What's up with virginity?

I started reading a new book today about three women during WWII entitled "The Postmistress." It's historical fiction but still manages to address some intersting gender issues. In the very beginning, one of the women sees a doctor to have him give her a certificate proving the she is virgin. This woman will give the certificate to the guy that she is planning on sleeping with. She thinks that he desperately wants this "assurance." Later, I was watching Wedding Crashers with my mom and at one point, Gloria tells Jeremy that she told him that she was a virgin after they had sex because she thought that that was what he wanted to hear. However, the situation is never reversed. In the movies, tv shows or books, a girl doesn't "get to know" if a guy is a virgin. It's not even a blip on the radar.

I agree that losing your virginity is a pretty big deal. You should have sex for the first time with someone that you trust, and is important to you and everything. But, I also think that society makes it into a bigger deal than it should be. Some people say that a girl losing her virginity is "naturally" a bigger deal than for a guy, but I don't agree. I think that it varies depending on the person. When I lost my virginity, it was a non-issue. I had been dating surfer boy for around six weeks, I liked him, and I wanted to have sex, so we did (after he told me that he wanted to as well). I know that my experience is not the norm. A lot of girls experience pressure or forced sexual encounters or are just uncomfortable losing their virginity for a variety of reasons. But my experience shows that losing your viginity is not "naturally" a more emotional experience for a girl.

I never felt like I "gave away a part of myself." I didn't "lose" anything. Being a virgin was never part of my identify. When I described myself in three words, I usually said "motivated, silly and enthusiastic." Not virgin. I don't want to over-generalize, but none of my friends who lost their virginity in a healthy way said that they felt like they lost anything afterwards. Most of them (including me) are happy that they enjoyed a healthy, positive sex life in high school and afterwards.

The media severly effects the way that teenagers perceive virginity. A guy taking a girls v-card is always a good thing (in the eyes of the guy and his friends) and is generally a bad thing in the eyes of the girl's friends and/or parents. Rarely do the parents and/or friends ask the girl if she wanted to have sex. They usually tell her not to and tell her various reasons that "she's not ready." (For example, check out Gossip Girl: Season 3 about Jenny and her bf) People always talk about "losing it" or how a piece of you is gone. What are you losing??


Again, I totally agree that losing your virginity makes you feel vulnerable and leaves a lot of room for errors. Honestly, I'm not trying to criticize someone's choice to remain a virgin. I am questioning the importance that the media places on teenage girls maintaining their virginity. I say treat the importance of virginity EQUALLY for everyone and let boys and girls make the choice to lose their virginity on the basis of what is good for themselves. (We need comprehensive sex education obvi) Is there any other reason than the general suppression of female sexuality and the patriarchy? Guys, do you care if a girl is virgin or not?

Lots of Love,
Lady Lola aka Katie

"bad feminism"

I want this to be a mostly reader generated post. So please comment freely!

Is it possible to be a "bad feminist?" If so, how? What constitutes bad feminism? Who decides who a feminist is? Each person individually (even if her/hir/his definition of feminism seems "bad" to others)? Or the collective group?


I'll contribute just a little two cents: taking on the term "feminist" doesn't make you one necessarily except perhaps by your own definition. But all social movements (and all words, really) are deeply open to interpretation (think about how "liberal" means something very different to Nana than it does to someone who identifies politically as a communist).

What say you, readers?
The Sheriff

the trouble with recovery

I found a nutrition textbook in the house library, and decided to page through it. It's incredibly helpful for me to educate myself about how food functions as fuel--when I see it that way, it's make it easier to make the right choices, day after day (i.e., not puking and eating nutritional and adequate foods). Whenever I pick up a book about food, body, exercise and related subjects, I almost compulsively check the index to see what pages they've mentioned eating disorders on, to see what misinformation people are spreading these days (with good intenions, no doubt, but a superficial understanding of the disease as "Gymansts-and-ballerinas-who-should-just-eat-a-fucking-sandwich-disorder" doesn't help anyone). One book I read blatantly stated "lower class girls are not at risk for eating disorders," which resulted in me writing them a nasty letter detailing the horrors of my disorder as well as the horrors of my finances. Thus, the bar of my standards is set pretty low.

And I was shocked by what information this nutrition book had to offer. First of all, it was pretty good. It wasn't dumbed down, or overly simplified, and even mentioned Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectic Behavioral Therapy (CBT and DBT, for those into the acronyms), two forms of therapy often used to combat the psychological end of eating disorders. But two statistics in particular blew me away.

The average time for recovery from anorexia? Seven years. The average cost of treatment? $150,000. I have no idea how much my parents paid for my treatment at Renfrew, but I know it was somewhere in the range of a heinously disgusting amount that we couldn't afford. I knew women there who joked that they went to Renfew instead of college, but it was real. Many insurance companies won't cover the cost of treatment, especially if someone has been through it before. Aetna, my lovely provider, cut me off when I reached the weight my doctor set as minimally sufficient to keep my heart beating and eyes blinking. Not when I'd reached a place of mental, emotional, and spiritual development and restoration, but a number on the scale.

I only truly kicked my eating disorder out of my life for good this spring (symptom free since February 10th!), meaning I struggled with my eating disorder for almost nine years. It makes me deeply sad to think of all the things I could've experienced and the fun I could've had if this disease hadn't had such a grip on me, if I could only stop isolating myself, if I could just relax about the calories and eat the fucking ice cream.

What's scary and overwhelming and also beautiful about recovery and what keeps many addicts of all kinds from improving is that you have to choose it everyday of your life. It's not an event that occurs, like an orgasm or childbirth, where you know you came or went through labor. There's no moment when you know you're recovered for the rest of your life. It's the accumulation of a series of choices that you make because you're finally honoring the person you are and the person you deserve to be. It's little bits of labor everyday, forever. You've got to choose actively to craft that life worth living, and even now that I'm on that path and I'm doing it, I can see how overwhelming it is when you're stuck in the abyss. It makes sense to me on a very deep level why eating disorders have the lowest recovery rate (and are the most lethal) of any mental illness.

But it's a commitment, like any other. I've committed myself to writing this blog, to living my feminism, to being a good HR, to making great grades, to enjoying Smith to the fullest extent. And I've got to re-commit to recovery, by taking better care of myself in the face of stress (this five hours of sleep shit ain't cuttin' it). It's not glamorous like starvation is portrayed to be, but it's the building of a lifelong relationship with oneself that's based on respect and love and compassion that makes recovery (and life!) a triumphant experience.

Much love,
The Sheriff

motherly dowdiness: culturally induced or necessity?

July 4th was Independence Day for most of the country, marked by fireworks, backyard BBQs, and patriotic trappings all over the place. For me, July 4th was the day I become a surrogate mom to 107 teenage girls.

This job is much more intense than I thought it would be; by 8:30 this morning, I had comforted a crying homesick girl, given directions to the gym and various stores downtown, fielded three phone calls from parents, and at least a dozen smaller tasks too minute to list but time-consuming on their own. The rest of the day fills up with tracking down missing girls, delegating to my interns (<3 love you guys!), and fielding the occasional bank account break-in. I only realize the depth of my exhaustion when I stop moving.

Don't get me wrong: I love my job. But it startlingly resembles, to me, early parenthood. The flurrying around, the unnecessary panic, the putting my own needs on the back burner to meet others' needs, the sleep deprivation (oh, the sleep deprivation). Even now as I type this, I'm technically on my "night off," but I've fielded phone calls and emails despite this supposed time to relax...just like a mom needs to pick up/maintain the house/etc while her child naps. I went to a bar but actually came back because I felt guilty leaving the kids! So much happens in the course of the day that when people ask me how it's going/what I've been up to, I draw a blank and mumble something about residential tasks.

But this brings me to the big question: Is motherly "dowdiness," manifested both in physically caring less about one's appearance than one would like to, evidenced in me moving away from cute tops and skinny jeans to cut-off shorts and flip flops with whatever top is within arms reach as well as in neglecting one's needs and desires for those of the child, a cultural phenomenon or simply what happens when one has a child (note that for the record, as tired as I may get at times, I know having an actual baby would blow me out of the water compared to this job...and no one pays you for that. Usually. Digression over!)?

I believe that, like most things, it's both nature and nurture. We've been conditioned to believe that unless a woman gives up all her personality for her children, she is a bad mother, she is selfish, she's probably a whore! But the simple nature of parenthood, having a helpless individual totally dependent on you to have its myriad needs met, also demands that you re-prioritize your life. I find myself growing a little irritated at the individuals who don't change much about their lives with a baby on the scene: they continue to party regularly, dumping the kid off at grandma's place while they act with their friends as if nothing's changed. But I also cringe at the idea that your personality must disappear just because sperm and egg collided.

Flying in the face of this so-called maternal instinct is the "hot mom" trend, which thrives on the idea stated above: just because you're a mom doesn't mean you can't be hot, hip, and maintain a personality. With your overdone makeup and Pilates taut body, you'll prove to all the other PTA members that you can have and do it all without your hair out of place and with your pre-pregnancy jeans on. Which is great...if it's what you really want, not merely something you find yourself collapsing in on because of the cultural pressure to be/do/have it all.

And for the record, I've never heard of a man feeling the pressure to be a FILF.

What say ya'll?
Much love,
The Sheriff

team miley!: why Taylor Swift is terrifying

While neither Taylor Swift nor Miley Cyrus can really be said to have anything resembling talent (Taylor repeats the same stories over and over and recycle chords while Miley...well, she's just bein' Miley), I decidedly fall on Team Miley. Influence-wise (did I just make that up? whatever, let's roll with it), I think Miley is much better than Taylor.

Taylor is purity embodied. Her songs and her interviews are devoid of any sense of sexuality or development; despite the fact that she was banging one of the hottest males ever to grace this earth (click here for evidence!), she never gave off a hint of sexual heat or of normal teen growth. She was the born the same year as myself and most of the other bloggers here at FF, yet she seems to be stuck in this false nostalgic idea of what high school love is like: handholding and football games and dances. She's innocent. We're, as a culture, comforted by this.

But this is all bullshit--she didn't even go to high school (and if she had, given her hometown's proximity to Reading, PA, it would NOT have been an experience of hand holding, it would've been about drug dealing)! Her ideas about high school and boys and dating are based on a myth of cultural milieu and images that she's absorbed and now spits back out to young girls in the form of repetitive songs. Her lyrics are bone-chilling sometimes in their capacity to ignore sexuality or to treat it with a negative glance. Consider the song "Fifteen," which chronicles a girl's freshmen year of high school. One line in particular drives me nuts: "Abigail gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind and we both cried." What was Abigail's everything? Her hymen. Can having your first time with someone who doesn't care about you with mutuality be awful? Of course. But is your virginity your "everything?" I can't speak for this Abigail character or Taylor, but for me, there's a hell of a lot more to me than the status of my hymen (perhaps my sparkling wit, my intelligence, my personality...hell, even just my tits?).

Taylor also perfectly illustrates what Jessica Valenti (founder and editor of Feministing) talks about in "Purely Rape" from Yes Means Yes when she says, "At the heart of the purity myth is who gets to be positioned as 'pure.' The perfect virgin as imagined in US culture is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's accessible and eager to please. 'Virgin' is a designation for those who fit into what a certain standard of women are supposed to look like. The positioning of a kind of girl as good and 'clean,' of course, implies that the rest of us are dirty," (page 300, for those source maniacs).

And what does this make Miley? Dirty (virgin/whore dichotomy? My favorite!).

I give Miley a scrap of credit: I can't imagine how awkward it is to come of age under the spotlight of Disney-related fame, and you can tell she's reveling in it now (her latest single's title, "Can't be tamed," tells you all you need to know). While I don't think pole dancing at the Teen Choice Awards was necessarily appropriate, sexy, or an especially "feminist" thing to do, she at least is acknowledging the flourishing to sexuality and sexual feelings that she's experiencing, while Taylor brushes them under the rug and cries some more tears on her guitar while wearing a white sundress.

I think Miley makes people uncomfortable because she's so uncouth about her sexual development. Her family has the trappings of a white trash family that stumbled accidentally into money. They are tasteless (her mother showed off her angel wing back tattoos that were exposed by her absurdly expensive gown at some awards show, and the red carpet host even joked that she might be a bad influenced on the newly-tatted Miley), they are in your face with it. Miley can't just blossom into a woman; she grinds on a pole to show us she's growing up. I don't particularly endorse this form of sexual expression (it's exactly what we get from every other source for young girls), but at least she is acknowledging this piece of herself.

Taylor, on the other hand, refuses to envelope that piece into her identity, to the point where she hasn't even said she's pro- or anti-abstinence. She just ignores it entirely. It seems to be a recipe for financial success (girlfriend must be ballin' outrageous), but she's giving her fans only a small portrait of what growing up is really like. She's selling them short.

Much love,
Sheriff

a litle on rape

I agree wholeheartedly with Katie that rape is portrayed in a way that's still deeply problematic in the media.

A woman's sexual past is regularly brought up as evidence that what happened to her, while unpleasant, wasn't rape. She's already opened herself up as a commodity (because that's all women are, right?), so her claims that she didn't want it are invalid. Once you want it once, you obviously want it all the time.

There's a lot of talk on college campuses about women watching their alcohol intake and making sure the pace themselves and don't get roofied (which bothers me because you don't need to be drugged or totally incapacitated for it to be real rape! It can happen when you're sober, or just a little drunk and confused and no one talks about that as a legitimate experience). But what no one talks about is MEN not getting so drunk that they don't hear the word "no," that they don't pick up on someone's body language saying "stop."

We need a two pronged attempt to stop rape. We can't just tell women they need to prevent it from happening to them. We need to send the message to men that they need to encourage their friends, teammates and co-workers that rape isn't acceptable, that rape isn't something they do, AND to recognize what rape really is. Just because you're not holding a knife to her throat and because you've seen her eye you up in lecture doesn't mean "she wants it." That doesn't constitute consent.

This is crazy talk because it would also insist upon a slight reconfiguring of the college sexual scene. Perhaps parties where both men and women get so trashed they can't stand isn't the best place to attempt to get laid.

Just sayin'.

Much love,
The Sheriff

"She was asking for it"

I was watching Law and Order: SVU a few nights ago, and per usual, the case rubbed my feminist leanings the wrong way. Back story: A girl was raped in a bathroom by a guy on the high school football team (of course) and he was on trial. However, at the trial, the ADA had to drop the case b/c a photo the cops found a photo of the girl flashing another guy at a party a few weeks prior to her rape. The ADA was worried that this photo would undermine the girl's claim that she was raped, because it made her look like "she was asking for it." Later, you find out that guy had given the girl ruffies and then raped her which made her case strong again. I have two major problems with this episode. 1- That "incriminating" photos can be used to establish a sexual history that undermine a woman's claim to having been raped. 2- The ruffies. I watch A LOT of SVU, and almost every case involving rape of teens or college girls involves ruffies. To me, this sends a message that unless you were ruffied, you will find it extremely difficult to prove the rape, and have to accept that your entire sexual history will be open for discussion. (Rarely is the male defendants sexual history open for discussion). SVU tries to address some pretty serious issues which can be both entertaining and informative. Given that it is has been on tv for so long, the show has probably shaped the way that Americans view sex crimes.

The problem of date rape is huge on college campuses and increasingly at high school parties. (SVU features it in many episodes) These days it's hard to find a girl that hasn't felt at least slightly violated or threatened at a party. The problem is that the cases usually come down to "he said, she said." (I'll be honest. Most of my knowledge comes from extensive watching of SVU or reading the occasion newspaper article, so I might be WAY off base here) For a girl to prove that a guy did something to her, she has to prove her purity and innocence. If she drinks a lot or has a lot of sex, then a jury will have difficulty believing that she "wasn't asking for it." While rarely is the sexual history of the guy on display. If he has been accused of this before, then yes, but the fact that he is a man-whore or in a relationship or has pictures of himself drinking on fb isn't discussed. This basically reflects the double standard: guys are expected to be promiscuous, but girls are expected to limit their sexual activity or be "sluts." Anyone who deviates from this standard is seen as abnormal and suspect.

Part of the issues around date-rape is that girl's are seen as the "gatekeepers." (The book I read on sex talked about this). Guys rely on girls for signals to continue. (opening or closing the gate) But at the same time, guys expect girls to say "no" without really meaning it. Most of the guys interviewed in the book, "Gender and Sexual Agency," said that if a girl says "no", they expect her not to mean it especially if she had been flirting with him etc earlier. (The author asked them to describe a situation of date-rape, so this is not from personal experience necessarily). According to them, date-rape happened when a girl forcibly said "no" and started to struggle, and the guy continued. (I totally agree with this btw). But I also think that there are a lot more places for date-rape to occur. A girl can feel taken advantage of or pushed too far in many stages of a sexual encounter.

I guess it goes back (as always) to enthusiastic consent and both sexes being vocal about what they want. If people had the agency to say, "let's bang" instead of waiting for signals or "opening gates," then maybe things would be a little bit better.

Lots of Love,
Lady Lola