More on Race and Privilege

i'm not exactly sure of the meandering path that landed me on racialicious reading a post about the politics of hair. normally i stay in my happy little feminist/FA circuit of blog reading, venturing into other -ism blogs only as they relate to the other stuff i'm reading. mostly because it's all too much for me to wrap my head around most days. there's too much for me to process all at once, and i just let the search take me where it seems to want to go. which is probably how i ended up there.

i've been mulling over privilege, again... because it's the hinge that everything seems to be hung on. and it's the thing i have the hardest time seeing in myself. but Latoya Peterson's post about her decision to let her chemically relaxed hair grow out to a natural texture, and the body politics that came along with that, was really eye opening. and i thought, wow i can totally relate to that. that's just like the time i decided not to diet anymore and... then i realized it was nothing like that. yeah, there were body politics involved with that decision. but no one told me i was more or less really a part of my racial background because of it. while the beauty myh that leads fat women to diet is the same myth that leads women of color to relax their hair it's not the same situation. and i guess i'm making progress that i was able to rethink the desire to relate to her post and then make it all about me. maybe it's enough to just relate, to say wow that resonated with me. i haven't posted a comment to her blog, mostly because i'm unsure of how to bring myself into her space and not bring my entitlement and privilge with me.

and so i went back into posts about privilege to read more about it and get a furthur handle. i'm still working on sorting it all out. i know i have white privilege. i know i have a seemingly heteronormative relationship which confers privilege. i know even if/when i find another partner to join the relationship there will be a shift in that seeming but i don't know to what extent. i think a lot of it will depend on who i end up with. another white guy? a woman? a person of color? each varriation brings other bagage with it. baggage i'm sure i'll deal with at that time.

but the white privilege thing is the one that i trip over the most. and in amoung the articles i found this gem. it's got some typos and it's an older piece but the list Peggy McIntosh puts together had some ahhhhhh moments for me. these in particular:

I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.
I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.

that last one especially. because, like peggy, i was taught that racism is acts of meanness and bigotry and are pretty blatent. i still get a gut reaction when i hear, or read, about someone saying something is racist when there is no clear bigotry. i think to myself the person crying discrimination is being overly sensitive, or just trying to get sympathy, or is trying to get more help then they were offered. i'm not sure what i can do about it yet, other than keep on reading and pondering.

sexy is as sexy does

so kate and the gang at shapely prose had a post up this past august, which i am only just reading, about attraction and whether or not a person should include efforts at finding fat people attractive as they progress through fat acceptance. the article can be found here.

the things that struck me were two more or less. one being the idea of attraction. we get told, rather often, that attraction is animal and natural and not a social construct. but our concept of beauty and sexual worth is a social construct. i think it's interesting, and i might add admirable, that anyone would be willing to own their social conditioning and allow that they might have missed out on a wonderful relationship or three because they thought someone was too fat. or too thin. or too disabled. or whatever other characteristic they've been enculturated to find non preferential in a mate or potential sex partner. i had never really thought about why i find certain people attractive or why i don't, and i know i'm still working through some of my initial judgement of people based on their outsides. but a really good point was brought up (ok a whole bunch were but this struck me) in the comments about how FA isn't about forcing the world to find fat bodies sexually appealing but rather about according fat people with the respect and dignity due every person regardless of whether you find them sexually appealing or not.

which might be the tie in i've been missing for why FA is a feminist movement at it's core. because yeah, i'm still struggling with the feminist thing and i make some progress and then i take a few steps back. i can get behind the fight for reproductive heath rights, ad the fight for equal rights under the law for EVERYONE, and i can begin to get behind the fight to see more women in top executive spots. but i stumble when it comes to looking for sexism in everything i do, see, read, listen to, touch or taste. i have trouble separating myself from my own privilege as a white middle class woman. so maybe i just have to be hit over the head with a clue by four but the idea that the sexual attractiveness of a person, their decorative ability, might be a measure of their worth in the world at large was one i had a hard time wrapping my head around. (M-O-O-N that spells uptake) because on some level i still crave that outside affirmation of my sexual attractiveness. i want men and women to notice me when i feel i look good. i want the vision of me in my head to be reflected in the eyes of people who look at me.

which brings me to part two in which i was reminded just how close i came to passing up the relationship i'm in now. because he's tall and thin, and i mean knee jerk reaction feed the boy a sandwich thin, and i thought i couldn't date a guy that i out weight by 80 lbs or so. my level of attraction was irrelevant because i just knew he wouldn't find me to be attractive. more importantly i was sure that he might find me decent looking with my clothes on, cause i can dress this body pretty damned well thankyouverymuch, but with my clothes off.... a whole other story of soft jiggling flesh would be revealed against the slim muscle of his body and i just knew it would make me seem 10 times fatter and just kill the mood. so i rejected the idea of intimacy with him, and refused to see the reciprocity of attraction until i realized that i was moving out of state and leaving behind someone i was insanely attracted to, and insanely compatible with, because i was hung up on his waist measurement. and when i put it that way i realized how stupid i was being. and thank god i came the my senses, because he is a constant delight and has made the move to another state so much less lonely and frightening and stressful.

so i can add this attraction thing to the growing list of things i think i need to re-evaluate. and i like the concept of working to find something good in the look of every person rather than mindlessly responding to them as a set of physical characteristics. will is suddenly develop a lust for the very large? i don't know. and that's ok.

Book Store Feminism

Anyone who knows me know that I love books. I mean I LOVE books. So for me, going to a good book store is akin to heading for Mecca (or other religious city of your choosing). Especially if I can sit with a stack of books and hide on the floor in a corner and read through the first several pages or chapters to decide if this is THE book to buy.

So I'm in the local book store with my boyfriend, enjoying the evening out together, enjoying our trip to Mecca, enjoying the wooden floors and oddly tiered wren of stairs and nooks. And lo, into the Women's studies section I wander. Now, under normal circumstances I shudder at the thought of entering this section of the book store. There isn't enough of me to give over to the anger reading these books tends to generate. I can't put that much of myself into the idea of feminist conspiracy, and men as the ultimate in oppressors and villains. I just can't. Plus I'd rather be a humanist than a feminist.

But here I am looking at a bright little book I could fit into my pocket with a pretty pink daisy and the word CUNT plastered on it in bright yellow letters. And i have to stop, I have to pause and look at this unassuming little book with such a charged word on it. As I reach for it, I notice that it's sitting on the shelf right next to a book on planning your ultimate wedding. I started laughing, couldn't help it. Here I am, surrounded by feminist and post-feminist books on giving up our oppressive self images, on what it is to be a woman in less enlightened places, on how we need to fight the oppressions of men and the double standards of sex. Here I am practically hearing the angry voices of a dozen women and right in the mix is how to have the best wedding.

Hooray for cognitive dissonance.

But this is illistrative of the issue of the beauty myth. Not that we can't be women of power. Not that we can't reclaim words like cunt or bitch or whore. Not that we can't disolve the word slut, or remove the double standard that keeps it on the lips and tongues of teenage girls. But that we are expected to do these things AND plan the perfect wedding. Or, and I noticed this sitting on the same shelf, be "alternative" brides who still want an amazing and perfect day just not like THOSE women. And it's the idea of my kind of women and those kind of women, the idea of us versus them that is so hard for me with feminism.

I have a girlfriend who has the ability to be a stay at home mom. She could choose to be otherwise, but her spouce makes enough to support her and their three kids without it. So she chooses not to work in an office and wear power suits. She chooses to stay home and homeschool the girls, and taxi them to their half dozen extra curriculars. She chooses to be an author and a mother rather than a power broker. But she's been told she is oppressed by her domaniering husband and she should make him get her a stitter so she can get out of the house and be more fulfilled. WTF!?!?!?!? She is one of THOSE women in the eyes of many feminists. And I don't get it.

Why do I have to choose between being a cunt and being a wife or mother. Aren't I supposed to be able to do both?

But then that's part of the oppessive issue too. This idea that I should be both. That I should try and be both. That I somehow need to be super mom and run a business or museum.

I read breifly through a handfull of those books, sitting on the wooden floor of that book store and found something profound. One of the authors wrote that the feminists of the 70s don't think that there are any young women wanting to fan the flames or carry on the torch of modern feminism. And I think there's a reason for that. Gender rolls have been torn appart by the upheavals of the 70s. And they needed to be. But in this ambiguous place where women and men can be anything, so long as they're not traditional, a vacume now exists. And we all know nature abhores a vacume. So we try to fill it, as best we can, with sex and beauty and money and youth. We starve ourselves to be beautiful and mutilate ourselves to be better, and make snide comments about women who don't. We scream about male oppression, without giving men any idea of what to be, and then wonder why young boys grow up to oppress women.

And now I feel as though I need to deffend myself for making these statements, lest I be thought of as one of THOSE women. And I shouldn't have to.