Laurie and Debbie say:

The Olympics (summer and winter) are, of course, gender-essentialist events, with virtually every sport and competition being men-only or women-only. And yes, there are some good reasons for sports events to be gendered, though the truths of different abilities are a lot more subtle and complex than they are generally presented … and of course, not everyone is straightforwardly male or female.

At the same time, the Olympics are special to young people who either are or want to be athletes: a chance to project yourself into that gold medal winner who might be from your country, or look like you, or be winning in a sport you’re good at, or just be someone you can imagine being.

In the Vancouver Olympics, two things happened outside of the actual competitions, both of which underscore the insidious effects of judging people’s behavior by their gender … and both of which brought out really strong responses from athletes.

Johnny Weir, a U.S. figure skater, is known for his fabulous routines and gender transgressive presentation. After he skated in Vancouver, a couple of Francophone sportscasters made fun of his routines and questioned his gender. Weir responded brilliantly:

He’s not asking for an apology. He says he believes in free speech and wouldn’t want these men fired for expressing their opinion. (“I’ve heard worse in bathrooms and whatnot about me,” he quipped.) He just wants them to think before they speak — and to imagine the damage they could do to people like him and to generations of children whose parents may not give them the same freedom and support his did if they think their child will only be ridiculed for being who he or she is. “I would challenge anyone to question my upbringing and question my parents’ ideals and feelings about bringing up me and my brother, who’s completely different from me but taught very much the same way that I was,” Weir said.

He also said that only his closest intimates know what makes him tick … and it’s no one else’s business.

Special kudos to Weir for saying he doesn’t want an apology: the apology is due to the dreaming kids who were hurt by the sportscaster remarks.

Elsewhere in the Olympics, the Canadian women’s hockey team came in for some criticism after their exciting gold-medal win against the U.S. team. In the grand tradition of sports success everywhere, they had a celebration: beer, champagne, and cigars. They chose to celebrate on the ice they won on.

Apparently, one slightly underage team member had some champagne. (The horror!) The International Olympic Committee originally said it would “investigate their behaviour,” but eventually decided to leave the issue alone.

Captain Hayley Wickenheiser said … there was a double standard at work.

Wickenheiser said if it were a men’s team, there wouldn’t be a hint of controversy.

“I don’t brush it off, the underage [part] and being on the ice,” said Wickenheiser. “Those things maybe could have been done different. But at the same time, it’s celebrating, it’s hockey, it’s a tradition we do. When we see a Stanley Cup winner, we see them spraying champagne all over the dressing room, you see 18-year-old kids there and nobody says a thing.”

Wickenheiser didn’t specifically reference the girls watching at home and imagining their own victories, but those girls are still part of the story.

Both of these events have received a lot of coverage, but we haven’t seen anybody putting them together. Despite the huge forces out there who want men to behave “like men” and women “like women,” and will work hard to enforce gender policing, the Johnny Weirs and Hayley Wickenheisers are getting more power and more voice. And that is the best thing that can happen for children with dreams.

Laurie says:

It is 100 years today since the German feminist Clara Zetkin’s idea of International Women’s Day was born.

So do something good for a woman today or tomorrow….

Here are some images for celebration.

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Laurie says:

I was thinking about memory today. Mine is pretty non-linear. Rather like the medieval christian god’s view of time, i.e. it’s all happening in one total timeless view.   My memories tend to be small vivid flashes unless I”m consciously trying to remember. Then they can be far more complex, detailed and linear (if needed).

The In-Camera Project images are somewhat reflective of my memory in their vividness and their size. This doesn’t necessarily mean there is a connection, but it’s interesting to think about. In the early stages of a project there are always different threads to follow, and often it turns out that they weave together.

These are the new photos.

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This is a stained glass window that looks out on my garden.

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This is view of a quince bush in the garden.

Debbie says:

I just got back from watching the Oscars with a gaggle of teenage girls (and another adult). I could do a complex critique of gender and ethnicity politics (those critiques always run in my head). But I just wanted to say that the camera went frequently to Gabourey Sidibe (nominated for Best Actress), .

and also to Mo’Nique (who won the Best Supporting Actress award). Both women were in Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. It was such a joy to see stunningly beautiful and genuinely fat women, dressed to the nines, among the stars at the Academy Awards

The girls I was watching with were critiquing everyone’s dresses, but not anyone’s size. And aside from one relatively harmless crack about Sarah Jessica Parker weighing “a single pound,” no one on the stage was being rude either.

And then Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman ever to win a Best Director Oscar (for The Hurt Locker).

Sometimes, it doesn’t seem quite so bad out there.

Laurie and Debbie say:

Some of our friends are up in arms about “vajazzling.” If you haven’t heard the word, it refers to having tiny Swarovski crystals heat-sealed onto your waxed (or super-shaved) vagina (which here at Body Impolitic we do not call the “vajayjay”). Jennifer Love Hewitt does it and (sadly) she says she does it “to feel good about her privates.”

Okay, this is a little complicated. Some of the background things to think about:

1) Waxing and shaving both have a flavor of infantilization, of looking like prepubescent girls instead of women.
2) Anything that modifies your vagina (or any part of your body) at a price is going to be sold as “better than natural,” because “natural” is free. So there’s always a disturbing hint of “you don’t look good the way you are.”
3) Vagina modifications in particular are almost always spun as of “it’s icky down there unless you make it better/cleaner/neater.”

All that being said, we think that if it’s your style vajazzling is a pretty harmless variation on sprucing up your private parts. It isn’t invasive, it lasts about five days (which means it’s a real moneymaker for vajazzlers who can attract repeat clients, but it’s also something you can do for a fling), and it’s sparkly!

Doree Shafrir at Gawker interviewed a few men to see what they thought about it, and got basically negative responses, including Gabe Delahaye at Videogum, who said,

“”Gross. People who vajazzle should have their vaginas taken away,” he said. “They can have them back when they are ready.”

We’re a lot more grossed out by men who think it’s okay to judge women that way then we are by women witih sparkly genitalia. And sad to see feminist friends repeating it with admiration.

One last point about vajazzling: men clearly are not who it’s for. Hewitt did it to recover from a breakup. Bryce at the Luxury Spot, pictured above, was hardly worried about the injunction “not to engage in any ‘vigorous activity for at least the first day,’” saying, “I should be so lucky.”

If you’re going to wax anyway, you can afford it, and it’s your style, why not add some crystals into the mix?

Debbie says:

For the last day of Black History month, we bring you “The Promise,” an interactive presentation of contemporary and historical photos, interviews, and audio commentary. Contemporary photos by Platon, commentary by David Remnick.

Watch them all.

The above image is from Like a Whisper’s daily posts for Black Herstory Month. This picture is of the first African-American girl scout troop, started in 1924 and cancelled two years later when its founder, Josephine Groves Holloway, was forced out of her job by her supervisor. Read about it here.

Like A Whisper’s Black Herstory Month coverage, including today’s extensive “link love” post, is essential reading.

Laurie says:

I have two new photos for my In-Camera Project.   These are the digital color images I’ve been working on.  After I shoot them, they are not modified or manipulated except for cropping, so all the work is “in camera”.  (Apologies to those who’ve heard the explanation already.)  The work is feeling very pure and direct, and I’m very happy with it.  I have a strong feeling that it’s leading somewhere really interesting.   All I know at this point is that on some levels its about light.

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The photo is of a lemon tree branch with a Japanese bell.

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This is a quince blossom branch.  If you look closely (at least on my monitor and in the print) you’ll see that the background isn’t truly black but designed. This photo was shot with flash.  It’s the first time I’ve ever used it.

There are earlier images from the project here and here and more to come.

Lynne says:

I ran into an article not long ago in The New York Times, The Americanization of Mental Illness by Ethan Watters, based on his forthcoming book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, discussing how the American way of mental illness being exported along with other American products such as rock n’ roll, Coca Cola, and anorexia.

The classic case of Western media-induced anorexia happened on the Polynesian island of Fiji, where eating disorders were unknown for 3,000 years until television became available in 1995. A 1999 New York Times article describes what Dr. Ann E. Becker, director of research at the Harvard Eating Disorders Center of Harvard Medical School, found when she investigated shifts in body image and eating practices in Fiji over a three-year period.

Before 1995, Dr. Becker said, there was little talk of dieting in Fiji. ”The idea of calories was very foreign to them.” But in the 1998 survey, 69 percent said that at some time they had been on a diet. In fact, preliminary data suggest more teen-age girls in Fiji diet than their American counterparts.
Study Finds TV Alters Fiji Girls’ View of Body By Erica Goode, May 20, 1999

Oddly enough the idea of viral mental illness set me to thinking about some unusual toys I played with as a child. My father was a psychologist who administered psychological tests for schools, government agencies and mental institutions before he gave that up to go into military and aerospace research.

He had a cupboard full of old psychological tests that he never used, and when I got old enough not to mess them up, he would let me take them out and play with them. I think by then his worldview was that these tests were indeed games, so why shouldn’t I play with them.

It’s been nearly 50 years since I last picked these up but I still remember how beautiful the Rorschach ink blots were. They were large, thick cardboard about six by nine inches and not just black and white, but with almost three-dimensional gray shadings, and colorful red, blue, green orange and pink swirls.

Another test was the TAT or Thematic Apperception Test, again pictures on even larger cards. Each drawing showed a little scene that you were supposed to tell a story about–good training for a novelist, although that was hardly anyone’s plan for me at the time.

The creepiest test was the Szondi test–no, not Zombie test, it was named after Hungarian psychiatrist Lipot Szondi (1893-1986). This test consisted of four sheets of mug shots, 48 pictures of mental patients taken in the late 1800s to early 1900s. As my father explained it, if you got on a bus and there was an empty seat next to each of these people, who would you sit next to?

Szondi lived into the 1980s and I don’t know if he ever changed his diagnostic definitions, but the eight diagnoses the Szondi test used were: homosexual, sadistic, epileptic, hysteric, catatonic, paranoiac, schizophrenic, depressive and manic.

Just that list gives you an idea of how ideas about what constitutes mental illness have changed just in America.

The Watters New York Times article that started my whole trip down memory lane talks about mental illnesses that once were common and now are rarely if ever seen, such as hysterical paralysis. He reports a contagious anorexia phenomenon in Hong Kong, and goes into a fascinating digression on how one culture’s treatment of schizophrenia as spirit possession actually leads to fewer relapses than the Western diagnosis and drug treatment

An internet search away from the Watters article was an equally absorbing commentary by Greg Downey at Neuronthropology.net. Downey suggests that export of mental health can also be motivated by:

[P]ure mercenary impulses, as drug companies try to persuade new markets that the individuals need their products, suffering as they do from disorders of which they were previously unaware. Here, the idea that it’s just the beliefs about illness held by therapists and authorities obscures the naked greed that goes into public relations campaigns designed to produce disorder.

He cites the case of GlaxoSmithKline’s fostering of depression in Japan, where the concept of depression (and thus treatment with their product) was unknown until 1999. The manufacturer of Paxil was forbidden by Japanese law to advertise directly to customers, so they embarked on a series of “educational” ads telling consumers: “Depression is a disease that anyone can get. It can be cured by medicine. Early detection is important.”

So, as Dr. Phil would say, “How’s that working for GlaxoSmithKline?”

Pretty well, alas! A 2007 Boston Globe article reports that depression and the drugs to treat it have taken solid root in Japan.

A couple of weeks ago, Somebody Think of the Children! reported that the Australian Classifications Board is banning adult publications and films that depict small-breasted women. I kid you not.

The argument behind this decision is that small-breasted young women of legal age (often barely) are depicted so as to evoke the appearance of young girls. While I am sympathetic to this sentiment on some levels, it’s a ridiculous thing to put in to practice. To start with, it makes naked pictures of me illegal. I know that not everyone wants to see me naked, but it shouldn’t be a crime. Besides, Laurie made me look really good when she took this 15 years ago.

Aside from my general dislike of the idea of censorship, this Australian twist is just boiling over with other problems. I’ll skip the details of all the other things they are banning, which I’m sure include me as a trans woman too. Let’s start with the straightforward foreseeable impact, in terms of public perception of body types.

I recently got a collection of truly crappy teen summer exploitation films from the 1970s (corny disco beach party sorts of things). Watching them, I’ve been astounded at the lack of big boobs. The films show plenty of boobs: they’re just small (actually medium-sized, but they sure do look small to a modern viewer). The difference from the range of breast sizes seen on any modern television show is astounding. Modern media is so permeated with big boobs that even I have lost perspective. I can only imagine how this would all look to me if I was twenty years younger.

I have small breasts. I like them that way. I almost never wear a bra (which these days means that I stand out because you can actually tell that my breasts are small). I recently got myself fitted for a bra at a fancy department store and was astounded at what the current standard is for “not much padding.” No wonder everyone else has bigger breasts than I do. My new bra puts me firmly into the range I consider “fairly big” and I didn’t want much padding. All of this is to say that we are already living in an environment where expectations of breast size are drastically divorced from reality, yet another way for young (and not so young) women to feel bad about their bodies.

This phenomenon is bad enough as it is. Australia is about to make it even worse. Small breasts won’t just be unpopular, they’ll be illegal.

Do we really need the Australian Classifications Board further erasing any of the actual range of human variation? I believe any porn where the folks depicted are consenting adults is okay (even if I don’t like it). Perhaps more to the point, couldn’t they come up with a more nuanced way to exclude what they are declaring objectionable? I am not a depiction of a teenager.

I’m so flabbergasted at the stupidity of this that I feel like I don’t have anything of value to say. I guess you’ll have to make do with a few paragraphs of my sputtering and a cute picture of my tits.

Lynne Murray says:

On the NAAFA (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance) mailing list, I learned from Esther Filderman about how filmmaker/director Kevin Smith was thrown off a Southwest Airlines plane in which he was already seated, with armrests down. The Flight Captain deemed him a “safety risk.”

“Thank God I don’t embarrass easily (bless you, Jersey Girl training),” he continued. “But I don’t sulk off either …” So he promised more tweets zinging the airline in the coming days for telling him “I’m too wide for the sky.”

Smith said he refused a $100 voucher offered by Southwest and eventually got on another Southwest flight. He then tweeted a photo of himself on the plane with his cheeks puffed out, writing, “Look how fat I am on your plane! Quick! Throw me off!”

One thing I love about Twitter (speaking as a novice) is the breaking-news quality of some tweets. I love that Kevin Smith was getting the word out AS he was in the process of being thrown off the plane.

Meredith Galman, also on the NAAFA mailing list, pointed out an excellent report on the event from Kate Harding at Shapely Prose.

I am really happy that Kevin Smith, human being, is on his way home, but I also hope Kevin Smith, Famous Person With 1.6 Million Twitter Followers keeps up the righteous indignation on behalf of all the fat people who aren’t in a position to say, “WELCOME TO YOUR PR NIGHTMARE, ASSHOLES.” And even though he is, and he did, and he doesn’t embarrass easily, and a whole lot of us thank him for all of that, his last tweet tonight says it all:

The @SouthwestAir Diet. How it works: you’re publicly shamed into a slimmer figure. Crying the weight right off has never been easier!

I confess to being a hopeless fan of Clerks and Clerks 2, so I enjoyed listening to Kevin Smith ramble on in his Smodcast #106

I was also interested that he happened to be returning to Southern California from a San Francisco Bear Nation event.

I couldn’t help but imagine a contingent of big, take-no-nonsense Bears surrounding the ticket counter!