Friday, July 29, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
To Embrace A Woman's Role or Shout the Postfeminist Raunch Culture
Postfeminism suggests that something has indeed changed from decades past when women weren’t allowed to divorce, or vote, or wear pants. It accepts that some progress in the women’s rights arena has been made. Postfeminism also points out that there are men in the world who aren’t oppressive, and that maybe the gender divide is becoming archaic and stale. However, postfeminism also believes that “constructive dialogue and structural change” (Barker 284) would further facilitate the role of women in society.
All of the above understandings about postfeminism make a pop culture celebrity like Christina Aguilera an ideal subject by which one can recognize the way postfeminism radically drives forward the feminist need. Christina Aguilera is a current, influential raunch culture icon but she didn’t always present herself in such a manner. Her first album created an image for her that was reflective of the girl-next-door, teen-age, nice girl. All of which are acceptable and considered appropriate by mainstream society. On her second album however, Christina embraced an image that “advocate[d] sexual provocativeness and promiscuousness by women as women… [that] spoke of … rights to objectify sexuality like a man” (312). When asked about her recreated, fractured identity in a 20/20 interview, she claimed that people didn’t have such a negative reaction to music videos in which men portrayed hyper sexualized and often times, anti-feminist messages. She said, “I think it scares people when a woman is comfortable with herself, her sexuality” (Aguilera). Not only did she become comfortable with herself and her sexuality during the process of preparing for her second album, but she also prepared herself to project lyrics that pointed out inequalities in the male, female master/slave relationship. A prime example is her song entitled “Can’t Hold Us Down.” The video and lyrics are shown below:
So what am I not supposed to have an opinion
Should I be quiet just because I'm a woman
Call me a bitch cause I speak what's on my mind
Guess it's easier for you to swallow if I sat and smiled
When a female fires back
Suddenly big talker don't know how to act
So he does what any little boy would do
Making up a few false rumors or two
That for sure is not a man to me
Slanderin' names for popularity
It's sad you only get your fame through controversy
But now it's time for me to come and give you more to say
This is for my girls all around the world
Who've come across a man who don't respect your worth
Thinking all women should be seen, not heard
So what do we do girls?
Shout out loud!
Letting them know we're gonna stand our ground
Lift your hands high and wave them proud
Take a deep breath and say it loud
Never can, never will, can't hold us down
Nobody can hold us down
Nobody can hold us down
Nobody can hold us down
Never can, never will
So what am I not supposed to say what I'm saying
Are you offended by the message I'm bringing
Call me whatever cause your words don't mean a thing
Guess you ain't even a man enough to handle what I sing
If you look back in history
It's a common double standard of society
The guy gets all the glory the more he can score
While the girl can do the same and yet you call her a whore
I don't understand why it's okay
The guy can get away with it & the girl gets named
All my ladies come together and make a change
Start a new beginning for us everybody sing
This is for my girls all around the world
Who've come across a man who don't respect your worth
Thinking all women should be seen, not heard
What do we do girls?
Shout Out Loud!
Letting them know we're gonna stand our ground
Lift your hands high and wave 'em proud
Take a deep breath and say it loud
Never can, never will, can't hold us down
[Lil' Kim:]
Check it - Here's something I just can't understand
If the guy have three girls then he's the man
He can either give us some head, sex a roar
If the girl do the same, then she's a whore
But the table's about to turn
I'll bet my fame on it
Cats take my ideas and put their name on it
It's airight though, you can't hold me down
I got to keep on movin'
To all my girls with a man who be tryin to mack
Do it right back to him and let that be that
You need to let him know that his game is whack
And Lil' Kim and Christina Aguilera got your back
But you're just a little boy
Think you're so cute, so coy
You must talk so big
To make up for smaller things
So you're just a little boy
All you'll do is annoy
You must talk so big
To make up for smaller things
This is for my girls...
This is for my girls all around the world
Who've come across a man who don't respect your worth
Thinking all women should be seen, not heard
So what do we do girls?
Shout out loud!
Letting them know we're gonna stand our ground
Lift your hands high and wave 'em proud
Take a deep breath and say it loud
Never can, never will, can't hold us down
This is for my girls all around the world
Who've come across a man who don't respect your worth
Thinking all women should be seen, not heard
So what do we do girls?
Should out loud!
Letting them know we're gonna stand our ground
Lift your hands high and wave 'em proud
Take a deep breath and say it loud
Never can, never will, can't hold us down
Spread the word, can't hold us down
Noting that Aguilera sings about the double standards that society forces upon us while strutting around in a purple tube top and short-shorts number, with heavy make-up and suggestive movements further emphasizes the point she attempts to make in her 20/20 interview. Women should not be ashamed of their sexuality, nor should they be subject to the male gaze just because of their physiology. Perhaps rejecting the traditional female role in favor of a more risqué appearance is only feared because it places the still well accepted notion that “all women are linked by childbearing bodies and innate ties to the natural earth that support egalitarian, nurturance-based values” (288). If a woman begins to assert her power and sexuality, if she allows herself to enter what Luce Irigaray theorized as “a presymbolic space or experience for women that is unavailable to men… constituted by a feminine jouissance or sexual pleasure, play and joy, which is outside of intelligibility” (288), then what becomes of the familial role? What happens to the cultures idea of womanhood and motherhood? Who raises the children to be ‘proper’ citizens? If women are asserting and wildly expressing their sexuality, then the voices of society would seem to beg, will every aspect of the family as we know it crumble? People like Christina Aguilera are willing to challenge these cultural fears in favor of a freedom from the oppression that follows any person with breasts and a uterus.
What becomes problematic is the way in which society views the women who are brave enough to step outside of their presubscribed roles. Even the way Barker’s text presents it’s section on raunch culture reads as connotatively negative. It claims that women of the raunch culture believe that “they are entitled to rejoice in their own sexuality and to act on it in just as assertive, and even predatory, a way as men. One might describe raunch culture as postfeminist party-time” (313). If acting just as assertive and predatory when rejoicing in their own sexuality becomes postfeminist party-time for women, then it is the subtext that becomes interesting here. Perhaps it’s suggesting that rejoicing in sexuality and in the physical body that genetically makes one a female is party-time and thus frivolous or irrelevant. However through comparing a woman's rejoicing to a man’s already established way of life, as is suggested, it becomes evident that for a male the ability to be assertive is normal, and in fact respected.
Maybe Christina Aguilera is on to something. Pushing against the societal norms is the only way to project ideas and beliefs that aren’t widely accepted. A more appropriate title for raunch culture would be ‘postfeminism x-treme’. Postfeminist party-time reads as quite tame.
Word Count: 729
Works Cited
20/20. Perf. Christina Aguilera. YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. 10 Mar. 2009. Web. 27 July 2011.
Barker, Chris. "Sex, Subjectivity, and Representation." Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage, 2008. 288+. Print.
Can't Hold Us Down. Perf. Christina Aguilera. YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. 17 Nov. 2009. Web. 27 July 2011.
"Christina Aguilera Lyrics." AZ Lyrics. Web. 27 July 2011.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
People of the Los Angeles Coffee Shop Culture
The sound of blenders and the smell of burnt coffee grinds buzz in the air. Drains flush loudly, and milk steamers scream like teapots. Two female baristas work the Starbucks conveniently located inside of a Barnes and Noble. One takes orders, and has on gold hoop earrings and purple eye shadow. The other shuffles her feet when she walks. She makes the drinks and hands them to the customers over a short clear class partition. They both wear green aprons and black caps. Two customers wait near the partition, tapping away on their iPhones. They don’t look up or at one another although they entered the shop together. The female counterpart wears a bikini top underneath her tank top. The male wears a stuffed backpack and oversized jeans. As the female approaches the counter to retrieve her hot beverage, I notice a large tattoo of wings in black and grey ink located across her entire upper back. She also has sunglasses on top of her head.
A woman across from me is eating hot tomato soup. It smells like pasta. There is an elderly couple behind me. The male gets up about every five minutes to ask the barista if his drink is ready. Each time he returns to his seat, he wonders aloud if the next drink being thrust over the partition is his. A woman in a blue and white floral blouse orders a drink. The blender is on. Refrigerators are being opened. Two men enter the shop. They open the small drink refrigerator before they approach the counter. One man is young with a blue star tattoo on his elbow. The other man is older with grey hair, a tan cap, and blue jeans. A woman waiting in line behind the two men shifts back and forth from foot to foot. She stares at the case concealing cookies and cheesecakes and other treats, and shifts her feet some more.
Now, the barista taking orders is a short female who can barely see over the register. She has a pink flower stuffed in her shirt pocket. A man stares up at the Barnes and Noble level above us while waiting for his drink. He wears a green button up shirt, and has an afro. Three women, two brunettes and a blonde, sit to my right. One brunette puts her fingers up and waves them in the air when she talks. The blonde keeps her drink in her hand the whole time and nods. The other brunette woman has her back to me but her head shakes from side to side occasionally.
The line is growing quickly, and people continuously shift their eyes to see if anyone in the seating area is getting up. It’s a crowded Monday afternoon. A woman sits punching in things on her white iPhone, and a man is coughing next to her. He is on a large black laptop, wears a pink shirt and has ear buds in his ears. A man with a green collared shirt grabs a banana and walks off. The barista refills the espresso machine. Two women with backpacks sit down and begin talking in a high pitched tone. One checks her makeup in a compact mirror, and begins touching and dabbing her face all over. She has glasses on. The woman at the table next to them reads a book that says Thailand on the cover. It’s a National Geographic edition. She is Asian.
A woman in a purple knee length jacket and green skirt enters the shop. She wears sunglasses on her head and has a large brown leather satchel on her shoulder. She is looking into the case of cookies. A man in a blue collared polo shirt has been anxiously searching the shop for a place to sit. After pacing back and forth and moving his backpack from one section of the store to another, he finally grabs the table the two women with backpacks were sitting at. He motions to a female to come sit with him. He pulls out a Macbook Air and a notebook. The female companion is writing something on a sheet of paper. The man in the blue polo switched from the seat on the right of the table to the seat on the left. He pulls his laptop along with him. He crosses his feet.
An older woman enters the shop with a blue and white striped cap and dark brown sunglasses. She has grey roots but the rest of her hair is red, or at least what I can see of it under the cap. She has long fingernails and wears a large ring on her left hand. She has a white coat hanging from her shoulders and wears beige, sharply ironed pants. She orders at the counter and her male companion enters the store to pay for her order. He has unruly grey hair and lifts each leg cautiously when he walks. He has a yellow polo shirt and a large belly. His pants are also perfectly ironed. He has brown suede shoes. They talk to each other and he smiles. Unfortunately, I can’t hear their conversation. The woman turns around and her blue stud earrings and red lipstick show brightly. The retrieve their coffees and walk out of the shop together side by side. There is a lull in customers and the two baristas are counting the change in the drawers. One emerges from behind the counter to wipe of the few empty tables and to refill the condiment bar.
A girl in a green T-Shirt and black leggings orders something at the counter. She is hunched over and her hands are clenched in front of her chest. She bounces up and down while talking to the barista. A tall woman with short blonde hair stands in line behind her. She fluffs up her bangs. She wears a black suit jacket and black sweatpants. She orders and scratches the side of her face. There is a woman dressed in running attire behind her. Her shirt, pants, and bag are all some shade of blue. She has a magazine under her arm. The woman with the black suit jacket stands at the condiment bar. She leans over when she pours the sugar into her drink.
A woman with a pink black and white floral print dress enters. She’s digging in a bag that is literally as long as her torso. There is a blue clip on the side of her bag. She digs for a minute or so, but the walks away. She drags her feet as she exits the store. She had on black sandals with approximately two-inch –tall heels. The woman in the black suit jacket stands, coffee in one hand, weight sitting on one hip, and looks at a rack of magazines. She sips quickly.
A girl next to me writes frantically on a piece of paper. She has books and journals strewn all across her tiny table. She has a coffee sitting there that she hasn’t touched. The steam rises from its open lid and I can smell the caramel. A woman with small legs and a short torso with a green jacket tacked with silver buttons down the sleeves and red hair stands at the counter. She has a brown purse strap trailing across her back. She leans over to sign her receipt. She wears black and white pumas and dangling green earrings. Her jeans stop right above her ankles. She’s smiling. She stands at the side of the partition looking around at the shop, and the people occupying its space. A man stands behind her wearing a blue cap and glasses with a neck strap.
A woman in short shorts and a white zip up jacket stand at the counter next to a guy in a plaid shirt. He licks his lips as he looks into the air. She plays with her long light brown hair. After ordering, she stands at the partition with her arms crossed and back turned to the barista. A woman stands in line whistling loudly. She has blonde short hair and large bangs. She holds what looks like eight magazines in her arms, and sets them down on the counter when she orders. A woman in a red long sleeved shirt enters, but goes straight to a seat. She orders nothing. She has a backpack on and immediately begins talking on her cell phone. I hear her talking about how she can’t afford the trip to Santa Barbara, but she says she will keep the person on the other end posted. The plaid shirt guy and the girl in short shorts walk out of the store. He puts his hand in her back pocket. She’s holding a large black purse and a pink beverage. She twirls strands of her hair in her free hand, and they leave.
What the entire above observation becomes, is a construction of identity. Each thing mentioned in the ethnography has its own constructed truths. The Starbucks itself has characteristics that signify it as what it is, baristas with green aprons and black caps, the saturating smell of coffee grinds and sugar, and the display case of sweet treats. The cups with the green Starbucks mermaid logo: clear ones for cold beverages or solid white for hot ones, is a sure identifier of the brand.
Has the Western world become so obsessed with the notion of identity that even its stores must possess and hold true to one? The Starbucks store itself has a social identity. People expect all of the aforementioned things to appear in the Starbucks they enter. If they don’t, then that store sure isn’t Starbucks. Perhaps it’s a Coffee Bean.
Each person who entered Barnes and Noble and then trekked up the two flights of escalators, cell phones and laptops in hand, before reaching the Starbucks was projecting an image that helped to create their social identity for that moment. In a place as packed as that particular store was on a Monday evening, asserting ones identity was as easy as pouring sugar into a coffee. Each customer’s identity seemed to be “formed through difference as constituted by the play of signifiers. Thus, what [they] are is in part constituted by what [they] are not” (Barker 221). It was evident that the baristas were not the customers as signified through one’s uniform and physical position behind the counter, and another’s “everyday” clothing and ability to enter and leave the store as they wished. It was clear that some were in a hurry and others weren’t, as it was that some were male and some were females, and some were older and some were younger.
However, if looking at one specific example from the theoretical perspective of Ernesto Laclau, in which he attempts to dissolve the constraints and connections imposed by cultural and hegemonic commonalities, one can see that perhaps the labels applied to the customers of Starbucks are lackluster, elementary, and even stereotypical. Using the older couple as a prime example, it might be difficult to identify them as older than other customers when understanding that “the concept of articulation suggests that those aspects of social life, for example identities, that we think of as unified and eternal can instead be thought of as the unique, historically specific, temporary stabilization or arbitrary closure of meaning” (229). Although it is true biologically that the couple was older than most at the store, evident by the grey hair, wrinkled skin, and the slowness of their movements (which could be seen as their social identity), their self-identity emanated beyond their physical appearance. It shows that they care about their outward appearance. They appear to take better care of their clothing and their appearance than younger people, which is interesting to note being that this seems to be a culture so focused on appearance and looking attractive. The woman of the couple wore perfectly sculpted makeup and pretty jewelry. By no means did this couple assume the American stereotypical appearance of elderly people. They were not trapped in decades past, and were not abusing their identity as elderly people. They seemed to focus more on a connection with one another, and presented a quite strikingly young identity, if one is looking solely at outward accessories. This understanding of the two people breaks down the “links between discursive concepts” (229). This couple’s true age is more complex than it seems at first glance. Sure they may have lived more than sixty years on this planet already, but they seem to refuse to succumb to societal restraints that the age supplies for them.
Truly ruminating on identities takes more thought than an hour-long observation at a public place. Each person mentioned in the observation can be broken down and understood (just as the “elderly” couple was) in terms of Laclau’s idea that connections between discursive positions and essential identities are temporary. Perhaps all of society’s notions of the surrounding world are just that: simply ephemeral.
Word Count: 2,170
Works Cited
Barker, Chris. "Issues of Subjectivity and Identity." Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage, 2008. 229. Print.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Jerry Maguire Shows You The Love
The film Jerry Maguire seems to portray the message that love is the threshold upon which success blooms. It seems to suggest that inspiration paired with commitment is the pathway to this love, and that if one doesn’t have love in their life things will eventually fall apart. The film also purports that experiencing love in one relationship can simultaneously spark the appearance of love in another. Overall, all of the above said things lean to proving the simple fact that love grows. It doesn’t begin in full force with commitment and approving a lack of make-up.
Love starts out like it does for the characters Jerry Maguire and Dorothy Boyd, with a strange and awkward yet somehow kind meeting in an airport. An interesting “knight-in-shining-armor” moment occurs which forces the underground attraction between the two to move up a level. What woman wouldn’t love that the hot-shot of the company she works for is willing to help her find her young son in the middle of a crowded public place? The attraction then builds when Dorothy, spurred by the inspiration and fairness supplied in Jerry’s mission statement, agrees to leave the large corporate company in favor of working for Jerry. For Jerry, Dorothy’s decision was what allowed him to continue passionately pursuing his career. For her, passion and the desire to create a company that allows personal connections with clients is enough for her to walk away from a stable paycheck to support herself and her son. Both of them are seeing their relationship to the other through an individual lens. This places an interesting spin on Feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being” (de Beauvoir). Both male and female in this situation define themselves in relation to what the other can provide, and in this way neither are autonomous. This causes the relationship between the two to be more static, and forces this notion that to them is love, to grow faster. The constant close connection between the only two workers at Jerry’s new company creates intimate opportunities for even more attraction to grow like moments where Jerry interacts with Dorothy’s son Ray.
The relationship Jerry develops with Ray can be seen as the force that truly pulls Dorothy further into the relationship, as her son was without a father figure. She thinks she loves him because her son does. And as one can see, the relationship develops into something like love. Each party needs the other for a particular purpose, although the relationship between the two never really develops beyond what role they need the other to fulfill.
Of course, the Hollywood happy-ending ties all of those ragged and love rejecting ends together. The development of the way this couple experiences love must come full circle in order for the audience to see a shift in Jerry Maguire’s character.
Jerry says, “Tonight our little company had a very big night… but it wasn’t complete… because I couldn’t share it with you.” He comes to realize that having success and having someone worth sharing that success with are synonymous. Witnessing his client being able to share his success with his wife, allows Maguire to realize that he needs that same ability. Does love create success? Jerry Maguire says yes. Jerry Maguire also says that passion and the drive to keep that love alive are necessary ingredients.
Word Count: 589
Works Cited
Beauvoir, Simone De. "Simone De Beauvoir The Second Sex, Woman as Other 1949."Marxists Internet Archive. Web. 25 July 2011.
Jerry Maguire - YouTube. Dir. Cameron Crowe. Perf. Tom Cruise and Johnathan Lipnicki. TriStar Pictures, 1996. YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. YouTube, 14 June 2008. Web. 25 July 2011.
U Had Me at Hello - YouTube. Dir. Cameron Crowe. Perf. Tom Cruise and Renee Zellweger. TriStar Pictures, 1996. YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. YouTube, 07 Apr. 2007. Web. 25 July 2011.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Things that Make Us Different
How has culture managed to transition from the realms of art, literature, and classical music into a world of celebrities, reality television, and cosmetic upkeep? As a society, functions have changed, ideals have shifted and priorities have nearly flipped upside down. People of the twenty-first century look to the media for practically every bit of advice and every ounce of their relaxation. That being said, it’s no wonder these things that come to define our society have become demandingly popular. Most people could tell you the size of Kim Kardashian’s engagement ring, or what happened on the last episode of So You Think You Can Dance (or perhaps thrill you with whatever their cultural indulgence of choice is for that month).
Understanding that the aspects of society that the current generation deems important have not always been popular, let alone, have existed is a necessary epiphany one must have in order to gaze deeply into the world which we inhabit. Definitions of culture have embodied from a classical sense what it means to have taste artistically and from an anthropological standing: to understand behaviors and how people interact. It has stretched to encompass class domination and how people respond to that rule. Culture has offered people a way to escape from the capitalistic, hierarchical structures that are their lives, and has simultaneously broken down these ideals and offered people an opportunity to challenge them in innovative ways. The expanse of definitions of culture mentioned above move from what is considered high culture to what is believed to be low culture: yet another way to distinguish between classes, between generations, between sexes, between careers, and ultimately between what is, simply put, good or bad.
Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan’s Introduction entitled “The Politics of Culture” mentions French sociologist Pierre Bordieu’s provocative belief that “culture is a way of distinguishing between positions in the social hierarchy. Those who are born into upper-class echelons will acquire dispositions that allow them to appreciate certain forms of culture (high art, for example), and such abilities will help them secure elevated positions in the class hierarchy” (1026). This observation leads me to the questions, then, how prevalent is this upper-class group of people who can appreciate high art? And what exactly is this high art? The way it seems, most people, high class or not, are consumed by a consumer culture, whether they’re buying from Victoria’s Secret or La Perla, shopping at Target or Saks Fifth Avenue, visiting the Getty or watching Beyonce in concert. True, each one of the above signifies that there are differences between the people who do one versus those who do the other, but ultimately each person is searching for their own identity in the midst of the things that populate the world they live in. Sorting through those things, finding what strikes them as important, and then reflecting that in the way one lives is the most common way to carve out a niche for oneself. Perhaps that is all culture is really supposed to do.
With that said, now would be an appropriate time to watch a little something mentioning the things that bring people together. A little comedy-culture from below never hurt anyone, right? Here is George Carlin's perspective on some of our differences and more of our similarities.
Word Count: 551
George Carlin on Our Similarities - YouTube. Perf. George Carlin. YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. 3 Aug. 2007. Web. 19 July 2011.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Femininity Versus the BRCA1 Mutation Gene
“Pretty isn’t beautiful, Mother, pretty is what changes. What the eye arranges is what is beautiful.” –Stephen Sondheim, “Sunday in the Park with George”
One would imagine that if in the quest for health, beauty was compromised it would be acceptable. Consider if in the quest for life, your essence as a person became compromised. This horrific situation brings to consciousness what it means to be alive in the face of death, what it means to be human, and ultimately for Jessica Queller, what it means to be a beautiful, feminine woman. Faced with her mother’s stage II breast cancer and then six years after that, facing her mother’s stage IIIC ovarian cancer and death, Jessica was soon hit with another terrifying discovery. She tested positive for the BRCA1 genetic mutation; Jessica had in fact inherited the very genetic disposition that brought upon her mother’s death. In her touching novel, "Pretty is what Changes," she describes if knowledge really is power and how decision to have a mastectomy came to redefine her life, her femininity, and her future.
Being raised by a mother that believed beauty was the most important attribute a woman could have, Jessica and her sister learned to embody, “not that femininity is a false entity, but that the women concerned are not feminine” (De Beauvoir 1265). Jessica said her mother would, “tell [her] how important it was for a woman to have a career, but, she added, a woman also had to be beautiful. ‘All girls are pretty when they’re young,’ she’d say. ‘Once they’re grown up it’s another story. Luckily you and your sister have my genes” (Queller 2). The irony of this statement is of a high emotional caliber when one is presented with the decision Jessica came to face. The very genes that her mother claimed gave Jessica her beauty, were now threatening to eventually take her life in the most violent way, or deprive her of the very things that made her a woman: her ovaries and breasts.
Before Jessica knew about her genetic mutation, before her mother’s untimely death, Jessica saw her mom fight for life. Jessica remembers her mother as, “a willful creature-she’d worked as a fashion designer with her own label for over thirty years among aggressive, conniving men, some of them gangsters. As tough as she was, she had a damsel quality-an elusive aspect that made people want to take care of her” (Queller 13). In Stephanie Queller’s life, playing the role women were expected to play worked in her behalf. She allowed people that wanted to take care of her to give her an advantage, and she understood that, “to decline to be the other, to refuse to be a party to the deal-this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste” (De Beauvoir). This superior caste was of course the conniving men who fell in love with her damsel quality. This damsel was now up against cancer for the second time, and the doctors gave her the grim time span of five years to live, “in fact, she would live less than two” (Queller 20).
Jessica remembers her mother fondly, yet realistically. She says, “My parents were self-made dynamos in their respective careers. They typically came home from work after Danielle and I had already been put to bed by the housekeeper. To make up for this, they devoted weekends to us children” (Queller 25). This didn’t leave much time for interaction between parents and children and it was evident that the need for monetary gain had, “torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and [had] reduced the family to a money relation” (Marx 659). Despite this, Stephanie did her best to create a connection between herself and Jessica. Jessica recognized this, but didn’t appreciate it as a teenager. She says, “My mother’s attention was fixed on exteriors. When I was in high school, she’d devote two hours to setting my thick hair in hot rollers for an audition, yet she would not know the names of my teachers or friends, never mind the name of the play I was trying out for… That was her way of giving-through the material” (Queller 17). This lack of understanding between mother and child lead all the way into Jessica’s adult life where she says, “the only signpost I had was my desire to differentiate myself from my mother” (Queller 28). Jessica didn’t want to become a “model of a real without origin or reality,” (Baudrillard 1557), simply a simulacrum of femininity. She desired individuality.
When Jessica was born, her mother “named [her] Tiffany after Breakfast at Tiffany’s the movie starring Audrey Hepburn. Her [mother’s] name was Stephanie and [Jessica’s] name was Tiffany, and [Stephanie] reveled in telling everyone [they] were exactly alike” (Queller 28). Jessica despised being called Tiffany, and felt she “could not escape the stigma of [her] powder-puff name,” (Queller 29), and so she legally changed it to Jessica. Tiffany came to represent all the things Jessica did not want to be; “the value of [this] term [was] accordingly determined by it’s environment” (Saussure 859). Tiffany wasn’t just identification, it became a representation of “shallow, frivolous women” (Queller 29). The individuality that she fought for her entire life thus far, would fade into the background when she found out her body harbored the same genes that brought breast and ovarian cancer upon her mother.
Once the reality of losing her hair from chemotherapy sunk in, Stephanie “reflectively stroked her pretty, dark mane over and over. Only worse than losing her hair, she said, would be to lose her breasts… To her mind, a little more advanced cancer was far preferable to losing her breasts” (Queller 30). Stephanie Queller with breast cancer was life as usual; despite “nausea, vomiting, mouth sores, or lymphedema, my mother exercised on the StairMaster every weekday morning, got dressed in her Armani suits and Manolos, caught the subway, and was in her designer showroom by nine. When her hair started falling out in clumps, she put on custom-made wigs. She never missed a day of work, scheduling chemo appointments during her lunch hour, and wowed nurses and patients with her spike heels and movie-star clothes” (Queller 31). Stephanie Queller was one who exemplified the claim, “we shall not, then, permit ourselves to be intimidated by the number and violence of the attacks launched against women,” (De Beauvoir), that violent attack being breast cancer.
Stephanie beat breast cancer triumphantly, with her femininity in tact until six years later, “until the age of fifty-eight, when she was struck again – this time with ovarian cancer” (Queller 31). Jessica’s mother was hit harder by this bout of cancer, and Jessica relocated from Los Angeles to New York to live with her, to take care of her. Meanwhile, Jessica was having a secret relationship with her boss, “my new secret romance was having a blissful, drug like effect on me and took the edge off of those long nights. It was a scary kind of drug-like heroin. A crash was inevitable” (Queller 44). Jessica began to define herself in terms of this man, who already had a wife. Jessica’s life at this point was an example of Simone De Beauvoir’s theory that, “man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man” (De Beauvoir). He was her drug,the way to escape the terror of her mothers illness, whereas she was just another girl he could do with or without, since he had another one at home anyway. Soon Jessica realized that Adrian was “a man who would never be good for anyone. You’d think I would have summoned my strength and left him, told him to go back to his wife, his children, his responsibilities. That I did not do” (Queller 48). Of course, Adrian wouldn’t go back to his wife, or his children because he doesn’t see them as directly his responsibilities. His mindset was that, “woman has ovaries and a uterus; these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature,” (De Beauvoir), and thus he was home free. After enduring Adrian’s last trip to Los Angeles to see his wife, Jessica finally ended things, but not before she allowed herself to be taken advantage of by this man.
When discussing this occurrence with her therapist, Mark, Jessica “described how [she’d] laid down the law with Adrian. Mark listened in silence. When I was through, he took a beat, then asked if I thought I was creating turmoil in my personal life to distract myself from what was going on with my mother” (Queller 49). Mark understood the concept that every utterance is a response to what has come before it and the reply that will come after it (Bakhtin). He then gave the reply that preceded his above statement since Jessica was silent, “your mother is going to die from cancer, Jessica. There is nothing you can do but bear witness” (Queller 49).
Stephanie’s cancer was indeed progressing in a terrible manner. The plan had become to send her home to be in peace because there was no more the hospital could do for her. “In the days before her discharge, my mother sat up in the hospital bed, looking like a wide-eyed little girl. The brutal effects of the surgeries had knocked any worldliness out of her. She no longer had the filter that exists between impression and response” (Queller 67) Since “language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others,” (Saussure 878) bridging the gap between impression and response became impossible. Stephanie couldn’t control the thoughts that come along with the signified/signifier relationship. The immediate connotation of an event, action, or object was what she reacted to. Soon, Stephanie became so sick, so fearful that her “eyes were filled with terror, her mouth frozen in a permanent O. She refused to get near the bed – she equated the bed with death – and insisted on walking” (Queller 78). She might not have been able to filter impressions and responses, but she understood that, “the linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound image” (Saussure 852). To her, death was the concept and bed was the sound image.
Being that, “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime,” (Burke 459) Stephanie Queller’s defeat in the face of ovarian cancer qualifies. Despite the absolute horror of losing a parent especially in such a dehumanizing condition, it provoked a curiosity in Jessica Queller’s mind. In this way, Stephanie Queller’s passing was sublime as well; “there is nothing so productive of grandeur as noble emotion in the right place. It inspires and possesses our words with a kind of madness and divine spirit” (Longinus 139). This terror, this sadness, this grief is what encourages Jessica to take the BRCA test, and what brought her to writing this moving chronicle of her experience.
Once confronted with the daunting word: positive, Jessica Queller was introduced to the statistics that went along with that word. These “deleterious mutations in BRCA1 may confer as much as an 87% risk of breast cancer and a 44% risk of ovarian cancer by age 70 in women. Mutations in BRCA1 have been reported to confer a 20% risk of a second breast cancer within five years of the first as well as a ten-fold increase in the risk of subsequent ovarian cancer” (Queller 85). Jessica was surrounded by these statistics, a genetic counselor, and the advice to “consider chemoprevention or prophylactic surgery like mastectomy or oophorectomy” (Queller 90). A personal friend of Jessica’s endowed her with more in depth knowledge of what she might have to endure, “ she went on to say that Kim the breast surgeon saw cases of deadly cancer every day and felt it was essential for me to get a bilateral mastectomy as soon as possible. But not to worry – plastic surgery could do marvels these days – I could pick out a lovely new pair of breasts” (Queller 92). From this moment of knowledge on, Jessica would be “haunted by a sense of [her] femininity” (De Beauvoir). When “there is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future,” (De Beauvoir) the difficulty becomes choosing a savior that will delete both sexuality and an element of nurturing in motherhood. When woman “appears essentially to the male as a sexual being and for him; she is sex-absolute sex, no less” (De Beauvoir) the removal of breasts becomes life threatening as well for woman who wants to have a family. Will removing breasts simultaneously remove the possibility of a husband or a family? Being a single woman, Jessica intensely considered this question; she thought, “Maybe I should have waited, say, until forty-five to take the test; that would have given me a decade of blissful ignorance in which to fall in love, have kids, breast-feed…” (Queller 92).
Even doctors were torn about recommending a double mastectomy to a woman who hadn’t yet contracted cancer, who also hadn’t yet contracted a husband or children. One doctor replied, “prophylactic bilateral mastectomy was the gold standard for preventing breast cancer in BRCA-positive women, and that he would strongly advocate it for a woman who was married and had finished bearing children. But for someone like [Jessica], who was single and whose personal life was not yet settled – he couldn’t recommend it in good conscience” (Queller 97). To this doctor, this male professional in the medical field, Jessica was seen as being the other, as simply being a woman who needed to fulfill her duty in life, not a woman whose life could be at risk. He represented the culture that “still widely advertises domestic conceptions of femininity, the ideological moorings for a rigorously dualistic sexual division of labor that casts a woman as chief emotional and physical nurturer” (Bordo 2245). This need for a woman to be the chief emotional and physical nurturer took precedence over the need for a woman to be alive and healthy.
It took Jessica a year to decide if she should have the life altering surgery or not. She questioned, “If I had a mastectomy and reconstruction, would men no longer find me desirable? Would I feel deformed? Would I ever want to be touched again? Would I no longer feel like a whole woman?” (Queller 113). Jessica was so haunted by these questions because “particularly in the realm of femininity, where so much depends on the seemingly willing acceptance of various norms and practices, we need an analysis of power ‘from below’ as Foucault puts it; for example, of the mechanisms that shape and proliferate – rather than repress – desire, generate and focus out energies, construct our conceptions of normalcy and deviance” (Bordo 2242). The debate between normalcy and health raged on.
When Jessica decides that waking up without breasts is “the lesser of two evils and [that she’ll] be more traumatized if [she] woke up with cancer” (Queller 152) she also realizes that “at the farthest extremes, the practices of femininity may lead [her] to utter demoralization, debilitation, and death” (Bordo 2241). Despite the fact that, “our bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, and femininity” (Bordo 2240) none of those things matter when one realizes that “Having surgery is taking care of myself. My true self. My spirit, my character, stuff on the inside. Whatever the cosmetic result of my body, my breasts, is not all that consequential” (Queller 195). In this way, Jessica is living the essence of the Rene des Cartes’ Cogito. Without the essence of herself, her character, her life, she would not truly exist. Her ability to think makes her human, makes her woman, and makes her Jessica.
Post double mastectomy, Jessica reminisced on her feelings about the surgery; “I was afraid I’d feel deformed, afraid I wouldn’t feel at home in my reconstructed body, afraid that my sexual partners would find me unappealing. Afraid that somehow the physical and emotional consequences of my choice would sabotage my ability to find love. None of this turned out to be the case” (Queller 226). Jessica still wanted to fulfill her role as a woman, but first she had to experience that “cultural values emerge as the result of an inscription on the body, understood as a medium, indeed, a blank page; in order for this inscription to signify, however, that medium must itself be destroyed – that is, fully transvaluated into a sublimated domain of values” (Bordo 2543). She had to assess her breasts for their true value, and see if they were truly attached to future love, children, family life, and ultimately womanhood. Once detached from her breasts, it became possible to see them as simply breasts, not as the inscriptions that were written on them.
A transformation of the ideals of beauty occurred. Through her mother’s cancer struggles and death, through her own journey from BRCA1 test to mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, Jessica came to truly understand what it meant to be a woman in this modern day society. She found that “through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity – a pursuit without a terminus, requiring that women constantly attend to minute and often whimsical changes… female bodies become docile bodies – whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, ‘improvement’” (Bordo 2241) but also that if one takes their destiny into their own hands, they can absolutely rewrite it.
Jessica Queller defamiliarizes what it means to be a woman. In this way, she is refusing to accept the notion that women must put themselves in danger and risk their health in order to live up to the standards society has placed on them; that they must attract men sexually, they must produce and nurture children, and that they must be perfect and pretty. She exemplifies the theory that, “today’s female writer feels that she is helping to create a viable tradition which is at last definitively emerging” (Gilbert and Gubar 1930). She creates a source of comfort and advice for women experiencing the same decision, and a source of inspiration and self-assuredness for all women to believe in who they are and accept their feminine characteristics, while not settling for less in life because of them.
“We are living in an age in which scientific advances give us new opportunities to live. Seize them.” – Jessica Queller
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. "Discourse in the Novel."Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean. "The Precession of Simulacra." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.
Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. Second Edition . W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2010, 2001. Print.
Burke, Edmund. "Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful" Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.
De Beauvoir, Simone. "The Second Sex Introduction: Woman as Other." Web. 9 Aug. 2010.http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm
De Beauvoir, Simone. “From The Second Sex.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. Second Edition. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2010, 2001. Print.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. "Madwoman in the Attic." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. Second Edition. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2010, 2001. Print.
Longinus, Cassius. "On Sublimity." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.
Marx, Karl. "The Communist Manifesto." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.
Queller, Jessica. Pretty Is What Changes: Impossible Choices, the Breast Cancer Gene, and How I Defied My Destiny. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009. Print.
Saussure, Ferdinand. "Course in General Linguistics" Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
The Racial Mountain: Too Difficult for Michael Oher to Tackle
“The Blind Side,” novel turned mega Hollywood hit, not only depicts a family that adopts, nurtures, and saves a young, black, male’s life from being a part of the street life he was born into, but it also portrays Langston Hughes’ idea that “this urge within the race towards whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible” (1192). Of course on the outside, as one can see from the movie trailer, Michael Oher was indeed saved from a life of violence, poverty, and struggles by this kind hearted family who welcomed him into their home. However, most Americans might fail to see the larger implications of watching a movie like this. They might fail to see how the movie perpetuates a master slave relationship between whites and blacks; how “The Blind Side” screams out, just as Langston Hughes claimed even the “high-class Negro” does: “Look how well a white man does things” (1193).
In the trailer Leigh Anne Touhy’s grand, upper class, white status is immediately juxtaposed with Michael’s downtrodden, impoverished, gang and violence-ridden life. Thus, the audience automatically feels that this family has the opportunity, even the obligation to help poor Michael. In this movie, it is evident that “the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all the virtues. It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money” (1193). Because the Touhy lifestyle is placed right next to Michael’s less than safe lifestyle, it becomes a natural transgression for one to think that this white family has it all. The Touhy’s have beauty, morality, and money; Michael, being black, has nothing.
Another element to note in the trailer is that the focus of this movie, Michael Oher, has very few lines. He speaks a total of three small phrases throughout the trailer, while Leigh Anne Touhy (played by Sandra Bullock) speaks nearly the entire two and a half minutes. This implies that despite being adopted by the Tuohy family, Michael is still the other in the relationship; he is “still Negro enough to be different” (1193). Once again, this movie perpetuates the stereotype of the poor, uneducated, silent black person.
One could argue that there are many implications to tease out of this trailer alone, let alone the film in its entirety. It could be argued that “The Blind Side” is simply a portrayal of one of the few kind families left in America who would be willing to open their home to a complete stranger. It could be argued that this movie depicts the harsh and growing gap between classes as well as races in modern America. It could be a commentary on Hollywood, and how they will capitalize on any story that comes their way; commodify the story and change it to fit what the consider to be marketable even if the end product is completely different from the story it was originally based off of. And this very fact is what makes “The Blind Side” such a great platform to discuss the Racial Mountain that Langston Hughes writes about. When the media “chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country with their innumerable overtones and undertones, surely, and especially for literature and drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand” (1194). This array of themes available to tease out of “The Blind Side” allow those who don’t want to admit to the racist and stereotypical elements of the movie, to not have to do so. They can be completely ignorant of the larger implications of this movie, and regard the Tuohy family as loving, and Michael Oher as simply lucky.
This intersection between accurately portraying the story at hand, and giving the public what they want to see is where things become difficult. The movie should, “ ‘be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,’ say the Negroes” (1195). But at the same time, “ ‘be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,’ say the whites” (1195). Caught in the middle of this junction is “The Blind Side.” It shows the negative aspect of poor black communities, while showing the potential a young black man can have if given the right opportunities. However, it also shows the stereotypical way some people view blacks, as uneducated, silent when faced with people of a higher stature, poor, and violent. In this way, the movie fails to reveal truth about humanity; it only extends the idea of white supremacy.
Something important to consider when thinking about how this movie affects the United States on a larger scale, is seeing how the actual person this story was based on, reacts to the movie.
Based on that interview, it is evident that Michael Oher was uncomfortable, even annoyed by the questions being asked. He could only say that the movie is, “a great story, it gives people hope.” When asked about Sandra Bullock and her awards, it seemed evident that Michael Oher recognized the focus on the Tuohy family in the movie; he only played the role that allowed the family to be seen as a grand savior. It’s also interesting to consider that Sandra Bullock, the person playing his adoptive mother in the film, never met him. Actors and actresses often meet the people they play, or are supposed to be related to in movies as to make sure they get the part just right. The question comes to mind then, why have these two not met? Michael Oher and Quinton Aaron (the actor who played him in “The Blind Side”) supposedly haven’t met either. These facts raise the question, was the entire movie based on the Tuohy family’s impression of Michael Oher? Perhaps, the movie is just a simulacrum of double-consciousness… Now the entire country gets to view Michael Oher through the eyes of the white family who saved his life.
Works Cited
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ3kwMq18-8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz5C9D-bPqk
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
My Contribution to Project Feminism
My presentation was on Simone De Beauvoir's "Introduction to the Second Sex: Woman as Other", and a little of Sanda M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's "Madwoman in the Attic". I decided that in order to induce a more active discussion in our classroom environment, I would need to strike up some controversial ideas. The class was quite involved in the discussion, which I was pleased about. The handouts I put together I hoped would help the class understand that even on the surface level of reading a simple synopsis from a female author's novel, this relationship of the One to the Other is present. This relationship is the way a female author can represent the world she lives in, while marketing her book to a world that is male dominated. This lead into the idea of the anxiety of authorship, and how the female author feels she can not create because she hasn't had the same relationship with writings ancestry as men have. I tried to link this idea to the fact that Emily Giffin's five novel's are evidently about the plight of women, and how this is her way of relating to her audience; in the same way in which all women are acknowledged in the world. Which is her way of I had my own handout on which I wrote down quotes from the critical essays that I believed would help the class get talking. However, the class participated more than I expected them to, and were able to raise some good points.
I hope the class enjoyed our discussion, and was able to understand more about feminism, its use in fiction, and it's relativity in the relationship of man to woman.
Femininity is How Many Pounds Exactly?
Loving a Larger Woman
by Bruce Guberman
I'll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.
She was out on a bike ride, and I was home watching football, leafing through the magazines on her coffee table, when I found her Weight Watchers folder -- a palm-sized folio with notations for what she'd eaten, and when, and what she planned to eat next, and whether she'd been drinking her eight glasses of water a day. There was her name. Her identification number. And her weight, which I am too much of a gentleman to reveal here. Suffice it to say that the number shocked me.
I knew that C. was a big girl. Certainly bigger than any of the women I'd seen on TV, bouncing in bathing suits or drifting, reedlike, through sitcoms and medical dramas. Definitely bigger than any of the women I'd ever dated before.
What, I thought scornfully. Both of them?
I never thought of myself as a chubby chaser. But when I met C., I fell for her wit, her laugh, her sparkling eyes. Her body, I decided, was something I could learn to live with.
Her shoulders were as broad as mine, her hands were almost as big, and from her breasts to her belly, from her hips down the slope of her thighs, she was all sweet curves and warm welcome. Holding her felt like a safe haven. It felt like coming home.
But being out with her didn't feel nearly as comfortable. Maybe it was the way I'd absorbed society's expectations, its dictates of what men are supposed to want and how women are supposed to appear. More likely, it was the way she had. C. was a dedicated foot soldier in the body wars. At five foot ten inches, with a linebacker's build and a weight that would have put her right at home on a pro football team's roster, C. couldn't make herself invisible.
But I know that if it were possible, if all the slouching and slumping and shapeless black jumpers could have erased her from the physical world, she would have gone in an instant. She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft.
As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn't matter, I knew that to her it did. I was just one voice, and the world's voice was louder. I could feel her shame like a palpable thing, walking beside us on the street, crouched down between us in a movie theater, coiled up and waiting for someone to say what to her was the dirtiest word in the world: fat.
And I knew it wasn't paranoia. You hear, over and over, how fat is the last acceptable prejudice, that fat people are the only safe targets in our politically correct world. Date a queen-sized woman and you'll find out how true it is. You'll see the way people look at her, and look at you for being with her. You'll try to buy her lingerie for Valentine's Day and realize the sizes stop before she starts. Every time you go out to eat you'll watch her agonize, balancing what she wants against what she'll let herself have, what she'll let herself have against what she'll be seen eating in public.
And what she'll let herself say.
I remember when the Monica Lewinsky story broke and C., a newspaper reporter, wrote a passionate defense of the White House intern who'd been betrayed by Linda Tripp in Washington, and betrayed even worse by her friends in Beverly Hills, who were busily selling their high-school memories of Monica to Inside Edition and People magazine. After her article was printed, C. got lots of hate mail, including one letter from a guy who began: "I can tell by what you wrote that you are overweight and that nobody loves you." And it was that letter -- that word -- that bothered her more than anything else anyone said. It seemed that if it were true -- the "overweight" part -- then the "nobody loves you" part would have to be true as well. As if being Lewinsky-esque was worse than being a betrayer, or even someone who was dumb. As if being fat were somehow a crime.
Loving a larger woman is an act of courage in this world, and maybe it's even an act of futility. Because, in loving C., I knew I was loving someone who didn't believe that she herself was worthy of anyone's love.
And now that it's over, I don't know where to direct my anger and my sorrow. At a world that made her feel the way she did about her body -- no, herself -- and whether she was desirable. At C., for not being strong enough to overcome what the world told her. Or at myself, for not loving C. enough to make her believe in herself.
I wept straight through Celebrity Weddings, slumped on the floor in front of the couch, tears rolling off my chin and soaking my shirt as one tissue-thin supermodel after another said "I do." I cried for Bruce, who had understood me far more than I'd given him credit for and maybe had loved me more than I'd deserved. He could have been everything I'd wanted, everything I'd hoped for. He could have been my husband. And I'd chucked it.
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This excerpt from Jennifer Weiner’s novel “Good in Bed” highlights the pressures every woman feels at one point, or many points in her life. It exemplifies the need for feminist intervention, the need for women to begin to see themselves as their own individual essence, instead of what society tells them their essence needs to be.
In the section above, the audience lays eyes upon the article Cannie Shapiro’s ex-boyfriend has written about her. Calling his once-upon-a-time lover by the discreet initial, “C.” Bruce begins hacking away at a daunting description of Cannie. Bruce claims, “Her shoulders were as broad as mine, her hands were almost as big, and from her breasts to her belly, from her hips down the slope of her thighs, she was all sweet curves and warm welcome” (Weiner). Now this strikes the average modern reader as unnatural; a girlfriend physically as large as her boyfriend? Why, that’s preposterous! A woman should be smaller than her significant other for numerous reasons, it’s pleasing to the eye, it makes the man feel more masculine, and the woman more feminine. If every man only dated, married, loved a woman who was smaller than himself, “it would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity” (De Beauvoir). If a woman isn’t feminine, is she still a woman? If a woman has rounded hips and full cheeks, is she still a woman? The character Bruce might say so, as long as he isn’t in public.
In this case, both Bruce and Cannie suffer from the weight of public expectations. The reader gets the sense that, “the attitude of defiance of many American women proves that they are haunted by a sense of their femininity” (De Beauvoir). Cannie had to “agonize, balancing what she [wanted] against what [she'd] let herself have, what [she'd] let herself have against what [she'd] be seen eating in public” (Weiner). This weight struggle wasn’t a simple diet to drop five pounds, for Cannie, and many women in society today, weight and image are constant battles that consume every thought and every second of the day. Cannie was haunted by her lack of femininity, and her lack of control to comply with the rules of femininity or to reject the weight struggle completely.
The pressure that a woman endures to be an acceptable weight is so intense that she can no longer separate herself from the number on the scale. Her value has been sewn to that number, sealed to it by surgical tools and super glue. Thus, “the ideal of slenderness, then, and the diet and exercise regimens that have become inseparable from it offer the illusion of meeting, through the body, the contradictory demands of the contemporary ideology of femininity” (Bordo 2246). Because Cannie has yet to meet these demands of ultimate femininity and thinness, she will not believe what anyone else has to say. Society has the last word, and in this case society says “fat.” Despite the fact that Bruce used to tell Cannie that she was beautiful, that what the world said she ought to look like wasn’t a part of his criteria, he could never change her mind.
In this article, Bruce takes on the role of the victim, claiming that, “loving a larger woman is an act of courage in this world, and maybe it's even an act of futility” (Weiner). In this way, Bruce is able to play his nice guy role claiming that he loved the way Cannie looked, and that it was society who ruined their relationship, while maintaining power in the no longer existing relationship through his playing of the victim role; he decided to engage in the futile act of loving a larger woman. Bruce “shows a certain duplicity of altitude which is painfully lacerating to women; they are willing on the whole to accept women as a fellow being, an equal; but they still require her to remain the inessential” (De Beauvoir 1272).
Once Cannie reads this article in its entirety, she begins to see herself as even more inferior due to her lack of this man. “He could have been my husband. And I’d chucked it” (Weiner). Cannie feels like she needs this man to complete her, because who else in this vast world could love a heavier-than-seen-on-T.V. woman, besides Bruce? Cannie was already empty based on her lack of femininity. She has been “told not that femininity is a false entity, but that the women concerned with it are not feminine” (De Beauvoir 1265). After reading this article, Cannie has been reduced to the absolute negation of a woman: she is not attractive in the way society wants her to be, and she lost the one man who could ever truly love her.
Works Cited