the adventures of dr. diana york blaine

"Dear Dr. Diana, in addition to the negative ad campaigns during super bowl this one stood out....made me cry. I know it is still a marketing ploy and they are trying to get people to buy their product, but at least they are doing it in a more positive way. Let me know what you think...I'm curious. "

Dear Reader, I too was surprised to see a commercial during the Super Bowl aimed directly at women and regarding the very topical and emotional issue of low-self esteem among girls. And I am not surprised that you were moved--indeed I do not know a single woman who feels comfortable in her skin. This pressure to look at ourselves and judge ourselves negatively in comparison to unrealistic media images begins earlier and earlier. I read the other day that the majority of first and second grade girls wish they could lose weight. In the nineteenth century, girls were concerned with improving their character. Now it's our thighs.

But yes you also note wisely the problem with this advertisement, that it's generated by a company that wants us to buy products. So first of all their motive is, and should be, entirely suspect. Entirely. I am not naively placing my well-being in the hands of a for-profit corporation. I do not know who runs it, i do not trust their values, I do not believe their goal is for me to love myself just the way I am. They spend lots of money to put those cute little kids on the screen and play sentimental music while we look at them and feel their scripted pain and joy. It's fake, fake, fake, even if the misery we experience as females in this sexist and superficial culture is very real. And Dove certainly does not have the answer to the problem it is identifying because the answer comes from rejecting these beliefs that beauty=happiness.

In fact, the Dove campaign that has been running for a while now encourages us to enjoy our "real beauty" and uses some models who do not all conform to the underweight ideal we see so often. Yet what are they trying to sell us in these ads? Firming cream. Firming cream! Now let me get this straight. I am ok the way I am/I need firming cream? How hypocritical is that? There's been this big poster in my gym locker room for months that plays this evil head-game with every woman who walks by. Real women have curves, it says, featuring a picture of a woman who looks to be about a size 8. Every time I walked by I felt the intrusion into my space by a corporation trying to make me crazy. According to this ad's subtext, I'm supposed to feel both grateful they aren't featuring an anorexic for once and good about my big ol' self. So I finally got out my Sharpie pen and scrawled "then why do I need firming cream?" I go to the gym for my health, not for some insidious soul-killing message about my unsavory appearance. Get a pen for yourself. I highly recommend it.

There's no such thing as firming cream, and no need for firming cream. The need and the product have both been generated by this company and others like it so that we will spend our money on their goods. We follow their lead in the hopes of being happier because that's what the commercials promise us, happiness through external approval. Even worse than pointing us down this fake path to self-esteem is the fact that products like this contain toxic chemicals. Just try to find one without paraben. This killer pervades nearly every cosmetic item we are pressured to smear all over our precious bodies 24/7. The other items at dove.com also have potentially negative effects on our health, including deodorant, which may be responsible for the huge upswing in breast cancers.

I am glad Dove wants females to have self-esteem. I do have self-esteem, thanks to feminism, and I am going to use this self-esteem to just say no to their sneaky phony smarmy attemps to convince me that they love me the way I am AND I need to change. No firming cream for me today. And if someone thinks I am too "loose," well my self-esteem says that he should go f*&^k himself. 'Cuz I ain't gonna!

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 07:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There are actually people in this country who think they know better than I do whether or not I should have a child. Since they are not content simply harboring this belief, they are also actively working to force me and all other women to birth children we cannot support and do not want. The Supreme Court has clearly been stacked in their favor, and recently has agreed to rehear the issue of "late-term" abortions. If they overturn the previous ruling, women will be forced to carry to term fetuses with no brain. Sounds logical to me. State challenges are now beginning as well. South Dakota's legislators will vote Wednesday on a bill to ban all abortions except to save the life of the mother. Let's hear that again. South Dakota is moving to make abortion illegal. In our "free" country.

At the same time these same people are working to prohibit people who want to adopt children from being able to do so. We women have to have the babies we do not want, and then people who do want them cannot adopt them. How's this supposed to work? And why are these people viewed as unacceptable parents? Because they have the gall to love someone that these total strangers do not think they should be loving.

So according to this system, a woman like me who does not want a baby and is relieved to abort a fetus makes a better parent than a gay couple who is just dying to raise a child. Welcome to the logic of the religious right, 2006. If being one of them leads to so much judgement and hate, I'm just happy to be a member of the irreligious wrong.

Meanwhile let's be sure they don't turn this democracy into a theocracy. Get active. The time is now.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

As I walked to class the other morning, I passed a young woman wearing a shirt in the USC colors of cardinal and gold that said "UCLGAY." In case you do not know. the University of California Los Angeles, or UCLA, is our major crosstown rival. The competition between the two schools ranges from the healthy and fun to the sick and extreme.

This shirt is an example of the sick and extreme manifestation of that rivalry because it implies that the two worst things in the world are UCLA and gay people. I was absolutely outraged. My heart started to pound. I felt like I was going to explode. Because I went to UCLA? Nah, I got over that years ago when I started teaching at USC. Now, in fact, I root for the Trojans, deeply and with my considerable passion.

But as I made clear in my editorial last Spring I do not co-sign the hateful sexist bullshit that all-too-often goes along with the playing of sports at this university. I want this world to be a place where women of all ethnicities, men of color, and folks with non-normative sexual and gender constructions walk just as freely as privileged straight white males. We have fought long and hard for this to happen, and there's been real progress in areas like getting the vote, but there's still much work to do, as this shirt signifies.

Gay people love each other. What could be more beautiful? And just as I am allowed to freely express my love for my heterosexual partners, celebrating this love in every way imaginable including forming legal families with them (though only one at a time), homosexuals need to have these same freedoms, and we are nowhere near, nowhere near, accomplishing that goal.

I hear hateful bashing of gays every day. And bashing of gays generally means bashing of gay men, which actually stems from our hatred of women. Yes, homophobic ideology associates gay men with females and then reviles them for it. So this issue manages to hit two of the areas I care the most about in the world, freedom for all people to feel dignity in spite of who they are attracted to, and freedom for women to feel dignity in spite of not being men.

So, insted of passing this person by, letting her hate speech go uncontested, I said "You have GOT to be kidding me!" She giggled nervously. I added in my most sarcastic sneer, "that's real nice, real nice." In class I shared with my wonderful students the frustration and disappointment I felt over seeing such an open expression of hatred for gays on our campus. We were reading Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a beautiful homoerotic text which the author denied was about same-sex love. In whole or part this denial has to be because of the nineteenth-century climate he lived in, where homosexuality was illegal, unthinkable. I had been wondering what Whitman would be able to create and do in our modern tolerant world, that is until I saw the shirt.

Well, to my surprise a number of students informed me that when "gay" is used as a term designating something as horrible, it does not refer to homosexuality. This kind of (il)logic makes my brain hurt. The argument seems to rest on the notion that "gay" has become a dead metaphor, one in which we no longer see the origins, that the term has become entirely divorced from its original context. "Language is fluid," said one person defending the use of UCLGAY.

Language is fluid, yes, but it ain't flowed away from the current meaning of "gay" yet. Gay marriage, gay rights, gay identity, gay people, every one of these terms holds a stable meaning in our culture at this time. And not only do they hold a stable meaning, with "gay" as an adjective meaning some version of erotic attraction to/genital contact with people of the same biological sex, but this term connects to a highly-charged political and social debate about whether folks who self-identify under this term should be allowed to have civil liberties equal to those of heterosexuals. I'd seen a blurb on a "gay" issue that very morning on television, and the reporter did not have to explain to us viewers what gay means. The report showed same-sex couples who went to the courthouse on Valentine's Day to request marriage licenses. They were turned away. Because of hate. And I am not going to stand by and let heterosexual privilege embed that hate even deeper by using "gay" as a pejorative and then turning around and denying that saying gay=bad is predicated on hatred of homosexuals.

Yes. It. Is.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

This is just another day, a Tuesday to be exact, but it's also the day that our commercial culture dictates that men show women love. Love of course means buying things, so right there we have a problem. The implication behind gifts, that we cannot afford anything ourselves because we don't have jobs, messes up the supposed purity of the exchange straight away. And it just goes downhill from there. Men follow their script, that they don't know how/what to buy, that expressing love is something so far from their capability that they have to act like ignorant children, which they most definitely are not. Advertising supports this image of men as doofuses. Let's reject it!

And women, told that we are nothing without male attention, follow our script and wait for someone to buy the right thing so we can feel good about ourselves. This recipe for disaster certainly accounts for the miserable status of heterosexual relations at this point in history. Men are reared to not show affection, women are reared to crave it from men exclusively. How is that supposed to work?

Happily there's solutions to the problem! Raise your boys to show love, to do the emotional work of nurturing that we currently force entirely onto women. Raise your girls to be individuals, happy to nurture and just as happy to make their own way the world. As for you, write your own script. What would you like to get today? Go get it. What would you to do today? Go do it. What would you like to hear today? Go say it to yourself. Be your own lover.

Most importantly, ask yourself who you can help today. Instead of waiting around to get love, go give it. Call an elderly relative, give some money to someone who needs it, let that stranger pull in front of you in traffic. Repeat every day. I can guarantee you you won't miss the crappy flowers and obligatory junk.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

"Hey Dr. Blaine,

I still have that little voice (my aunt) telling me what not to eat. She also told me that I would look so pretty if I were thin. I asked her if I wasn't pretty now. She said yes, but I would be so much prettier if I were thinner. I talked to her about this yesterday and expressed my feelings on this.

I told her that it was vain to consider lipo and that she should be proud of me and accept me for who I am and what I had done. I feel much better after the talk. I feel like I've opened up some issues that have bothered me."

Dear Reader, I don't know a single woman who has not had endured this kind of criticism and pressure to be "pretty." For so many of us, it seems that we have failed somehow at this task and we carry a deep sense of shame around with us as our daily companion. But the failure is not ours, it is our culture's. We should not be reduced to pieces of meat--see the Burger King entry for a brutal example of this!--but instead should be valued as individuals with individual talents.

Congratulations on speaking up. One of the main sexist tools that patriarchy employs against us involves discouraging us from having a voice. From Polonius to Dr Phil, we are told to be quiet, shouted down by men who tell us we are crazy, emotional, stupid. And sadly, we women are inscripted into this very army against women. Hence the female "role models" in your life and mine, including our "heroes" like Oprah, who try to silence us, shame us for taking up space. I am here to claim mine, my own lusty, big, loud, voracious, funny, amazing, silly, confused, active, spiritual, loving, intimate, kind, angry place in this word. May you claim yours too, my love.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Women in this culture are supposed to serve men. Serve men what? and how? Well, serve men food, and serve men sexually. Feminist theorist Carol J. Adams notes that in fact women are often represented as food in our pornographic culture in which male possession of the female mirrors male dominance over animals.

Certainly the Burger King commercial which ran during the Super Bowl exactly fits her paradigm. We see dancing girls dressed as burger parts singing about their "sole purpose" which is "fulfilling your wishes." In the commercial these maniacally cheerful hamburger fixings tell us they are "always willing," and they wink and nod lasciviously as they say so just in case we're too obtuse to catch the sexual overtones. "Yes, we're tasty and eye-popping," they assure us, and also that they are available just as women in pornography are available. "Hey, we're hard core," they shout. Just ask the "freaky King." We see him smiling and waving a phallic torch, ruling over a land of women who are also food--thrilled to be used by men. Explicitly invoking the language of pornography, "hard core" and "freaky," forces us to associate women with graphic and exploitative sex, and, by association, meat eating with dominating women and enjoying sadistic pleasure in doing so.

In case you are wondering, cows aren't really thrilled to be raised as machines and then brutally slaughtered. But there's no cows in this ad, for the women stand in for the cows, who become what Adams terms the "absent referent." We don't need to think about our food sources, in other words, only about how appropriate it is to use women, how much we like being used. It's our "sole purpose."

At the conclusion each of these "pieces" falls into a pile thus constructing the burger. We hear their "oofs" and groans of pain. Why add this detail into the soundtrack? Because the viewer is meant to get off on dominating women, just as he is asked to get off on dominating non-human animals. Yes, the viewer is a "he," the normative human subject of our culture. Three guesses who the "you" in "have it your way" refers to. Here's a hint: it isn't us women. We're the servile burger parts.

This ad lays bare the mechanics of male privilege. "We don't blame your jaw for dropping," trill the meat-females. It's true that my jaw was dropping, but it was not because they looked so hot. My jaw dropped because in a land predicated on equality we still condone such blatant sexism. It ain't my way, and I'm not having it.

Why not tell Burger King you're not having it either?

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 03:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I know I live in Southern California where the weather kicks ass and when I go somewhere like Kentucky this time of year they say "hey why are you so tan?" But let's face it, we white folks in L.A. just aren't that tan right now--except for some of us. And I am starting to suspect that those people are doing what I used to do: courting skin cancer by hanging around inside a glowing coffin and paying for the privilege.

It's hard to live in a culture that's so focused on appearances. I am sympathetic to the urge to fake a bake just as i am to the urge to get a tit. But it's crucial to me to make decisions now based on what is truly best for me, and I am highly aware of the fact that it is no better for me to chase approval than it is to have even more exposure to the carcinogenic rays of the sun than I already have.

So why not trust these people who are glowing bronze in February? Because they don't trust themselves, and they are not comfortable with reality. And that means that they will lie, without even realizing that they are doing so. How do I know these things? Because I have been there. And now I am working hard to be somewhere else.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 06:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

And Wendy Wasserstein. Here go our feminist foremothers, leaving this planet but also leaving behind a legacy of female independence and empowerment. Friedan's crucial work The Feminine Mystique changed generations of women's lives simply by letting housewives tell the truth, that they felt bored, trapped and unhappy, and that everyone around them ascribed these feelings to their own personal shortcomings rather than something central to the insitution of marriage.

The personal is political, says Friedan, and that simply means what we experience as individual women actually relates to larger cultural forces. What an amazing and liberating concept. All of the body loathing that we feel, for example, is not because there really is something wrong with our bodies, or because we aren't strong enough to discipline ourselves, but because the politics of gender today dictate unnatural thinness.

Knowing these things enables us to resist them. And in honor of Betty Friedan, today I will reject self-loathing and will refuse to lie to myself about what I am feeling, even if that makes people in this sexist world uncomfortable. The truth shall set us free. Rest in peace, Betty.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)