The Fighting Life, Jump Kicking, Etc.

Learned how to do a jump kick last night. Well, sorta. OK, I figured out how to do the basics of a jump kick last night. You know that winning move at the end of The Karate Kid that Danny uses to win the match? It's like that. Only, without the arms.

We had an odd number of people during the target training class, so I got paired with Sifu Katalin, which was cool and intimidating at the same time. My coordination is terrible, and it means that whenever we get something new to learn, I feel like it takes me twice as long as everyone else. In actual fact, this isn't true - I've progressed about the same as everybody else who started when I did, but it doesn't feel that way when I'm hopping around on the floor. Give me punching drills. I'm way better at those - of course, I was just as uncoordinated and hopeless at those, too, when I first started them. Anyway, Sifu Katalin seemed really confused that I could do a jump kick OK the first couple times, then switch to a left leg jump kick, get confused, hesitate, and botch it. I admit it confused me, too.

A lot of this had to do with the fact that I've spent the last six months learning that you kick with the leg you initially bring up off the ground. For a right jump kick, you step forward with your right leg, put your weight on your right leg, but you bring up your left leg as if you're going to do a left leg front kick, only you don't - you jump off the right leg, kick with your right leg, and land on your left.

Confused yet?

For what it's worth, I'm really bad at dancing, too.

It's the coolest kick ever, when you nail it. It's officially my favorite kick, but trying to wrap my uncoordinated brain around it was frustrating. I could do it two or three times in a row without a problem, then I started thinking about it, doubting myself, and tripping over my legs again. "Left? Right? Huh? But you always kick with the leg you bring up first!"

I felt the same way when I was learning how to do uppercuts. It was like, "The fuck? How do you move your body that way, and shift your weight that way? And you can hit them with an uppercut to the body that way?"

Now I understand the mechanics, even if the technique isn't perfect.

We did target training intercut with ten pushups and ten situps for 13 rounds. I didn't think much about this (because it's become the norm for this class - they switch out the class routines about once a month, for variety), until we lined up at the end and Sifu Katalin gave some encouragement to those newbies who were having trouble with the situps.

"We did ten situps, 13 rounds, that's 130 situps. Even if you only managed to do half of them, that's still 65 situps. So for those of you who felt like you were dying, don't be too hard on yourselves."

Now, I do 170 situps every morning as part of my free weights and stretching routine, but when she said that, I realized that not only had I done the situps (::yawn::) but I'd just done 130 *pushups.*

Not those pansy-ass push-ups, either, the kind you do on your knees, but real pushups. OK, yea, I could have bent my elbows more and improved my form, but dude, I did a 130 pushups. No, not all in a row. But dude, I did 130 pushups!

I wonder if I'm strong enough to do chin-ups now? I have awful memories of those terrible, terrible days in gym class when we'd have to face the chin-up bar, and it would be sweet-ass to see if I can do a couple now, instead of, you know, just sort of falling off the bar once they take the chair away.

Adulthood: spending all of your time trying to be stronger, smarter, better-looking and more intelligent than when you were a kid.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why people who were already strong, smart, and good-looking when they were kids end up being really boring adults. They don't have any reason to be better.

2004 Roundup

Because I wasn't invited to today's meeting. I have mixed feelings. That aside... here's a yearly round-up questionairre via Vandermeer:

1. What did you do in 2004 that you'd never done before?

Took up martial arts and boxing, started a blog, got a story published in Strange Horizons, got the most "this is a great story that I can't publish" personal rejection letters ever. Went to Wiscon.

2. Did you keep your New Years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I joined an MA school and *tried* to sell my book. Those were the big ones. I also got hired as a "real" employee at my job. This has probably been my first year as a "real" adult with a "real" job and extracurricular activities that are moving forward.

Next year, I need to finish and sell Jihad. And I want 3 short fiction sales. Also, I plan on dropping back the last two sizes to get me back to my Alaska fighting shape. This means bike riding more, and more boxing sparring, which I've been lax on.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Yes! My buddy Patrick and his wife Karin are now raising up Little G.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

No. But somebody's going to jail. Anyway, the holidays aren't over yet.

5. What countries did you visit?

Does Wisconsin count? Also went to Vegas, which is also very like another country. Oh. And I saw Indiana, where the Bush voters live.

Seriously another country.

6. What would you like to have in 2005 that you lacked in 2004?

Traveling money and time. And a more out-going personality. Can I get one of those in my stocking?

7. What dates from 2004 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Election day, cause it sucked. The week I was sick with laryngitis, a sinus infection, and an ear infection just after Wiscon, because I spent the entire time psyching myself up to start kickboxing. And the day of my buddy Stephanie's wedding was truly awesome: one of those weddings that proves to the cynical (like me) that there really is such a thing as a gloriously happy wedding day that isn't marred by unwanted pregnancy, unhappy brides, bickering bridesmaids, spastic or drunk family members, or vindictive, back-stabbing friends.

Probably one of the few times in my life where I've been at a gathering of people that was really, truly happy.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Six months of mixed martial arts training. It's made a huge difference

9. What was your biggest failure?

Not selling a book or a story, or getting an agent. Three sales last year: nothing this year, though the SH story showed up in February, they bought it last December.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Yea. Aforementioned week confined to bed due to a series of illnesses that all piled on at once.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

My tablet PC.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Pretty much everyone's. A bunch of my Clarion buddies had great things happen. Greg sold a story to Sci Fiction, Patrick sold a couple stories to Amazing Stories, Julian got accepted to Oxford, Jenn got her Master's certificate, Inez just landed a great job, and back home, my buddy Stephanie got married.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

My sister's still running after a loser guy. The same loser guy.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Books. Student loans. Martial arts school fee.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Finishing the big rewrite of book one of the fantasy saga.

16. What song will always remind you of 2004?

The Secret Machines "Nowhere Again."

17. Compared to this time last year, you are:

Stronger, denser, more self-confident, slightly better read. Also, much better at popcap.com games.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

More writing. More MA classes. Wish I would have started French. Wish I could get that Planned Parenthood volunteer app. to load correctly. Wish I made more money. Wish I'd paid off more of my student loans.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?

Less angsting about stupid things, like height, weight, and dating. Should have spent less time playing popcap.com games at work.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

I'll be going back to WA state for a week so I can clean my parents' house.

22. Did you fall in love in 2004?

Oh, at least two or three times.

23. How many one-night stands?

::snicker:: For an SF girl, I sure am a prude about casual sex.

24. What was your favorite TV program?

There's actual shows on TV? Well, the one I've seen the most of is Lost.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?

No. The same people who were blowhards last year are blowhards this year.

26. What was the best book you read?

Ack. I'm always reading The Hours (I just keep it by my bed, and when I get to the end, I just start over). But this year's favorite discoveries were Balzac, Vandermeer, Bishop, and Joanna Russ's nonfiction, particularly On Strike Against God and What Are We Fighting For?.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

The Secret Machines.

28. What did you want and get?

A job that pays my bills, and some happiness, however fleeting.

29. What did you want and not get?

Agent/book contract, you know, the usual.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?

Well, favorites that I *saw* this year: Run Lola Run, followed closely by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I did absolutely nothing for my birthday. I think I bought some food or something. My roommate wrapped up two books and gave them to me. I got quite teary-eyed about it, because I hadn't gotten her anything for her birthday. I turned 24 this year.

32.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Sex?

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2004?

Hats. Particularly, newsboy caps. And coats. Boys' coats and striped scarves. Also, boots with good square heels.

34. What kept you sane?

The usual. Writing. This year, that included blog writing.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Kate is the best. As always. But I did officially fall in love with Paul Bettany this year.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

The election sucked ass. The erosion of women's rights continues to trouble me.

37. Who did you miss?

My buddy Stephanie, back in WA state, and my buddy Julian, now rowing his heart out at Oxford while writing a Ph.D. dissertation.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

Sifu Katalin & the Amazons.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2004:

Here's this year's: there are often long stretches of downtime on the road to where you're going. You know, those long stretches of highway between New York and LA, or the shitty stretches of nowheresville between Seattle and Chicago - but those distances, those driving times, are neccessary to get to where you need to go.

2004 has been a shitty stretch of midwestern highway, with road stops along the way like Toledo's Tallest Tree & Billy Bob's Lint Museum, intercut by signposts that say stuff like "Civilization: 2000 miles," and the car has mostly run pretty good, but it overheated once (luckily, I keep a couple gallons of water in the back), and got a couple of flats (ever since my roadtrip to Skagway, I keep two spares in the trunk), and there was the odd problem with something hanging off the engine that was resolved by tying a couple of choice parts back together with a shoelace before I got to stop off at the shop and get it fixed proper, and I didn't stop for any hitchhikers along the way, but I felt bad about it. I'm now consulting a really confusing map somewhere in the Salt Flats of Utah on my way to the ocean, and yea, I'm stronger and more confident, and I'm getting better rejection slips, but I can't see the ocean yet, likely because I'm just not ready to see it yet. Likely because I need to pick up a few hitchhikers and learn how to play the harmonica and trade in the car for a motorcycle, but I switched from fast-food to granola bars sometime back, and I've got better shoes and a good pair of sunglasses, and there's nothing so cool as arriving at the seashore on a sweet-ass motorcycle, wearing a floppy newsboy cap as my striped scarf streams behind me, and maybe that's the whole point.

There's a place I want to be. This is the road I'm taking to get there.

I don't mind that it's a long road. It just means I'll be a more interesting person by the time I get there.

Remix

A Perfect Circle has a remix of Lennon's "Imagine" (and, uh... check out the very familiar propaganda posters they've got scrolling over their front page. I laughed and laughed)

I'm usually not a fan of remixes, but I've had this one on repeat all day.

Makin' the Crazy

One of my favorite studies on caloric restriction and the effects of dieting on appetite, metabolism, and brain function is actually 50 years old. Ancel Benjamin Keys, PhD., did a groundbreaking study about the effects of a restricted calorie diet on healthy men during a 6-month period.

I'm very, very thankful that he did this study on men, cause you can bet that if it'd been a bunch of women consuming 1600 calories a day (which, these days, is considered a pretty liberal "diet"), the amount of freak-out hysteria he found would have been attributed to the fact that his patients were women.

Check it out:

Young male volunteers, all carefully selected for being especially psychologically and socially well-adjusted, good-humored, motivated, active and healthy, were put on diets meant to mimic what starving Europeans were enduring, of about 1,600 calorie/day -- but which included lots of fresh vegetables, complex carbohydrates and lean meats. The calories were more than many weight loss diets prescribe and precisely what's considered "conservative" treatment for obesity today. What they were actually studying, of course, was dieting -- our bodies can't tell the difference if they're being starved voluntarily or involuntarily! Dr. Keys and colleagues then painstakingly chronicled how the men did during the 6 months of dieting and for up to a year afterwards, scientifically defining "the starvation syndrome."

As the men lost weight, their physical endurance dropped by half, their strength about 10%, and their reflexes became sluggish -- with the men initially the most fit showing the greatest deterioration, according to Keys. The men's resting metabolic rates declined by 40%, their heart volume shrank about 20%, their pulses slowed and their body temperatures dropped. They complained of feeling cold, tired and hungry; having trouble concentrating; of impaired judgment and comprehension; dizzy spells; visual disturbances; ringing in their ears; tingling and numbing of their extremities; stomach aches, body aches and headaches; trouble sleeping; hair thinning; and their skin growing dry and thin. Their sexual function and testes size were reduced and they lost all interest in sex. They had every physical indication of accelerated aging.

But the psychological changes that were brought on by dieting, even among these robust men with only moderate calorie restrictions, were profound. So much so that Keys called it "semistarvation neurosis." The men became nervous, anxious, apathetic, withdrawn, impatient, self-critical with distorted body images and even feeling overweight, moody, emotional and depressed. A few even mutilated themselves, one chopping off three fingers in stress. ­They lost their ambition and feelings of adequacy, and their cultural and academic interests narrowed. They neglected their appearance, became loners and their social and family relationships suffered. They lost their senses of humor, love and compassion. Instead, they became obsessed with food, thinking, talking and reading about it constantly; developed weird eating rituals; began hoarding things; consumed vast amounts of coffee and tea; and chewed gum incessantly (as many as 40 packages a day). Binge eating episodes also became a problem as some of the men were unable to continue to restrict their eating.

So... the dieting industry keeps itself in business by encouraging the binge/purge cycle of starvation. And dieting men and women are more likely to be weak(er) and more hysterical than average.

Excellent. We'll be less likely to make informed political decisions. Old White Rich Guys must love this.

WTF `04, indeed.

Why Women Appear to Be Crazy - Just Like Everyone Tells Us We Should Be!

Amanda regularly takes "advice" columns directed toward women and their hetero dating habits to task. If you're not following these (particularly if you're a guy), you should.

With advice like this, it's no wonder a lot of guys keep telling me that they find women really confusing (I've never found myself very confusing) and women feel so confused. Look at all these mixed messages about women's "proper" social behavior and then tell me how anybody connects with anyone else anymore:

To sum up: To make a man love you, come on strong and then ignore him so he wonders if he did something wrong. When you do consent to go out on a date with him, wait with an expectant look on your face for favors while declining to do anything nice for him yourself. Then stare at him lovingly like he was the last man on Earth. What kind of man could resist? Well, besides the ones who are too smart to hang out with crazy people.

Shit, throw out that Cosmo. Don't read dating advice at MSN. You'll become one of those people hovering over the telephone every night. I was channel flipping last week and found the authors of He's Just Not That Into You fielding questions from Oprah's audience. One woman stood up and said she was a lawyer, and that for the first couple of dates she had with a guy, she tried really hard not to mention it, and if she was online dating, her friends told her not to put that she had any post graduate work, "Just put college or some college," her friends told her. "Otherwise, no guy is going to go out with you."

I wanted to throw something at the TV. All the time and money and hard work and cramming sessions, and we're reduced to this: lying about how smart we can get some lame underachiever into bed. As if that were really difficult. Can't we all just act like nice people, and hang out with other nice people, and be nice and respectful and have fun learning from each other and spending time together?

Ah, yes. But "we're all just looking for respectful affection from a healthy, intelligent partner(s) who isn't boring" doesn't sell magazines. I keep forgetting.

Margaret Sanger & Radical Feminism & Silencing History & All That Jazz

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966)

Stumbled across this, and it reminded me of a couple of my posts: "On Merit. And Sex. Of Course" and "More On Why Power is All About Women." Just to reiterate, once again, that there's nothing new under the sun.

Just keep saying the same damn things, over and over and over again, until we reach critical mass. Or something:

THE MOST far-reaching social development of modern times is the revolt of woman against sex servitude. The most important force in the remaking of the world is a free motherhood. Beside this force, the elaborate international programmes of modern statesmen are weak and superficial. Diplomats may formulate leagues of nations and nations may pledge their utmost strength to maintain them, statesmen may dream of reconstructing the world out of alliances, hegemonies and spheres of influence, but woman, continuing to produce explosive populations, will convert these pledges into the proverbial scraps of paper; or she may, by controlling birth, lift motherhood to the plane of a voluntary, intelligent function, and remake the world. When the world is thus remade, it will exceed the dream of statesman, reformer and revolutionist.

Her whole book, Woman and the New Race (1920) is online here.

Revenge of the Media

No. I'm not watching Earthsea tonight, in all it's whitewashed glory. Author Nalo Hopkinson and Leguin each rant about it. Remind me never to sell the rights to anything I've written that's really close to my heart. I'll end up screaming at the television (apparently, according to the director, it's a "multicultural" adventure because there are British and American actors in it hahaha hahaaha).

Speaking of moving pictures, the trailer for War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise is out. In true conservative SF fashion, all of "mankind" and "men" and "man" are in trouble, according to the voice-over. I always wonder what all the women are doing when the men are out getting slaughtered. Oh, yes, that's right. That's how I got interested in my research topics.... try watching Cold Mountain instead. There are actually people in that movie. For an urban guerilla movie, check out Guerrila, which looks cool.

Nicola Griffith has an excellent, excellent essay called "Alien in Her Own Tongue" about the frustration with the proliferation of "he"s in the media. This article really resonated with me, and helped me figure out what was bothering me about all the he-man language. I haven't backed down in my defense of neutral pronouns since.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to plug some books I haven't read but know will be good because... because... I just do. I had to cancel my recent amazon.com order due to money constraints, but on it was Catherynne Valente's book The Labyrinth, which you can order at a slight discount from Nightshade Books . Also, Vandermeer & Friends (& Co. & Conspirators? et. al? it's actually edited by Jason Erik Lundberg) also have a new book out, a quirky mix of fiction and recipes which looks like a lot of fun - check out Scattered, Covered, Smothered.

Big Dogs in Town

The Big Dogs from corporate are in town today, so it's been a bit of a "busy" (this is a relative term) morning, prepping some stuff for Blaine, my boss. I've got a few hours before their plane shows up, but they'll be here all week, so things could be busy with meetings I'm invited to... or not. I really never know. Just a head's up.

We're doing a bunch of heavy restructuring, as we've just signed a nationwide contract. My boss has moved from Senior Project Manager to VP Business Development since I've been here, and the VP of Wireless North America - let's call him Mosh - wants to put me back more firmly into the wireless team and ease up on my "support" function for my boss, because really, Blaine doesn't use me all that much, and I'd be way better as a Project Support Manager better melded with the corporate wireless team. This also means that when I'm ready to move in a year and a half, it'll be easier to switch offices. I wouldn't mind working at corporate. They're out of Colorado.

So I'll be meeting - let's call him Piper - the Senior Project Manager (wireless) for North America today, who'll be my new boss. Yellow's also going to be moving up in the world - they're giving him Project Manager North America for this project, so we'll both be reporting to Piper.

On the phone, Mosh made it sound like this was a Big Promotion for me (we'll likely be hiring on other people to take over some of my prior duties - you know, back when I *had* duties, six months ago), and he wanted to sit down and talk to me about my "career."

You better bet I'll be asking for a crapload more money. Especially if they give me my own support staff.

Muwahhaa haha aha

More later. Linkdump coming up.

Writing Today.

Yes, seriously. Really. I mean it.

I'm going to go and find plots for four short stories that've got lots of character and setting and not much else.

That's pretty much always the story of my stories.

In the mean time, check out the blogroll, rail against the idiots, snicker about power to the people with MoveOn, and just generally go out there and have a great time.

See you all on Monday.

Remixing War Propaganda For the War On Terror

I'm a sucker for war propaganda: my master's work looked at propaganda aimed at the recruitment of women in the ranks of the African National Congress (as violent fighters & activists - otherwise known as "the recruitment of terrorists") in South Africa during the 80s, and I got to page through lots of goodies.

So, I have a special fondness for these beautiful remixes.

Here's a great site that's remixed WWII propaganda for today's War on Terror.

Frickin' brilliant.

Tapping Out

"Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world."
- Dave Barry

"Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
- Isaac Asimov

John Rickards Is My Secret Boyfriend

Because I haven't been keeping up with Jon Stewart.

Here, John presents "a step-by-step demonstration of what editing a book at 3am looks like from the writer's own eyes."

It is absolutely, inarguably accurate.

Fat: More Handwaving

A roundup of thoughts on The Obesity Panic, stolen from BigFatBlog:

Commentary from Nick Gillespie: Thus the United States turns from nation building abroad to nation bodybuilding at home. In a world beset by terrorism, poverty, and malnutrition, who could have imagined that being fat would become the subject not simply of the derision and scorn it has long inspired but a political topic every bit as heartburn-inducing as a Tabasco-flavored Slim Jim?... The United States is the most tolerant nation on the planet -- as long as you look good in a tight pair of Levi’s. So when exactly did freedom become just another word for 10 pounds left to lose?

And, oh, the fucktards! Here's a weight loss surgery clinic comparing fat to cancer, and speading doom, gloom, and fear to the masses! Check out their truly horrific television ads.

Here's a piece examining the role of fat in reality television: On reality television, fat people are the new gay people. Earlier this year, Fox was forced to cancel two gay-themed reality shows, the short-lived Playing It Straight and the never-aired Seriously Dude, I'm Gay, due to protests from advocacy groups and general viewer indifference. These shows, which I discussed in a Slate article at the time, exploited cultural fears about homosexuality by making gay men the "wild card" in traditional reality-show competitions. To their credit, audiences responded with a shrug. But the evil forces that plot new reality shows have now turned their attention to a new sideshow attraction: the overweight.

And, for the record, here's what a 5'9 180 lb woman looks like. According to America's BMI, she's bordering on obese - you know, like me.

Damn, we're scary.

I suppose that's the real issue, though, isn't it?

Actually, the "Average American Woman" is a Size 14, But That's Not the Point, My American Harem Ladies

I just about flipped when I found this:

Fatima Mernissi and the Size 6 Harem

It was during my unsuccessful attempt to buy a cotton skirt in an American department store that I was told my hips were too large to fit into a size 6. That distressing experience made me realize how the image of beauty in the West can hurt and humiliate a woman as much as the veil does when enforced by the state police in extremist nations such as Iran, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia. Yes, that day I stumbled onto one of the keys to the enigma of passive beauty in Western harem fantasies. The elegant saleslady in the American store looked at me without moving from her desk and said that she had no skirt my size. "In this whole big store, there is no skirt for me?" I said. "You are joking." I felt very suspicious and thought that she just might be too tired to help me. I could understand that. But then the saleswoman added a condescending judgment, which sounded to me like Imam fatwa. It left no room for discussion:

"You are too big!" she said.

"I am too big compared to what?" I asked, looking at her intently, because I realized that I was facing a critical cultural gap here.

"Compared to a size 6," came the saleslady's reply.

[...]

"And who says that everyone must be a size 6?" I joked to the saleslady that day, deliberately neglecting to mention size 4, which is the size of my 12-year-old niece.

At that point, the saleslady suddenly gave me and anxious look. "The norm is everywhere, my dear," she said. "It's all over, in the magazines, on television, in the ads. You can't escape it. There is Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Gianna Versace, Giorgio Armani, Mario Valentino, Salvatore Ferragamo, Christian Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent, Christian Lacroix, and Jean-Paul Gaultier. Big department stores go by the norm." She paused and then concluded, "If they sold size 14 or 16, which is probably what you need, they would go bankrupt." [Kameron note: Like Old Navy and Eddie Bauer??]

[...]

Yes, I thought as I wandered off, I have finally found the answer to my harem enigma. Unlike the Muslim man, who uses space to establish male domination by excluding women from the public arena, the Western man manipulates time and light. He declares that in order to be beautiful, a woman must look fourteen years old. If she dares to look fifty, or worse, sixty, she is beyond the pale. By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility. In fact, the modern Western man enforces Immanuel Kant's nineteenth-century theories: To be beautiful, women have to appear childish and brainless. When a woman looks mature and self-assertive, or allows her hips to expand, she is condemned as ugly. Thus, the walls of the European harem separate youthful beauty from ugly maturity.

These Western attitudes, I thought, are even more dangerous and cunning than the Muslim ones because the weapon used against women is time. Time is less visible, more fluid than space. The Western man uses images and spotlights to freeze female beauty within an idealized childhood, and forces women to perceive aging—that normal unfolding of years—as a shameful devaluation. "Here I am, transformed into a dinosaur," I caught myself saying aloud as I went up and down the rows of skirt in the store, hoping to prove the saleslady wrong—to no avail. This Western time-defined veil is even crazier than the space-defined one enforced by the Ayatollahs.

[...]

Women enter power games with so much of their energy deflected to their physical appearance that one hesitates to say that the playing field is level. "A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty," explains Wolf. It is "an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one."

Research, she contends, "confirmed what most women know too well—that concern with weight leads to a 'virtual collapse of self-esteem and sense of effectiveness' and that . . . 'prolonged and periodic caloric restriction' resulted in a distinctive personality whose traits are passivity, anxiety, and emotionality."

Similarly, Bourdieu, who focuses more on how this myth hammers its inscriptions onto the flesh itself, recognizes that constantly reminding women of their physical appearances destabilizes them emotionally because it reduces them to exhibited objects. "By confining women to the status of symbolical objects to be seen and perceives by the other, masculine domination . . . puts women in a state of constant physical insecurity. . . . They have to strive ceaselessly to be engaging, attractive, and available." Being frozen into the passive position of an object whose very existence depends on the eyes of its beholder turns the educated modern Western women into a harem slave.

Read the whole thing here .

There's also a fantastic book called The Body Project that looks at the history of women's obsession with their bodies. Essentially, she argues, we've merely gone from using external devices to control women's shapes (corsets, elaborate skirting and hooping), to using external devices (the 1920s saw the corset going out of fashion, and dieting or "reducing" really coming into its own): you can chalk up plastic surgery here, too. Many women who get breast implants don't "have" to wear a bra anymore. Their breasts are now hard and high enough that they don't jiggle much at all. Same goes for obsessions over flat abs - we used to wear corsets for tummy control and the illusion of a bust. Not having corsets doesn't neccessarily make women any more liberated in regards to their bodies. Sure, you've got less restricted movement, but if you're starving yourself to look thinner, you've hardly got more energy to move around.

And, perhaps more importantly, as Fatima says, "To deprive me of food is definitely to deprive me of my thinking capabilities."
Fascinating stuff.

Good vs. Evil (the same old story)

What Christian Fundamentalists tell us is Evil about Muslim Fundamentalists:

- They hate liberated women and all that symbolizes them. They hate it when women compete with men in the workplace, when they decide when or whether they will bear children, when they show the independence of getting abortions. They hate changes in laws that previously gave men more power over women.

- They hate the wide range of sexual orientations and lifestyles that have always characterized human societies. They hate homosexuality.

-They hate individual freedoms that allow people to stray from the rigid sort of truth they want to constrain all people. They hate individual rights that let others slough off their simple certainties.

What Christian Fundamentalists hate:

-They hate liberated women who don't follow orders, who get abortions when they want them, who threaten or laugh at some men's arrogant pretensions to rule them.

-They hate the wide range of sexual orientations that have always characterized human societies. They would force the country to conform to a fantasy image of two married heterosexual parents where the husband works and the wife stays home with the children even when that describes fewer than 25 percent of current American families.

-They hate individual freedoms that let people stray from the one simple set of truths they want imposed on all in our country. Robertson has been on record for a long time saying that democracy isn't a fit form of government unless it is run by his kind of fundamentalist Christians.

I would laugh, and laugh, if only more people actually saw the irony.

more here
(thanks to Jenn for all the morning links. I'm feeling lazy today)

Sexing & Stuff

ActivistGradGirl has a great series of posts up about sex, gender, and sexuality here, here and here. Some really great thoughts on the gender binary we get banged on the head with. I think my biggest surprise regarding aguments for gay marriage was that nobody played these two big cards:

1) If you're going to say marriage is only between a man and a woman, you're going to have to define man and woman. And you're going to have to be really strict about it. So that women who are "visibly" women but who have XY chromosomes shouldn't be allowed to marry men who have XY chromosomes, and what about those who've had their sex surgically altered, whether in infancy (hemaphrodites, the most famous famous/visible here in America being Jamie Lee Curtis), or in adulthood? Man/Woman biology isn't an exact science.

2) Not allowing same-sex marriage is sexist. Period. If I was born a man, I would be able to marry a woman, but because I'm a woman, I can only marry a man.

THIS IS A HUGE ONE.

Hello! Obvious sexism here, people!

Anyway, she's got some good thoughts on what makes up sex and sexuality (throw out the illusion of the gender binary! Blah!). Check it out.

Bowing Out

More writing work today. See you all tomorrow.

"The mind I love must still have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two (real snakes), a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of - and paths threaded with those little flowers planted by the mind."
- Katherine Mansfield



"Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up. Well, maybe once."
-Isaac Asimov

Buddy-buddy Boys

There's a professor who's done a study about the origins and use of the word "dude": the interesting part?

Kiesling says in the fall edition of American Speech that the word derives its power from something he calls cool solidarity -- an effortless kinship that's not too intimate.

Cool solidarity is especially important to young men who are under social pressure to be close with other young men, but not enough to be suspected as gay.

And:

Anecdotally, men were the predominant users of the word, but women sometimes call each other dudes.

Less frequently, men will call women dudes and vice versa. But that comes with some rules, according to self-reporting from students in a 2002 language and gender class included in the paper.

"Men report that they use dude with women with whom they are close friends, but not with women with whom they are intimate," according to the study.

Huh. Not sure if I'd go with the universal "all guys" thing there.

Why I Fight

So, yesterday I was doing my daily lunchtime walk at the Wildlife Preserve across the street from where I work. This is a low-crime suburb area (I have a long train commute out of Chicago), so I don't carry much trepidation with me. But yesterday I passed a questionable character - you know, you just get that "uh-oh, psycho" feeling and put your guard up a bit as you pass.

Nothing new. It's called being a woman.

But this time, as I passed him, I flipped through defense moves. Got my elbow strike to the face ready, focused attention on my gut, where - if you do it right - you should actually feel the force of your strike. Elbow to the face, turn, right cross, clamp your hands around the back of the head, knee strike to the face, front kick to the groin, and if he's willing to fuck with you after that, he's a serious pyscho, so you should probably run. If he tries to tackle you, jab out his eyes. I also know a couple of ground moves, should things progress to that point.

But, no. I wasn't attacked; the liklihood of that happening around here is pretty nil. But I realized I had my confidence back.

I haven't been jogging in two months, because it's dark by the time I get home now, and though crime rates around where I live are average, I've grown up with that Woman's Fear.

You know it: those raped, mutilated, murdered female joggers. The stories we all get bombarded with so we stay at home, or don't go out alone, the ones that tell us we better get ourselves an escort.

It's always female joggers.

The entire reason I started fighting was because I was really sick of being afraid. Somebody like me, who does a lot of traveling and spends a lot of time on her own, can't afford to sit around her flat all night being afraid. Granted, in South Africa, a lot of this fear was warranted, and I don't know that I'd push my luck there again even with some more self-confidence, but Uptown Chicago is another matter entirely.

So I went jogging last night, my usual route to the lakefront, under the suprisingly well-lit tunnel that goes under Lakeshore Drive, and onto the not-so-greatly-lit jogging path at Lakeshore Park.

There weren't a lot of women there at 6:30 at night.

There was some trepidation at the lack of light along the pathway, but I'd made sure not to wear my headphones, so I could hear pretty well, and I was still my usual vigilant self.

And, of course, I went jogging and came home and did just fine.

I could have been jogging like this for two months, of course, but you know... it sucks to be a woman. It really fucking sucks, to grow up with these stories, to know that yes, it's statistically unlikely that anything will happen to me (more women are attacked by people they know than strangers), but damn, I've been fed so much fear, had it so ground into me. Sure, I'd wander good areas of cities by myself, and backpack major cities by myself, but jogging at the park in the dark? Oh, how cliche that episode of America's Most Wanted would be!

I needed to feel like I knew what to do if something happened. I didn't want to feel like prey. Even if I'm full of crap, and not a super ninja or anything like that, I needed to feel that I had the strength and at least a little of the knowledge about what to do if something happened, however unlikely it might be.

I don't think you really realize how much you internalize all the social bullshit that actually controls you. When I was 19, I finally started framing questions about my doubts for doing what I wanted to do this way: "If I was a guy, would I do it?" If the answer was yes, I did it.

Because you know what it felt like to me, going jogging at Lakeshore Park in the dark, alone?

It felt like freedom.

More On Why Power is All About The Women

Here's a great compilation from the Mahablog of all the bits and pieces we've been throwing around the last couple weeks (divorce and teenage birth rates in red vs. blue states, the education of women, etc) and some sly commentary to boot.