannot get any play–that the very same women who may critique macho male nonsense contradict themselves by making it clear that they find the “unconscious brothers” more appealing… Their black female peers confirm that they do indeed hold contradictory desires. They desire men not to be sexist, even as they say, “But I want him to be masculine.” When pushed to define “masculine,” they fall back on sexist representations. I was surprised by the number of young black women who repudiated the notion of male domination, but who would then go on to insist that they could not desire a brother who could not take charge, take care of business, be in control.
Their responses suggest that a major obstacle preventing us from transforming rape culture is that heterosexual women have not unlearned a heterosexist-based “eroticism” that constructs desire in such a way that many of us can only respond erotically to male behavior that has already been coded as masculine within the sexist framework…
Years passed before I found a man who respected those rights [to say no] in a feminist manner…While I liked his alternative behavior, I felt a loss of control–the kind we experience when we are no longer acting within the socialized framework of both acceptable and familiar heterosexual behavior. I worried the he did not really find me desirable. Then I asked myself whether that aggressive emphasis on his desire, on his need for “the pussy” would have reassured me. It seemed to me, then, that I needed to rethink the nature of black female heterosexual eroticism, particularly in relation to black culture.
Critically interrogating my responses, I confronted the reality that despite all my years of opposing patriarchy, I had not fully questioned or transformed the structure of my desire. By allowing my erotic desire to still be determined to any extent by sexist constructions, I was acting in complicity with patriarchal thinking. Resisting patriarchal culture meant that I had to reconstruct myself as a heterosexual, desiring subject in manner that would make it possible for me to be fully aroused by male behavior that was not phallocentric. In basic terms, I had to learn how to be sexual with a man in a context where his pleasure and his hard-on is decentered and mutual pleasure is centered instead…
Concurrently, when heterosexual women are no longer attracted to macho men, the message sent to men would at least be consistent and clear. That would be a major intervention in the overall effort to transform rape culture.
In other words: talking feminism and anti-oppression is good and well, but if you’re still dating/ fucking guys who act out the myths of seduction through coercion and domination (does our entire culture have Stockholm syndrome?), you’re contradicting and undermining the message.
And I know that desire can change because I’ve seen mine change, expand from attraction solely to caucasians to people of varied ethnic/racial backgrounds. And a friend of mine, after becoming a feminist, noticed that the sorts of female bodies he was attracted to changed and broadened after the conceptual shift. I know sexuality is plastic, but how plastic? And how does one go about changing one’s desires and responses? Can knowledge alone accomplish the shift?
bell also writes about BDSM (which, despite superficial resemblances, is distinct from the mating’n'dating rituals referred to above) as inherently problematic, as does Audre Lorde. The orient
ation towards certain dynamics or psychological themes can be an axis of desire as central, important, and as gender orientation. But is it even mutable? Or is Dan Savage right that our kinks are here to stay?
