Sexism

Angelina Jolie was Once a Chunky Young Woman


Rob and I decided to snuggle up with the computer Thursday night and watch a dvd in bed, as is our wont. We have four selections from the bookmobile currently in queue. Nothing upbeat however, which earlier events of the evening screamed out the need for, so we chose the least evil – Playing God with David Duchovney, Timothy Hutton and Angelina Jolie.

To say this was a B movie would be a great injustice to B movies. Bad acting abounded. Hutton’s channeling of Jack Nicholson couldn’t even save it, and I personally found it oddly distracting to hear Jack and see Tim.

I love Hutton. Have since I first saw him in Taps when I was junior in high school. Being a Catholic school kid, I naturally loved movies where kids outthink and and outclever preening, officious adults, and Taps is the ultimate private school kid’s fantasy of takeover and take no prisoners while doing so. My soft spot for Duchovney stems from The X-Files. I loved Fox Mulder. Misfit. Misunderstood. Fighting a nebulous authoritarian entity bent on maintaining a population numbing status quo for the benefit of the elite and the powerful. It appealed to the peon public school teacher that I was at the time. That and I just love tv and movies with well-written, snappy and intelligent dialogue. Give me character depth over mindless action any day. Nuff said.

The movie dates itself though with Jolie. It had to have been one of her earliest roles because the girl had meat on her bones. Not fat however. By normal people standards – even accounting for the slightest of imaginative stretches – the woman was still thin. A form fitting red silken pants suit she wears in the final scenes, that would have made any real person look like a raw sausage,  and showed clearly that Jolie was in fine shape. Still, it was odd not to see the collarbones, sternum/ribs and emaiciated cheekbones that make her lips even larger and scarier.

The visible ribs and sternum are de rigor for “older” actresses these days. I was noticing it yet again last weekend when Rob and I were watching The Inside Man. Jodie Foster couldn’t have looked more like a female Skeletor if she’d set out to do just that. The Dachau survivor look is partly a female over-reaction to middle-age (and I do know firsthand of what I speak) and in the case of women in the spotlight like Hollywood actresses, it is the only way they can stay ahead of the pretty young things who are allowed to be a bit rounded when they first start out and still considered beautiful. The reason for this abbreation in my opinion seems a bit pedophilic on the part of the old men who run the movie business, but that is just my opinion.

Round and middle-aged just spells f-a-t to most men past twenty-five, and who sets the beauty standards? They do. Brandon over at WWTDD had a piece this past week on male preferred female body types (okay – his preferred but I am thinking that he is not the minority on this issue), and he states that skinny with big breasts is best. (Just as an aside – my body type – is not preferred except by my husband who is not a dirty old man or a silly twenty-something boy).

Sad what the pressure to conform does to most actresses, and ordinary women, eventually. I was thinking about Angelina and writing this piece when I was getting ready for my workout at the gym this morning. Today was weights, abs, stretching and then walking. A full work-out. An abbrievated one, like yesterday, because I had to hustle up to get to my daughter’s school to help with the field trip into the museum in the city, is abs, stretching and shorter walk.

So, as I was tying up my shoelaces and setting the iPod score for the morning activities – because mood is important – I notice two women getting ready, without much enthusiasm, for the exercise class that meets in the gym.

I don’t take those pseudo-aerobic post Jane Fonda classes. Took only one class like that in my life when I was in college. I needed a final P.E. credit for graduation, and it was the only class left with openings. I have never loathed exercise so much as I did those 9 weeks.

One of the women was complaining that despite not eating (it sounded as though they were both doing some sort of fast) and coming to work out, she felt bloated and sick and was sure she had gained weight. The other woman questioned her a bit  but could only offer sympathy and as I was leaving I overheard the first woman say she was tempted to just start using a laxative. Now, I didn’t catch all the conversation. They looked over at me quite a bit while they were talking and whispered a bit – afraid I was listening (I was) and waiting for me to leave. I could have interjected and offered some advice based on my own experience, but I didn’t. Both women were very overweight. I would say if not morbidly obese than darn close on the BMI scale. And I remembered when I was very heavy. I didn’t want to hear anything from thinner women about how they did it.

I assumed that all thin women were genetic lottery winners anyway, and I know now that many thinner women lie like rugs about how they got or stay thin. My own sister was the Dexatrim Princess in her teens in her fight against weight, and a lot of women simply don’t eat or use excessively amounts of exercise to maintain their “I’m just naturally thin” appearances.

Celebrities in particular are notorious for questionable weight loss and maintenance methods. The majority of the population is not gifted with thinness that requires nothing to achieve.

I walked upstairs to the weight room thinking about those women. I remembered when I was first starting to jog back in college. I was chunky. The excess flesh on my legs and belly jiggled when I ran though I couldn’t feel that movement as keenly as I do today. I didn’t have the spatial sense of myself then that I have earned through years of running and other activities. It was not easy to put on shorts and go down to the field across from the Student Union and run everyday. The Union was a lunch mecca and my P.E. class was at 12:30 in the afternoon. There were people everywhere. But running was like teaching would later turn out to be for me – in my blood. A combination of running and having to walk everywhere during my college days eventually thinned me, and I continued to tone up and thin as I added a variety of activities to my repetoire as I got older.  

Aside from pregnancy, I have really never been overweight since then, but I remember those days and I feel deeply for heavy and overweight women when I see them at the gym or out jogging or walking. Their effort is more than a physical one. While some people cannot fathom the idea that celebrities can be learned from in any way, my Jolie encounter Thursday night reminded me once again that it is all women who are damaged by the inane and arbitrary beauty standards of our society. No one is immune.

Large Women need not Apply


For most of my life adult life I have weighed roughly 160lbs and have ranged from a 10 to a 12 in size depending on my level of fitness (which, of course, was far greater when I was single and could devote hours and hours a week to exercise). During a year long bout with gallbladder disease followed by food allergy issues, I was unable to eat much at all because of the pain and consequently I lost most of my muscle mass and dropped to an all time low (and I mean all time that includes my adolescence) of about 145. I was actually able to squeeze into a pair of size six capri’s. How scary is that for a woman nearly 5’ 10” tall? And though I freely admit to having loved being celebrity magazine skinny for the only time in my life, I was frustrated by my inability to eat much of anything and by my lack of physical strength which kept me from being very active. Having now identified most of my food triggers – a lengthy and nonsensical list – and taken up weight lifting again (about four months now), I am back up to my pre-illness weight and, dismayingly for me, size. A size twelve most comfortably in pants as I loathe form-fitting anything and a size ten in some other styles – notably my Lululemon gear. Like most women my age, especially if they have had children, my tummy muscles are not what they were and I don’t have the same ambition to tame them that I did before (or the time – who has two hours a day for exercise?). As long as I keep the tummy covered, I look really good for an older woman. But I know that I am not quite fit and it bugs the heck out of me. When did I get so effing vain?

 

Yesterday we were in the city to shop. We stopped at Earth’s General Store on Whyte Ave because Jordan had given us a gift certificate to the place as a wedding gift and as we are hurriedly arriving at our first anniversary (June 26th) we needed to get it used. The store is just a room upstairs from street level that has a peculiar odor that stops sort of foul and though it carries a few eco-friendly things (soaps of all kinds, cleaning products, toiletries, baby products and free market coffees) it is mostly a purveyor of over-priced, feel good about yourself without having to do much, tree-hugging, pseudo/wanna be activist stuff. We stocked up on laundry stuff mostly and then after another quick stop at Planet Organic for toaster pastries, we hit the MEC.

 

The Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) is really a place for the hardcore outdoor sports enthusiast to gear himself or herself up. It is also a Mecca for the dilettantes. I am not quite the former but not exactly the latter either. I needed a pair of hiking pants for our upcoming honeymoon trip to Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. The kind that dry quickly and zip off at the knees if one gets overheated. Lots of over-sized pockets and such. While I was there, I also tried on a few pair of shorts and sports tops. One thing I noticed is that there were a plethora of small sizes. XS, S, and M/M. Larges and X-larges were non-exist or picked to the point that only the bright yellow or neon pink colors were left. And if you were a larger size? Shop somewhere else. Preferably a fat chick store and I say “chick” because the men who shop at MEC are allowed to be more than large but like so many places, women are confined to acceptably size limits.

 

I found this to be true of Lululemon too. The sizes stop at 12. Yes, you read that correctly. Women over the size of 12 must shop elsewhere (though I have noticed when I am there that plenty of my middle-aged sisters are willing to endure muffin top for the sake of the Lulu trademark on their back or bum). And I have gotten to wondering once again, why the insistence by clothing manufacturers and retailers to ignore the obvious? Most of us are not small. We are average (size 14 or 16 depending on your source of information) or larger. At the Lulu store, the 10’s and 12’s are always out. The larges (there are no XL women in Lulu’s world) are picked to the ugly colors and less aesthetic styles.

 

I find this annoying and, oddly, patronizing. At a 12 I am considered a plus size. Remember Anna Nicole in her Guess jeans days? A 12 and referred to as a gorgeous women – for a plus sized model. Huh? Last year I was a bony size eight. Bony. Seriously. Sure, I could slide with ease into just about any piece of clothing but it didn’t disguise my protruding collarbones and the fact that you could see my ribbed chest. And I was an eight. According to the test I took at the Self magazine sight, my “happy” weight is 157lbs. I am a bit over that, but the accepted weight range for my height is 127 – 171lbs. At 145 I was veering on dangerously thin and if you look at the fashion and celeb magazines there are women my height who are routinely about twenty pounds less than I weighed when I couldn’t eat. And that’s the key to being on the lower end of those oddly figured weight ranges. Not eating. You just can’t do that for long and of course that is why diets don’t won’t as well as changing food habits and exercising (although that isn’t as quick-fix or easy).

 

I have to admit that I am struggling with the return to my natural weight. I dislike the in between period of getting toned again. I don’t like feeling encased in my own body even when the reality is less about being buried in fat (which is what I feel like) and more about not being in shape with which I am most contented (and just as an aside – between pregnancy, childbirth, care giving and widowhood – it has been years since I reveled in my own body). At present, my weight training level is now about satisfactory but my cardio level has dropped because I am so effing board with circling an indoor track everyday. I long to run outdoors and I know I am strong enough now to do it again but the winter drags on and on.

 

Mostly though, I am tired of society and its sexist imposition on women via fashion. Although this is hardly the only way in which women are still oppressed in our world, it is one of the most effective ways of keeping us in our “place”. Despite my progress – I have no interest in make up, shun bras and aside from hi-lighting (I love being blonde) don’t fuss with my hair at all I am still a slave.

Sexism: The NY Times thinks Girls are too dumb to run a Newspaper


The New York Times ran a piece on the Des Moines Register stating that the paper’s endorsement is seen as a great prize among candidates running for president. The article also pointed out that for the first time, the top three editorial spots at the Register are occupied by women and wondered if this wouldn’t give Hillary Clinton an unfair advantage because as we all know, women mindlessly vote for their own kind regardless of qualifications and the issues.

What an infuriating piece of crap! Nothing raises my blood pressure more than sexist thinking like this. The fact that most men wouldn’t vote for a woman unless she was in a wet t-shirt contest rarely gets talked about, but when a woman actually runs for public office and manages to overcome the mean girl backlash and draws other female supporters, this is seen as some kind of herd mentality response. Men never seem to think that anything they think, do or say is influenced by their gender though there is a mount everest worth of reasons to believe that they are even more hormonally driven than their sisters, but anything under the sun a woman does is probably a result of PMS if she isn’t currently on the rag.

Although I don’t believe the Des Moines Register is a great newspaper (because it’s rather light on news beyond central Iowa and it allows the city’s elite to use it as though it were a high school publication), I am going to go out on a limb and guess that a person doesn’t get to be one of the top three there unless they have proven themselves in their field. Interestingly, though women are often accused of being tokens when they achieve positions like these, the truth is that women are usually held to much higher standards than the men who wind up in similar positions.

The Times should really be careful when it accuses others of bias. Aside from the ads, there isn’t a neutral thing printed in it ever, and I imagine that the East Coast ignorance about the Midwest played a role in the sexist conclusions that Mr. Zeleny, the piece’s author, came to write. Iowans are particularly plagued with Grant Wood images being superimposed over our lives and realities to the point where I don’t know if anyone out East even realizes that the majority of the state’s population lives in urban settings and that we have to organize field trips for our students to take them to farms so they know that milk comes from a cow and not from the AE plant on E. University. Shame on him still however, and shame on any who persist in the antiquated belief that when men vote for men it’s a result of thoughtful deliberation of the issues and facts whereas women only vote for the candidates based on their shared gender or because they have good personalities. Men are just as capable of casting their votes away as mindlessly as anyone and mindless voting is a result of just being stupid which is an equal gender opportunity judging from the NY Times piece.