the adventures of dr. diana york blaine

The beautiful woman's green eyes stare up to the sky unseeing. Her porcelain skin fairly shines, setting off the long dark lashes, the blood-red lips, the blood dripping from them. Next to her disembodied head rests a white flower whose purity both reflects and mocks the presumed loss of her own. She's sexy. She's beautiful. She's dead.

And she's coming soon to a theater near you.

This advertisement for "The Black Dahlia" has popped up all over, itself a form of morbid flower growing in the garden of my daily life. As I run errands, as I walk the dogs, as I exit the supermarket, I am assaulted by the image of a murdered female. Of course I am not supposed to notice, not supposed to think of it this way. I can just hear my students asking, "why are you making so much of that? It's just an ad."

Why? That's precisely why. Because I live in a culture that commodifies females and uses them to sell products. Women=things. This message trumpets from billboards, from televisions, from magazines, all day long, all night long, relentlessly, unrelentingly. You don't think these messages affect you? As media activist Jean Killbourne notes, advertisers count on our complicity, need us to deny that these images have any power. Meanwhile they spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year shoving them right in our faces. Hundreds of billions of dollars a year is a lot of money. Guess why they are willing to spend it.

We have all heard that sex sells. But how often do we stop to ask what that means? How is "sex" defined? Who=sex? What impact does this have on our daily lives? Simply put, sex refers to women, to the female body, to that object we stare at. For no matter your anatomy, you're a "male" when you look at advertising, and that "thing" that you look at is female.

The implications of such propaganda are breathtaking, especially when you consider how many advertisements we see and how little education we get regarding precisely what it is we're looking at. Men are fed the pernicious message that females are nothing but sources of pleasure, that the female body should be scrutinized and judged in parts; females are taught to identify with ourselves as a thing, turning that same judgmental male gaze on our precious bodies and punishing them into submission.

It works. Today on campus I saw a sorority woman wearing a tee-shirt that said "meet our new fall line." Who taught her to see herself as an object? Last week one of my students saw a young woman on campus wearing a tee-shirt that said "I'm too pretty to think." Who taught her to see herself as an object? Too many of the women in my life loathe their bodies, hold them to impossible standards, look at themselves as if they were judging cattle on the block for sale. Who taught us to see ourselves as objects?

Of course advertising is not entirely responsible. Institutionalized sexism pervades our culture at every level, hence its omnipresence in the media. But as a gender scholar I am particularly disturbed by representations of eroticized females--in this case an eroticized dead female--as well as by the near total silence surrounding them. Why do we continue to generate sexualized representations of corpses? Since our highly unnatural culture often rationalizes sexism through appeals to "nature," I'd like to know what "natural" attraction the dead white woman holds.

No, clearly we're dealing with ideology and not evolution. Ever since the "Cult of True Womanhood" in the nineteenth century, females have been discouraged from seeing ourselves as autonomous and powerful individuals. While we're told that we are "naturally" passive, massive prohibitions have been enacted to keep us that way. It’s like saying water “naturally” wants to stay in the reservoir but we build damns to hold it in just in case. Thanks to feminist activism, many, but not all, of the legal limitations hobbling our ancestors have been removed. What remains is an entrenched anti-woman ideology promoting female helplessness and objectification.

Where, you ask? On a bus stop near you.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBacks (0)

I accompanied a young female relative to Planned Parenthood on Friday. When we arrived, she was pregnant; when we left, she was not.

It seems so simple, and in some ways, it is. She's incapable of nurturing a child at this point, not in a stable relationship, not stable herself. To her the decision was not a difficult one at all, nor was my decision to assist her. The clinic staff was efficient, the operation safe and successful. She was then given a shot of Depo Provera which will protect her from another pregnancy, at least for 3 months.

Ah, but how complex such things truly are, especially in the United States, a country still led by men and dominated by ideologies promoting control of female autonomy. As I held her in my arms after the surgery while she sobbed over her fate--no mother, no boyfriend, no job, a baby she couldn't welcome, a vicious drug addiction--I looked into the eyes of the concerned clinic worker who'd waited with her until I'd arrived and thanked her, thanked them all, for being there for women when we most need it. "Thank god places like this exist," I said. "And I'll do everything I can to make sure they always do."

As I sat there, my head spun at the thought that conservatives were and are actively working to prevent people like this girl from having access to safe and legal and affordable abortion. Two old white men stood outside with placards trying to discourage the young women from going through with their surgery. President Bush deliberately packs the Supreme Court anti-abortion jurists. The male governor of South Dakota signs an anti-abortion bill into law.

While I doubt that these men see their goal as anti-woman and anti-life, I do. I cannot see it any other way. That child is not ready to have a child. Maybe she'll never be. So how can anyone who cares about the wellness of women insist that she bear one at this time? She's living on the streets. Is that where the "precious baby" belongs? How anti-life can you get?

I've really struggled over the years to understand why anyone would believe that he knows better than the mother whether or not she's prepared for the staggering burden of parenting. And I've also watched as those in charge of the country have moved steadily forward to erode our right to abortion, a right that must be protected if females are to have true self-determination. Abortion has been crucial in my own journey. It was for my mother as well. Thanks to the work of generations of feminists, neither of us was compelled to have children we did not want. This is a good thing.

In my mother's case, she was the married parent of three children when she became pregnant again. As it was explained to me at the time, it was simply too much for her and dad to have another child. I remember being anxious while waiting for her at the hospital; I do not remember questioning the decision of these adults to go forward with the abortion. I understood there was something mother could do that she needed to do and it was done. Now that I comprehend the politics more clearly, I still respect her decision. What could be more pro-life? Her life, dad's life, my life, my brothers' lives. Those are lives.

We continue to insist that it's women who are the nurturing ones. Men are discouraged from showing compassion or learning how to take care of the young. In popular culture, masculinity is increasingly portrayed as a red-meat eating, woman-hating, Hummer-driving cartoon. Yet in spite of this, opponents of abortion insist that these same nurturing women should not be in the position of determining when to reproduce. Here's the logic: we are "naturally" connected to children in a way men are not, but we are somehow wrong when we say we know we do not have the room and resources to give birth to and support a baby. So bizarre. So anti-woman. So illogical.

Meanwhile our “pro-life” conservative administration sends thousands of mother’s children off to die in Iraq, sends thousands of mother’s children to kill other mother’s children--and their mothers as well. A new book reports that the people Halliburton chose to “reconstruct” Iraq, meaning reap billions in profit, had to be anti-abortion in order to qualify for the job. So bizarre. So anti-woman. So illogical.

When a woman tells me she wants a child, I respect that choice. When a woman tells me she does not, I respect that choice as well. When technological advances make it possible to safely terminate an unwanted pregnancy but ancient sexist superstition and current-day contempt for female freedom militate against access to this solution, I shake my head, grit my teeth, and gird my loins for battle.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 8:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (32) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just gotten back from a spiritual pilgrimage into the desert where I experienced five days without consumerism, five days without corporate media, five days without strife. I wandered amongst other pilgrims, most of us devoted in one way or another to a world without hate, one in which capitalism does not determine our dreams and limit our possibilities.

Most of the time I sought to be of service to others, helping friends and strangers with their own journey. Also I opened myself up to deep feelings of grief for my father. When they came, I listened; hastening out to the temple, I wrote him a letter in the book someone had thoughtfully provided for just this scenario. The tears spilled out as my despair sought expression. Then needing even more privacy, I rode further into the desert, finding a space alone to sob and scream, to let go of my dad, the past, our relationship, his life, my life.

At one point during this episode I felt despair so profound that I was uncertain as to whether living made sense. It doesn't, really, in the abstract, since ultimately we die; all of our scrambling comes to naught. Having two dead parents was making this all too obvious for me and I hit an existential bottom, completely incapable of imagining why I should struggle along just to die. I'd never felt so alone, so sure that I could not stand this pain. And so I did something I rarely do: I demanded that my god show me immediately that it was o.k. Five seconds later a man rode up on a motorized scooter. "Are you ok?" he said.

Now this poor bastard had a tall order. He'd been sent by my god, that much was obvious. And so I expected him to be MagicalSacredHolyMan, but he was just some guy. Some guy who wouldn't go away, I might add, for I wanted him to, torn between recognizing that he was precisely the sign I had requested and hating having pedestrian human contact when I was at such a nadir. Of course this is exactly what I needed, to be drawn back into the human family, and there's no better way to do that than have a stranger come up—in the middle of nowhere, remember--and express concern.

As we talked I felt myself coming back into my/self, that part of me that exists on this planet and is comfortable in her own skin. He said things about my relationship with my father that made real sense, even though he hadn’t known either of us; I could suddenly see again the beauty dad and I had shared, the joy that he had taken in my love for him and in my own personal wellness, the unconditional care that I give him, particularly in the last decade of his life when he most needed it.

And I ultimately realized that this man next to me too was a soul seeking comfort. Balance returned as I was able to show him support and compassion. He was experiencing his first Burning Man without the companion who had originally encouraged him to come. He’d not found human connection yet, which can be really alienating at this festival in which there seems to be so much of that going on around you. Finally, we shared a hug that was, well, MagicalSacredHoly.

He saved my life, that regular guy. How appropriate. And in return I was able to touch his. Beautiful. I pedaled back to what passes for civilization in Black Rock City with a huge smile on my face, knowing I had served my parents well, accepted their dying, sought to become a better woman throughout the process, and continually seek to become a person who gifts the world with her presence rather than demanding that it serve my greedy needs. That's the meaning of life. Death has its own meaning, but not today, not for me.

Saturday evening, at the culmination of the week's events, I was wandering back to my camp when I experienced a sense of utter and total satiety which was unrelated to having my needs met. It was, instead, the total absence of desire. It was nirvana, at least as close as one gets on this planet. I’ve never known such complete satisfaction, not from any drug, not from any drink, not from any external stimulus. I walked by thousands of people in varying stages of hilarity, able to see and appreciate their different state but in no way desiring to join in. At one point a lovely young woman in a nurse's uniform bounded up and offered me a cigar. It was so disconcerting, the thought of taking a toxic substance into my holy body, that all I could do was touch her shoulder and look into her eyes and say "thank you for the consideration." There was simply nothing on earth that I lacked and I marveled to think that not all people felt my same sense of wholeness. But I also felt no judgment of them whatsoever. We’re all seeking, every last one of us; we are not, however, on the same path, nor have I always been at the point in my journey that I am now.

Now I am home, wondering if I might keep this sense of utter peace given the myriad demands on my attention. The problems large and small that need consideration would rob me of this serenity, that is if I let them. My father's house requires fixing up and selling in a market that has slowed; my beloved terrier is showing signs of aging and approaching death; Donald Rumsfeld accuses those of us who seek peace of being fascists; women continue to be encouraged to damage our bodies in pursuit of acceptance; Norway pumps carbon dioxide back into the earth in hopes that this will "solve" our greenhouse gas problem; corporations invent diseases so that we might further medicalize ourselves at a time in history when we need to be more active than ever.

The Iroquois nation asks that before people make a decision, they consider what effects it will have for seven subsequent generations. My society seems to be doing the opposite--ignoring the impact of our choices on the rest of the world and the folks yet unborn--let alone the damage our materialism and prejudices do to our own soul. There also seems to be such contempt for those of us who stand up to question our values that it's tempting to head back into that desert and give up. But there's no real hiding from these problems, even as I enjoyed being freed from having them shoved in my face all week. I'm called to speak, and speak I shall. For if I refuse to be me, who will?

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)