Our Daughters’ Bodies, Ourselves

My daughter, who is five, knows where babies come from. She knows what menstruation is.  She knows the word “vagina” and we do not use any cute euphemisms for that part of her body.

My daughter sees my naked body all the time. This is partly because she doesn’t really get—or doesn’t really care—that I might like a little privacy when I’m dressing and undressing. But one of the reasons I don’t police my own privacy too much is because I want my daughter to know what a woman’s body looks like. I want her to know that my soft, roundish, un-waxed, basically healthy forty-one-year-old body is an acceptable shape for the female form to take.  I don’t make my body a mystery to my daughter, because I do not want her body to be a mystery.

My daughter loves my body. Not too long ago, it was a source of nourishment. Once upon a time, it was home. It’s still a source of comfort. My daughter has no idea that my body should be anything other than what it is.

Since the day she was born, my husband and I have shaped our talk about her body to emphasize health, strength, and agency. When she was tiny, we praised her for being so big and strong. Now that she’s big and strong, we let friends, family, and strangers coo about her gorgeous eyes and amazingly long lashes, while we marvel at the powerful legs required to pedal a Big Wheel so fast. Our daughter’s body is not something for other people to look at and admire. It is hers, to nurture and use and enjoy.

I’m thinking about all this because, like a lot of my feminist fellow travelers, I was dismayed by the recent episode of Dance Moms in which girls between the ages of eight and twelve perform a burlesque routine, and the essay from the April issue of Vogue in which a woman describes putting her seven-year-old on a diet.

I don’t watch Dance Moms, so I can’t say that the mothers on that show are living vicariously through their daughters, but I have watched enough clips to know that they have basically abdicated responsibility for their children and accepted the authority of their dance coach. Given that “reality” shows are designed to create conflict and controversy, I feel confident in suggesting that the dance coach has embraced her own monstrosity at the encouragement of the show’s producers. If there weren’t actual children being hurt by her desire to shock, she’d be a rather compelling character. But she is hurting actual children, and her apparent desire to teach these children that they are commodities is repellent—and particularly perverse, since little girls who have worked so hard to become incredible dancers should be able to take some pride in and ownership of their achievements.

The Vogue story is even more troubling to me, because I really don’t think either the author or the publication intended to be provocative.  Ostensibly a mother’s own account of helping her daughter to achieve a healthy weight, it’s actually a profoundly upsetting portrait of a woman trying to pass on her own dysfunctional relationship with food and her own body. It’s made all the more harrowing by the daughter’s resistance, and the mother’s steely insistence that new-won thinness is a kind of existential rebirth:

For Bea, the achievement is bittersweet. When I ask her if she likes how she looks now, if she’s proud of what she's accomplished, she says yes... Even so, the person she used to be still weighs on her. Tears of pain fill her eyes as she reflects on her yearlong journey. “That’s still me,” she says of her former self. “I’m not a different person just because I lost sixteen pounds.” I protest that, indeed, she is different. At this moment, that fat girl is a thing of the past. A tear rolls down her beautiful cheek... “Just because it’s in the past,” she says, “doesn't mean it didn't happen.”

My point is this: If we don’t want anyone else to own our daughters’ bodies,  we need to be the first ones to teach our daughters that their bodies belong to them. We can care for them. We can nurture them. We can help them learn to make good choices by presenting them with healthful options. But we can’t own them. We can’t shape them. And we sure as hell can’t live through them. And if we want our daughters to be strong and happy in their bodies, we need to show them how to do that by being strong and happy in our own bodies. 

Loose

Here’s the thing about women: They are, by their very nature, loose.

While men are like tempered steel—hard, unchanging, complete, perfect—women are in a constant state of flux. They are fluid, unfinished, always becoming. They are permeable, designed to be penetrated by men and inhabited by babies. They bleed without being cut.

Women are, obviously, dangerous—to themselves, to everyone else.

Women need fathers. They need husbands. They need careful governance and physical restraint, male-defined codes of behavior and the sheltering walls of the domestic sphere.

These ideas are as old as Aristotle and as current Rush Limbaugh’s attempted slut-shaming of Sandra Fluke. Critics—myself among them—have noted that Limbaugh’s attack had nothing to do with Fluke’s actual testimony, but this excellent piece reminds me that, yes, of course it does. A woman speaking as a public citizen is, in Limbaugh’s worldview, essentially the same as a woman making herself sexually available, and a woman who assumes her own sexual agency is, by definition, undiscriminating in her pursuit of partners. She is out of control.

Consider the word “slut” itself. When it entered the English language in the fourteenth century, it meant an untidy or slovenly woman, and we can still find it used that way in Victorian literature. But the shift from that sense to current usage was a minor one given that a woman who is sloppy in her housekeeping will, of course, be sexually sloppy as well. All female sins can be reduced to same one: a refusal to allow men to define and control female sexuality.

Or maybe it’s this: a refusal to accept that a woman is defined and controlled by her sexuality. When Limbaugh cast Fluke as a whore, he was putting her back in her place—the place where he wants her to stay, the place where he has the power to tell her what she is and what she should be. Limbaugh ignored the content of what Fluke had to say because the very fact of her saying anything at all was, as Bady points out in the aforementioned essay, a threat to his privilege. It is, in fact, a threat simply because it calls attention to that privilege (and, by extension, the privilege of the Congressmen who also chose not to hear Fluke speak). When men like Limbaugh call women sluts, it’s because they’re afraid of them.

They should be.

Sealing the Deal: The wet and wild world of selkie romance novels

It began with my friend Julie. At some point in our early adolescence, she started giving me her mom’s romance novels, helpfully dog-eared at the raunchy bits. My parents were into mystery and science fiction—my copy of Judy Blume’s Forever was probably the smuttiest book our house—so Julie’s supply of mass-market romances provided me with a welcome surfeit of sexually explicit scenes and situations.

Now, decades later, I know that the books I was skimming for words like “shaft” and “thrust” were a direct result of the awesome success of  Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Flame and the Flower. First published in 1972, this novel reinvented romance fiction by making explicit what had previously been decorously implied—which is to say, penetration. While there are still readers who prefer a chaste romance, and while there are still publishers happy to cater to this audience, sales figures for The Flame and the Flower made it abundantly clear that most romance fans wanted action, and lots of it. The book was a bestseller as a hardcover original—most romances debut as paperbacks—and more than four million copies had been sold by 1978. The Flame and the Flower is still in print. It’s even available in electronic editions.

Woodiwiss’ breakthrough provided the formula for pretty much every romance I read in the ’80s. As I worked my way through Julie’s mom’s castoffs and rummaged through neighborhood bookshelves during babysitting gigs, I encountered the same scenario over and over again: Naïve young woman experiences sexual awakening when she succumbs to older, very powerful man, while older, very powerful man is domesticated—but not in any way emasculated!—by aforementioned naïve young woman. True love and lots of intercourse. This is the formula that helped romance dominate bookselling. (Romance consistently beats every other category in consumer publishing, and the genre has, in recent years, proven itself recession-proof, continuing to grow even in a shrinking economy.) This is also the formula that inspired the pejorative “bodice ripper”—a reference to both the bosom-heavy art on the cover and the many garments torn from women’s bodies within—and earned the genre the enduring scorn of literary critics and feminists.

Indeed, if you’re not a romance reader, your perception of—and disdain for, perhaps?—the genre is probably based on the typical romance of thirty years ago. To be sure, there’s plenty to hate about the form Woodiwiss pioneered. The Flame and the Flower itself makes for difficult reading—and not because it’s intellectually challenging. The characters and conflicts are thin, insipid copies of prototypes by Jane Austen and the Brontës. (I am not alone in recognizing this: Scholars of the genre have long identified these nineteenth-century authors as the progenitors of modern romance fiction.) Heather Simmons, the protagonist, is like Jane Eyre without Jane’s intelligence, passion, and self-reliance. Innocence is a vital component—perhaps the vital component—of her appeal as a heroine, but her much-discussed naiveté manifests mostly as the most exasperating kind of stupidity. This line is not the best example of the aforementioned dynamic, but it’s probably the most (unintentionally) hilarious: “Her eyes traveled downward innocently to his pants.” Brandon Birmingham (the man with the pants) is, like Rochester, a hero in the Byronic mold—Heather even compares him to Satan—but he’s only like Rochester if Rochester raped Jane while under the impression that she was a prostitute, which brings us to the most troubling feature of the subgenre Woodiwiss spawned.

For more than a decade after the publication of The Flame and the Flower, rape-as-a-plot-device was a nearly ubiquitous element of the successful romance novel. The best explanation for this phenomenon is that it was more socially acceptable—within the pre-twentieth-century settings of historical romance, but also within the modern contexts in which readers were consuming historical romance—for a man to assault a young woman than it was for that young woman to willingly have sex. In a chapter devoted to rape in Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan summarize the situation thusly: “[R]ape scenes gave the heroines permission to explore their sexuality without appearing to be sluts.”

I would like to say that I stopped reading romance novels when I realized how regressive they were, and that my budding feminist sensibility was shaped by my outrage at their persistent portrayal of women as victims, but that would totally be a lie. What really happened was that I could no longer take the tendency of romance authors to build a plot out of a stupid, easily avoidable misunderstanding that metastasizes. Also, I discovered Showtime After Hours Presentations, the nation’s premier source of softcore porn during my most hormone-addled years. My surreptitious reading was replaced by late-night cable viewing—with the sound turned way down to avoid waking my parents—and that was it for me and romance novels.

Until, one fateful day in 2008,  when I got a call from my friend, Sarah. She was standing in line at a drugstore, and she had, on impulse, plucked a novel from the rack. “You have got to get this book,” she told me. The novel Sarah recommended was Sea Witch by Virginia Kantra, and, just looking at the cover, I knew that this was not the romance novel as I remembered it. There’s no passionate clinch, no heaving bosoms—no bosoms of any kind, actually—simply a lone woman, naked and viewed from behind, rising from the ocean beneath a full moon. The novel’s opening line is just as arresting:  “If she didn’t have sex with something soon, she would burst out of her skin.” Clearly, this was a heroine who did not need a man to force her into sex. She just needed a man—as soon as possible.

The preceding was the original introduction (cut for length) of my latest piece for Bitch. You can read the published article here.

BONUS! Archival interview with Virginia Kantra

The Comedy Stylings of Julie Kristeva: The Semiotic and the Symbolic

Setup: In this symbiosis with the supposedly phallic mother, what can the subject do but occupy her place, thus navigating the path from fetishism to autoeroticism?

Punchline: That indeed is the question.

 

Setup: The precondition for such a heterogeneity that alone posits and removes historical meaning is the thetic phase.

Punchline: We cannot emphasize this enough.

 

Setup: Although originally a precondition of the symbolic, the semiotic functions within signifying practices as the result of a transgression of the symbolic.

Punchline: Therefore the semiotic that “precedes” symbolization is only a theoretical supposition justified by the need for description

In Honor of National Poetry Month

8 Reasons Why I Hate Poetry

1. It’s too short.
2. Or it’s too long.
3. It’s too fancy.
4. Or it’s just words broken up into weird lines for no good reason.
5. No dialogue.
6. No narrative.
7. No wizards, no space ships, no mystery-solving medieval monks.
8. Performance poets. All of them.

 

Frances™

I am not, nor have I ever been, wild about Disney. As a young animation fan, I much preferred the wiseass Brechtian theater of Looney Tunes to the prissy sentimentality of Disney movies and shorts. As an adult, I get very cranky about what Disney does to folklore (ask me about it some time!), and I find the princessification of girlhood to be profoundly upsetting.

So, when I decided to take my daughter to Disney World—pardon me, the Magic Kingdom® Theme Park—it was with some ambivalence. I was sure she’d have a good time, but I was reluctant to reinforce the idea that childhood fun should be licensed. Ultimately, I determined that one day of Disney was not going to irreparably damage my child.

Frances was about as excited as I thought she would be—which is to say, very. I was more appalled than I thought I’d be—which is to say, very very. I did not care for the “cast members’” habit of referring to every female as “princess”, and the little girls emerging from the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique all looked a little too JonBenét Ramsey for my comfort.

Frances, of course, wanted to dress up. I explained that the full princess regalia was too expensive for us, but that I would buy her one dress-up item, my treat. Frances tried on a lot of glittery shoes and a number of sparkly crowns before she decided on a pair of white gloves and a Tinker Bell purse.

As soon as we left the store, Frances asked if I would take the tags off her gloves and purse. I obliged, and she pulled on the gloves. Then she asked for the Tinker Bell mouse ears she had purchased earlier. She put the hat back on and arranged her hair.

Then Frances commenced to promenade down Main Street, waving. She had transformed herself into a costumed character. Frances made a special point of waving to all the small children, leaning down and smiling into strollers. Parents were delighted. Children were mystified. I was totally glad I took Frances to Disney World.

This might be my favorite photo from the trip. The mom is encouraging her kid to wave back at Frances. The kid herself is clearly thinking, “Why the hell should I?”, while Frances, true to her nature, remains entirely unperturbed.

A Letter to the Editor of GOOP

Many of the absolute best beauty products I’ve found come from regular French pharmacies. I always stock up on these items when I’m in France or ask friends to bring some back when they’re passing through. Below is a list of all of my favorites.

Love,

GP

Dear Gwyneth Paltrow,

I’m always excited to see a new issue of GOOP in my in-box, and this week’s missive was exactly what I have grown to expect from you. Because you have given me so many awesome tips, I wanted to tell you about something you might now know about.

We have this thing now called “The Internet”(I’m kind of surprised that you don’t know about it, since you have a website and an e-mail newsletter and such, but maybe your assistants haven’t explained how all that stuff works?) One of the reasons why The Internet is great is because you can use it to buy things, such as 6 of the 9 items that you seem to think are only available in France. Instead of asking your friends to find room in their luggage for things like Avène Eau Thermale Water Spray and Klorane Gentle Dry Shampoo with Oat Milk, you could just order them from Amazon.com, Drugstore.com, SkinStore.com… Well, a lot of places, actually.

Sincerely,

Jessica Jernigan

P.S.  It’s true that Avibon is not distributed outside of France, but we have something here in the United States that seems to be virtually identical. It’s Retin-A. Maybe Dr. Fredric Brandt, or Dr. Jessica Wu, or some other celebrity dermatologist could write you a prescription.

An Open Letter to Anyone with a Time Machine, or Some Other Means of Traveling Through Time

Dear Time Traveler,

Recently, I found it necessary to remove both Pee-Wee Herman and Duran Duran from my Facebook news feed. Both posted just way too much, and nothing they had to say was ever interesting. It has occurred to me, though, that my 14-year-old self would be horrified to learn that her 40-year-old self would show such callous disloyalty to Pee-Wee Herman, much less Duran Duran.

So, should you find yourself in northeastern Ohio in 1984, and should you find a teen girl who looks pretty much like me but with asymmetrical hair and a bigger shirt, please do not tell her that I have removed Pee-Wee Herman and Duran Duran from my Facebook feed. I don’t expect that this will be a problem—I mean, it’s not like you want to waste all your in-the-past time trying to explain Facebook in the first place, right?

Thanks,

Jessica

Blessed

Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate, and Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, led the criticism in the summer of 2009. Ms. Palin said “Obama’s death panel” would decide who was worthy of health care. Mr. Boehner, who is in line to become speaker, said, “This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia.” Forced onto the defensive, Mr. Obama said that nothing in the bill would “pull the plug on grandma.”

A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that the idea of death panels persists. In the September poll, 30 percent of Americans 65 and older said the new health care law allowed a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare. The law has no such provision.— “Obama Returns to End-of-Life Plan That Caused Stir”, New York Times, December 25, 2010

In October, I got a call from my mom. She told me that my grandmother was dying. By the time Ted, Frances and I arrived in Ohio, my grandma had already been moved from the hospital to my aunt’s house. She had stopped taking the various life-extending medications that most 89-year-olds take, and her caretakers—her children, their spouses, her grandchildren, and a hospice nurse who visited the house—had shifted to palliative therapy, mostly painkillers and some anti-anxiety drugs. She was allowed to eat whatever she wanted; nobody was concerned about her cholesterol levels anymore. Nobody gave her a hard time for smoking—in fact, people who had been trying to get her to quit for forty years were buying her cartons of Pall Malls. Relatives from all around the country came to see her.

My grandmother bloomed under this regimen. She gained weight. She was lucid most of the time. She  came to my fortieth birthday party and had a glass of wine—made acceptable to her palate with the addition of a tablespoon of sugar.  She had the chance to hold a brand-new great-grandbaby. And, on December 20, she died at home, with four of her seven living children at her side.

The doctors my grandma saw in October made it clear that she was dying. They did not send her home; she chose to go home, and her family chose to care for her. We had the chance to celebrate with her, and hospice care made it possible for her death to be of a piece with her life. I think I can speak for my whole family when I say that we were blessed to have those last months with her—and “blessed” isn’t a word I use very often.

There is no “death panel” in this story. Nobody “pulled the plug on grandma”. The debate about healthcare reform had reached the peak of lunacy when my grandfather was dying in hospice care last year, and my anger was intense and personal (You can read about that experience here). It was just so upsetting to hear people equating informed, compassionate end-of-life planning with “death panels”. I understand the political utility of fear, and I understand being afraid to die. But talking about death isn’t courting death. Death doesn’t need an invitation. In fact, communicating with loved ones and preparing for the end actually gives us a small measure of agency when we confront the inevitable—agency we lose if we wait until we are too incapacitated to understand our options or make our wishes known.

Six days after losing my grandma, I was heartened to see that the Obama administration has managed to resurrect the kind of end-of-life planning that was shouted down last year. But I’m also bracing for the return of misinformation and fear-mongering. So, if I can ask you a favor, it’s this: Do what you can to keep the inevitable debate reality-based and compassionate.

Bitch: The Action Issue

Check out my review of Women, Food, and God in the latest issue of Bitch. Or, don’t check out my review of Women, Food, and God, but do check out the latest issue of Bitch.