Permission and Who is Granting It

Are we giving them the permission to control our bodies? This is a question that seems to be popping up a fair amount for me. “We” is my general term for socially liberal women, and “them” is sort of a pejorative term (I can full admit to using it like that) for the men or women trying to control my body or my views on how I may use my body, whether through enacting laws or upholding controlling social constructs.

My issue in this blog is that I don’t think the “them” is as dichotomist from the “we” as I would like to imagine. In fact, I have started to wonder how much permission “we” are giving “them”, and are “we”, in fact, becoming a catalyst to let it continue.

This has started with a few comments that I have heard directed towards a friend about her sex life. She has an active sex life with different partners, but she uses protection and gets tested a few times a year (even though she doesn’t have health insurance to pay for it). With those qualifiers, I find nothing wrong with the way she carries herself or what she chooses to do. However, a few of her friends have thought it is appropriate to make comments about her “sluttieness” and the vibe she gives off about “just wanting sex”. To be quite honest, terms like slut and whore are not terms that I am unfamiliar with in my own life. If I had not been in a committed relationship for the past year and on a hiatus from any type of contact while I heal, I am sure I could be using my own stories today.

However, I should note that, in my own life, I have added in a third qualifier to be able to have an active sex life that I feel comfortable with, which is the state of my mental health. This is not something I put on anyone else as a necessary qualifier. However, I have been upset with myself in the past when I risked my mental well-being to have sex, and I have come to draw some hard boundaries on what I will do because of that feeling of regret (something I should never have post sex). I really do digest why I am doing something, the possible outcomes, and I how I will feel afterwards. With this in mind, it becomes a little trickier than condoms and a test for me to get into bed. However, in no way am I saying my thought process to determining what my sex life may look like is any better than anyone else’s. So I am using this friend’s experience as an example just out of convenience and not any moral reasoning. In fact, she may have more qualifiers than I know about.

So back to these comments that have been made to her. While they are individual comments not being made in the loudspeaker at Santorum’s political rally, I do feel they still have an effect on the way society perceives they can treat women. In order to explain my connection, I guess I have to figure out why educated, liberal women would make these comments to their friend. Sadly, when using terms like “slut” or “portraying yourself like you only want men for sex”, I don’t think these are meant to be constructive or helpful. In fact, I think these comments actually reflect back onto the person that made them rather than the person they are directed towards.

On a side note, this not a rant on the use of words like “slut” or “whore” in language. I don’t like it when it is being directed at someone in a denigrating way. However, as a typical white, middle class, urban female with a slight (Chicago normal) drinking problem, I do have friends that great me at the bar with terms like “hey slut-face”. I never really took offense, because I have known the people saying it to me do not judge my choices in my bedroom. In fact, I think smiling and accepting the term with some sick pride sort of gives a screw you to its use as denigrating. I do recognize that argument is as precarious as the N bomb in music and societal use, but it also having this ability to deeply degrade another person. That is why I am not arguing that topic today. It is not a topic I find unnecessary to attack. I probably am avoiding it mostly because I am not totally sure on what my argument would be for it in order to not sound hypocritical.

Now back to the original point. I don’t believe these women used these terms to support my friend through something. I feel as though they used it in order to gain some power for themselves. They may have been called a similar term and need to feel as though they are at least better than someone else. Or they may have a jealousy for the level of inhibitions this friend has about her body and enjoying it. Either way, it ties closely to them and their experience, and this is where the issue lies for me interpersonally and in the larger society. We, as women, feel this need to excuse ourselves in this society and to take part in this accolade given to frigidity or our ability to pretend to be so. We may be too liberal to be trying to claim virginal prowess, but we all participate in the “at least my number is less” or “at least I loved more of them” thinking. We feel a need to excuse ourselves through comparison. It is that mentality that I believe our society relies on. That we no matter, at whatever level of the scale it is, buy into some sort of power over another woman with chastity.

I am not asking us to go marching through the streets screaming out the number of our sexual partners, or walk into bars and have sex every night without attachment, but I would like us to stop comparing ourselves. We have different qualifiers and lifestyles, but if that person is being safe (whatever that may mean to them outside of not spreading diseases), why do we feel the need to be socially defined “better women” than the next woman.

This is a commitment that I have to make to myself too, as I am absolutely guilty of it. I need to stop feeling a sense of superiority in my knowledge of my millimeter step up on the chastity scale compared to someone else. Because that scale that we are clinging to is what “they” rely on. We are too scared to leave it completely, and really say that it’s ok to be a healthy, sexual woman in any large venue where our reputation may be risked. We are scared the level of promiscuity that will be assumed about us and how it will affect our future if we say, “you don’t need to determine how I use my vagina. I seem to be doing ok at it”. As long as women keep controlling women, “they” have to do a whole lot less work to get people to buy in to their standards of what we should be. So while every time we think I am better than her, we aren’t directly adding a vote to this war on women, we do contribute over large cycles that may be invisible to us.

*this is not to say that a friend that has contracted something is deserving of these terms or to be looked down upon. However, that is a point where as a friend you can step in and make sure she understands why she is having sex the way she is, and what you can do to help her get back to a healthy place.

Loss, Control, and My Feminism

Losing seems to be the word hovering above, around, and in my life right now. It, however, is being used in so many contexts that I can’t grasp all of the feelings that are in me right now. In the most immediate and direct terms, this losing feeling highly correlates to my evening job, as I am a lacrosse coach on multiple competitive teams. Being in season, that word is striking harder every day. As a newer coach with a relatively short, impressive background, I am scared this is the season I (and my multiple lacrosse jobs) will learn that my history has been luck and not skill. This is a fear that I have every season and with every team. I am not sure how long or what type of season it will take to quell that insecurity, but that sense of losing sits hard with me continually throughout the day.

Losing, though, has taken some more subconscious effects in my life recently. I am recently out of the most serious relationship I have ever had. And by most serious, I also mean only serious relationship I have ever had. I took the first few weeks of us ending to mourn the loss of our relationship as I was told to do, but as I enter the 4th month of not speaking to him, I also now have to accept the loss of that person as an aspect of my life and as a topic I can excusably dwell on after a certain amount of time. Never having had a break up this intense, I thought the feeling of loss goes away after a few weeks, and you are back to normal. I have learned it is not like that, and in my attempts to feel ok and move past it quickly, I have prolonged this feeling of loss. I have prolonged it to a point of frustration in myself for being this far out from the relationship’s end and incapable of imagining someone else touching me, physically or emotionally. I am also frustrated for allowing it to sit and collect until I find myself crying in cabs alone at the end of the night. It has become increasingly hard to not contact him to let him know how much he hurt me. I want to tell him that my not talking to him is not a sign that what he did was ok or forgivable, but due to, and thank goodness for, my over inflated sense of dignity, I have not reached out. I want him to know that me not reaching out is a sign of my strength over my love for him, and that he did not break that strength. I do logically realize that contacting him to tell him that would undermine that exact point. That, still, does not end my desire to still do it.

However, that imminent sense of losing and subconscious sense have been compounded with one of the harshest most realistic senses of loss I could imagine, a death sentence. Matthew Puckett is facing his death March 20^th. He knows the time, the date, and the location. A security in knowledge sometimes we may wish for in our own lives, but none of us could ever realistically want. He will be executed despite however much I may try to speak, write, and petition that he should not. This knowledge of his death will not deter me for trying to stop it, but I know the outcome, as I have faced this before. Matthew is a pen pal of a good friend of mine, and while I do not know Matthew in that way, I lost a friend like this before. A man that I used to share poetry with was executed a few years ago. I was shocked by how much a known upcoming loss could still affect with such surprise and lack of control. It is those memories of lack of control that now resurface, and I feel I must learn to address within myself

Losing in all of these senses correlates very closely with control to me. And it is control that I think I struggle with the most when it comes portraying my feminism. Feminism is didactic and interpretative, and I have largely supported both entities despite divergence from each other. With this loose definition of what a feminist is, I have been able to mold my feminism to my immediate world in order to function. However, the control of my emotions has not been flexible in defining and portraying myself as a strong woman. I believe a woman’s need for strength is fluid and a not always necessary for women to always be seen as a strong woman. In fact, with my friends, I usually encourage embracing weakness as a sign of humanity within, because humanity is an absolutely necessary trait in a modern feminist. However, I cannot accept weakness within myself. In fact, I get angry at myself for feeling so deeply or so extensively. My weakness in some way, to me, reflects on my strength as a woman.

I am not all together sure if I have put this pressure on myself or if it has come from my social interactions. In many of my friendships and personal interactions, I am told that my strength is what they admire or rely on. I allow the people in my life to see this trait as strength, and very infrequently do I ever let anyone see that my strength is just a need for control that I cannot loosen my grip on. I am scared what my weakness will look like, and how I will be able to define myself if I succumb to it. I am currently falling and losing my sense of self to loss, as I cannot control it and I cannot fix it by taking my emotions and wrapping them tighter around my finger. As much as I have tried, they keep coming loose. I am scared of the losses I cannot control and even more of the ones I can, because at some point something is going to break, and I can’t pick what it is.

A First Step Back or Forward

To start, I am not sure if I am writing this blog for people to really read, or just for my own peace of mind. I came to a realization today, when I got angry at the bow on my bra, that I have started to feel trapped in my life. This claustrophobia has led to overly angry reactions to absurd things. Here is the background to how I got to this point:

Over a year ago, I made the switch from social work to finance. This was just as surprising to me as it sounds. I had been a Women Studies and English major undergrad and spent close to 10 hours a week throughout college volunteering inside prisons and as a sexual assault/ domestic violence counselor at a SAFEhouse. I thought social work was my calling. It might have been; however, I found out bureaucracy was not. This job became available, and I took it. I didn't think I would be here this long, but I like the company and my freedom within it, so it looks like I am staying.

The caveat to liking this job is I also feel continually silenced (mostly, scarily, by my own doing). I work with Traders all day long. Traders are a special breed-- mostly male, mostly inflated egos, and generally very politically conservative. Feminism is as foreign to them as poverty. Being called "Hot Stuff" and having hands put on the not-really-small-of-my-back-anymore spot is pretty common. However, this is by men that manage billions of dollars, and our little start up cannot afford a bad reputation (traders also gossip like teenage mean girls), so I keep my mouth shut, not because my boss asked me to, but because I care about my company.

Compound these occurrences with the current War on Women in our government (and yes, this may sound harsh, but it is truly a war) my anger has been spilling out to a point that I want to rant about a bow on a bra.

To explain that rant, I have a large chest, and all bras, no matter what you try to do, in my size they look like they were made for grandma. So why put a bow there? Clearly, I am buying a full support, full coverage bra. Do I want a man to see this at all, or if they do, do I want them thinking, "cute bow" (because that's what I am sure he is thinking if he sees my bra)? Or do bra designers put that bow on there for me, so I can feel more girly when I have to strap on some wires to my chest to go outside into public (a whole separate blog post there)? Because, trust me, those wires are reminder enough that I am a girl. Stop trying to make me girly and make me feel sexy at all times. Sometimes I want utility, comfort, and to be able to bend over without a nipple popping out. That is it.

However, I have decided to not post that rant on facebook for quick relief and instead take a few minutes out of my day to do something productive, whether just for me or other people. So here it is, this blog. I am a feminist in finance trying to get back to my roots and bring them into this new life.