Body Sculpture

One should never think too terribly hard about motivational sayings, posters, or images, but a striking comparison presented itself to me today, and I could not avoid having thoughts.

(I do try, sometimes, to avoid thoughts. Especially the inconvenient ones.)

A few months ago, a few different friends of mine shared the following:

I do not know the source of the image: who created it, for what purpose, or who owns the copyright.  (If the originator somehow finds this post and speaks up, I'd love to be able to give proper attribution.)

My friends who shared it had different intentions in doing so and different interpretations of the image.  One found it inspirational; another was horrified by it; still another (a "friend" only in the Facebook sense, and not for very long after he shared this) took the opportunity to make fat-people jokes.

Words in the url on which I found the image offer their own ambiguous interpretation: funny-stone-fat-woman-carving-herself.  I know not how to interpret either the words "funny" or "fat."  Even "carving" is giving me more trouble than it should.

I was and am uneasy with the image, although (or perhaps because?) it does seem to represent faithfully a longing that many women have (to re-sculpt their bodies) or an idea many women have of themselves (of a fit, beautiful, self-disciplined, happy woman hidden somewhere inside them).

I couldn't put my finger on exactly why the image made me uneasy, though, until I tripped across this one, today:

I think the inspirational quote on the man's image works for either image.  Both of them are proclaiming the malleability of the body, and the fitness (pardon the pun) of the project of self-renovation.

But there's the rub, no?

The man is not engaged in a project of self-renovation.  He is in the midst of self-creation.  He takes unformed, undifferentiated matter and makes it into himself.  He is a little god in that sense, performing in his own little way the same work that God does in forming man out of the mud of the earth.

It is a pure and gratuitous act of self-creation: he is powerful and he is free.  He is Man.  He is a god, a son of the Most High.

Not so the woman.

She starts trapped in her own body.  The "real" her is thin and beautiful and fit, but this ugly, evil monstrosity (called her body) is imprisoning her.

She must cut that body away to find the real her inside.   She must punish it for its sins so that her real self--the thin, beautiful, fit, happy her--can break free.

He is free to pursue his project of self-making.  She must--must--succeed at it in order be free.

There is no sharing in the creative work of God here.  She is not Eve, mother of the living, blessed with the capacity to make and feed little humans with her very body.  She is not even Christ, freely giving her body to be sacrificed for others.


She is just whittling away at herself, carving her own embodied life into a more controlled--and controllable--form.

How will she know whether that form is free?  Might she not find that that form, too, must be whittled away?

I'm a fan of caring for one's health through exercise and diet.  Really.  But self-hatred disguised as self-care . . . not so much.

What I've Been Reading This Week

This is a long, careful, and necessary article, written for those of us struggling to make sense of the life and writings of John Howard Yoder.  His description of Christian non-violence is as compelling and beautiful as his history of coercion and harassment of female students is horrifying.

One of the things that particularly strikes me about this is the way our language about such interactions frustrates the victims of them.  One woman, for example, told of receiving a letter from Yoder that described her body in wildly invasive personal and sexual detail--so much so that the only language she could conjure to describe the experience of reading such a letter was one of sexual violation.  "I felt as if I'd been raped."

I myself am struggling to find words to describe her experience--at second-hand, obviously, and therefore inadequately, but without reference to violent sexual assault.  She wasn't touched, she wasn't penetrated, her body wasn't forced to do anything against her will.  And yet something dreadfully wrong was done to her, something that women experience far too often at the hands of men, and something that men don't tend to go through life experiencing or fearing.  The legal language of harassment wasn't necessarily available during the earliest years of Yoder's career, but even today that language seems insufficient.

But using the language of actual sexual violence is problematic for at least two reasons.  First, it does, I think, some injustice to women who have experienced sexual assault, the way it does injustice to survivors of the Holocaust to have non-genocidal situations described as holocausts.  And second, it lets men give themselves permission to dismiss women's accounts of such experiences: "Seriously?  You got an explicit letter and you felt raped?  Gosh, you women sure take these things way too seriously!"

Still, somewhere between "he sent an inappropriately explicit letter to me" and "I felt like I'd been raped," there is a great yawning void in our language, and women are continually struggling against it.  The absence of language to describe what sexual harassment does to its victims (and even the word "harassment" has proven wildly inadequate to the job) only helps those who commit it.

By happy coincidence, I read the above article along with this one, about male privilege in the church.  The writer does an admirable job trying to put words to those experiences that do not rise to the legal definition of harassment and yet constantly hound women in the workforce.  While it would have been nice to have a #11 (You will go through most of your days neither fearing nor actually experiencing inappropriate sexual or personal barrages passed off as "jokes," constant references to your sexual availability, or having a colleague "accidentally" play porn at you when you walk into his office for a meeting), it is, I hope, helpful for men to think about what it would be like to have their work constantly qualified with reference to their gender.  No one ever says, "He's the best male theologian we have on staff," or "you're a really good theologian, for a man."

On the other hand, I have to say that very, very few of my experiences of being at a real disadvantage because of my sex have taken place in an ecclesial context.  I felt far more vulnerable to men's beliefs and behaviors the few times I've worked in entirely non-religious, male-dominated contexts than I have in the church or in church-affiliated schools.

How Many Clueless Men Does It Take To Host A Radio Show?

I'm so glad so very many other people are commenting on the sheer stupidity evidenced by these two children masquerading as men.

It saves me the trouble.

Well, since it's not out of my way, I'll go ahead and state the obvious:

Sure, dudes, let's go ahead and make women responsible for cutting open their own bodies to avoid you missing a baseball game.

I'm sure your children, too, (will) appreciate hearing that you think they should schedule their neediness around your professional lives.  Being born surely takes a back seat to 1/162ndth of a single baseball season.  Thanks, Dad, for putting that into perspective!  I'll mark you down as a "no," then, for high school and college graduation, shall I?  And I won't dare to plan a summer wedding, don't you worry!

You know, now that you put it this way, I'm sure all parents will be nodding in agreement, that parenting is exactly just like that--you can arrange every detail of a child's life, from conception onward, to suit yourself.

Also, no one can respect a man that stops doing a life-or-death activity--you know, playing baseball--to do something stupid like hold his wife's hand after she, you know, does nothing of any importance whatsoever.  Real masculinity requires, positively obliges, men to be ready to dismiss at a moment's notice and for any reason, anything done, or valued, or said by people with ovaries.

And it's totally true that biology teaches us something important about ethics: men don't have boobs, so they're pretty much useless after they donate their sperm.  They can get on with more important things, like playing baseball.  Sure thing.

Yes, you're the one "putting food on the table" with your Really Important Work.  The fact that I can produce food with my very body--not important.  At all.  You're feeding us.  It's all you.

Also, the thing where you endanger women by casually tossing around your disgusting opinions about their bodies and their medical care so that you can have a cute little reputation as a "controversial" commentator--totally okay.  With all of us.

I'm definitely pointing you out to my sons as role models to follow.

Oops.  I think I may have gotten a little sarcastic there.

Despite the above sarcastiplosion, the idiocy, the ignorance, the appallingly willful and unabashed misogyny evidenced by these two men is not really the thing that troubles me about this video.

What troubles me more is the possibility that this will shift the conversation about child-bearing and -rearing toward the collectively-bargained rights enjoyed by a few privileged men and away from the lived experience of women who still cannot afford to exercise what few and inadequate protections they have.

Working mothers will hear every one of Esiason's and Carton's contemptuous dismissals of their needs as mothers, every one of their contemptuous rejections of a father's role in nurturing children, and gnash their teeth at being told by one more pair of assholes that it's their job to breastfeed the babies, alone, while their husbands go off and do "real" things, things that matter, things that put food on the table.

But they will also hear, in the background, everything contemptuous thing their co-workers and bosses say about "breeders," about women who take maternity leave at "inconvenient" times for the company, about women who "owe the profession" a single-minded dedication that leaves no room for child-bearing at all (much less child-rearing).

(I'm not making this up.  I've actually been told that it's my job as a woman in academia to delay childbearing until I have tenure, or forgo it entirely.  I've been told that it's what I owe the profession, and especially other women in the profession.  I mean "been told" literally, here.  Like, by a person, speaking to me.  In those exact words.)

They'll read all the articles cheering Daniel Murphy for doing such a "sweet" and "important" thing as showing up for his child's first week of life, and they'll remember all the times they, as working women, were criticized for doing the same thing, or for their failure to do so.

Women are criticized by traditionalists for failing to handle all the nurturing on their own, and they're criticized by supposed progressives for failing to protect The Company from the inconvenience of their functional reproductive system.  (I guess they're supposed to be grateful for the sort of "progress" that allows them to work for pay at all, and not pay attention to such things as maternity leave, lactation accommodation, and health insurance for dependents.) 

I was extremely grateful to my colleague at [my former college] for covering my classes for me the first two weeks of the spring semester after the birth of my third son, because it allowed me to have a full month's maternity leave.

But the insanity--the stark, raving insanity--that Amos's birth will forever in my mind be linked with all of the professional obligations he didn't interfere with (fall semester exams, grades due, seven Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services)!  I swear, I am not making this up: I have never once spoken of Amos's birth without joking about him "helpfully" waiting until the day after Christmas to be born "because of all of our pastoral responsibilities."

And the insanity--the stark, raving insanity--that I've met actual, real, live, educated, professional women who have told me that they went back to work within a week of giving birth because they "couldn't afford" to take maternity leave!

Please hear me: I am among the privileged few in the world, even if you can't tell it from my bank account.  My colleagues are other privileged women--women with terminal degrees in their field, with professional clout, with publications and numerous speaking invitations per year, women who've been on NPR, even.

If my colleagues and I have to worry about this . . . what on earth is going on in the rest of the world?

No.  I don't get worked up by the fact that a pair of idiotic men said some idiotic things about men taking paternity leave.

But I am worried that a bunch of men will use this as an excuse to spend their time wagging their tongues what wealthy men do with their legal rights and collectively-bargained contract protections, and ignore--once again, still, always--the needs and rights and near-constant vulnerability of women and children.

Penalizing the Wrong Thing

It seems that the only people still struggling with institutional expressions of moral courage are the Catholics.

This tends to cause kerfuffles, because moral courage always involves sacrifice and risk. Pissing people off is not a certain sign of being right, but it is a not-uncommon result of the exercise of moral discipline (self-discipline or imposed discipline).

One recent kerfuffle was caused by a Montana Catholic school's decision to fire an unmarried teacher who became pregnant.  The evidence of her having violated their moral turpitude clause was plain for all to see, and so they acted on it.

The temptation, of course, is to say that the school was in the wrong because they were being mean, judgy McJudgersons.  This is a response that implicitly condemns any exercise of institutional moral discernment, that makes all moral decisions not immediately and forensically related to work performance private, individual ones.  This is the default practice of virtually every institution in the country, even those that are explicitly religiously affiliated.  (The UMC has a hard time firing pastors for moral turpitude, much less secretaries or daycare workers, and churches whose well-liked pastors have been terminated for having multiple affairs with many different congregants bear resentment against the mean, judgy denomination for decades.  Firing pastors for incompetence is a near impossibility, but that's another story.)

I honestly don't think that argument is a helpful one, even if I am sympathetic with the underlying concern--that firing this woman is the wrong response.

Cathleen Kaveny has written this lovely and careful piece responding to the issue and has offered a better line of thought.

In it, she highlights a crucial problem with the exercise of moral turpitude clauses: only women can be found guilty.

This isn't really true, and Kaveny doesn't make the mistake of putting it that way.

It is functionally true, however.   The Catholic church--themselves almost the last remaining institution with a moral backbone--have retreated from virtually every issue but that which makes them the most unpopular: sexuality.  And in that realm, since the beginning of time, there has only been one gender whose very body bears the incontrovertible evidence of sexual sin.

Only women can get pregnant.

And pregnancy is the only "proof" that cannot be hidden or ignored.  Men can be forced to take paternity tests, of course, though few institutions have gotten around to remembering that and fewer still manage to overcome their general reluctance to give a man a reason to file a lawsuit.  (Do women file fewer lawsuits?  Probably.  There is certainly less institutional fear of those who might.)

But a big, fat belly thrusts itself into our communal consciousness just as surely as it thrusts itself into a room before its duck-waddling bearer can catch up with it.  Institutions can no more forgo institutional responses to the inconvenient facts of women's reproduction than seventy-year-old men and women can forgo rubbing pregnant women's distended bellies.

So sweet Miss Susie walks into school one September with a big, big belly, and the school cannot ignore that problem, the way they can ignore the Lamborghini Mr. Michael very sensibly keeps at home or the bruises Mr. John's wife is careful to hide or the income Miss Janie doesn't report and tithe or whatever else violates their moral convictions.

And, of course, Miss Susie's paramour suffers nothing, unless they were caught, as Dr. Kaveny puts it, canoodling in the broom closet at school.

So the burden of these punishments are shared unfairly, and the community learns the wrong thing: it is pregnancy that is punished, not extra-marital sexuality as such.  Getting caught--and only women can get caught--is the problem.  Pregnancy is the problem.

This ought not be.  Pregnancy is not a problem.  It's not evidence of sin.  It's evidence of life.  It's evidence that God continues to give the gift of children to us, even in the midst of--even by means of!--our sinful condition.

This is exactly the mistake that Isaac's school's Health program makes, and it suffers from the same pedagogical idiocy: it teaches that pregnancy is the problem to be avoided.

One exercise in particular jerked my chain.

Isaac was required to calculate the financial burden a child imposes its first two years of life.

I thought we were having a great moment of communication, until I realized what was going on.

"Hey, Mom, how much do Amos's diapers cost?"
"Well, we use some cloth, so it's hard to say exactly, but it's about $35 a month for the disposables."
"When did he switch to regular milk?  And is formula more expensive than milk?"
"Oh, yes, formula is, like, twenty-five dollars a week, if you're formula-feeding full time, and that's if you're lucky enough not to need the special needs stuff.  You switch to milk at one year, but the amount they still need isn't exactly trivial."
"What are other things babies need?"
"Um . . . wait a minute . . . why are you asking?  Is there an urgent need here that I should be aware of?"
"Health class."
"Oh.  Oh.  Mmm."

The assignment was designed to discourage teen childbearing, but it did so by presenting a baby as a costly, burdensome thing.  It was one of the few assignments that spoke a language teens can understand, and it was all oriented toward making a baby seem like a bad thing.

Isaac didn't understand why I started throwing a temper tantrum at the end of his assignment.

"Okay, son, what's the total cost you've come up with?"
"$13, 850.  But the website says that I didn't include living quarters or travel expenses, which I would need because I'd be on my own."
"What?"
"I'd need to get my own place."
"ARE YOU FARGLING KIDDING ME?!?!"
"I mean, you know, some parents would . . ."
:hostile stare:
"So, uh, that's, uh, why I didn't even think to include the cost of the apartment, because, uh, I knew you and Dad would . . . uh . . . be . . . so, $13K.  Pretty pricey."
"Okay.  So.  You're in your car.  You're on a date.  Your girlfriend is with you.  It's dark out, and the windows in the back seat are tinted."
"Um, Mom, I don't like where this is going. . ."
"Do you really think to yourself, 'Gosh, I'd like to, but this could cost me $13K'?  Is that really going to stop you?"
"Well . . . it . . . maybe . . ."
"No.  It won't.  The only time you're going to think about $13K is when the little test strip comes back with two pink lines on it, and you think, 'Gosh, I could spend $300 now, or $13K later.'"
"I would never!"
"Well, you might now.  Now that they've frakking given you a reason to!!!!!"

It focused on disincentivizing child-bearing (or, really, child-rearing), not teen sexuality.  Having a baby is costly.  Having sex isn't.

And, as if to drive the point home, there was no corresponding financial activity related to STDs.  No calculating how much getting HPV or HIV or gonorrhea or chlamydia costs you.  Oh, they mention STDs.  The medical aspects.  But not the financial costs.

The part that is simply and entirely costly and painful and burdensome is noted, but the burden is not demonstrated in the terms teens understand.  (They understand money, because they all want iPhones and candy bars and cars with full gas tanks.  That's why the price-out-a-baby exercise works.  They do not understand sickness and death.  They think only old people get sick and die.  "You can get this disease, and it's really bad, so use a condom.")

But the child that might result is reduced to a single, uncomplicated, and entirely negative quality--its costliness.

And so they teach my son that getting pregnant is a bad thing and worth avoiding and preventing and "fixing" if you get unlucky.  They don't teach him that teen sexuality is a dubious pleasure at best and worth forgoing.

They also didn't bother to teach him that his parents are actually good people to consult when he is confronted with such issues, but I suppose that cannot be remedied.

Let this serve as your notice, though: Parents whose children must take school-based health classes, do not neglect to correct all the misapprehensions your children will pick up in those classes, but especially, most especially, the one that you are not going to be on their side if they "get caught."

Let them know that getting pregnant is not the bad thing, the thing to be avoided, the thing worth punishing.

Let them know that there's a difference between a serious thing--which having a child most assuredly is--and a bad thing--which having a child most assuredly is not.

Let them know you love them.  And that they will screw up.  And that you will still love them.

So, There Was Someone ELSE On The Stage, Right, People?

My dearest sons:

You all know that your mother is occasionally a little picky about things like table manners and homework and chores and saying nice things to your brothers, but not so picky about penmanship and getting your bed made every morning and wearing a coat when it's a little chilly out.

I haven't yet had occasion to be picky about this issue, so you may not know that it's in the Picky rather than Not Picky column.  But it is, and you need to know this.

Treating Women Right is in the Picky column.  Treating Hurting Women Right is in the Especially Picky column.

When you take a girl on a date, you give her your full attention and you don't ogle other girls.  If Angelina Jolie walks into the room, the right answer is, "Who?  Oh.  Is she famous or something?  Get back to what you were saying.  I'm really interested."

That's Treating Women Right.

When your boss is a woman, you speak respectfully to her and you do what she says and you don't undermine her authority by using the belittling language that men like to use when they're embarrassed about taking orders from a woman.

That's Treating Women Right.

When you are the boss and a woman works for you, you speak respectfully to her and you keep your comments focused on her work, not on her person, and you don't try to keep her subservient and dependent on you by paying her less than you would pay a man for doing the same job.

That's Treating Women Right.

Also under this heading would be things like avoiding gendered pronouns and descriptions for issues that are not sex-determined (like pretty much everything but reproduction and having prostate cancer), assuming you'll be doing a lot of the housework if you ever get married, and teaching your daughter how to read in at least two languages before you teach her how to put on make up.

Your daddy has given you a pretty good example to follow in this regard, and if you just ask What Would Dad Do?, you won't go too far wrong in life in general, nor in the Treating Women Right realm in particular.

You will meet a lot of hurting women in this world.  You will not have been the one to hurt them, I hope, but you will meet them.

Treating Hurting Women Right is not markedly different than Treating Women Right, but it 1) is even more important and 2) requires even more courage.

Treating Hurting Women Right often means going even more against the grain, taking an even more public stand, and sometimes, even, confronting the Hurting Woman herself with her brokenness.

Treating Hurting Women Right means not participating in the sex industry, even if you're in Nevada and the woman is supposedly okay with it.

Treating Hurting Women Right means being ready to shelter an abused woman if she gets up the courage to leave the abuse, or at least offering a ride home to a girl that's getting chewed out by her boyfriend in public.

It means not laughing--pointedly not laughing--when your friends make rape jokes.

It means leaving the party if somebody gets the idea to call a stripper.  It means offering to get the stripper to a safe place if the party next door gets out of hand.

It means being the one to bring up gender issues so that the women in the room don't have to feel like angry bitches all the time when they bring them up.

And when a girl is so hurting, so broken by her past or her present, so caught up in a destructive mix of unrestrained hedonism and even more unrestrained advantage-taking that she thinks performing a simulated sex act on national television is a good thing, it means refusing to be the guy she's grinding on stage.

Let me tell you, sons, if I ever see you doing what whatever-his-name-is did to a girl on live TV, I will not be telling the world how shocked I am at what she was doing.  I will not be telling the world that I didn't expect her to put her butt so close to your groin.  (Because, like, your groin was just innocently standing there when this girl's butt unexpectedly accosted it!)

And I will most especially not be commenting on how sharp your suit is.

You'd better get this one right, sons.  Because the world will not be writing blog posts and tweets and ponderous articles on your behavior.  They'll be heaping it all on the Hurting Woman and not asking themselves or anyone else how she found a guy so unchivalrous as to join her in her public self-degradation.

But I for damn sure will be asking that.

I will be in your face asking in very pointed words and at very loud volume why you weren't the guy telling her she didn't have to do this, asking her not to do it, giving her alternatives, giving her the healthy attention she needs rather than the poisonous attention she's become addicted to.

I love you, and I will love you no matter what, in life, you do wrong.

But don't get this thing wrong.  If a woman is hurting, help her.  If you can't, at least refuse to be the guy that keeps the hurt going.

Don't be that guy.

Don't. be. that. guy.