the adventures of dr. diana york blaine

Fox just called to cancel because they ran another topless-professor-in-trouble-with-her-university story today. Who is this woman horning in on my territory? Guess there's a whole slew of us hussies. Anyway, to be clear, I am not in trouble with my university, to its credit. And as far as I know, I am still on for the Rita Cosby show tomorrow night--unless the other naked lady hustles me out of that one too!

Gosh, however will I spend this free time in New York City?

Update: So here's the sad story of the woman featured on Fox today who is apparently going to be fired because of her topless photos. She's not actually a university professor, it turns out, but a high school teacher. Thanks to Artie Bigley for sending along this link to the Topfree Equal Rights Association.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (35) | TrackBacks (0)

Thanks to the recent flap over my possessing--gasp--a body under my clothes, I've become a hot media commodity. I know, I know, it's hard to believe that people around the world have actually heard about me, but I am grateful that sexist American prurience has granted me the opportunity to share my feminist vision with a wider audience. So I am flying off to New York tonight to appear on several television programs. I'm also going to meet my literary agent, who contacted me about my book on breast implants after hearing about me from the author of this piece which ran in the Village Voice.

I'm so blessed!

Anywho, I will be on the Rita Cosby Show on MSNBC Thursday night at 10 and Dayside on Fox Friday at 1 p.m. (pacific standard time 3 hours earlier).

No, it ain't Oprah yet, but it's just a matter of time now, isn't it?

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 06:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

Once you're a feminist, it's tough finding things to read for entertainment. I grew up on "women's" magazines, those rags that dictate how we should look and act, generally to make us more pleasing to "men." Happily, since the actual males I know appreciate intellect and curves, there's no reason to become a passive painted dolly who needs advice about how to run her life. So those magazines are pointless and I avoid their toxic messages like the plague.

But still sometimes I like to read something light, and over the years as I have turned away from Cosmopolitan, I haven't always been certain what to turn towards. I love the recently resurrected Women's Review of Books, for example, but it's not relaxing to read since I get all excited about the ideas. Plus when you look honestly at the role of women here and around the world, much of the time it's not going to make you whistle a happy tune. So there's no escape offered in those pages. Funny Times is awesome, hysterical and brilliant, but again, because of the political content, I often still find myself anxious about the state of the world upon reading it.

Vanity Fair is one magazine I have enjoyed for the purposes of sheer escape, but Jeez Louise do I have a love-hate relationship with it. For one thing, I loathe the advertising, which tends to depict women as emaciated hangers for jewelry and clothing. I've actually gotten a number of my female corpse ads from Vanity Fair, so as you can see, it's not a venue where I can leave my work at the door and just enjoy looking at the pictures with no knowledge of what I'm seeing.

I even cancelled my subscription years ago for this very reason. It's so painful for me to see girls and women depicted as helpless, soulless, dead, that I couldn't see being a supporter of the magazine. Plus the relentless commercial emphasis on materialism saps my soul. Somehow it doesn't seem to me that $15,000 watches are the meaning of life.

Yet I buy it off the shelf sometimes because I'm attracted to the articles. They cover old Hollywood, or criminal scandals, or familial wars of the British elite--stuff that can be exciting without being engaging. I am aware of the sexism--after all the world I live in is one that universally foregrounds the male perspective--but usually there's enough of interest to make the read worthwhile.

This month though I couldn't help feeling dismayed by the number of articles that relentlessly reinforced sexism. First of all, the article on the middle-aged actor Sandra Bullock describes her as a "girl" three times on the cover page. Christopher Hitchens has a piece on fellatio, and of course an article by a man about blowjobs is going to be "sexist," so I didn't really expect much in the way of feminist theory. But as he was trumpeting the wonders of oral sex, he pondered why saying something "sucks" is pejorative, since getting head is so great.

Is he kidding? This guy is so smart and well-educated that I was
waiting for him to explain the obvious fact that saying something "sucks" equates being the person who does the sucking with being in the inferior caste. And guess who "sucks" in our culture? Yep, women and gay men. And guess who ranks beneath straight men in our hierarchy of privilege? Yep, women and gay men. So, Chris, saying something sucks is tantamount to saying women and gay men are beneath contempt. We, well, "suck," as it were. I find his ignorance about this dynamic chilling, but then again it's such ignorance that keeps heterosexual male privilege intact. Tactical stupidity, I guess you could call it.

After reading Hitchens, I moved on to the article about the Duke rape scandal, which I knew was asking for trouble. I don't know what happened that night, so I wasn't expecting the author to "defend" the accuser or anything like that. I just expected him to be neutral and report the facts. And so at first when he said it 's impossible to tell from the pictures "whether the alleged horror took place, or whether something equally horrible occurred--a false accusation," I shrugged off the discomfort I felt at seeing forced anal sodomy conflated with being falsely accused of a crime. Surely nobody deserves to be blamed for something he didn't do. That is horrible.

But then the author did it again: "If the three suspects have been charged with a rape they did not commit, it's a hideous tragedy. If the accuser's claims are in fact true, it's a hideous tragedy." Umm, excuse me? Why the insistence on using the same rhetoric--"hideous tragedy"--to describe two incredibly different situations? It's not the same thing, so why try to make it so? Besides, I can bet you those rich white Lacrosse players will have lives ultimately unscathed by this "hideous tragedy," no matter what really occurred that night.

Just ask William Kennedy Smith.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (19) | TrackBacks (0)

"Look how skinny you're getting!" It was a quick aside to me from a friend this afternoon as we were discussing, oh, I don't know, dumb things like our families, our lives, our dreams.

There was a time when such a comment would have brought waves of gratitude flooding over me. "Thank goodness," I would think. "Approval! Hurray! All of my hard work is paying off!"

Today it just seemed wildly inappropriate, possibly untrue, and completely uninteresting.

And MAN that feels goooooooooood.

The title of this entry comes from a phrase every fat girl in the United States has heard and, sadly, repeated to herself and others: "Nothing tastes as good as thin feels." What total crap. First of all, many foods taste absolutely wonderful, and the urge to deny this reality seems to me to be equal to denying life itself. Secondly, the idea that thin feels "good" refers not to how a woman experiences her body, whether it moves well and freely or responds effectively, but how—follow me now ‘cuz this is important—she feels other people feel about her when they look at her: "I feel like you approve of me and that feels good."

This is sick. But it's what passes for a "self" in current definitions of femininity. "Do you like my looks? Oh then I deserve to be here!" We’re pressured to seek external approval at all costs, which creates a cycle of self-loathing that easily leads to a distorted relationship with food, that most basic element of life.

As a woman who has been fat on and off since fifth grade, I know what I am talking about. I finally found a solution to the fat-thin-fat-thin-fat-thin rollercoaster, and that was by getting off the ride. I don't play by those rules anymore, and it works. What if I am not thin? Well, what my body looks like is none of your business. My friend’s comment to me reflects our sick national system in which the female form belongs not to the individual but to the public. Thus everyone feels free to praise or criticize us for that reason. Makes one long for the veil! I bet nobody in a burka gets told her ass is fat….

Far more importantly, what my body looks like is none of my business either. So in 1997, I quite making food choices geared towards altering my physical appearance. Simple! My diet is no longer a "diet" at all but the intake of wonderful nutritious delicious foods all day long, whenever I am hungry, whatever I want. Imagine that.

Treating myself like a grown-up who deserves to eat did wonders for my weight. When people ask me how I lost 50 lbs and kept it off all these years, I tell them the truth: I stopped dieting.

Diets don't work, in case you haven't noticed.

Apparently Oprah has not noticed this, because her show the other day was an old-school fat-girl nag program, where a bunch of victims were rounded up and put through a number of humiliating paces, shouted at like they were children, and praised when they obeyed. Key to successful weight loss, barked expert Oprah, is never eating after 7:30 p.m. She bragged to her pudgy posse that she'd even turned down a dinner invitation with Jerry Seinfeld the night before since it was past her "cut-off" time.

We were supposed to be impressed.

I was absolutely horrified.

And I'm also pretty sure it means Oprah isn't done gaining and losing weight.

Here's one of the richest and most famous human beings on the planet, an obvious powerhouse of amazing will and talents, treating herself like a bad little girl being sent to bed without dinner. Why on earth be a fabulously wealthy celebrity if you cannot go out to dinner with another fabulously wealthy celebrity? It's like becoming president of the most powerful nation in the world and then not being allowed to enjoy sex with a willing partner.

I thought this was a free country! What weird prison are these people in? Why don’t they get to do what they want? Or, given their obvious failure to toe the mark time after time, maybe the question should be, why don’t they get to want what they do?

It's all about shame, of course. Because of our Judeo-Christian heritage, Oprah feels ashamed of her body, ashamed of her appetites, and so can only imagine some kind of fascistic control as the solution. Ain't gonna work. If you ingest the perverse morality of a culture that fears pleasure and codes the body as "fallen," you won't be freed from a desire to "sin," you'll develop a compulsive relationship with your pleasure of choice.

Just ask Clinton. Because of our values, he's ashamed of sex, ashamed of his appetites, and voilá, cannot help himself from indulging in that forbidden piece of intern pie. If you don't think he tried, you haven't read the Starr report. Every fat girl on the planet will recognize his desperate techniques to avoid “letting himself go.” "If I just stay out of the kitchen, if I just don't eat the crust, if I just don’t keep any of it in the house, If I just eat it straight out of the carton......"

"If I just don't eat after 7:30 p.m."

Coincidentally, I had come home late the night before and enjoyed a fabulous mahi-mahi sandwich at, gasp, 10 p.m. I”ll bet it had fat grams! And calories! There were even carbohydrates in that bun, no doubt! How dare I?? Who's in charge here? Don't I know that we are supposed to internalize those hateful voices from the outside telling us we're helpless and then follow rigidly prescribed prohibitions against enjoying ourselves? Otherwise we might not get people's approval!

Well tough. I'm free. I don't comment on other women's bodies any more; I don't decide to eat something depending upon whether it's "fattening" or not; I don't make decisions based upon how the action will make my body look; I don't look at the clock to see if I can eat; I don’t care what other people think about my body. I just live, eating great food, getting great exercise, thinking great thoughts--no rigid rules, no prohibitions, no internal hater watching me eat and scolding me for doing so.

No freaking way.

And Jerry, if you ask me out to dinner, I can guarantee my answer will be "yes, with pleasure," no matter what time it is. You see, I'm a big girl today, and by big, I mean fully in possession of my own power and thinking for myself.

Oprah, I recommend it.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBacks (0)

I just had a sudden impulse to go to the mall. Not to buy anything I need, though. Come to think of it, I am not sure the mall has anything anyone actually needs. No, it doesn't, and I guess that's the point of the mall.

Nor do I need anything, from the mall or elsewhere. I have everything I need. More than enough. Too much. Stuff bulges out of drawers, cascades down from shelves when I open closet doors, piles up in the office, garage, breakfast nook. I've got enough stuff.

So why the sudden impulse to go shopping? The answer is simple: escape. Shopping center designers have created environments designed to narcotize customers, transporting us into fantasy realms where every dream can be fulfilled. Omnipresent mirrors encourage narcissism; products offer solutions to feelings of unease. There's no garbage, no backed-up plumbing, no poverty, no responsibility, no politics, no sadness. No reality, in other words.

In fact, the new trend in malls is to create fake downtowns, old bank buildings and beauty shops that never were, now housing Banana Republics, a store that crystallizes everything abhorrent about capitalism, the very name mocking socio-political realities in which elites exploit people for profit.

As we strolled through Victoria Gardens the other evening, which is our local version of this fake Mayberry, I pointed to one of the retro buildings and said to my husband, "ah, mother used to bring me to that salon to get my hair done. That's where I got my first page-boy haircut."

Of course the beauty shop I was pointing to never existed. It's just a fake sign on a fake building pointing to a fake business from a fake past. The mall itself is only a few years old. Yet I felt a strange--and I mean strange in literal meaning of estrangement--feeling of nostalgia, homesickness for a home that never was, poignance over a memory that never really happened.

Yikes. That's life in Postmodern/America!

Freud uses the term "uncanny" to describe this sense of having always/already been estranged from home, for having home- sickness for a home that one never really experienced except in fantasy. He was talking about a psychological state, the impossibility of getting back to a place that is largely a creation of one's memory, but in our society, this inevitable psychic feeling of isolation is promoted by public places like Victoria Gardens, by the reality of creating reality through artifice. We’ve got no past in the United States, so let’s create one where the feelings of estrangement and homesickness can be assuaged by buying, buying, buying.

Ah, but I wax theoretical, which I suppose is another method of escapism. For when I had the impulse to go to the mall (not Victoria Gardens, I might add, which is--gasp--actually outdoors, but to the hermetically-sealed Montclair Plaza, site of my fervid fantasies since childhood), I was already playing Tetris, another form of escapism. Why my full flight from reality this morning?

Dad's dead.

It's really that simple.

Dad’s dead. And yesterday was Father's Day.

Don't know about you, but my organism doesn't relish feeling pain. When I experience dad's absence, it's as if a wind howls through my soul. It's chilling, and I don't like it. So before I get down to those base emotions of loss and sadness, I tend to do a whole bunch of avoidance--without even knowing it. Let's shop! Let's get frustrated! Let's play Tetris! Let’s eat chocolate! Let’s watch the NBA playoffs! Let's run away. Run away. Run away.

But to where?

We are preparing the family home for sale. So I spent yesterday walking through the place that I lived for my entire childhood, the place that was always, always, there, always had parents in it, even after mom's death had at least one parent in it, right up until May 24 when they took his body out on a stretcher.

Gone.

Uncanny.

I found myself touching things as I walked through, as if trying to connect to a past that doesn't exist, never existed. Trying to get to a home that isn't there. I touched the till in the family room, that shelf where I had so many birthday cakes, set so many school projects, fed so many fish, dished up so many Thanksgiving feasts. In touching it, I was trying to touch the past, connect to those times, to that girl, to that family, once 5 in number, now down to 2. Uncanny. Gone. Untouchable. Unreachable.

How do people cope with this? How to deal with the permanence of death, the endings of place, the loss of childhood, the impotence of memory?

Easy. We go shopping.

And lucky for me, Victoria Gardens has created a fake past where I can have fake memories of fake good times with my family. When you get right down to it, these are just about as good as the real thing, because the real past is not "real" either. The mall’s historical lie is only slightly less unreal than the past each of us imagines in our personal psychological landscape, itself a construction of language. Memory's a fiction. That house in Pomona, which my family bought in 1965, doesn't "really" hold memories for me. My mind creates them, shapes them, suits them to my needs. And so my organism desperately tries to cope.

I’m pretty sure that’s why we’ve become a society obsessed with photographing ourselves in the act of whatever. Maybe if we can see images of the party while we are at the party, images of ourselves in our cars, at restaurants, walking down the street, we will be able to believe that we really exist, that this isn’t all just temporary and illusory. Maybe if we fill elaborate scrapbooks with pictures, spend lots of time making them look just perfect, we can convince ourselves that we really exist, that this isn’t all just temporary and illusory.

Heavy. And no wonder one wants to run away. But I'm not really going to go shopping. We've got $26.13 in the bank. That's not what's stopping me, though. Like everybody else, I’ve got plenty of plastic. We're not supposed to stop shopping in the United States, even if we don't have any money. President Bush even told us that shopping is our patriotic duty. So I guess I am committing a radical act by refusing to go and get some more junk made by miserable Chinese prisoners and desperate little children in Bangladesh today. I know that what I really need: to get quiet and feel my grief rather than react to the impulses to run away.

In doing so I am practicing a kind of lazy suburban white girl version of what the Buddhists call "mindfulness." I'm detaching from my thoughts, watching them run, instead of mistaking them for a reality that needs to be heeded and acted upon. This contemplation may not increase the coffers of my local retailers, but it will help me to live a richer and more spiritual existence, even if I have to accept the reality that we are just temporary and illusory.

And that's what I want, a richer and more spiritual existence. Even if to do so I need to feel pain, grieve the losses, accept my own mortality, let go of that notion of “home,” feel the wind howl through my soul.

Uncanny.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night I saw a television commercial that piqued my interest even though the sound was down. I am quite sure that advertisers intentionally make the ads visually compelling these days, since the advent of the mute button has allowed us some freedom from their constant huckstering. Anyway, the scene depicted a cute young white woman going to the beach. No big deal, that is unless you live in a culture that has astonishingly sick attitudes towards the female body. And you do.

So in the commercial, this gal has wrapped herself in a bright red raft, those cheap kind you blow up and float on then leave in the trash when they pop on a sharp rock. We watch her struggle to keep herself hidden as she maneuvers throughout a store and snack bar and finally out onto the sand wearing her unlikely covering. There was no way to avoid the message: body loathing-body loathing-body loathing-body loathing. Body loathing was obviously the whole point of the ad.

Now I am wondering what product will "fix" her "problem," so I turn up the sound. In the background I hear "she wore an itsy, bitsy, teeny, weenie, yellow polka dot bikini," which I recall as a novelty song from my childhood. Ah, so, this young girl cannot show herself because she's self-conscious in her teeny bikini. I guess she might have some body fat, which we aren't supposed to have these days. Poor thing. No fun for her. She’s gross.

But wait, there's hope! It turns out she's eating Yoplait light, blech, or some such brand of non-food, probably with some awful chemical sweetener in it. So she removes her raft after all, and sits down to nibble at this low-calorie snack with a look of utter satisfaction.

Here's the kicker. I could see all of the bones in her chest. One, two, three, four, there they were, one after another, sticking out of this underweight, undernourished model. Who is supposed to be my ideal. I rewound and froze the screen and stared in disbelief at the clear signs of this person’s diseased body. Bones, sticking out of her chest. Right where the normal sub-cutaneous layer of body fat should be.

And I got pissed.

More than just pissed, I might add, I got truly, deeply, frightened. I saw with absolute clarity exactly what was happening right in front of me, and comprehended deep-down inside what that means about the world I inhabit, the world I am handing down to precious girl children like my friends Charlie and Riley, ages 4 and 5 respectively.

When will they start poking at their stomach bulges and calling themselves "fat"? When will they start dreading going to the beach instead of celebrating it? When will they start losing those vibrant selves to the debilitating self-consciousness of “femininity”?

And how dare we--HOW DARE WE--hand these sick values down to those innocent children?

Honest to goodness, I was hit so viscerally by the horrific reality of this message--women need to be ashamed of our bodies and starve ourselves and eat weird processed chemicals in order to deserve to walk freely--that I longed to call for help.

"Hello, 911. What's the nature of your emergency?"

"Well every house in this country has a t.v. in it and every t.v. has commercials coming out of it, and lots of these show sick women starving to death and use every manipulative trick they can to make us all feel like we need to look like them. Children are watching this! Every day! All the time! Hell, I'm watching this. DO SOMETHING!!!!!. IT’S COMING RIGHT INTO OUR HOMES! HELP!!!"

It's not enough to tell me to turn off my television. I am just the messenger. There's no denying what's happening right in front of our eyes. There's no way to avoid these images. There’s no way to avoid their influence completely. There’s no way I would have any self-esteem at all right now if it weren’t for feminism.

There's also no way I would eat Yoplait Light. I think I will head over to their website and let them know that they should be very, very ashamed for committing crimes against women's well-being, commodifying starvation, conflating it with happiness, and then connecting it all to a product.

What are you going to do?

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 07:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m having a Disney kind of day, and believe me, that’s the last thing I ever expected to say at this point in my life. I am pretty disenchanted with the enchanted world mass-marketed to our kids, so I happily avoid anything related to that happiest place on earth. I happen to prefer the real thing.

But a friend is turning four tomorrow, and she wants a Sleeping Beauty cake. I personally think rather than waiting for a man to come along and rescue her, Ms. Beauty should get an alarm clock and learn to wake up on her own, but hey, it’s not my birthday, it’s Charlotte’s, so I am fulfilling her desire and doing it with great joy.

The local craft store had a Cinderella cake pan, but not one for the lazy lady, so I am sneakily restructuring the icing pattern in order to transform Cindy into Sleepy. (Charlotte’s not going to know the difference unless you tell her, so let’s just keep this between us, o.k.?)

Anyway, in order to get a good look at Aurora, as it turns out she’s called, I held my nose and dipped into the Magic Kingdom via Disney.com, which handily arranges everything in order to maximize the purchasing of Disney items. Once there, I waded through the various princesses, wishing we had something less sexist to offer our girl children to fantasize about than these languorous ladies waiting for princes to come.

I simply cannot stand the idea of either having to buy things in order to be a good mother or having to constantly say no in order to try and maintain some kind of authentic relationship with my child unmediated by racist, sexist, classist, homophobic corporate materialism. So I have chosen not to have children of my own.

But I am definitely enjoying hand-making Charlotte’s cake. That will be her gift from me. Something about buying junky plastic crap made by Chinese prisoners just doesn’t seem to honor life the way I think life should be honored. Baking a beautiful cake, however, does.

And speaking of Chinese people….I ended up watching the Disney channel later in the day, something I’ve never done before. Don’t be shocked. As I said, I’ve no children and we’ve only had cable, well actually satellite, a few months. For the last 15 years I’d figured there was no point in paying for even more junky television than already beams into the house for free, but finally got tired of tripping over the antennae wire that snaked in from the outside and across the living room into the den, so we called Direct TV and joined the modern world.

As I imagined the programming is largely forgettable and frequently offensive-- though we have been enjoying the NBA playoffs and “The 200 Pound Tumor” show. Also since I am writing the book on implants, I watch the plastic surgery when I can stand to. But man that’s some depressing stuff. It gets hard to enjoy popular culture once you’ve become aware of what you’re really seeing. My students often tell me I have “ruined” movies and television for them since they now realize how formulaic the narratives are. I simply tell them they’ve become more sophisticated and can demand higher quality entertainment. Thought that was the point of going to college--getting educated. That should mean that you actually change.

Anyway I have a sore throat and am trying to stay still, which is hard because the world is so filled with fun things to do. I decided to rent some videos, but the trip to Blockbuster yielded only Capote. Nothing else interested me at all—100s of movies written by children based on hateful ideologies or recycled television shows from my youth.

So to pass the time I ended up watching “Freaky Friday” on Disney. (This is yet another remake. Are there any new ideas being generated out there?? Yesterday in class someone was reporting on the film Troy, and when a classmate said she’d not seen it but she’d read the poem, he said “there’s a poem?” At least in that case it was a remake of the Iliad….)

Anyway the movie was cute, yeah yeah yeah, and funny, ha ha ha, but it was hard for me not to cringe at the overtly racist plot device that attributed the magical mother-daughter switch to “weird Chinese voodoo.” This reminded me of the overtly racist plot device in the film Ghost, where the white lady cannot see the dead guy but the black woman can. And that reminds me of the overtly racist plot device in Meet Joe Black where the only character able to spontaneously recognize Death was, yes, a black woman.

Hard not to see a pattern there, huh? White people are “normal,” and people of color are odd, not quite human, not in the same way as Anglos. White culture prides itself on being reasonable, cornering the market on this characteristic. For centuries Anglos have mocked the superstitions of other people, making fun of their spirituality, undermining their right to self-determination by branding them simple-minded.

But the president of our country thinks that men give birth to women, at least in the case of Adam and Eve. Oh yes, god snatches a rib out of the side of his newest creature in order to create another one as an afterthought. Now even when I was a kid I knew this story was just that, a story, and I continue to marvel that some adults not only believe it but simultaneously believe themselves the most rational beings on the planet.

Phew!

So white people get to have their cake and eat it too, basically. We are supposed to view Christianity as somehow less freaky than Asian or African religious practices, even though it features cannibalism, water-walking and resurrection of the dead, not to mention giants roaming the earth mating with mortal females. Hmmm. I mean, fine, believe whatever you want. But why not try to respect the humanity of others at the same time? And acknowledge how bizarre your own religion is? Who cares? It’s all right to admit none of us are that reasonable when it comes right down to it. Try it sometime. If we didn’t take ourselves so darn seriously, we might just end up less miserable. And less miserable might translate into less spiritually empty. And less spiritually empty might translate into less greedy.

For I think what worries me the most about films like this is the mindless embrace of materialism. Houses are huge, cars high-end, possessions shiny and multiple. Is this the best the most religious nation on earth can do? Shop ‘til we drop? Grasp and grasp and grasp, taking more than our share and then some? I’ve seen a bunch of shows on t.v. lately touting the amount people spend on their children’s parties. No one seems to realize that love does not cost money. Marx said the cash nexus would infect all relationships under capitalism. “My Super Sweet 16” makes than point better than he could have ever imagined.

And speaking of sages, Jesus said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. Seems like that message hasn’t quite resonated within our Christian country. Maybe a little ancient Chinese voodoo wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a cake to bake for a little pal. And I hope I can show her as she grows older that being thin and pretty and white and waiting for a man to come along to buy you a bunch of crap ain’t got nothing on being a real live person.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBacks (0)

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- unless your pursuit of happiness includes forming a legal family unit with someone who has genitals that look similar to your own. You can just forget it, Weirdo!

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Does anyone else find it creepy that the entries on this website containing the word "rape" attract lots of porn spam? Why do we associate violence with sexuality?

Simply put, the modern definition of masculinity requires men to be dominant, seeing themselves as omnipotent masters of their universe. Of course they are not. They are merely human beings, nothing to be ashamed of unless your culture says there's something wrong with vulnerability--and ours does.

This state of affairs, which arose (or at least accelerated) under capitalism, discourages men from exhibiting weakness. In order to conduct the charade that men are naturally aggressive, competitive and independent, we've come up with the idealized child-woman, someone whose lesser power and greater vulnerability permits the fantasy of the masterful male. The only problem with this scenario--well actually there's LOTS of problems with it--but one big one lies in the fact that we women aren't actually weak and childlike. So lots of cultural resources go into keeping this myth alive.

For example, our body hair signals maturation, and so we are expected to remove it. Lest anyone think we are growing up, women reflexively shave our armpits as soon as they begin to sprout. Officially we all claim this daily and potentially dangerous routine must be done because body hair is "gross," but there's nothing naturally offensive about it. We've concocted this assertion and circulate it so widely that we rarely question why that would be the case or why we don't find male underarm hair offensive and require its removal.

In order to have a sense of self-definition, we females often claim that we personally decide to do things like shave, as if this is some unique aspect of our essential selves divorced from cultural imperatives. But if you are a woman who claims to "choose" to shave, try stopping. To say you are making a choice means that you have viable alternatives. Shave or not, take it or leave it. Yet most women I speak to cannot imagine not shaving. Therefore they aren't really choosing; they're being coerced into removing a detestable sign of maturity from their bodies because they fear cultural repercussions for failing to do so. Some choice.

Wanting to avoid harassment and criticism makes sense, of course. I don't fault us for desiring acceptance. The question for me as a feminist, though, is at what price do I obey cultural mandates? First, most of us must come to an awareness that we are even doing so, for as I have said, the pressure to follow these demands of modern femininity so pervades our world that few of us even stop to ask why we do them.

The fact is that the more we conform to the standards of the ideal woman, the more we undermine our own individuality. This culture values the notion of individualism more than any in history--indeed we've done much to invent the very concept itself. Yet the definition of the individual works on male parameters. To be an individual in the United States means to be independent and strong, aggressive and adult.

Far from being encouraged to be independent and strong, aggressive and adult, women today are encouraged to be small and weak, passive and childlike. We're told that we exist only to please men, and that men will be pleased most if we make ourselves available to them, conforming our notion of pleasure to what pleases them, conforming our bodies to girlish standards, skinny and hairless, no wrinkles or sagging.

This current image of femininity was made blindingly clear to me when my friend Freddy gave me the Playboy featuring undergraduate women of the Pac-10, which featured a former USC student of mine. Fred found it ironic that I had been the center of a scandal for daring to expose my body on my personal Flickr site and yet there was no scandal when these young women bared their bodies in a place which exists solely to perpetuate male pleasure and privilege.

Of course there are some obvious differences between us that makes their nudity more acceptable than mine, an analysis of which only goes to prove my point. I am bigger, older, and more mature than these gals--hence some find it objectionable that I do not hide my middle-aged and normal-sized body away in shame. I am also an authority figure at the university, and hence some find it objectionable that I would also position myself as a body, exposing the fact that I am naked under my clothes. We have an artificial mind/body split in this culture, with the very notion of "authority" constructed on masculine grounds. According to this scenario, thinkers don't have bodies, and thinkers are male. Females, on the other hand, have bodies, and are not thinkers.

For even as the fine print in the Playboy layout asserts that these young women "all have functioning brains," which I do not doubt for a second, they are missing something else: pubic hair. Not only has underarm and leg hair been erased from female bodies, but now women are expected to have vulvas that look exactly like those of little girls.

Yep, little girls.

So if this is all "natural," stemming from a male desire to procreate with fertile females, why insist that females appear pre-pubescent? And at what expense, literal as well as metaphoric, do women comply with such dictates?

We've learned so reflexively to hate real nature in this culture which prefers the Disney version with its neon-blue water and happy Indians that sometimes the person who points this out seems to be the aberrant voice. But as one who has walked both sides of this divide, I can tell you that shaved vulvas look as aberrant and unnatural to me as do artificial breasts. This current penchant for helpless little girls with big boobies reveals a female designed not to be an independent adult, but a helpless object available to serve and please. Hooters, anyone?

The problems with all of this range from the time and expense required of women to appear unnaturally feminine to the ways in which compliance subtly and overtly undermines our ability to be empowered. Instead we’re encouraged to cultivate the supposed power that comes from turning men’s heads and getting them to buy us drinks. The problem is, this kind of “power” only signifies that we are currently pleasing to the person with actual power and privilege, and that as soon as he ceases to find us pleasing, we can be tossed away and replaced. Hence the desperate struggle to prevent the signs of aging that so many women feel obligated to undergo.

Most chillingly, this message that females exist exclusively for men to use and dismiss creates a culture which encourages sexual violence both in fantasy and reality. Recall my original question: Why do we associate violence with sexuality? That’s why.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (0)