Tag: women

Slut Shaming

 

After she read my last post on useless emotions, my 70 year old mother and I got to talking about slut shaming and how ridiculous we both think it is. She comes from an era where good girls remained virgins until marriage (or until engagement at least), but men were supposed to be experienced upon entering the marriage bed. Who, may I ask, were men supposed to get that experience with? Women were not even supposed to admit that they enjoyed sex in that era.

The sexual revolution of the 1960’s in North America, started to change that attitude and the advent of the Pill helped women on a path of sexual self discovery. We were embracing our sexuality throughout the 1970’s and into the 80’s, but then AIDS came along and that changed things. Women who slept around were now being judged more frequently than in the decade prior, but the genie was already out of the bottle and women had gotten used to being sexually free. There was no going back to the good girls don’t model.

We talked about how men spend their entire single life trying to get a woman to be a slut for them.  One would think that sluts would be held in much higher regard by men. Alas this is where the male ego comes into play. It’s fine to be MY slut, but don’t you dare come to the table with anywhere close to the same number of sex partners as I have amassed. There are some men who aren’t afraid to admit that they like a woman with experience, but most don’t want to know that THEIR woman is more experienced than they are. Guess what guys, WOMEN LIKE SEX and we shouldn’t be made to feel bad about that.

Unfortunately, in the game of sex, women must play defense. We are the ones who run the risk of pregnancy, so we must be far more discriminate about who we sleep with than men. So while, we like sex, nature dictates that we must be more sexually responsible. We are the ones (for the most part) who are responsible for making sure the sex act will not end in pregnancy or disease. Then there’s that pesky serotonin and dopamine we produce during sex that gets our emotions all tangled up in the act of sex, whether the guy is boyfriend/husband material or not. Let us not forget the whole fairy tale culture that has been shoved down our throats since birth that teaches us that we are nothing without a man to complete  us. Oh, and magazines like Cosmopolitan that tell us we should be having hour long orgasms while we are sexually pleasing those men, morning, noon and night, all the while, pursuing a fulfilling career. The thinking woman has a lot on her plate to consider before saying yes to sex. Then once we do, we are forever branded sluts, unless we marry the first man we sleep with.

In my last blog I branded shame as a useless emotion. “Women are made to feel shame for everything from natural bodily functions like menstruation (the curse) and menopause (the change) to our sexuality (slut shaming). It’s a wonder we can leave the house at all.” Men are allowed the luxury of pride after a night of sex. Women must do the walk of shame.

 

 

I see no reason why we shouldn’t strut down the walk of shame like it’s a runway. If we start to change the way WE feel about our sexuality, then maybe we can own the word slut. It’s only by owning the word that it will stop having power over us.

Events like Slut Walk are a great way to sexually empower women. Not to mention to get the point across that no matter how we are dressed, we are never saying yes to being raped.

 

 

We must, as women, not be afraid to teach men what is and isn’t acceptable behavior, both in and out of the bedroom. That sex isn’t about power or revenge, it’s about pleasure. There are still far too many places in the world that don’t understand that women NEVER want to be raped, abused or beaten. It’s only by raising the bar that men will rise to meet it. It’s only by not allowing ourselves to feel shame over being human that we will finally be treated as equal.

 

We haven’t come a long way, baby.

Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day and March is Women’s History month in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

It has taken every fiber of my being not to comment on the complete train-wreck going on in the United States right now what with congress debating contraception and Rush (Big, Fat Idiot) Limbaugh’s comments towards a Georgetown female student. After all, I don’t live there. But as someone who is seeing this from the outside, let me just say that it’s this kind of backward thinking that has the rest of the world looking at you as a joke, America. Before moving on to another topic, I will say that Rush Limbaugh and his Tea Party cronies have done American women a favour. By spouting off their true colours, they have shown the next generation of young women voters that feminism is not only still a relevant cause to fight for, but just how tenuous their rights are in their own country.

As a feminist, I can’t help but look at International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month as little patronizing pats on the head. We won’t be truly equal until we no longer need a day or a month telling us how we are appreciated. I do understand the importance of a movement that helps stop violence against women, but why should that only be publicized on the eighth day of the month of March? Feminists are working every day to increase awareness and change laws to protect women world wide. We really don’t need a day of the year dedicated to us to make us feel that our efforts are being recognized. You want to make us feel that way? Work with us and not against us. There are still many atrocities being committed against women all over the world, from rape as a weapon of war, to female circumcision, to honour killings. Women’s rights are not nearly equal to those of men. Even in North America (yes, Canada too), women still don’t have equal pay for equal work. Now as much, if not, more than ever before the feminist movement is necessary.

So, Happy International Women’s Day. What are you going to do about it?

For information on how you can get active, here are three great places to start.

http://www.oxfam.org/

http://feminist.org/

http://www.now.org/

Never promise me a rose garden

 

Love songs, poetry and Valentine’s Day cards are all considered romantic ways of wooing a woman. These things might work on girls, but women want more. Well, actually, women want less. Less crap. We all know that when you say, you’d climb the highest mountain, or swim the deepest sea, just for one touch of our hand that it’s a line of crap. Those types of sweet nothings mean just that to a woman… nothing.

If you really want to impress us, instead of promising to cross a desert why not promise to leave the toilet seat down? Instead of saying you’d walk 500 miles for us, how about picking up your dirty clothes off the floor and putting the in the hamper… or (gasp) actually washing them yourself? You tell me that you’ll give me the moon, when all I really want is for you to listen to me.

Men spend a lot of time working on their “game” in order to get a woman. And women, I’m not cutting you any slack here either… you’ll believe anything as long as it’s what you want to hear at the time, then wonder why your relationship isn’t what you want it to be. I have news for you. Once the wooing is over, real life begins and no amount of roses will make up for the fact that the dishes need to be done.

For you married couples out there who wrote their own vows years ago, don’t you wish that instead of promising each other a lifetime of eternal love, you’d promised to always put the cap back on the toothpaste,  promised to share the carpool duties equally or promised never to go into more debt than you can realistically handle? I know that these things may not seem like romance, but in the long run they mean so much more.

Romance is for teenagers who are too naive to know better, but when we reach adulthood, romance becomes outdated and impractical. If we entered into our relationships with even half the amount of thought that we entered into choosing what car to drive, we’d all be having much longer relationships.

So don’t tell me how much you love to cuddle, tell me that you know how to fix the plumbing… now that’s romantic!

 

The Love Delusion

I grew up in the Disney era when little girls were taught that, if we were good little girls, someday, our prince would come and rescue us. All the movies of my childhood preached the idea that girls needed a handsome prince to give them a happily ever after. My grandmother used to tell me, “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man” over and over again. All this preaching didn’t sink in, however. I was a rebel and the feminist movement was the female voice that was speaking directly to me. I had a long string of relationships with men who were not only, not rich by any means, but not ambitious either. I was the bread winner and the caretaker until I realized I wasn’t getting anything out of the situation, lost all respect for my partner and eventually moved on. I have become the man I want to marry and I never wanted children, so marriage has now become a moot point for me. I firmly believe that marriage is for people who are planning on raising children. But lately I’ve been thinking about the message that society has been sending women about love and marriage.

As I mentioned, the Disney movies of our youth told us to wait for that handsome prince to rescue us. From what? From getting a job, standing on our own two feet and realizing that we are strong enough to take care of ourselves?

I guess there’s a shortage of princes and rich men now because it seems lately the romantic movies are preaching to successful women that we should go for the sweet poor guy rather than the rich guy who’s married to his career. Movies like Sweet Home Alabama, Letters to Juliet, and Leap Year illustrate this message. Of course the message is wrapped in the delusion that it’s only the sweet poor guy who could ever REALLY love you. Don’t rich men have feelings too? Apparently, if we are successful women, we can’t have a successful man because that would throw the earth off it’s axis or something. The movies of today are also telling men that they are spending way too much time working, money is not what’s important and they should be home with their families more. Movies like Liar, Liar and Click illustrate this point.

My question is, if no one is working, who is earning the living that’s needed to raise a family? Kids are expensive. So then we get back to the women should marry rich message again, but that’s bad. If you do that then you’re a gold digger, which is the societal equivalent of being a whore, which is also bad. After all marriage is supposed to be about love, pure love, true love. Scientists have found that this thing we call love is simply a chemical reaction in the brain caused by hormones and neurotransmitters… romantic huh? Maybe my grandmother had it right all along… it is just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man, when you look at love in terms of hormones and neurotransmitters.

Let’s go back to the gold digger label for a moment. It used to be that women sought out a good provider to mate with so that their children would be well taken care of. These women weren’t called gold diggers, they were called smart. Now that so many women are a success in their own right, they are looked down upon for seeking out a good provider. In my opinion, gold diggers are getting a bad rap. In the movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn Monroe has a great little speech where she defends herself against the accusation of being a gold digger. “Don’t you know, that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn’t marry a girl just because she’s pretty, but, my goodness, doesn’t it help? And if you had a daughter, wouldn’t you rather she didn’t marry a poor man? You’d want her to have the most wonderful things in the world and to be very happy. Well, why is it wrong for me to want those things?”

So, which is it? Do we marry for love, marry for money, make our own money and marry for love, marry for money then force our hard working husband to spend less time working or just say to hell with it all and try to find happiness no matter what it looks like?

Funny or Insulting, the Stephen Hawking interview

This week, perhaps the most brilliant mind of our time, Professor Stephen Hawking gave a short interview to New Scientist magazine. See the interview here  In it he talks about String Theory (or M Theory), the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), quantum gravity and his thoughts on black holes. The last question of the interview was “What do you think most about during the day?” Professor Hawking’s response was, “Women. They are a complete mystery.”

Every online news outlet picked up this story and gave it headlines like, Women are a mystery to British physicist Hawking and What mystifies Dr. Hawking? Women. Now I understand that news outlets have to create the most interesting headline in order to get the most jaded of us to read the story, so I really don’t blame them for taking the answer to that last question and turning it into a headline. That being said, his response reads to me as a cute, funny reply. Likely meant as a joke. Dare I say HOPEFULLY meant as a joke.

If it wasn’t a joke, the implication here is, the smartest of men is still stymied by women, so what hope does the rest of the male population have in figuring them out. Even if it was a joke, the same implication is there. Women are a mystery so impossible that no man will ever solve them… so why bother trying?

This implication is insulting because it diminishes women as a gender. It’s akin to saying, “Don’t worry your pretty little head”  or “Shhh, men are speaking.”

Let me give you a small bit of wisdom, men. I’d ask if you were listening, but we know that not listening is the problem. If you really want to figure out and solve women, all you have to do is LISTEN TO US. Let me go one further, listen and really HEAR what we are saying. I know that this seems like a lot of effort when you could just build cities, fast cars with cool technology, explore the earth, explore space and spend your time thinking up new and clever pick up lines to impress us. Women are always saying they want a man who is a good listener, yet all men hear when we speak is their own voice, saying ‘I hope she shuts up soon so I can get some food/sex/sleep’. How many fights do you have with your partner where she says, “YOU NEVER LISTEN”? You expect women to listen so closely to you that we can read your minds and cater to your every whim and you can’t afford us the same respect? Understanding that women are PEOPLE same as you, and not a Rubik’s cube to be solved will go a long way in achieving a peaceful end to the battle of the sexes.

So until men get the message, I guess women will remain the world’s most unsolvable puzzle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in the arrogance of men.

Marriage is for Men

 

It seems there’s been a rash of celebrity engagements this past couple of weeks. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Drew Barrymore, Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel, Mario Lopez, John Legend and even Aretha Franklin all announced engagements. Even Sinead O’Conner is staying married, after announcing a split. With all of this attention put on marriage, I thought I’d take a look at who really benefits in a traditional marriage.

The institution of marriage predates reliable recorded history. It was the norm for all marriage to be arranged, sometimes at birth. The parents would pick a spouse based on purely economic factors. Families joining to become financially and socially stronger. Whether the groom’s family paid a bride price, or dower, or the bride’s family paid a dowry, the melding of families was very much for power and economic reasons and had nothing to do with love. It was a purely secular union put in place to help each family move up in society. Brides wed out of obligation and duty and were expected to be virtuous and faithful to their husbands, who, in turn were expected to provide financially for their wife and children. However, sexual monogamy was never expected for the husband. It was assumed that his sexual needs would be met both inside and outside the marriage bed. Great deal for him, but what about her?

These women went directly from their father’s home to their husband’s home and were expected to be obedient in both surroundings. They never enjoyed the luxury of personal freedom and exploration. Even in North America, women weren’t able of choose to be single without fear of societal backlash until the sexual revolution of the 1960’s. Women were expected to subjugate their personalities in favour of the path their husband chose… even when marrying for love. It was 2006 when the Church of England officially took the word OBEY out of the marriage vows. Yes, women were expected to OBEY their husbands. That one four letter word gave men all the justification they needed to abuse their wives for centuries.

In the 1960’s women in western civilizations seemed to have had enough. There was an uprising of women who were demanding their human rights. The right to choose what to do with their own life. It sure took us long enough, but once we started tasting freedom, it became more and more widespread. The church was still doing everything in its power to keep us barefoot and pregnant, from not allowing birth control use and abortion to shoving the institution of marriage down our throats at every opportunity.

There was a perceived danger in women choosing to be single. The erosion of the family unit. Traditionally, parents would take care of their family, then later in life, the family of their children would take care of the parents. If a woman chose to be single, how could she possibly afford to take care of her parents in their declining years? Would she even want to? If she is choosing freedom, what does obligation even mean to her? These were some of the questions at the root of society’s fear of the Women’s Movement.

Indeed marriage rates did decline and divorce rates went way up.  Men went from “Honey, I’m home. What’s for dinner?” to wondering when the delivery guy was coming. Something else of importance  happened during this time. In 1965, in the United States, medicare and medicaid became available. This took away the need for children to take care of their elder parents. This changed the economic family dynamic.

Unfortunately,  there was a backlash to the feminist movement. It seemed to create a generation of men with severe Peter Pan syndrome. These adult men, not only want their wife to be a partner, but also a mother. It seems that these liberated feminist mothers didn’t think to teach their sons how to be liberated, strong men. This, along with the media (magazines, movies etc.) telling women that they are not complete without a man, created a surge in marriages. .. marriages that didn’t last. After all, what liberated woman wants to be mean mommy to her husband? And let’s face it no man (unless it’s his fetish) wants to have sex with mean mommy.

Women who choose to be single, have reproductive freedom like never before. Now medical science has made it possible for women to have babies without benefit of marriage, or even a relationship. It’s easy to understand why there are so many heterosexual men out there who seem to genuinely hate women. They fear they are being rendered obsolete, and that is a legitimate fear. Successful women are choosing to be single mothers.

As Gloria Steinem once said, “Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.”

Yes traditional marriage was great for men. They had a subservient wife who took care of hearth and home, their every need and want, with no expectation of sexual fidelity. The pendulum travelling inexorably to the other side now. Even in the non western world we are seeing another women’s revolution. Here in the west, there are women who choose marriage just to have a companion, knowing full well that it can be as permanent as they want it to be.

This attitude has spawned another type of man. I have seen it in generations Y and Z. This young man is looking to be kept. They are male gold diggers, looking for an older, successful woman to marry.

I suppose marriage hasn’t changed that much after all. After a brief flirtation with love, it’s still all about money and power.

 

 

Fashion to die for

A few of years ago I stopped wearing a bra. I have a history of fibrocystic breast disease (I get large fluid filled cysts that must be drained with a big needle) and I had undergone a lumpectomy to remove a cancerous tumor. While fervently searching the internet for any bit of a hint as to what I might be doing to cause these conditions, I came across a very interesting study regarding a link between wearing a bra and breast cysts/cancer. http://www.breastnotes.com/bc/bc-causes-singer-bracancer.htm As a massage therapist, I am very familiar with human anatomy and this made a lot of sense to me. I was one of those women who wore my bra all day, then slept in it as well, never allowing my lymphatic system to do its job.

Before you think it was easy for me to just stop wearing a bra, let me tell you that I have quite large breasts and sagging was a concern, admittedly a vain one, but a concern nonetheless. I was also worried about worsening the back pain I had suffered from by having to bear the weight of my breasts without help from a bra. These concerns, it turns out, were entirely unfounded. Yes, I now sag a tad more than I used to, but not nearly as much as I had feared and likely not more than I would have just by aging. My back pain has lessened. All those little muscles that were being “helped along” by my bra, were now forced to work and became stronger. Even my posture is better.

Since I have been braless, I have had exactly two cysts drained (once each), as opposed to 3 to 5 cysts twice a year and no recurrence of breast cancer. I never changed my diet or my exercise regimen. I did quit smoking, but that was the only other change I made to my lifestyle. I will wear a bra occasionally, but never for more than a few hours at a time and never an underwire bra. After a week or so of feeling oddly naked without a bra, undershirts, or soft cotton tank tops have become far more comfortable than I ever imagined and I don’t have those horrible divots, caused by bra straps, in my shoulders anymore.

It seems those feminists of the 1960’s knew what they were doing when they burned their bras, even though they may not have known it was the healthy thing to do. Breast binding with a bra is no more healthy for your breasts than foot binding is for your feet.

I encourage you to try going without a bra for a month and see how it changes your life. If you are a man, I hope that you pass this on to the women in your life.

There is no need for women to be a slave to a fashion item that can kill them.