Try googling “feminist Spirituality” (googling a subject matter is often my point of entry, as you might have realized, if you read any of my other entries), “mainstream” feminist spirituality is often connected with some version of essentialist feminism – aka women are so cool because_____(fill in the blank with something about nurturing, the earth or the moon, and you get the point).

While, I consider myself fiercely feminist, and I attempting spirituality, I have not yet found a feminist spirituality that is “egalitarian,” at its core, or even thinking along that line (feminist for me as philosophy of radical egalitarianism). Calling god the something earthy, like the “wind” or the “spirit” instead of “he” is not what I am referring to, such changes are too easy, because, while attempting to posit a genderless god, old school good is just glossed over with “hippy” names.

An “egalitarian” spirituality ought to deconstruct the very notion of god, because god “the wind” exists in hierarchal relationship with the earth just as god “the king.”

Back to google my Oracle – a search for “egalitarian spirituality” is evens less likely to yield fruits. As expected it boils down to either “love the earth” religion or “everyone is right” religion, which is not what I am saying on either count.

After parting ways with Orthodox Judaism, and going “egal,” I’d love to take “egal” to the next level, and wonder what it would look like to have an “egal” spirituality.

Below is a brief “chat” with a man who is relatively progressive – a good friend, and used to be rather kinky back in the day.

Me: I am still wondering what you meant by “my sex life sucks, but marriage is a trade off”
The Man: i thought that was pretty clear
The Man: different people want different things out of marriage/life
The Man: I am happy with a loving wife who has a golden heart and will be the best mother imaginable.
The Man: and who has time for sex anyway?
The Man: I am mean, there were times when it bothered me, and im sure it’ll be an issue in the future again, just not now.

This man is settling for a woman he hardly fucks, because you guessed it, she “will be the best mother imaginable.”

This framework denies his wife the full humanity she is entitled to – by conceptualizing her as having “a heart of gold” and a cunt of ice. The only good thing that comes out from what’s between her legs are his babies – that she will then mother.

However, it denies the husband his full humanity as well by creating a false choice – where a “loving wife” that will bear children is a trade-off for a sex life that “sucks.”

In the conversation, appropriately, the man defines this false choice by the title – “marriage.” (my sex life sucks, but marriage is a trade off).

This is indeed “marriage.” (I am not implying that marriage cannot be reclaimed).

And marriage as the institution it has been and the institution it continues to be – sucks.

For many it does not suck as obviously as described above – I do not deny that it is possible to have mind blowing sex in a patriarchal marriage.

However, a patriarchal marriage is the relationship that has utility beyond itself (financial, reproductive. social, religious) – and it is in that soul destroying utility that the full humanity of both men and win goes to die.

]]> http://sotah.net/2008/09/23/whats-wrong-with-marriage/feed/ 1 Sotah http://sotah.net/2008/09/02/the-pregnant-body-is-the-most-political-image-on-earth/ http://sotah.net/2008/09/02/the-pregnant-body-is-the-most-political-image-on-earth/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:31:08 +0000 Sotah http://playingagirl.wordpress.com/?p=35 Continue reading →]]> The pregnant body is the most political image on earth. The pregnancy of Bristol Palin, the daughter of the gun toting, bible thumbing, baby popping, Republican V. P Candidate, Sarah Palin finally motivated me to write.

Why is it surprising, or even interesting that Bristol Palin has sex – I mean pregnancy is generally the sure-fire way to know that one is having sex, which is really why this pregnancy is show-cased. The real news here is that the daughter of moral values America is having premarital sex (along with 40% of American teenage girls). The official statement by Sarah Palin actually suggests that Bristol might be having a shot-gun wedding – Morally Majority indeed!

Bristol Palin is not the only daughter of the Moral Majority who is engaging in premarital sex – She however, will be the only one on cable news, the only one that requires official statements. Her body is not hers anymore, it belongs to body politic and for this I am incredibly sad, and sadder still because the bodies and sexualities of young women are routinely co-opted because they are universal targets that are made to bare opposing ideology upon their shoulders.

The sexuality of young girls is always understood as someone’s failure. For the progressives Bristol’s pregnancy is the failure of the abstinence only sex ed. For the abstinence camp, by having the baby she is taking responsibility for the moral failure to closing hers legs tight, until she sells the right to her sex to some dude. Either way, what is going on here is a failure.

There are no interviews anywhere to be found, no statements of any kind from Bristol herself – we are told she choose to have the baby (choose!!), we are told she will marry the father. Her voice is gone. The image of her holding her baby brother – is shockingly prophetic, and thus ironic. I wonder why she was holding her brother (the woman & future mom) instead of Sarah Palin’s husband.

Is it always a failure for someone to fuck? - Young women, poor women, drug addicted women, retarded women, genetically inferior women, lesbian woman all these women ought to keep their fucking secret and never ever, flaunt it in the face the body politic by actually becoming pregnant, and continuing their pregnancy to term – there is no greater sin against the social order.

In this way, abortions (while must absolutely remain legal), are actually not some radical departure, abortions are maintaining the social order. Bristol only has only thing going against her – age, and thus while scandalous, we can forgive her the pregnancy, if of course she promise to marry the father and thus her sexuality will again be safely possessed and controlled – if her parents couldn’t keep her chaste, perhaps her husband will achieve the proper results.

Now Imagine that Bristol is not only young, but she has one or two other notch from the list above. Better yet, imagine it was not a mistake, imagine that Bristol (still 17) paid one of her high school friends for his sperm, and injected herself with the sperm, or better yet her lover injected herself with that sperm. Then what would we think? Abstinence Sex ed. cannot be blamed any longer, nor the promiscuity of the youth. Who will we blame then for the radical act that is pregnancy.

However, for the women that are the opposite of the list above – older, educated, health, wealthy, and wise – for them the failure to conceive is just as heretical as is the choice to be pregnant for other women.

The pregnant body is the most political image on earth.

I’ve always been a pick-you- gyno –out-of the-yellow-pages kind of girl, since all I needed was the birthcontrol prescription, and the gyno was the gatekeeper of the goods. At my University Health Center, the kind nurse- practitioners understood this truth and happily forked over the birthcontrol prescriptions and answered any questions I had.

After, I graduated and moved to DC, it was time to go to a grown-up gyno, and I simply called a few random ones and picked the one that had appointments available. Low and behold, I stumbled on Doctor Constance Bohon, who decided to discuss my fertility and the way its being destroyed by my fat, issues I did not ask anything about. When she brought up her “concerns” I told he that I appreciate the information; however, I was comfortable with my body. The Good Doctor, actually went to tell me that, it is a major problem that when I look in the mirror, I think ‘this is me” and I am ok with it. She knows some older women who are like that, but me at me young age, I can still change, thus I should not accept my body.

In the process of my short visit she also managed to mention that she has “friends” who do not accept pregnant patients who smoke tobacco… I am surprised the doctor accepts patients who are fat, but then, I guess it’s an economic necessity.

I also did a bit research to see what everyone else thought about Bohon, and following bit of medical wisdom was attributed to her by the Washington Post:

“In pregnancy, the uterus weighs a lot more, and jogging puts extra strain on the ligaments around it. So that can start to drag the uterus down”

The general guidelines of this topic seem to be, if you used to run, nothing wrong with continuing to run during pregnancy. Don’t believe me, give it a google.  And, the uterus will just have to learn to catch up!

Thank you Doctor Bohon for your good advice.

As annoyed as I was at the time, I did not bother to write this post, I just went on with my life, until today, when I needed Capital Women’s Care (a practice of many gynos, one of whom is Bohon) to call in my birthcontrol prescription to a pharmacy in New York City, which they finally agreed to do, after I lost it and screamed at them in front of my entire office.

Thank Capital Women’s Care for the excellent care you provided today.

At the end of all that, I was not able to pick up my prescription after all, because the medical insurance will not cover it until tomorrow!

And what is the point of this rant?

We need some way of knowing which doctors are going to judge us, and which doctors will treat us? If only there was some kind of forum where we could trash gynos we hate and celebrate gynos well love… is there such a thing already, and I just don’t know about it?

However, while hardly anyone actually admits to selling them, they are certainly available for sale; I purchased  a size 16 bikini at target.

Clearly, I am no fan of modestly or diets as can be seen from past posts, thus I spent the last few days contemplating the intersection of bikinis, feminism, and fat acceptance.

As Wikipedia will happy point out, we did not invent the bikini, the Romans did; however the bikinis in the west did not come around till 1946, and then were band from many beaches until the early 60^th, when the bikini began to go mainstream (or almost mainstream, back to that in a bit). The 60^th are all also the caldron where contemporary feminism stewed, until it too became somewhat main stream in the 70^th at least in regards to the law of this land. The acceptance of the bikini came about a decade before the key government reforms that are the corner stone of gender justice as understood today (equal pay/ anti discrimination legislation, marital rape laws, legalization of birth control and abortions).

There are basically three perspectives on this particular correlation.

(1) Skimpy clothes, aka Bikinis degrade women, and “gender equality” actually hurts women because it erase what woman really want, which is to mother children, while someone provides for them economically, an impossible situation in a world where men and women are expected to desire and pursue the same course.

This perspective appears in texts such as What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us : Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman by Danielle Crittenden.

According to this book Feminism makes women unhappy because it calls out social status into question, thus prohibiting women from being happy in their “natural” role.

“Those aspects of life — whether it’s the pleasure of being a wife or of raising children or of making a home — were, until the day before yesterday, considered the most natural things in the world. After all, our grandmothers didn’t agonize over such existential questions as to whether marriage was ultimately “right” for them as women or if having a baby would “compromise” them as individuals. Yet we do. We approach these aspects of life warily and self-consciously: A new bride adjusts her veil in the mirror and frets that she is selling out to some false idea of femininity; a new wife is horrified to find herself slipping into the habit of cooking dinner and doing the laundry; a new mother, who has spent years climbing the corporate ladder, is thrown into an identity crisis when she’s stuck at home day after day, in a sweatsuit, at the mercy of a crying infant. It is because of feminism’s success that we now call these parts of our lives into question, that we don’t thoughtlessly march down the aisle, take up our mops, and suppress our ambitions.” -excerpt from  What Our  Mothers Didn’t Tell  Us

(2) While equal pay is all good, and women should go to college and question their roles, the skimpy clothing is actually bad (“degrading”), and speaks to feminism gone wrong; it’s a kind of side effect of liberation, that actually hurts women by preventing them from being who they really are and getting what they really want which is of course marriage and motherhood.

One of the most prominent voices within camp is Wendy Shalit the author of Girls Gone Mild and a Return to Modesty. All over her books is this weird question “If doing away with “repression” was supposed to be liberating why are things now so bad?” (p. 16 of Girls Gone Mild, the first chapter is available on her website).

It is entirely unclear to me what is so bad, however the very premise of this ideology is that things are bad. In both of her books the “mild girl” aka the “virgin” is compared to the “whore” who sleeps around with guys she does not care about because of social pressure. This particular character is at the heart of the argument, just as in the first perspective rests on the character of the unhappy career women who is ignoring her true calling of house work. Thus, it is impossible for a woman to love her job or love having sex with several partners, she is actually repressing her deep unhappiness.

(3) Both the equal pay, and the bikini are aspects of our liberation. It cannot be ignored that societies where women have the most rights are also societies were women were can wear and due wear the most revealing clothing. Feminism is about the liberation of both our minds and our bodies (this is my perspective if you have not figured it out).

This perspective is often loosely labeled as third wave feminism. (Shalit occasionally tries to call her point of view fourth wave feminism). This movement is fragmented, and does not have a single unified voice; however one of my favorite blogs that represents this ideal is Feministing.

From this perspective wearing a bikini is not degrading, it is actually liberating. Now, if it is considered hideous or completely inappropriate for some people to wear bikinis (or revealing clothing in general), it would follow that those people are not as liberated, or rather are not as privileged as the bikini wearing group.

Discrimination against fat women is a documented fact, fat women are denied equal pay protection routinely. While, wearing a bikini will not end the everyday inequality faced by fat women, it is still a political and a feminist act for a fat woman to wear a bikini, just as it was a feminist and a political act for women to start wearing bikini’s in the 60^th (a decade until the passing of legislation that radically changed women’s lives).

This summer, at the biggest size I have ever been (size 16) I will wear a bikini (to bad I could not find a yellow pok-a-dot bikini), because Bikinis heralded the arrival of gender equality, and I too am equal (and very hot indeed J)

It would be amazing, If people actually read this post and send me comments with pictures of themselves in a bikinis of all sizes to post on my blog, as protest to fat discrimination (No that’s 4^th Wave feminism!)

Some bloggers have cited parallels to eating disorders. Both anorexics and the burka women are denying their bodies in order to make them “disappear”. Both are reacting to unattainable cultural ideals, be they size-zero thinness or increasingly stringent standards of modesty in the Charedi world, by taking them to an obsessive extreme. And anorexia is often understood to be a desperate way for women to assert control over at least one aspect of their lives. Surely, wearing a burka or vowing silence can be construed similarly. Jewish Chronicle.

The assumption behind the blog I cited above is that there is a kind of modesty that is good, and thus by comparison wanting to be skinny per se, is not the problem, it is just the twisty version that becomes a problem. This analysis does not implicate the “healthy” majority in the illness of the fanatics. I, however, implicate the very notion that a woman should strive to be thin or/and modest as the fuel behind this bazaar fire.

Women who strive to be thin or/and modest are doing so (most of the time) because they believe, that they are striving for an ideal of womanhood, an idea that is directly connected to pleasing men sexually (anorexia) and following men’s rules (modesty).

Tangent: Lesbians are at much lower risk of Anorexia. Doesn’t surprise me! (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 1994; 62(2):252- 260)

There is no “good” desire to be thin, and there is no “good” desire to be modest. Modesty, is a bad idea, not just at its extreme, it is a bad idea at its inception, because modesty is about women not tempting men by remaining silent and covered! Women silencing themselves for the sake of men is the very definition of patriarchy, if you ask me.

The perversion of modesty is only it progression. And anaraxia, is just the progression of the desire to be thin (aka, desirable, aka beautiful, aka for men).

Thus, the frame of reference must change. Twisty modesty is not going to disappear, until the ideal of modesty disappears, and of course the same thing can be said, and is often said about eating disorders. The change in these fields begins with a change in discourse.

Modestly aught to be a dirty word.

Some might respond to this critic, by attacking the conclusion (rather than the premise); this of course has been done in the Jewish community in regards to women’s learning. Jewish feminists he fought back by saying “It is not true, a learned woman will be just as moral as she was before, even more so.”

This argument is actually devastating to women’s dignity, because it assumes that a goal for womanhood is good behavior, and if men let us learn, we’ll continue to behave (aka be sexually pure). This of course is not true, it cannot possibly be true. Be it Talmud or calculus, a woman who lives in a world where she is taught what is considered valuable for her culture, will by definition have a measure of freedom that will enable her to be “lascivious,” a right that men have cherished for quite some time.

Bottom line: The idea of trading girls’ education, for their good behavior is still alive and well and it will continue to be that way while we accept their premise: women’s top priority is propriety. Time for a new premise: Women exist for their own sake, and not for the purpose of blindly reproducing the hegemonic regime of the moment.

Despite what some well intentioned feminists might say, Women’s liberation is a liberation from “good behavior” first and for most; because it was in the name of “good behavior” that women were locked away from the world, century after century, civilization after civilization.

This leads to a fairly straight forward conclusion. There is no public policy reason to stop horny high school-ers from having safe sex, with age appropriate partners.  The adults responsible for the health of teenagers should teach the teens in their life to be responsible sexual beings, just like adults teach children to be responsible street-crossers and ultimately responsible car drivers.   

This of course is not the message of  4parents.gov, a website of the Department of Health and Human Services, their commercial features a bunch happy go-lucky pre-teens, asking their parents to talk to them about sex, and tell them to wait till their married before having sex. This “moral” propaganda clearly, presents statistically speaking, anti-social behavior, likely to lead to delinquency. 

                Why do some forces in society want kids to wait to have sex, clearly it is not for the stated reasons of helping young people grow into “health adults,” (as 4paretns claims) since becoming a healthy adult does not seem to have a correlate on with not having sex until marriage.  Why oh why, then does the government have an investment in virginity?  

                The easy answer to this of course is religion thinly veiled as “health.”   I however, think that really this campaign is not about female virginity at its core. What lead to this silly idea?  The curriculum of a fairly popular abstinence only workbook.  Checkout  “Sex respect” or yourselves.

The curriculum then focuses on the differences between males and females when it comes to sex and relationships. It explains that, “a man can experience sexual release with a woman even if he doesn’t particularly like her. A woman, however, often experiences more sexual fulfillment with a person she trusts and whom she believes is committed to her.” (Sex Respect, Student Workbook, p. 11) To make this simpler for students to understand, it goes on to say, “some people describe the differences this way: Boys tend to use love to get sex; girls tend to use sex to get love.” (Sex Respect, Student Workbook, p. 11) This paragraph is from: http://www.communityactionkit.org/reviews/SexRespect.html

Well this time he went beyond feel good platitudes, to trying to explain the reason “Why women dress skimpily in the cold.” The answer of course is “complicity of an educated generation of women in their own degradation and denigration!” Never mind, that the skimpy dressed “degenerates” are going to get up the next morning (with a slight hang over and march of to the office in business attire, of course even Shmuley admits that these women are “educated.” He accuses these women of being nothing but men’s “play things” rather than their own individual human beings. One would assume that someone with such harsh criticism comes from a community where women have more options, than the Dublin young Professionals; However, the Rebbi (dead leader of movement), spoke against the use of any of birth-control for Jewish and non-Jewish alike. The Rebbi said “We must convince the leaders of the country to fight against family planning and birth prevention by lobbying in Congress, simply soberly, and with common sense. (53)” I guess the real obstacle to women‘s dignity is mini-skirts and not reproductive freedom!

But, that’s not even the worst of it. Shmuley throws out, without citing, a particularly frustrating statistic that I seem to come across all the time (it’s the first five hits on google for the word combination of “depression, sexually active, girls).

A few years ago a similar US study, based on the government-funded National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, linked adolescent female depression and suicide with adolescent sexuality. The study found that about 25% of sexually active girls say they are depressed all, most or a lot of the time, while only 8% of girls who are not sexually active feel the same. While 14% of girls who have had intercourse have attempted suicide, only 5% of sexually inactive girls have. (Shmuley in the Jpost)

“A few years ago” is the key, because it turns out that this data is no longer accurate. The changing attitudes to adolescent sexuality removed some of the stigma , and the depression went with it. Thus it appears that premarital sex doesn’t actual cause depression, but social stigma does. Suppose, we all decide that eating apples is immoral, wait a while, and will find a strong correlation between eating apples and depression. I even have up to date information from a reputable source to back up my analysis. According the American Journal of Sociology

Girls who have sex at a young age relative to the norms of their peers experience a significant increase in depression, while those who have sex “on time” or later than the majority of their peers do not experience significant effects.

Apparently adolescent girls fall prey to….pear pressure. When they have sex “on time” all is well, but if they step outside the box depression hits. Sex, itself is not the problem at all.

A far more interesting question seems to be why are girls victimized by pear pressure in a way that boys are not at least when it comes to sexuality since according to the same study “males do not experience a significant increase in depressive symptoms after first sex, regardless of age norms or relationship status.” I’d love to have a serious conversation on this topic, because, all the answers I can think of are very sad. Perhaps, girls growing up in a liberal society are not very liberated at all, but stuck in whatever paradigm of sexuality is presented to them, be it virginity till marriage, or casual sex. In that case, neither model is particularly empowering or liberating. In that model the Lubavitch woman who is pregnant half of her adult life, and the Dublin partier are equally caught it in systems of power outside their own creation (some might call those systems of power patriarchy!), despite the varied window dressing.

Sources:

Kaploun, Uri. A Partner in the Dynamics of Creation: Womanhood in the Teachings of the Lubavitch Rebbe. New York City. 1994

Ann M. Meier, “Adolescent First Sex and Subsequent Mental Health”, American Journal of Sociology 112.6 (May 2007): 1-28.

She blaims FASD on everything from Epilepsy to loneliness. Thus clearly it a problem if it can cause any problem, and thus you cannot prove anything because, as suprising as it maybe, even women how do not drink have children, who may at sometime be lonely. However by far, my favorite line about FAS comes from a BBC article that is supposed to tell women not to drink, even one drink from the time they start trying to get pregnant till the baby pops out; however the following sentence makes me wonder

“Light drinking is not harmful but the only way to guarantee your baby won’t be affected is not to drink at all.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/619840.stm

What does that sentence even mean? It is like saying “The only way to prevent the unborn from getting hit by cars in side their mother’s womb is to stay at home, far from cars” instead of telling women to look both ways before crossing the street.

The end on this rather morbid, but fun topic!