Women's Issues

Despite my best attempts to appear disinterested and aloof, I would actually confirm that women's issues are important to me. After all, I am a woman, and a highly opinionated one at that. Since devoted partner has shown a waning interest in my post-Law and Order: SVU tirades, I thought I'd widen my audience to talk about this recent news tidbit that has my proverbial panties in a bunch.

Let us dispense with the obvious: rape is horrible; there is no excuse for rape; no one should be raped; people who rape other people belong in jail. Have I covered my bases? Good. Let's move on, shall we?

Once upon a time, New York City was considered a dangerous place. People disembarking from elsewhere were to be on their guards or suffer the violent consequences. As a result, many many people were wisely suspicious. Since the city became one of the safest big cities in the country, it seems to me people have become lax in the common sense department. This woman, who is a victim, showed remarkably poor judgment and I think there should be some significant acknowledgment of that.

Issue #1: The woman in question is 27. Not a 16 year old runaway, nor a wide-eyed recent high school grad coming to make her way in the big city. This person is a grownup (I would also take the other two examples to task for their decision making, but I think it's important to highlight that this person is a de facto and de jure adult). While searching for an apartment she discovered that a strange man she had never met wanted her to live for free in exchange for cooking and cleaning. Yes, I know New York is expensive, but did nothing about this "free lunch" strike her as OMGDANGERDANGERDANGER?

Issue #2: Let's pretend that this arrangement seemed normal to her. How about when he offered to buy her plane ticket? Had she never watched a Law and Order, or CSI, or any crime show ever on television? Does she not have the internet? Or cable? Or, I don't know, access to a newspaper? I know she's from Wisconsin, but people keep telling me that just because a person doesn't live in New York, that person isn't doomed to ignorance. Does she not have family or friends who said to her, "are you out of your ever-loving mind? You are so totally going to be raped and likely murdered by a psychopath!" Or how about, "this sounds really really suspicious. Give me all this man's information and make sure you call me as soon as you get there to let me know everything is ok, or I'm going to call the police because if I don't hear from you withing three hours of your plane landing, you are likely dead." (Come to think about it, why didn't this happen?)

Issue #3: He let her leave the house to go to work! Now, I know that if the woman had gotten this far she was probably so mortified by her own words-can't-describe stupidity that she might have been embarrassed, but I would wager a little embarrassment is preferable to returning home to your rapist and the handcuffs he hooks you to the radiator with.

Words like empowerment get tossed around to the extent they mean very little now, but the woman's issue that is most important to me is making women less f#$%@%@3ing dumb. There is no excuse for this having happened (which doesn't excuse the perpetrator). None whatsoever. This is a case of someone being so irretrievably stupid that she risked her life for no reason. And I don't know where this stupidity comes from, but this is not an isolated case. Whatever the disadvantages of being the second sex, there must be some way to make women smarter. At least smart enough to not get into these kinds of situations. Violence against women can't be solved merely by making women smarter, but it can make THIS PARTICULAR VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN go away. Everything she did was stupid. EVERYTHING. And it makes me very very very ALL-CAPS mad.

And what really gets me is that this kind of story detracts from women victims who couldn't have prevented their victimization. This is a great story: salacious, tv-worthy (for the record, at this point in time if you are a poor woman from a developing nation and you DON'T KNOW that if you accept free illegal passage to this country, you are coming to be a forced prostitute, you are stupid too). Victimized women whose stories are more heartbreaking and less glossy get forgotten.

I'm sorry Miss Wisconsin had such a horrifying experience moving to New York, but Miss Wisconsin did everything in her power to ensure the horrifying experience. She did nothing to prevent it and now she'll probably get a book deal. For being stupider than your average urban 6-year-old who knows not to accept candy from strangers.

WWCD

It is an unremarkable Tuesday and yet I am wearing a clean dress, high heels, and hair spray. I have mascara on, and lip gloss (with liner) and perfume. My eyebrows are plucked and my underarms smooth. This is not normal.

But something has happened in my bathroom and in my life and I cannot ignore it. A new crop of beauty products have arrived and, once utilized, they shame my lazy ass into shape. They are the beauty products of the beautiful and graceful woman who is staying in our guest room with her husband, the dearest friend of devoted partner. They are merely her travel beauty products. And the fact that her travel products and my permanent products were equal in scope has given me pause. I know I've written about this before and it's something I truly struggle with: how does a girl on a budget manage to do all the girl things she's supposed to while also saving for retirement? Well, I'll admit that after only two days of sharing my bathroom with C, I no longer care how much it costs, I'm willing to join the cabal of adult females who bathe and anoint regularly.

And yet, C is effortlessly beautiful. Whatever it is she's doing in my bathroom she's doing it with a light hand. I have mentioned as much to her and then she pretends she doesn't speak English. But she addresses one of my major concerns with doing one's self up which is that one tends, then, to look done up. And I don't like looking done up. From a vanity perspective, I think it ages me, and from a social perspective, I tend to think it cheapens me. C just looks together. Like someone who just spent an afternoon on a boat and got some color. Like someone who doesn't look at the act of face washing as a chore.

She has also renewed my commitment to spending the summer in dresses. Yesterday she wore, literally, a hoodie dress in a simple grey heather. She looked phenomenal. Perhaps the ridonkulous and covet-worthy red leather jacket dressed it up, but I saw her in the morning, before the jacket came on.

So I'm going to try, even after she leaves (and we are sad), to embrace more heartily the idea that 20-30 minutes in the morning is not going to kill me. After all, I've been flossing, and losing that 2 minutes hasn't radically altered the happiness in my life. Besides, my hair is looking really incredible and that doesn't happen when I just comb it and put it in a ponytail.

The Lies Women Tell

"My husband and I never fight."

"He can just look at me and I have multiples."

"Labor is the worst pain ever."

"My boyfriend's is enormous."

"I'd never want to be as skinny as she is."

"Every time is as magical as the first."

Thank god Amherst didn't have sororities or I would have been in trouble. I've not been fortunate in amassing a coterie of close female friends. There are a number of almosts, some halves, but I don't have that terrific group of women with whom I can take a week in Barbados. This makes me sad and the future prospects aren't great.

But, and rationalization this must be, some of the above statements have always given me pause when I am surrounded by an XX crowd. If you are a woman, you have heard other women you know, and occasionally like, utter one of the above ridiculous statements. Maybe you've ignored them, maybe you've pitied the speaker, or maybe, like me, you've seethed at the necessity for the utterance at all. Devoted partner has often said, and I have often been pissed at him for it, that while men measure their relative worth against other men on the power/income metric, women measure by relationships. And as we all know, no relationship can be good unless there is never friction and always huge member magical special time. Right?

I mentioned sororities up top because I always found this kind of chatter a form of hazing. I remember it especially when the topic of giving birth was brought up and those that had would launch into the most hyperbolic hysterics about how painful it was. But my mom told me it was no biggie. Sure, she wouldn't choose to do it every day, but her report of the experience was at complete odds with every other report I received. I chalked it up to a bit of one-upmanship. Of course when followed immediately by, "but it was worth it because my husband is gigantic and we had magical whoopie every night in an effort to conceive and I had a million little deaths each time," I felt less charitable.

Because isn't the goal of those statements, if only for a moment, to make the listener question her own life and choices? Wait a second, sometimes our special time isn't all that special, and last night I yelled about dirty dishes, and then there was that time when for a couple of months no one was reaching satisfying completion. F$%#%$K! Is my marriage/relationship/life doomed? Cause this bitch in front of me has it all!

Not nice, ladies, not nice.

I swear, and those who know me well know I am precisely this stubborn, I sometimes consider never marrying devoted partner simply in protest to all the people, most especially women who look at and speak towards me pityingly when they hear about my "situation." Or, should we birth, to film it and put it on YouTube showing me calmly reading a book during the whole process; or playing Parcheesi. For someone admittedly so good at lying, I seem to find insincerity and dishonesty at the top of my peeves list, and when I am around groups of women (no matter what kind of group), I hear it everywhere.

Now that we're older and people are, especially the coupled ones, having less sex, the bragging rights go to the couples that don't fight. Ever. I don't know why this is considered a good thing. To my mind, if you never fight, you're never really invested in something. Or you are so indifferent to one another that nothing seems worth getting heated up about. Or you've both already commenced your affairs, so why stir the pot?

Why this upsets me when, much like the television, I can choose to tune out or change channels, is that it simply perpetuates the wholly unrealistic picture of adult couplehood lapped up by young women. Which, when they discover how unrealistic it is, can spend much of their time feeling like they've failed. After all, if everyone else has X and I don't, there must be something wrong with me. And even among us liberated self-determinative, impervious types, there are a couple of moments of doubt we can all recall.

So why write about this? Well, I've been asking myself to identify things I'm passionate about and, as I look at what I've chosen to write about, I see a lot of women's issues creeping in. But not the traditional ones. Pay equity and reproductive rights, while certainly on my list, are issues there are more than enough people tackling. These other things, these insidious cultural things, these are never mentioned, and their ill effects are perpetuated. And we're all culpable. Any time we lied and instead of saying, "I'm really happy," we said, "it was perfect from the first moment," we contributed to the utter falsification of what a stable adult relationship is.

And we miss the opportunity to share the important information - how relationships aren't always easy, but when you know you want to work on them, you've probably found one worth staying in.

Feedback and Follow Ups

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

I am trying to embrace small-town living (and by small-town, you should understand me to mean fewer than 3 million people or so). When I saw that there was something called Art on the Avenue in Greenwich, I knew I wanted to go. Local artists' work being featured in local stores and an opening night schedule of festivities featuring live music? Love it. And certainly that was what was on offer last night. But it was lacking for me. There was no feeling of community. The streets, while populated, were not packed, and people were guarded, insular, and unsmiling towards strangers. As devoted partner (sadly at work during my perambulations) said later, Greenwich is a bedroom community and, as such, not a TV-ready suburb of neighborhood pool parties and town hall dances. This evening of purported festivities merely highlighted the differences between my perception of all non-urban environments, and their reality.

I mention this here because I had waxed rhapsodic about the feel of Scarsdale. But Scarsdale is also a bedroom community and while the lady at the knitting store in Scarsdale was nicer than the lady at the knitting store in Greenwich (I later discovered the reason: the Scarsdale knitting lady reverse commutes from Manhattan), the vibe of the street wasn't that much different. So I told devoted partner that for our next move, I'm thinking the south where it is possible that the small-town community shtick that I think justifies not living in the center of the world exists.

Nut-allergic Ed and I ate dinner together on Wednesday - our annual fete-ing of me by him to celebrate how long I have been alive - and he commented that in my anti-special-needs-food post I made no mention of litigation; that is, I didn't mention that the reason people pussy-foot around the nut-allergic, especially when those nut-allergic are children, is that should the child have a severe allergic reaction to the smell of peanuts somewhere in its vicinity, the parents would surely sue. He's right. I didn't mention it. Mostly because I hope those people are consumed by righteous fire, but also because I was being idealistic.

What the parents who crusade for peanut butter-free schools don't seem to realize is that the trading floor on the NYSE won't be peanut butter-free. Eventually, when there's no one left to threaten with lawsuits, their precious little angels will emerge into a dangerous world where peanuts exist. Their workplaces will have peanuts, their public transportation, the streets they walk down. So one of two things will happen: they'll adapt or they'll drop dead. I don't see how preventing the inevitable helps anyone. I know if you have that severe an allergy your life probably sucks, but might I suggest going to a special school, like other people with severe physical disabilities do?

Finally, Aidan wrote about women and lingerie this week. I knew she was going to because we had briefly discussed it, but I was not prepared for the response. No one, but no one, was on Team Yelena. Of the 29 comments left on the post, mine was the only one that advocated fancy things. All the other women were of the, "I'll wear baby-vomit stained yoga pants cause they're comfy and I dare my husband to not want to make it with me," opinion. That's partial hyperbole, but none of the other commenters thought nice undies were a necessary component of a well-lived life. This made me really sad.

And only partly because I dream of opening a lingerie store (I thought I could get together with Kate, my most fashionable friend, and open a fancy bra/fancy shoe store and call it Tits and Toes). I maybe a holder of many minority opinions and sometimes this might make me feel supremely badass (i.e. Tom Jones rocks!), but when stared in the face with it, especially about something I feel passionate about, it kinda stings. I am forced to ask why am I so alone in my thoughts. These thoughts, however, did not make me abandon my quotidian habit of wearing supremely badass underthings. After all, today might be the day I meet Tom Jones!

Real Women

Recently there's been some brouhaha because ABC and FOX passed on a Lane Bryant lingerie commercial. Whether or not the whole thing was a publicity stunt or FOX and ABC hate fat chicks interests me less than the reactions it has produced, both on the anarchic internet and in my mother. To paraphrase pretty much everyone, "ABC and FOX would rather show stick figures with bolt on plastic boingboings than real women."

Far from cringing, this kind of sentiment causes my blood to boil.

What in the bleepity bleep bleep bleep is a "real woman?" Want to know why Hilary Clinton isn't president (aside from some personality flaws)? Because women like to take the piss out of other women. Hate your thighs? Console yourself by saying that real women have jiggly thighs. Ok, I'm all for lying to yourself in the interests of self-preservation, but what, oh, what, does that make women with non-jiggly thighs? Fake women? What is she's slim, has fake boobs, but also jiggly thighs? Is she half-real? Half-fake?

This fanatic need to diminish other women who, let's face it, look better than we do because THEIR JOB IS TO LOOK BETTER THAN WE DO, is ugly, childish, and just plain wrong. One of my least favorite things to hear from people, whom I know are saying it to be nice is, "oh, I'm so glad you have curves like a real woman." Ok, in fairness, I'm glad I have curves too. I wish they were less filled with butter, but I like that in the figure lottery, I got the basic shape I got. But I like it because I like it, not because it may make me better or worse of realer or faker than someone else. My mother, a diametric opposite of me in the figure department, is no less or more beautiful because of this. My mother is beautiful because she has spent a lifetime embracing what she looks like and I am an aspiring beauty because she taught me this lesson. Which may have been difficult considering she had to send me first bra shopping with my aunt because she herself didn't own one. But to say my mother isn't a real woman because she has been slim her whole life is offensive. Oh, but maybe because a) my mom is old and b) she doesn't have fake boobs, she might get grandfathered in to the real woman category. But if my mother had gotten a breast enhancement, I don't know if that should have catapulted her from the stratus of the real. (And by the way, my mother was solidly on the side of the ABC should show real women crowd...)

And when your jeans are too tight, when your bust isn't full enough to flatter you in that awesome dress, when your legs are too stumpy for that short skirt, or your arms to flabby for that tank top, do you really, honestly, care how flippin' real you are? At that moment wouldn't you, somewhere, kill a man to look like Cindy Crawford or Angelina Jolie, or Taylor Swift, even if only for the evening? When I hear someone talk about real women, what I hear is deep, ugly insecurity. Because I am not perfect, I must be something else that purportedly perfect women are not. And that something is "real." Now I can feel better about myself because while she's perfect, she's inauthentic.

If we, as women, spent, oh one-tenth the time improving both ourselves and our lots in life as we do disparaging other women whom we envy, whose successes we don't understand and can't seem to emulate, I think the life of a woman would look radically different. And I say this as someone who has written about watching the Oscars and wondering why all these young famous people have crows' feet. Now I'll try to walk it back so that I appear ever so slightly less hypocritical, but the urge is in us all. Just, please, stop it short of trying to compliment me (or any other non-perfect woman) by dissing another woman. I'd like to get to a point where that sort of behavior is beneath us. All of us real women.

Before

Until I found myself actually weighing the relative merits of my wardrobe this morning, I hadn't thought that I would devote two posts to this evening, but now I realize I've devoted enough psychic space to it that I can lend thoughts to words.

Aidan is a former classmate from high school. But not really. I mean, yes, we went to the same school, but in different years and if I'm being honest, we knew each other, but mostly by, "hey, how ya doin'?" and not by coffee and cigarette breaks together during interval. But then I found her website and we started chatting occasionally by email. Aidan, for all intents and purposes, has a pretty optimum life. She is happily married. She has two children she seems to like. Her first novel comes out next month. She and her husband have purchased and are renovating a Manhattan apartment. She writes for a living. She's pretty. And slim. She goes nice places. Ordinarily this would mean that my deepest desire would be to bludgeon her with mallets of envy, but, to her credit, like the rest of us, she doesn't see her life as perfect yet. Though she might not worry about how she's going to put her kids through school, she does worry that she will totally hose up parenting - you know, like normal people. I look at her life and sigh that I'm an unmarried renter, variously ambivalent about kids, with no idea of what I want to be when I grow up, and with far more than 10 extra pounds lying about. From my patch of unmowed browning grass, her yard looks pretty good.

Which is why I'm doing something completely out of character tonight and it's her fault.

I'm going to an event she's hosting where the entertainment is in the form of a, for lack of a better word, life coach. Aidan is a master networker (or so it seems), and she has invited a group of women to listen to a successful woman entrepreneur talk about how we other women can have better lives. Or so I imagine. Now I can poo-poo all I want, but from what I've learned about Aidan, she's open to new things and, since her life seems way better than mine, perhaps I can fudge my logic for a moment or two and lend credence to the idea that one or two new things could contribute to my having a better life.

So before I go, I'll air my prejudices in the hopes that tomorrow's post holds some surprises. When I gave up on the idea of religion sometime in my teens, and despite a powerful course of brainwashing, I gave up on all groupthink. Man is an individual, I said, and must live or die by his individuality. Let us pass over, for a moment, that this kind of absolutism shares quite a bit with religion and groupthink. I decided that my destiny was my own and no formal course of thought would really change it - any change would be merely superficial and a result of my subordinating logic and reason to a more comfortable invented reality. How's that working out for me? It doesn't help that, for the most part, when I have encountered people who have participated in and benefited from secular improvement regimens, they talk funny. Of the truths I hold self-evident, elocution being a barometer for intelligence is certainly one of them, and a lot of improvement regimens use their own vocabulary which is frequently at odds with basic rules of grammar. This itches me from the start and I can barely hold back my ire at any group which would, just for the sake of commonality use nouns as verbs and such.

But here's the thing: most of these improvement groups aren't doing anything new. Whether AA or NLP, successful groups draw on memes inherent in our culture. They're not breaking new ground, merely translating tenets of philosophy, psychology, theology, and sociology into a regimen more easily accessible to all. So even if they use funny terminology, someone, like me, who actually knows the source material, can figure out what the goal is. Which is both a blessing and a curse. If you know someone, for the simplest example, is using reverse psychology on you, it's far easier to ignore it - you know the trick. Sure, it simultaneously prevents you from Kool Aid moments, but you're also able to tune out the message.

But then there's Aidan. Pretty, happy, not-poor Aidan. If there's a group I can belong to that gets me closer to that? Shit, I'd be a real idiot to not, at least, give it a shot. Now, granted, Aidan isn't a student of this speaker, she just learned about her, found her interesting, and organized an audience for her. But there will be other people there. Other women. As someone who, were a traditional wedding in the offing, seriously consider hiring bridesmaids to make up the glaring deficit, I could stand to meet some more people. Some more women. As I have learned, to my detriment, I won't really be making new men friends from here on in. They'll be the husbands of my friends. Or the friends of my "husband." Thirtysomething women don't really get to make new men friends. And I'm assuming that some of the women I meet tonight, by their life examples, could also teach me a thing or two.

Finally, there's an air of nostalgia about this that appeals to me. I am not the same person I was when I graduated high school. I am both less crazy and also less optimistic. The former clearly a plus; the latter an unspeakable minus. I'd like to get some optimism back and I'm prepared to make some ego sacrifices to do it (devoted partner claims I have nearly insurmountable ego walls). I'll have more to report tomorrow.

I(bra)nic

Ok, I'll admit it, I spent a fair bit of the commute trying to come up with this title and I'm still not pleased with it. Mostly because it suggests that I'm about to write a political piece on the shared histories of Jews and Muslims. But 'braronic' didn't work, nor 'brarony,' and I'll grant that this doesn't really work either, but the implicit: "The Irony of the Bra" sounded a little too 'must publish so that I can get tenure in the sociology department.'

But now we know what we're talking about. I've been wanting to write about this for a while, but, as with most great ideas, I had a mild epiphanic moment in the bathroom this morning and decided today was the day. As I'm sure you can guess, we're going to talk about foundational garments. To declare some bias from the start (not news for anyone who has ever lived with me or come to my house or gotten changed with me or been to summer camp with me), since arriving at the age where foundational garments were necessary, mine have always been pretty. I had a friend in adolescence who looked bangin' in the calvin klein panties that were popular in the late 80s, but I absolutely didn't. I was not then, nor am I now, best flattered by sportive styles. So I was always a lace and tulle kinda girl.

And when I came of foundational garment age, Victoria's Secret still made lingerie that could make a girl feel pretty. Just off the top of my head I remember the lace balconnets I had in orange and lime; the satin hunter green with autumnal accents (again if we went to summer camp together, you remember this one too); and the two rickrack pattern balconnets in red and navy, both of which ended up in a girlfriend's possession sometime during college for reasons I can't quite remember, and the latter of which is memorialized on my high school yearbook page.

But then something changed chez Vicky. Bras were all 'miraculous' and lace and tulle and satin were replaced by lycra, spandex, and cotton. Gone were designs and in were seamless styles in beige and beige and, occasionally, taupe. Not only were the padded designs not at all flattering, but I didn't want to walk around all day knowing I was wearing a cotton-blend seamless taupe bra. That does simply nothing for permitting a woman to acknowledge her inner bombshell.

So I searched elsewhere and, stereotypically, found myself shopping with the French. A simple look at ANY French lingerie website or store will underscore a major cultural difference: the French find underwear important. If you are not at work, I urge you to compare and contrast our mid-range store and theirs (and I would like to say that these are the landing pages for each site's bras; I didn't go hunting for pages that would prove my point).

My main problem is that the undergarments popular and readily available here fall into two, and only two, categories: eminently practical and self-mocking. Whether you shop at Victoria's Secret, Frederick's of Hollywood, Trashy Lingerie, or Agent Provacateur, there is an undercurrent of mirth. Bras as costume. Sex appeal or desirability as merely dress-up. When I pass by a lingerie store, I see t-shirt bras and things you would only wear on joke night. The idea of quotidian sexuality simply doesn't exist.

And I hate that.

Hate. Hate. Hate.

Because I think it says something incredibly dangerous about our attitudes towards sex. In the same way I have major major problems with the popularity of a certain series of books/movies that revert to Victorian ideas about women being taken/protected/unable to make rational decisions because they are being devoured by supernatural creatures, I have a problem with the idea that sexy lingerie must be subjected to ironic filters in order to be acceptable. If a women wears sexy lingerie unironically, she's probably a 'rhymes with more' (literally or figuratively). And just so we're clear, I'm talking about wearing the kind of things on the Darjeeling website, not anything more risque or complicated. Simply put, I advocate a woman wearing something nice under her suit. I know that for me, knowing that I am beautiful underneath my clothing is a huge confidence booster throughout the day. And I thought this even when I wasn't coming home to someone who would see it.

And it's getting worse for reasons I don't quite grok. Ten years ago the lingerie department at Sak's still had a variety of options, including popular brands from Europe. Now they have beige and the occasional tee-hee garment. One of my favorite French producers closed their American operations because there wasn't demand. And while you can find a simply dizzying array of control-top pantyhose, you have to search far and wide for a pair of stockings and chances are you'll pay for them as if they were made of saffron.

I have wiled away many an afternoon dreaming of opening a shop that stocked lovely things only to remember that I cannot singlehandedly create a market and that the current market says no to lace, no to color, and no to style.

And I say, as someone who can stress-test the hell out of a garment, that this is not a comfort issue. I would put my undergarments up against any t-shirt bra in a comfort test and a support test. Simply put, if the garment wasn't comfortable or supportive, it wouldn't be on my body. No I think the sole issue is fashion and availability, and I am deeply troubled by the underlying implications. Mostly because I no of no easier better way to go from blech to va-va-voom than by putting on a nice bra and panties. Even under sweats, even just to do the laundry, even when you're just going to see your accountant. Spanx might make you feel thinner, but they won't make you feel pretty. You'll be reminded all day of your imperfections and the garments you have to buy and wear to mask them. Wear a beautiful bra and panty set and suddenly those extra ten pounds, the loose skin from childbirth, and the thighs that are never quite tight enough DON'T MATTER AS MUCH ANYMORE. Trust me on this. I am an imperfect woman who most days would rather ONLY wear my underwear because it makes me feel exponentially prettier than what goes over it.