How would you respond?

So I'm afraid that Dr. Koshary's fear has been realized: I had a baby and stopped blogging. I won't say that this was Dr. K's greatest fear, but it was, at least, a minor, trifling concern that he expressed in the comments to one of my posts.

Anyway, I've compounded my unreadiness to post (because of having a baby) by convincing myself--as I always do--that I need to have some earth-shatteringly clever post to mark my re-entry into blogging. And then I would compose mildly amusing posts in my head, decide that they would be said earth-shatteringly clever post, forget how they went, and try to reconstruct them (still in my head) with little success. And then I'd, like, go to sleep or something. And so it went.

Whatever. I'll just jump right in here with this little incident from the afternoon:

I was walking down my quiet, residential, small-town street to a meeting. Two girls (around 12ish? I couldn't see them very well) were sitting in the open cargo space of a van at a house on the other side of the street, with the door open. One of them yelled, "Hey, girl, you want some milk?"

I figured that she was talking to someone in the house and ignored her. But when I drew abreast (ha ha) of the house, I saw that they were looking at me. I smiled, as one does in a small neighborhood in a small town. One of them repeated, "You want some milk?"

"No, thanks," I replied uncertainly, since milk seemed like a weird thing to be selling out of a van.

Then, when I was a little bit past them, one yelled at my back, "Those are some big boobs you've got there!"

!!!

In my inner monologue, I used the fact that I was running late for my meeting as reason not to turn around and demand to know why these young women were heckling women about their breast size, but in fact, I still haven't come up with a witty retort, and this is the reaction I almost always have when other people (= men, up until today) shout comments about my body. I'm curious: What would you have said to these girls, if anything?

All I can figure, honestly, is that they've seen me (discretely, let's note) nursing my son on the front porch of my house, because "want some milk?" is a pretty weird body-heckling comment, isn't it? The truth is, though--well, they're not wrong. But still, I'm not endowed to the point that it would like call to you from across the freaking street to comment.

Anyway, isn't that just strange? I have never been yelled at by girls. I'm rather appalled, to tell the truth. But I do expect that they'll grow out of such behavior, and maybe even be embarrassed about it one day. (Perhaps on the day when men start yelling at them. Unfortunately.)

No Pictures of the House Yet

But between the Wife of Bath and "Batter my heart, three-personed God," my Brit Lit survey has become an apologia for domestic violence.

(I actually prefaced my concluding comments last week with, "Ignore the justification for domestic abuse that is about to come out of my mouth." And, when a student said, "But I just don't like the idea of it; I wouldn't want to be raped by God," I at least had the wherewithal to add, "Good! I don't want you to want that.")

Well, That Was Disgusting

In the gym today, I was treated to a little show called "Young, Beautiful, and Vanished: 15 Unthinkable Crimes." As the title suggests, it was a parade of stories about pre-adolescent blond girls who were kidnapped, raped, and eventually found. But not recovered--oh no. As the show's TV psychologist (whatever that is) smugly remarked of one of the girls, "Elizabeth will never get over this."

Get over being raped by your father and confined to a cell for however many years? No, I should say not!

And of course we only want to watch re-enactments of young, beautiful girls being kidnapped and raped! Nothing titillating about an older woman, or one of only middling attractiveness. Or, God forbid, a boy. That would be, like, gay or something.*

The worst, though, was that this bit of hideous misogynistic trash was on the Entertainment network.



And that's why I like to pretend that 21st-century pop culture simply does not exist.


*I don't mean to imply by this that the viewership was necessarily straight men. In fact, I expect that it was largely female. But the sexual objectification of women means that women, faced with sexual imagery, frequently inhabit a masculine perspective: Sexualized women typically signify (hetero)sex, to men and women alike; sexualized men typically don't, or at least not as readily. In other words, I think that straight women could be as titillated as straight men by the stories in the show, and that both sexes would find a re-enactment of the abduction and rape of a young boy more jarring than the same story about a young girl.

Like a man

Well then! I don't know about the rest of you, but nothing cheers me up like a vaguely offensive form letter from my alma mater.

It starts out well enough, addressing me by my full-on pedigreed title. Of course, they're the ones who awarded me said title, so they should know. "Dear Dr. Mihi," it begins. Blah blah--offering services--blah blah. Sentence 2 is where it gets interesting:

"We recognize that--like a man--a woman needs life insurance."

Oh! Like a man, you say? Why, that makes it all the clearer! Thank you for recognizing that! Hey! You recognize that women, too, might have people to support? People like--as you make clear in the next sentence--a husband, parents, or kids. Maybe even other relatives. And that life insurance is one way for a woman to "keep the home that she's made" with these family members? Huzzah! How enlightened!

I realize that this letter might be seeking to address real issues; it wouldn't surprise me if women were statistically less likely to get life insurance, or whatever. But know your audience, people. This is from a seriously liberal doctoral-granting institution; feminism is hardly dead on this campus. Certainly not among its doctoral students. And even when addressing less-feminist women, do you need that "like a man" in there? Can't you just say that women need life insurance? Or something?

I may be overquick to judge. But really. This letter cracked me up. Like a man! I'm going to be using that all week. But that's enough blogging for today. For--like a man--I need to eat my dinner.

Two Brief Instances of Gender Prescriptivism

1. Scene: The dentist's office.

Receptionist. Where are the toothbrushes?

Hygienist. In the closet over there. The women's toothbrushes are on the bottom shelf; the men's are on the top.

Receptionist. Women's and men's?

Hygienist. I segregate 'em: the purple and pink on the bottom, the blue and green on top. Otherwise, everyone takes the blue and green--even the women--and the men are left with pink and purple. So I just separate them to make it easier.

(I, meanwhile, am being prodded and scraped by said hygienist, which makes it impossible for me to either laugh or twist my face in incredulity.)

2. Scene: The local cafe.

Woman: They have a great playground with lots of equipment, and a costume area--the boys can dress up like superheroes, and there's a princess area for the girls.

(I actually had to stifle the urge to join in the conversation at this point. How I hate, hate, hate the "princess culture" that little girls are forced into these days! And I can say with some certainty that I would have hated it as a little girl, too--I wanted to be Luke, not Leia. Or, better yet, Darth Vader. Or even a storm trooper. I was a militaristic child.)