the adventures of dr. diana york blaine

I met such a handsome man the other day, the kind who reminds me of all the promise of masculinity from my childhood. He's strong and tall and built, and he's really into boobs. Now I don't know about you, but when I meet someone like this, I always wonder if maybe I should conform to his standards just in case the whole meaning of life centers on getting his attention. And his standards definitely include having massive tits, much more massive than mine.

So one more time I found myself pondering getting breast implants. And you know what I decided?

Nope. Not even for him. Not even for the best looking man I have ever seen. No one is cutting into my healthy breast tissues and cramming a bag inside and filling it with chemicals, not even if that means that for the rest of my life fantastically attractive men like this one cough boredly and look the other way when I enter a room. Is this perverse of me? or sane? I live in such a strange culture it's hard to tell.

On the one hand it seems obvious that the best way to live is to be true to oneself, the advice Polonius gives son Laertes in Hamlet. But in that same play that same older male character has very different advice for the daughter. "Think yourself a baby," he tells her, and by this means that he will do her thinking for her. Since I am female, then, and not male, shouldn't I think myself a baby and follow the male advice that screams out at me from every corner?: GET BIGGER BOOBS.

The message is on television shows, in advertising, on the chests of the women at the gym today. It's like they were massing for my benefit this morning, one after another, little tiny things with big hardballs sticking out in front of them. How soft and small my own seem sometimes! How inadequate. Didn't these women do the right thing by surgically altering themselves so that all the men stare after them like salivating dogs? What if getting all that male attention is the key to happiness? How dare I think for myself and flaunt these little floppy titties? How dare I turn down the doctor's advice to cut off my aerolae and stitch them back up teeny like current fashion dictates?

How dare I indeed. I dare because women came before me who walked a courageous path in which they envisioned themselves as something more than appendages to males. They believed they were people, not tits, and that their sexuality was their own possession, not that of a sexist male patriarchy. I believe these things as well, and I like who I am today, and I want to feel like this again tomorrow. That means that I need to keep doing what I am doing, for it's working, and for it to keep working, I cannot give in to the fear that I am inadequate, to ask a surgeon to "fix" something that ain't broken.

Not even for him.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (29) | TrackBacks (0)

I was chatting with a man recently who enjoys going to strip clubs when he is away at conventions in Atlanta. It got me to wondering why men go to such places; he said because men are visually stimulated as opposed to women who connect with the mind and the heart. He also said that women enjoy working there; it's freely chosen by them to do so.

sigh.

Here's my responses:

In terms of strip clubs, I am interested in figuring out how our culture is set up in such a way that a place like that becomes necessary or logical. I already explained to you from the woman's perspective why it's necessary. Money. But from the man's? what does he get out of it? and more importantly, what does he NOT get? How does it fail to provide what it promises? Because on some level it seems to be that even as it promises connection, it has to serve to distance men from their own sexuality, from women, etc. And on that level, to me, it speaks to a need to change the way we do things. Not that I am anti-sex. Far from it. I believe I have the right to seek my own sexual pleasure and I do. But I do it on my own terms, not out of economic necessity. I wish that all women had that luxury and I wish that women having it was something that mattered to men. You're kidding yourselves if you think the commodified eroticism the woman exhibits at a strip club is "freely" given.

As to the visual stimulation stuff, another myth. Men are no more visually stimulated than women. How did researchers find this out? By attaching electrodes to the clitoris and penis and showing the subjects naughty pics. Women's parts react just the same as men's do. So why do we think that women don't want visual stimulation? In terms of power relations, we women have not had the ability to force men to become objects for our viewing pleasure. It's only been in recent history that we have even begun to be able to say what we want, and now that we can, 1/2 of the consumers of pornography are female. Apparently we get turned on by looking too. Is this really a big surprise? Yet the lie that we do not continues to circulate at every level.

Why?

We are in a time of real change, change that frightens people, especially the kind of men who are really into power. Strip clubs give them a feeling that female sexuality still exists for men rather than something belonging to the woman as an independent agent outside of male control. Hey, I answered my own original question! Men "need" strip clubs to reassure themselves that we are still their property.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 07:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (23) | TrackBacks (0)

I am speaking Wednesday March 22 for the Mortar Board Honor Society's Last Lecture series. I'm calling my "Last Lecture" "Why I Was a Liberal College Professor."

You are welcome to attend. The talk is in HNB 107 at 6 p.m. If you're planning to come, please RSVP to mbd@usc.edu so they can have enough food.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 07:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day I asked my hairdresser about a box of money she had sitting on the counter. "Oh, my church is having a Walk for Life. I am taking donations." I'd noticed the poster with the baby on it, assuming it had something to do with cancer, but now realized the Life she was talking about wasn't as in curing disease but as in opposing abortion.

Sure enough, she continued to explain, "we have a hotline for pregnant women in crisis, and try to help them deal with being a single mother. And we also go into schools and teach abstinence instead of safe sex."

Periodically there are moments when I am so relieved to be a radical that it's almost palpable. Heck, it is palpable. I simply never want to be someone who says with a straight face that she teaches our children not to protect themselves from disease and pregnancy when they have intercourse and then refuses to support their decision to get an abortion when they get pregnant. 'Cuz I would feel like an idiot.

I waited for her to ask me to contribute and knew I would politely tell her the truth, that I have absolutely opposite views on these issues. I think abortion is wonderful and I think education should be used to spread information and not ignorance. For if you refuse to teach people how to prevent the exchange of bodily fluids, you are quite literally spreading ignorance, which can be defined as the absence of knowledge.

Some people like to think of the young as best kept innocent, which is another euphemism for ignorant, but I prefer to offer them information, including the fact that sex play can be super fun and life affirming, especially if done consciously and intelligently. The kind of shame her group spreads results in kids feeling the need to have furtive sexual encounters rather than calculated ones, and recent research backs up the fact that abstinent teens may wait longer to initiate sex but are also much more likely to have oral and anal sex and less likely to use condoms or get tested for disease.

Guess there's not really any such thing as an "abstinent" teen when you put it that way!

Anywho, she didn't ask me to support this cause. She knows I am a feminist, and may know that this includes my insane belief that we should use technology to manage birth rates particularly when the prospective mother says that would be the best option. Can't get more "life" affirming than that, from my perspective. But then I am a crazy person who believes that individual and familial and societal well-being is more important than coercive reproduction based on ancient myths that clearly were created to explain the unexplainable and control the superstitious.

I will say she is a rockin' good hairdresser, which is why I keep going back.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 07:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night as Paul Haggis accepted his Academy Award for "Crash," he thanked the people who actually fight against injustice every day. Out loud to the television screen, I said, "you're welcome," then laughed self-consciously. My husband said, "he is talking about [people like] you." "I know," I said.

On the one hand it seems like teaching at an elitist institution is the opposite of fighting injustice, hence my laughter at positioning myself as one of Haggis's heroes. At the same time, what I do here at USC is educate people about the pernicious nature of hatred--of different races, classes, sexes, sexual orientations, abilities, religions, etc. Among other things, I give them the facts about how racism has become institutionalized, part of the fabric of the nation, and about how sexism is deployed in the interests of maintaining a status quo in which women are seen as secondary to men and not fully human. In doing so, I embody what the conservatives like to call a "liberal college professor," someone who is trying to destroy the American way of life, God, country, family, the flag, and so on.

They couldn't be more wrong. And they couldn't be more right. And I couldn't be more proud of what I do.

To be an American requires that one take an active role in our participatory democracy. To be an American requires that one fear and fight tyrannical government. To be an American requires that one work for freedom and to end injustice. Ergo, to be a liberal college professor is to be an American.

My heroes are the people out there running NGO's, people organizing protests, people watching government, people doing investigative journalism, people practicing social justice law, people working for the common good. They make a real difference in the world, and I sleep better at night knowing they are there. Otherwise it's easy to become cynical, to give up believing in an end to poverty, to hatred, to oppression, when it seems that so many of the people in power are working so hard to keep the structures that perpetuate these miseries intact, oftentimes by lying right to our faces.

For my part, I am sensible of the fact that many of the students whose lives I touch go on to become those warriors on behalf of equality, after their view of the world has been permanently altered by having seen mine, just as mine has been altered by those of the teachers who came before me. I have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in giving them a broader vision and helping to make the world a better place than it was before I was in it. In fact, one of those students I have taught is Paul Haggis's own brilliant daughter. May she be a gift to her world as I am to mine. Time to go to class!

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)