Another Inanity From a Male Feminist

Ever since Hugo Schwyzer came to this blog to inform me that he's had it with me daring to have my own opinions about his writings, I tried hard to abstain from commenting on his articles. It's difficult, though, because he often writes things that make me think that I'd rather have no male feminists at all than ones who write this kind of stuff. See, for example, a recent post from somebody who, let me remind you, teaches about body image on a college level:

When I ask my female students, as I do every semester, “How many of you would say it’s easier to get along with guys than with girls”, invariably over half the young women in the class raise their hands. The reasons they give are always the same: “girls are so competitive”, “boys just have less drama”, “guys aren’t as critical.” Of course, not every woman feels this way – but plenty do. So it may surprise you to know that the research on eating disorders shows that critical comments from boys are much more likely to lead young women to start to diet or purge. In a major 2008 study called Family, Peer and Media Predictors of Becoming Eating Disordered researchers found that the hurtful remarks of male peers were more damaging to girls’ self-esteem than comments made by other women of any age, including peers and female relatives. Only the media had a comparable impact on young women’s self-esteem.

Leaving  aside the fact of how annoying it must be to shell out a huge sum for a college education only to end up in a classroom where you get your time wasted on condescending kindergarten-level questions, it is mind-boggling that anybody would honestly believe something as silly as this. Self-esteem is something that is created on the basis of one's very early childhood experiences. After that, nothing short of extensive therapy can influence one's self-esteem in any significant way.

A person with a high self-esteem can watch media images of skinny women and ripped men all day and every day for decades and remain completely unaffected. A person with a low self-esteem can go into a major bout of depression because s/he thinks that somebody might have looked at them in a critical way. If your self-esteem is high and you know for a fact that you are stunningly gorgeous, nobody will even try to insult you with nasty remarks about your appearance. Let's say you want to annoy, offend or bug a person for whatever reason. Will you come up to them and say, "You have three heads"? I don't think you will because something that is so patently untrue is not likely to offend.

When I was little, I was always surrounded by a group of adoring adults who would exclaim, "Here comes our beauty!" in unison whenever I would enter the room. Today, 30 years and many pounds and wrinkles later, I still hear this admiring chorus whenever I appear in public. I just took a walk around the block and tried to remember a single instance when "a girl or a guy" made a nasty comment about my appearance. I came up with nothing. So if you have little kids - or are planning to have them - just make sure they know that they are beautiful. If you do that for them, neither the scary media nor condescending male feminists will scare them. 

Commercials Made me Do It!

Reader el shared the following comment from one of online discussions about the bad, mean and scary advertisement industry:

I like how the ad messages evolved from WW2, “Be beautiful while you work in the factories and marry a sailor!” to post WW2 get-back-in-the-kitchen and marry a veteran. The social engineering is really remarkable–it went well beyond creating needs and selling products to shaping behavior in all walks of life.  Advertisements still work that way, but I think they’ve gotten much more clever at being subtle. Insidious.

I can just imagine those subtle and insidious ad executives getting together and creating a world-wide conspiracy to shape people's behavior. Of course, it would make a lot more sense - and be a whole lot easier - simply to discover what people's basic needs and drives are and try to tap into those needs and drives. Is it possible that the old fogy Ockham was right and the simplest explanation is, indeed, the correct one?

I, for one, am sick to death of hearing how advertisement influences people to do things they don't want and buy stuff they don't need. As somebody who speaks to people for a living, I know very well that people have a tendency only to hear what they want to. You can repeat something a hundred times over, write it on a board, sing and dance it, put it in flashing lights and bright colors, and still people will hear the exact opposite of what you are saying because that's what they want to do. 

A while ago, there was this theory that advertisers put subliminal messages into TV commercials to provoke people to want to buy things on a subconscious level. I don't know about other people, but I can't even say with certainty what company my favorite commercials represent. People of the TV generations have learned to tune out of commercials to the point where they couldn't tell you what was being advertised two seconds after the commercials aired. I do, however, watch attentively the advertisement for products that I want to buy.

People criticize advertisement for talking us into buying stuff we don't need and getting into massive debt as we keep consuming like crazy. I could buy into this argument had I not read Benito Perez Galdos's 1884 novel La de Bringas, whose protagonist, Rosalia Bringas, gets into debt through an unbridled consumption of useless objects. Her crazy spending gets so bad that she has to resort to prostitution to repay her debts. One could, of course, find much earlier examples of out-of-control purchases that left people destitute. So somehow people managed to overspend without watching TV commercials.

Advertisement promotes an impossible standard of beauty, people claim. In order to believe this you need to forget that for millenia people did all kinds of crazy, bizarre and dangerous things to their bodies to pursue an impossible standard of beauty. Foot binding, neck elongation, drinking of vinegar - all these practices existed long before anybody heard of advertisement.

In my opinion, all that advertisement does is give us exactly what we want anyways. The impossible standards of beauty and loads of useless junk are things that human beings always have and always will pursue. Beauty, by its nature, has to be impossible to attain, or it would be no beauty at all. If everybody is special, then nobody is. It is very easy and attractive to find some outside agency that we can happily blame for everything that goes wrong in our lives. It isn't my fault that I bought objects I couldn't afford. The bad, nasty commercials made me do it. I'm not to blame for eating junk and then torturing myself with stupid diets to lose weight. The greedy ad execs are at fault. I'm not a responsible individual. I'm just a weak, powerless object at the mercy of forces beyond my control.

Or am I?

A Story About Hair

Now that everybody has met my new haircut, I will regale you with yet another story about hair. When my sister was 19, she met a thirty-one-year-old guy. Let's call him Carlos. My sister had been living with me since she was sixteen, so I understandably felt responsible for her.

One day she went on a date with Carlos. A short time into the date, she called me on the phone. She was crying so hard that she could hardly speak. 

"Carlos is soooooo mean," she sobbed. "I can't believe he did this to me."

When I heard that, I imagined every single horrible thing that a 31-year-old man can do to a 19-year-old girl. My heart plopped into my stomach and my hands started shaking. I tried to control my terror, however, in order to avoid traumatizing the child even further.

"What. . . did. . . he. . . do. . . to. . . you?" I managed to squeeze out of myself.

"It's horrible!" she wailed. "I don't even want to say!"

I saw images of hospitals, police stations and myself assaulting Carlos with a chainsaw flash before my eyes.

"He went to a salon and got this horrible haircut," my sister continued.

"And??" I asked, shaking in terror.

"You wouldn't just say 'And?' if you saw how ugly this haircut is!" she responded indignantly. "It's hideous! I can't believe he did this to me! Now I have to put up with it until his hair grows back."

My sister and Carlos have been together for almost 10 years. They are still looking for a salon that will do justice to his great hair.

Feminism and Armpits

It's hilarious how for some people being a radical feminist is reduced to the all-important issue* of whether to shave their armpits. Who cares about the assault on reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, countless victims of anti-female violence around the world, female genital mutilation, etc. when we can sit there and feel self-righteous about our armpit hair. Of course, presence or absence of hair in the armpits hasn't had anything to do with gender for quite a while now. Men who first started removing armpit hair on a regular basis have had time to see that hair turn gray. It is also self-evident that shaving one's armpits takes at most thirty seconds, even if you really try to make the process last as long as possible.

Of course, the kind of feminism that concentrates on whether you shave, wear heels, use make-up or visit beauty salons is a very easy and attractive kind of feminism. It gives you a list of things that you shouldn't do, which is always great because not doing something is definitely easier than acting. No intellectual effort is involved in this type of feminism either. 

While such pseudo-feminists are sitting there gazing at their unshaved armpits, the conservatives in this country are stealing the last sad remnants of women's reproductive freedoms. But who cares, as long as they know that we they true, unshaven, unpainted, low-heeled feminists who have never set a foot inside a spa**?

Truly, some people should finally get their heads out of their armpits and take a look at some larger issues.

* Before you follow the link, I have to mention that the post I linked to is very badly written. Don't say I didn't warn you.

** In case anybody is wondering, I've been to a spa once and hated it. But I don't suggest this as proof of my feminism. My dislike of spas proves one thing: that I dislike spas. As tempting as it is to make a soapbox out of this, I've resisted the temptation so far.