Hot Women and their Failure to be Invisible

My husband doesn’t need to see your boobs, written by a woman who is emphatic that she doesn’t need women with bodies she envies to stop showing them off, but just to realize that the visibility of their hotness is a stumbling block for her marriage because… well… hotness. Right?

At first I was annoyed. My brain went straight to, “Are you kidding me right now?” This is the kind of logic that results in so much ugliness toward and between women because of the bodies we live in, and here’s more of it from a woman who describes herself as committed to social justice. At first I was angry. Then I read more, and the more I read the sadder I got. Honestly, look.

I know you don’t mean anything by it. But I need to share one more thing with you.

When your bare shoulders and stretchmark-less bellies and tanned legs pop up, I not only worry if my husband will linger over your picture. I worry how he will compare me to you.

As I wrap myself into his arms at night, I wonder if he is seeing you there instead of my mess of a body left over from pregnancy. I wonder if he thinks I’m lazy and that I don’t take good care of myself. I wonder if he wishes I looked more like you than who I really am.

And then the insecurity monster comes back to bite at our relationship again–me, begging for affirmation, and him tiring from saying the same thing over and over.

At the end of this I just wanted to sit her down and tell her that her worth is about more than how well she places in some kind of bullshit competition among women for Best Boobies Evar(TM), a competition in which every woman below 1st place loses all measurable value. I know what she’s been taught, because we have all been taught it. All women know this stuff: the value of beauty above all, and one particular youth-worshipping fatphobic whitecentric standard in particular. We all know it. And you know what? We’re all taught that other women are the problem, too.

I wanted to comment on her entry, but I don’t have an account there and she probably requires one at this point because so many people are yelling at her for how ridiculously burdensome her message to hot girls is (which it is, yes) when quite frankly this woman is hurting from a lot of the same crap that hurts us all. Someone has to be the first to say, “Sister, this isn’t a competition. This isn’t a zero sum game. We’re not enemies just because you envy my cup size or that girl over there has a thigh gap. We’re not enemies.”

So here’s what I take away from her entry: What a painful way to live. It would never have occurred to me that my marriage extended into other women’s shirts, and I’ve never worried about protecting it from competing bustlines.

I guess I’m not sure what other people could do to adjust for this stumbling block in your marriage. It seems like she doesn’t want the women whose pictures cause such problems for her to throw on a niqab, but it sort of feels like she does want them to do SOMETHING. Is that accurate? What can anybody else do when the very shape of the body they live in is so upsetting to her? Would that really get at the root of the problem?

Her husband loves her and she is the one he wants, or else he would be with some 19 year old DD hardbody with a thigh gap. He’s not with one of those women. She is the one he wants and hers is the body he has chosen out of all the billions of other ladybodies on the planet. He knew the hardbodies were out there, and yet he made an informed decision for himself that she was the one. Seeing another set of boobs isn’t going to shake that, because he already knew those boobs were out there. He made his decision. He chose her.

If you have a hard time accepting that as the real truth of the situation, then I can’t help but worry that even if all the hot young things covered themselves up and hid themselves away, these thoughts would still be eating at her because she’d know the skinny teenager boobs were out there somewhere, waiting to invade her marriage.

I hope she finds a solution to this. Doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen until she really names and locate the problem, though. I don’t think it’s that the existence of perky girlboob is a threat to her marriage. I think it’s that she is having trouble reassuring herself that women have more to offer than perky girlboob, that she has more to offer than that. But she does. Look at her and all the amazing stuff on this blog! The best boobs in the universe couldn’t undermine that, so I don’t know why the owners of The Best Boobs Evar(TM) should worry about it happening either. Their boobs aren’t hurting anyone.

I occupy a middle ground where I do compare myself unfavorably to other women, or even to myself at other times in my life, but other women also have told me outright that they use the way I look as a way to bludgeon themselves for not being good enough. I have to live with the knowledge that every time I am visible near them, they are picking me up and using me to hurt themselves, like I’m some kind of convenient psychological poison they can’t even relate to except as an avenue to emotional self-harm. Do you think that feels good to me? Do you think I feel victorious and exultant at the defeat of another woman by my unstoppable invincible booty? No, of course not. In that situation nobody is happy! The whole thing is just one big perpetual misery machine and sometimes all you can do is look at those feelings, accept that they are there, be aware of the actual reasons they are happening, and don’t try to get other people to accommodate the cruel parts of your brain in the hopes that appeasing the jerkbrain is even a thing that can be done.

Your jerkbrain is going to be a jerk. The women you are so toxically envious of? I can say from experience that their brains are definitely being jerks to them too, and saying it’s because someone else is walking around having an enviable body shape. They aren’t your problem. They aren’t your enemy. The jerkbrain is our enemy. Not only does your jerkbrain not deserve to control all these other women, it doesn’t deserve to control you. Nothing good comes of it.

“We can’t hate ourselves into a version of ourselves we can love.” ~Lori Deschene

Jerkbrains gonna be jerks.

You cannot appease them.

The absence of visible hot young boobies won’t appease them.

If your boobs are the most perfect perky boobs on the planet, that will not appease jerkbrains either.

They cannot be appeased.

So I’m not gonna listen to your jerkbrain, and I hope someday I can stop listening to my own. I hope you can stop too, Lauren, because this self-hate is going to dog your heels until you do (no matter what anyone else looks like or where they do it or whether your husband can see).

Reproductive Justice Book Club

I am once again recommending the reproductive justice book club for which I joined Goodreads. The first book is Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.

It’s AMAZING. I haven’t enjoyed a nonfiction book this much in a while. It’s dense with research but still super readable and really informative.

It points out that fighting for reproductive freedom doesn’t work if we do it in a colorblind way that ignores the unique and disproportionate way that reproductive coercion is inflicted upon black women, and that fighting racism doesn’t work if we don’t specifically address how often racism manifests specifically as reproductive coercion.

I’m really excited that this is the book we started with! Other people should come join.

Fetus Graveyard

Friends, I was linked to the most amazing thing this morning. I can only hope you will be as delighted as I was. See, anti-choicers seem to be even more off the rails than I had suspected; if you know me at all you know this must be pretty impressive.

It is.

Kevin Swanson is amazing.

I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.

RH Reality check explains why this is wrong but I feel like they are missing the sheer joy of it. This is nothing short of hilarious. If you have a uterus and have ever used birth control, you are the host of a teeming internal nightmare, an unconsecrated fetus graveyard!

This is beyond misogyny. Misogyny is ordinary. It’s tired and boring and DONE. This is a brave new world and we are moving with the times! Misogyny is passé. Nobody cares anymore. It’s 2013 and it’s time for gynephobia. Wombs are scary and haunted! There could be anything in there!!! Sluts (by which we obviously mean any women on birth control) aren’t just dirty and ruined, but they’re probably full of disquiet fetus ghosts all up in their slutty slutslut snatches.

Kevin Swanson’s account of the latest research into the eldritch terrors inside of women that we call wombs is like obstetrics and gynecology written by the authors of American Horror Story (spoilers) or Jim Balent.

A Guide for Men with Good Intentions

A Guide for Men with Good Intentions

As the title indicates, this is not a post for men who don’t care whether their sexual advances frighten women. This is not a post for men who think that a woman can ever do anything to deserve being raped. This is not a post for men who just have a serious problem with women in general because their big sister never shared the Nintendo controller or whatever. This is a post for the men who really do respect women and either are being confused with the assholes or are simply afraid they might be.

This is for men with good intentions. I am creating this in the hopes that it will be linkable to men in multiple situations whose good intentions may not always be coming across. Given that, if you have been linked this, it is not necessarily because someone thought every single one of these headers was about you. If you have been linked this, it is because someone absolutely does think you care about them and the other people around you and because they believe that you have the empathy and self-awareness to be both willing and able to consider how your actions affect others.

Basically, if you got linked this, someone thinks you’re a good person.

If they didn’t think that, they probably wouldn’t be talking to you at all, let alone going to the trouble of reading, collecting, and linking resources that will help you have as many positive relationships as possible. If they didn’t think you deserved to have the people around you be comfortable with you and be intimate with you, they would be spending their energy to mess with you instead.

So please take this in that spirit. I am not trying to talk down to you, but if you have not ever lived as anything other than a man then I am going to be talking about experiences you have not had. That makes you not the expert on them, and that doesn’t mean you’re bad. It just means that we’re talking about stuff you probably won’t understand unless you consider the accounts of people who have experienced it.

As an aside, women are not the only people who could explain this to you. A trans man, for example, is a man, but has probably been erroneously treated like a woman at some point in his life and can therefore probably give you some perspective on what it is like to live without male privilege. Even if he is currently identifying and identified by others as male, this is probably stuff he has seen. Ditto for genderqueer individuals who are or have been misidentified by others as female. Odds are that they also know things.

Despite that, I am going to use “woman” as shorthand for “someone who lives without male privilege” despite the fact that that is not even close to covering absolutely all such people, just because “woman” is far more concise than “someone who lives without male privilege.”

This all means there are plenty of people who can and often will give you a picture of what’s going on in the world for people with a different set of pressures than your own, and odds are if they are sharing their experiences with you it’s not because they think you suck; it’s because they are operating under the assumption that you care, and if they’re right, this entry is for you.

The Girl Who Played With Fire

Trigger Warning: Rape Apologism!

Disclaimer: Statistically the vast majority of rapists are men, and the majority of rape victims are women. Nota bene: men do get raped, and that comes with its own set of extra bullshit that the victims have to deal with. LGBT people are also at serious risk for sexual assault no matter their gender identity or expression (but particularly transgender people).

I say these things because I am going to talk about rapists and rape victims in terms of their statistically prominent genders, but you should not take that as a cue that those are the only genders of authentic rapists or the only genders of authentic rape victims. It’s for simplicity’s sake, but it’s important to me to make sure that readers be aware that the full demographics of rape include more than “cis men raping cis women.”

Anyway. Onward.