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March 26, 2006

Women

There's been some discussion recently on the CR'd women's blogs about feminism and its flavors. It's a topic I've thought a lot about, and my thinking continues to evolve. My views for the last ten years could be summed up as:

1) Equal pay for equal work is good. Economic justice for women in a must.

2) Makeup, sex, and sexiness are good. Anyone who tells you you're not a feminist because you like to wear makeup and have sex should be removed from the planet. If you don't like to have sex or wear makeup, fine, don't. But those two things can be a lot of fun, both together or separately, and women should not be put down for enjoying either or both.

3) Women are mean and nasty to each other, and usually it has to do with jealousy.

I've made some wonderful female friends through CR. Mary, my CR mom, is a great example of a woman who is happy with her life and therefore can be genuinely suppportive of others. She has a great job, a sexy husband (I'm not hitting on you, Tim, I'm just stating the obvious!) and wonderful children. I consider Amy one of my friends, and I enjoy every step along her CR journey. Christine is one of those beautiful women to whom I'm always drawn because I feel like they probably know what it's like to be hated by other women, and her CR experience proves this true. (Have you seen Christine? She was drop-dead gorgeous pre-CR, and now that she's doing CR she must be scarily beautiful! Aaron must thank God every night that he married her while he had the chance! He is very lucky!) Zeynep and I certainly didn't start out friends, but we've gotten quite close as of late, and it was she who kicked me into gear to start writing again after my awkward experience of late February that temporarily made me lose interest in writing. Lindsay from the UK has been with me for my entire CR journey, and was the first to figure out that my major life changes of just over a year ago included MR! I wonder if Danielle, Sarah, and Jessica are still reading. I hope so. We have a wonderful little CR women's bloggie community. I hope Jamie returns to writing, as with all the interesting voices that pop up and then fade. Come back! You don't have to blog every day to have a fabulous blog. Just write when you can!

I've had issues with women. I find men easy to handle. They're gay or straight, older or younger, in a position of more or less authority. The lines are usually clear cut. All of my best friends are men. I've often found it difficult to relate to other women. I am an extrarodinarily straightforward person, and women don't seem to like that. I see what I want -- I go get it. I hunt it down and drag it back to my open air hut: see example of MR, happily writing away in his upstairs office. I am agressive in a way that suits me very well in my professional life and has darn-near ruined my personal life many a time. I am not demure. I do not wait to be asked to dance. I believe in The Rules, I know they work, but I have trouble following them.

So much of the difficulty between straight women can be boiled down to jealousy. I think that way too often, we act like men are in such short supply that if we don't attack and tear each other down, there may be no men left. This is absurd, if you look at the large numbers of men about.

Here is the odd thing about how I feel now that MR is the love of my life: I feel much more friendly towards other women. It's like I finally realize, deep down to my bones, that it's not a competition. For those of us who like men, there are more than enough to go around! My male friends, while wonderful, gorgeous, sexy, brilliant men, are constant reminders of how happy I am to come home to MR. At the end of every day, I thank Goddess that I can come home to my Orange Angel and my male friends return home to their wives or partners, who hopefully enjoy their company just as much as I enjoy MR's.

I used to really hate it when other women made choices different from mine. After Vermont, I feared any women who had the appearance of a cultural feminist. I rebelliously wore my nails long and red, my hair long and red, and when not at work (where I have to dress conservatively in business suits) I would wear the sexiest skirts and dresses I could find. Even now, the hot pink on my nails is an OPI nail color (salon quality, of course!) called "I'm Not Really A Waitress." I could go on for hours about the class implications of makeup, hair and nails, but suffice it to say that I have choice words for any women who looks down her nose at these symbols of feminity. Make your own choices, but don't call me stupid, not a feminist, or a member of the patriarchy for mine. I've been organizing women workers for 10 years -- have I not earned the right to wear nail polish?

A lot of the fire has gone out of my fear of other women's criticism since I met MR. HE likes my type! He loves my hair and nails and... well, no more need be said on the topic at this juncture. He loves my style and doesn't whine about how much my hair cuts cost. Being in love is an amazing thing. Everyone should try it at least once, just to see if it does weird things to you. I've never done drugs (except alcohol) but I can't imagine that it could be any weirder than being in love. Being in love makes the world look like a fun place. I can look at women who wouldn't touch eyeliner with a ten foot pole and feel something other than fear and hostility -- at least ten hours out of every day. Why? Because I already have the man I want, and while we don't rule out the possibility that at some point in the next 600 years we may take other lovers for a time, I know I've found the man I want to spend the rest of my radically extended life with. So I don't care so much what choices other women make. I'm, in some profound way, no longer shopping.

Many CR'd women have written and spoken about the difficulties we face with other women as we get thinner. We lose weight and we approach our culture's standard of ideal female beauty. We bring upon ourselves in this process great disapproval from our sisters who are not so happy with their bodies. Where does the competition come from? That's a subject for some grad student to investigate, and I don't have time to deal with it on the blog. But I think so much of it, among straight women, comes from pure and simple jealousy over men. And I don't know what to do about it other than to force every straight woman to find her ideal man, stalk him, and remain happily partnered with him for eternity. For me, there was no cure for the competitiveness besides finding my own love. I admire any of you out there who are more emotionally mature and can find some other way to handle the question of female competitiveness.

And to Christine: good luck. As Alana Davis and Ani de Franco before her said in "32 Flavors," one of my favorite songs of all time:
"Everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room."
I suspect your female friends and colleagues will continue to give you trouble as you lose weight and get healthier due to CR, and you may find yourself drawn to different people -- male or female -- who are more supportive of the new you. That's what happened to me. I just stopped spending time with people who wanted me to change back.

I was saying the other day to a male co-worker who somehow got stuck arguing with me on the topic that the problem is as follows: Women can't be neutral. Whether we wear makeup or don't, wear skirts or pants, color our hair or not, etc., society around us infers something about our sexuality and our sexual availability from our appearance. Men, on the other hand, can wear a business suit without wondering, "Is my skirt too short? Is this shirt too revealing?" or on the other hand, "Do I look like a nun? Will I be dismissed as a castrating bitch if I dress this way?" No matter how a woman looks, she's going to be put into some camp or the other by those who just take a quick glance at her. And for the most part, it's not men enforcing the dress code! How many times have you heard a man say, "She looks like a cheap whore?" about a woman walking down the street? But how many times have you heard a woman dismiss another woman as cheap or slutty based only on how she looks? Why do we care so much? Are we really so insecure that we have to tear down random women we run into in the mall? If we weren't somehow threatened by women who in their dress signal that they are more sexually available, I doubt that we would even notice.

I look forward to a better day, where straight women don't view all other women as competition for the last man on earth. That would be a nice change. But in the meantime, I will continue to wear my makeup, long hair, and red nails: not because I need them to keep my man (though he does like them, and if he didn't I'd beat him with a raw celery stick) but because I enjoy embracing those outward symbols of feminity as part of my style. If that's not your style, wear combat boots and goth hair. Or whatever. That can be cool too. In my mind (and I may be under the influence of the mind-altering experience of being in love!), nothing is cooler than a woman proudly embracing her own style, and whatever it says about the world. Perhaps, for a day or so, we women can just let each other be who we are?

Posted by april at March 26, 2006 10:40 PM

Comments

Posted by: Amy Wright at March 27, 2006 6:28 AM

Posted by: Jessica at March 28, 2006 12:07 AM

Posted by: CRWilliam at March 28, 2006 10:18 AM

Posted by: zeynep at March 28, 2006 1:30 PM

Posted by: zeynep at March 28, 2006 7:55 PM

Posted by: Marti at March 29, 2006 10:18 AM

Posted by: gregg m. at March 29, 2006 4:06 PM

Posted by: Judy at April 3, 2006 8:16 AM

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