Recently in Thank You Thursdays Category

...who kicks so much ass that it's hard to know where to begin. A quote from Hipparchia's Choice:

Women's oppression is characterized by, among other things, the fact that they breathe an atmosphere saturated with 'you are', 'you are not' or 'you should be', which more or less prevents them from determining what they want and what they want to be.

'Men simply are, and that's it. Whereas women are something: whores, virgins, martyrs, beautiful, ugly, modest, experienced, tall, fat, small, thin . . . but they are something' writes Cathy Bernheim. That is true... when women separate themselves from the various somethings Cathy lists, they are left with a big nothing. Or they were left with a big nothing, not so long ago. Hence, moreover, this famous counter-questionnaire made up by women from the Movement in answer to one published by Elle in 1970:

Do you think that women are women:

• down to the tips of their fingernails;

• down to the point of collapse;

• down to their hate for their sisters;

• down to the limits of men's imagination?

Growing up, being a girl meant I could make forts and collect worms when it was raining. When I asked for a toy tool set for christmas, I felt entitled to talk back if the person in question thought it would be more appropriate for me to have a "nice dolly." It also meant that I could still have teaparties and wear a lot of pink simply because it was my favorite color. It was easy being a girl because I had a firm sense that it didn't matter. I knew who I was and I liked myself that way.

But somewhere along my trajectory toward womanhood, something flickered inside me and went out. I began feeling profoundly dull, especially by the time I got to high school.  A large part of my sense of mediocrity ended up nestled in my perception of my appearance. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see what I saw, but what I thought other people saw: In that mirror, I was painfully unremarkable. 

Although I had a vague sense that I was betraying myself, I ended up focussing more and more of my value the judgement of my physical appearance. In the end, I totally lacked an identity. I harbored a nasty inferiority complex, and a disbelief that my intellect was even minimally involved in the esteem of others.  Struggling to be valued for my mind seemed so unrealistic to me, and when all was said and done, I deemed it a lost cause.

By the end of high school I had completely stopped trying academically, but I had rationalized that college was my chance to apply myself again; to take back my mind. So I entered my freshman year bent on becoming better, smarter, more competent. 

While my professors surely appreciated my initial commitment to their classes, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t off the hook; I still had all of the same old insecurities. So when my heightened awareness of my deficiencies accelerated into a borderline eating disorder, it wasn’t long before perfectionism caught up with me. Toward the end of freshman year, I was flushing both my grades and my anxieties down the toilet.  

The entire time that I had been struggling with my feelings of inferiority, and trying to fend off a full-blown eating disorder, I felt like I was fighting a one-woman battle despite knowing that I was coping with the same things that many, many other girls were. But I did a lot of rationalizing (“It’s just part of being a woman”) and I did a lot of othering (“I’m not as bad as them”) so the combination of the two ended up being very isolating. It was purgatory; I couldn’t relate to the others who were struggling around me because I assumed that they were all going to eating-disorder hell. I thought, “At least I’m half-way to healthy”.  At the time, I couldn’t see that the difference didn’t mean we weren’t coming from a similar place. 

Going into the following summer, I was beginning to doubt my assumptions. I somehow began to feel a tingling of righteous anger, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.

My younger sister just came home from a trip to Washington DC with her Confirmation class at temple. I'd been bothering her about it for weeks, mainly because I wanted to know what they were going to be lobbying for. Apparently they let the students choose when they got there, and my sister picked reproductive rights! The kids who were lobbying for repro rights heard speakers on abortion rights, comprehensive sex ed, and emergency contraception availability in hospitals before splitting off into smaller groups. (My sister picked comp. sex ed.)

And then, when I was explaining to my mother how no, you can't actually just get an abortion in most states (citing waiting periods, consent laws, and the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act), and she said "well, I'm pro-choice, but I don't know about that partial-birth abortion..."...my sister and I teamed up to explain why the ban is a really bad thing (no health exception; anecdote that my sister heard from a speaker at the Hill about how if his wife hadn't had an abortion to remove an anencephalic fetus, they wouldn't have the three children they do today; anecdote from that I read on Feministe about a doctor who would rather have let a woman and her twin fetuses all die and keep their consciences clean than perform a selective reduction so that two of the three could live; why would anyone get an abortion that late unless they'd wanted the child and there was a problem?) And lo, she was convinced!

So this is a non-Thursday Thank You to my little sister, for being a cool kid. :) (Now I will proceed to flood her with feminist blog links.)

I have to say that it has gotten to a point where I am as excited to read the posts in the Feministing Community page as I am to read the posts on the main Feministing page.  I've always known that most feminists were smart cookies, and I really appreciate all of the work others have shown in keeping the community page worth clicking on.

You all have been knocking it out of the park.  It's so exciting to read well-thought essays on everything from religion to racisim to body image issues to personal experiences with feminism and everything in between.

Keep 'em coming!

This is just a short thank you to some guys I know.

...to the guys who are comfortable enough in their straightness that they can hug and lean on other guys without needing to make homophobic remarks to make up for it.

...to the guy I worked with on a project for Gov/Politics where we had to represent the Republican side on same-sex marriage, and with whom I had many lovely conversations about what utter BS it was when we should have been planning.

...to my calculus teacher, who makes it clear that he doesn't care about anyone's sexual orientation or gender identity as long as they remember to take the derivative of the inside.

...to a certain friend of mine who is comfortable enough in his masculinity to list Vanity Fair among his favorite books on Facebook.

...to the guys who backed me up when I called out another guy in my English class for saying that the miller's daughter in the Reeve's Tale wasn't raped because she didn't scream.

...to Brian, who writes about feminist issues with me at a little blog called, somewhat awkwardly, City of Ladies.

Thank you.

I have two wonderful older sisters. They are my best friends and and the smartest, strongest women! I love them both equally but in the feministing tradition of Thank you Thursdays, I have to thank my oldest sister. She's pro-choice, pregnant, Obama-voting teacher of middle school children in a slightly conservative catholic school, and she is awesome for so many reasons including this story she told me last night:

The kids in her 6th grade class were excited about the elections. The class seemed to be divided equally between both candidates, and obviously the Obama half was very happy on Wednesday. The McCain half was bitter and you could feel it in the air. One little girl remarked "Obama's a baby killer" to which my sister said, "Really? How many babies did he kill?" The girl was surprised at her question and couldn't answer it saying "you know what I mean..." to which my sister replied, "no, sorry, I don't" Later, feeling the need to have some post-election clarification about the candidates and our President Elect Obama (sounds awesome doesn't it?!), my sister opened up her classroom to questions. The kids wanted to know what the candidates' religions were. "They are both Christian" my sister informed them. "No," another little girl said, "Obama's Muslim... He lied about being Christian" My sister told them, "you know, I don't know exactly what sect of Christianity Obama is, but I know he's not Muslim, and I'll prove it." During her lunch, she printed out candidate bios for her class. Sure enough, as we all know, Obama is not Muslim. He belongs to the Church of Christ. Not like that should matter.

Suffragettes.  'Nuf said.  Happy Election Day!

So even though I'm posting on Friday, I guess this still counts as a Thursday Thank You since it happened yesterday.

I was on the bus when I overheard two stereotypical gang-banger types get on and start calling each other "fag" and the typical homophobic slurs that seems prevalient in underprivileged communities.  They continued on about a lesbian they knew, talking about her breast size, trying to get her drunk, etc., basically being really offensive.

This award goes to Harvard Psychology Prof. Daniel Gilbert, for casually bringing up studies which suggest that the different "emotional" experiences of men and women are socially constructed. In his book 'Stumbling on Happiness,' a birthday gift I only just got around to reading, Prof. Gilbert takes aim at the ideas that men are less emotional than women, that men and women experience different emotions, and that we wimmenfolk get weepy because of that whole bleeding thing. (See the paperback, 228-29.)

I am in crush with William Saletan today.

In his piece, Breast-Feeding Kills: the pro-life case against birth control, nursing, and exercise, Saletan had me laughing and groaning all the way.

As satire always does, Saletan manages to make the conservative Pro-Life stance on birth control and abortion both funny and, well, contemptable.

So: Thank You William Saletan of Slate.com. In your honor, I'm going to go wash down my birth control pills with a liter of Mountain Dew and then do some jumping jacks.