Message from discussion
something I just wanted to complain about
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From: cort...@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: something I just wanted to complain about
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Message-ID: <2A64A3B6.6398@noiro.acs.uci.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Lines: 228
Date: 15 Jul 92 22:16:22 GMT
References: <2A61F3B8.18661@noiro.acs.uci.edu> <ROCKWELL.92Jul14210845@socrates.umd.edu>
In article <ROCKWELL.92Jul14210...@socrates.umd.edu> rockw...@socrates.umd.edu (Raul Deluth Miller-Rockwell) writes:
>Intro: I've already followed up to this post, but I've been bothered,
>today, by a nagging feeling that I've missed the main point. [I've
>still not seen the movie, by the way, but that just means I'm even
>more opinionated. :-> ]
>
>Janis Maria Cortese:
> I remember my mom one time (I forget what motivated her to say it,
> maybe the release of the movie "Heavy Metal") saying something that
> still sticks in my head: "Men don't like women's bodies. They like
> the (and these are her exact words) fantasy cartoon image they have
> of women's bodies." Boy, what a mouthful; more than that, I think
> she's right. Why else do we starve ourselves, and get the natural
> fat that nature put in our bodies suctioned out at great personal
> risk, and get carcinogenic gels injected under the muscle layers
> over our sternum? Men (and I'm using that word in a general way; I
> KNOW men who are sweet and I KNOW men who don't think that way, but
> boy are they in the minority) like the fantasy image of women --
> fantasies that won't contradict you or say that you've forgotten to
> carry the two, fantasies that won't EVER have periods, fantasies
> that will never say anything wittier than them at parties,
> fantasies of (as I've said before) DD breasts that stand up like
> twin torpedoes, the silhouette on the trucker's mudflap.
>
>Ok, first off, Janis' mom is not a man [as far as I know], so I think
>I'd be somewhat interested in what experience she was basing her
>opinion on. Janis agrees with her to a certain extent, and I've heard
>other women express dissatisfaction of a similar flavor, so there is
>obviously something here.
>
>But, when I look at my personal experience, I see something
>different... For example, one lady, who I was once quite close to,
>would vigorously disagree with me when I told her how beautiful she
>was. I don't mean as in playing coy, I mean as in distrusting me, and
>getting irate about it. Her hips were too thick [though,
>incidentally, not as large as "Holly Would"'s in Cool World posters],
>her breasts either too large or too small [depending], her waist too
>heavy, and her eyes, she thought, were ugly. Further, she had some
>very lovely tiger striping on her breasts [regular "stretch marks"]
>that I thought were attractive, but that she would prefer I never
>noticed.
In many instances (and I'm speaking from experience), if a woman's body
does not conform to what she's told (by various means) is nice, and
someone compliments her, she feel slike she's being made a fool of, made
fun of, or patronized. She may have gotten irate because she felt that
you were patting her on the head, saying, "Oh, sweetie, even if everyone
else says you're ugly, *I* think you're very nice," in an appropriately
condescending tone of voice.
Even if that was NOT what you intended (and I'm pretty confident that
that's what it is), it comes across that way at times. Open a woman's
magazine and look at how many ads there are for creams to remove not
"very lovely tiger striping" but "unsightly stretch marks." We are
NEVER told that stretch marks are attractive. You can't cure a lifetime
of put-downs with one "I think you're pretty."
>I mean, usually if a woman complains to me about how her body is
>"blah" I can figure out what she's talking about. And, maybe, there
>is something that men do that encourage such a negative self image.
Next time you go to the supermarket, look at how many magazines have
model's faces on them. "This is what you should look like." The next
time a commercial for a product that has "only xxx calories" comes on,
notice whether the company shows a man or a woman eating it, and keep
stats.
>But.. but... I've seen enough of this that I know that if anyone had
>the "silhouette that appears on a trucker's mud flap", that she could
>be very dissatisfied with her body, and could claim that her self
>image was something that men or society had forced on her. And maybe
>she would have a point.
It's either that or say that women are just genetically prone to lack of
self-confidence and a good body image, and that's just preposterous.
(I'm waiting for the follow-up to THAT.)
> stick straight up? No, stupid, have you forgotten that the bigger
> something is, the harder gravity pulls on it?
>
>Um, "guys have told her"? My first reaction on reading this was that
>this was something one guy had told her, and that she was
>generalizing.
Try about four or five, the MAJORITY of her boyfriends.
>My second is that maybe several guys had said how they
>wished her nipples pointed in a different direction, or some similar
>disparaging remark. [That might be easy to fix: point body in
>different direction... :-]
>
>Still, there's another point here: for at least part of their lives,
>most guys have little or know idea how girls look, naked. You might
>complain about how a cartoon character has no visible clit, but think
>about how much more this is so for people walking down the street
>wearing normal clothes. It's... polite society is not without its
>drawbacks.
My mother was very forward-thinking, and I was exposed to many of the
booklets in school that girls are given that talk about menstruation.
Get a few of them and see how many of the DON'T EVEN INDICATE the actual
entrance into the body. Every boy know what a penis is; I was a
teenager before I even knew that a clitoris existed. Keep in mind that,
again, I had gotten supposed education in school about female anatomy.
I mentioned this to my mom one time, and she said, "WHAT!?!?!?" She had
assumed that the booklets were more enlightened than in her day, and was
rudely awakened when I informed her that they weren't.
> And, now we have a MOVIE -- another movie -- that capitalizes on
> this! Yay!! This, ladies, is what we're supposed to look like!
> Get naked and stand in front of a mirror -- you think THAT'S a
> woman's body?!? Hah! Think again, sweetheart!
>
>Easy for you to say -- you've years of experience with your own body.
>And, you can't really blame an adolescent male's ignorant
>misconceptions on a lack of curiosity...
When that curiosity is satisfied by pornies and trucker's mudflaps, I
can get pissed about it, though. Why else do you think so much
ignorance exists? You can see tons of mags and TV/movie examples of
fake cartoon-female impersonator women, and NOT ONE about honest truths
of sexuality. We're too busy drooling over the cartoon to even CONSIDER
the reality. The cartoon is a smokescreen, keeping us from
investigating what's really there.
>I dunno, maybe the movie was totally embarassing to watch. Maybe the
>characters were two-dimensional and cartoon-like. Maybe the plot was
>weak and contrived. But, I can't help but think that the problem is
>not that this was a sexually oriented cartoon, but that the problem is
>the sexual nihlism which exists outside of the cartoon.
And the two of them are anything but unrelated.
> And, THEN -- of course the cartoon *W*O*M*A*N* has to become real
> by cracking her thighs. Isn't that what makes us ALL "real women?"
> Isn't that just the be-all and end-all of your life on this earth
> as a female -- to be the ultimate fantasy woman for some creep who
> can't relate to the real thing? But, then, I guess cartoon women
> don't tell you that you forgot about the clitoris again, huh?
> Hell, they don't even HAVE clitorises!!
>
>I take it this is a sore point. [I'm not trying to be snide, I'm just
>trying to be observant.] I'm a little bemused by that last paragraph
>-- is the problem too much emphasis on sex or not enough? Both?
Too much emphasis on sex from only one point of view. Feminine concepts
of sexiality are ignored -- there's far too little emphasis on that.
Masculine concepts of sex (or what are called predominantly masculine,
at least) are blown wa-a-a-ay out of proportion, until we only get one
side of the question. THAT'S what the sore point is. Sex is seen from
the eyes of only the men -- and not even REAL men! The point-of-view of
the men is just as much a cartoon fantasy as the women it sees.
>I mean, earlier in the article there's this complaint about how men
>are not interested in women's bodies, but that they're interested in
>their fantasy images of women's bodies. Addressing the element of
>truth in this: about the time a guy hits puberty, he's going to be
>aware that girls his age have been getting changes in their bodies.
Oh, really? How many little boys do YOU know of that understand the
mechanism of menstruation?
>And, if he's being raised by "good parents", he's not going to have a
>clue, for years, what the result is like. This is in spite of the
>biological imperatives...
He will, however, have yards of crap like this (a PG-13 movie so the wee
ones can see it) to fill up the void. Instead of truth, we fill our
young children's minds with misinformation and falsehood.
>The question I ask is: if you could change this, what kind of changes
>would you make?
I can't say. You don't get rid of crap like this by passing a law or
making it illegal. For YEARS (thousands of `em) sex has been called
filthy and shameful and driven underground, and this is the result.
Clearly censoring sex isn't the answer; that's what got us here in the
first place!
I'd like to see little kids' honest questions met with equally honest
answers about what the opposite (or same if you lean that way) sex is
like, so that they aren't filled with shit and then disappointed later
on when all that misinformation has NOTHING to do with reality.
That's awfully abstract, though. As to how to get it across concretely,
if I knew that, I wouldn't be so frustrated.
> Many men -- and my SO has agreed with me on this one when I've
> asked him WHY in god/dess's name it's like this -- like REALLY
> young girls. You know -- that fifteen year old inthe short skirt
> down the street? Simple. She is inexperienced enough not to
> complain if he doesn't know what he's doing (as he secretly
> believes he doesn't), she has an insufficiently formed sense of
> self-confidence to demand nice treatment when she doesn't get it,
> and her personality is in enough flux that she won't necessitate
> any messy self-examination on the part of the guy -- she won't
> expect him to be in touch with himself any more than she'll expect
> him to understand her. He's safe three ways from zero!
>
>You missed a couple bets -- when children are young, they're allowed
>to play with each other freely. As they grow older, they get
>segregated, for one reason or another. If you're of a conservative
>bent, you might wish for "the way things were".
How many kids' parents in this country do you think wouldn't freak out
if they found their kid playing doctor in the garage with the neighbor's
kid? Kids are NOT allowed to deal with sex freely. Playing dodge-ball
is not the same as screwing a thirteen year old.
>And there's the aspect where some older women have learned to avoid a
>variety of things. Be careful about smiling at someone, because you
>might give him ideas, that kind of thing. Or maybe it's less
>voluntary than this -- but it's always easier to converse with someone
>who's willing to talk to you than one who's not, regardless of that
>person's age or sex.
Especially if the conversation is sure not to verge into the areas of
himself that the man would rather avoid.
>Anyways, I hope that this cuts closer to the original subject. [And,
>maybe I should go see Cool World -- but not tonight.]
What IS the original subject, by your definition?
Blessings,
Janis
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