Leta Blake

author. human. working hard to become stellar at life.

feminism

“The problem isn’t small with only me as its isolated victim.” — @flickerjax #feminism #40 #yesallwomen

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“I meant this to be personal not political, (but the personal is, oh you know…) but I can’t avoid it because at nearly 40 I know much more of the world than I did at 16 and now I can see that the problem isn’t small with only me as its isolated victim.  It’s vast and keeping us all down and it’s shaped me over the years to dream of something better for anyone.  Where once I wanted to be taken seriously as person, now I wish to be taken seriously as a gender.  I want to live to see my sisters equally represented in positions of power.  I want our governing bodies, the world over, to truly represent our whole society.  Give me 51 female senators and 218 female representatives in my own country’s federal government.  Give all my sisters equal pay and equal opportunities or rise to commercial positions of power.  Bring us all up and punish those who strive to keep us down through sexual and physical violence, through words and actions, so that we may have justice with equality.  For my next 40 years that is my fondest wish, to live to see a world in which women can see a reflection of their true selves.”

via JJ writes & rambles | Hocine bibo aut in eum digitos insero?

Please do click the link above to read more from Ajax Bell. Really beautiful, powerful stuff.

Growing My Leg Hair Out For Self-Esteem #feminism #shaving #rosacea

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I wanted to write about some of my deep thoughts on make-up and simply don’t have the brain power for it today. It’s all convoluted and involves all kinds of connected topics such as trans*women, the covering up of “blemishes” or scars, and my own experience with a changing face.

Aw, hell, let’s try for it anyway. Okay, here we go.

Basically, I wanted to talk about what’s real and what’s “not real” and ask us all to ponder some questions about that distinction. Let’s talk about me and my rosacea for a moment. A few months back, I realized that when I manage to successfully cover the redness up with make-up, I felt better about going out in public. I felt less ashamed to be seen and more secure. When I got stared at, I thought to myself, “Today they’re looking at me because they think I’m attractive, not because I look like a splotchy-faced clown.”

However, I also found myself dismissing these stares and any compliments on my appearance because I didn’t feel like it was “real”. I found myself thinking things like, “If they only knew how bad my skin really looks under this make-up, they wouldn’t be saying that.” So, that led me to wonder how make-up does or does not play into a trans*woman’s experience of feeling “real”. And what does it mean to women in general if they’re taught to feel most attractive by applying something foreign to the base version of the “real” them? 

BUT those thoughts are a month or so old now and while they still apply, another experience has interceded and changed the flavor of them. In the last month, I’ve decided/realized a few important things:

a) due to her genes, my daughter is likely to have pretty severe acne in her teenage years. Her father had it and, physically, she is his mini-me. I realized that would be hard on her at that vulnerable time in her life, and in a massive, huge, wow-life-changing epiphany, I realized I didn’t want to model for her an obsession with my own skin. I didn’t want her to see me fretting about how it looked, or feeling ashamed of it, or complaining that I felt unattractive. Which, I’m ashamed to admit, she definitely has overheard many times in the past. I wanted to start modeling a behavior for her that makes it known that what her face looks like is so much less important than WHO SHE IS. So, I’ve stopped talking about my face. Ever.

Picture (not me!) from Razor Free Inspiration.

b) I decided on a whim to not shave my legs again until the hair has entirely grown out. I realized that I’ll be forty this year and I’ve never really seen my body as it naturally looks because I’ve spent my entire life, since I was nine years old and started puberty early, shaving and making it out like my body is something that needs fixed.

When my eight year old started asking when she could shave and I found myself struggling to explain why she couldn’t yet and what exactly “you don’t need to” means (because who NEEDS to? we aren’t going to die if we don’t shave) I chose to do this “no more shaving” experiment. I’ll cop to the fact that I am still shaving my armpits because I don’t like how hair feels under there. I let it grow pretty long but it was bugging me, so I shaved it. My leg hair is not bugging me, though, so I’m going to keep letting it grow.

I might shave again when I’m done and I might not. It all depends on how I feel at that time and if it’s something that I want to do. I admit I’ll probably want to shave for bathing suit season. The social issues alone are something I’m not sure I want to deal with, but I’ll need to give that some thought, too. 

c) By choosing to not talk about my face, or allow myself to even act like the rosacea is bothering me, and by choosing to let my body be natural in terms of the hair on my legs, I’ve discovered that I am much more interested in who I AM than in what I look like. And that realization has made me see how many years and how many hours I’ve lost being distracted with concerns about what I look like. I can’t fathom that men lose even a quarter as much time on that same question. The requirements for men are so much less time consuming and don’t boil down to these tiny nuances like the shape of their eyebrows or if their pubes are properly trimmed. When my husband wants to go swimming, he puts on a bathing suit and goes. When I want to go swimming, I have to tame a forest first. It’s exhausting and, frankly, makes me say no to swimming a lot more often than it makes me say yes. 

Since I’ve stopped focusing on my rosacea and stopped shaving, my husband’s sexual interest in me doesn’t seem to have waned and may have even grown. Not because he gets off on hairy legs (which would be fine, but he doesn’t), but because I think I’m a lot less anxious and a lot more willing to just let it all go in the moment, which is, of course, a lot more fun all around. No more, “Sorry, I didn’t shave….” comments. Or turn-off conversations consisting of, “Why is my face so bad? I didn’t eat any corn. It’s so ugly.” Instead, it’s just me being me and me not apologizing for stupid shit like hairy legs.

So, yeah, so far it’s all been a big success and while I can’t say that I feel awesome about how I LOOK, what I can say is that I think about how I look a lot less, and that’s AWESOME.

If I have the inner strength not to shave and wear what I want…I have the strength and mental fortitude to do anything – L Kaur

“Male athletes berate each other by slinging words associated with femininity” – #gay #sissy #feminism The Frozen Closet – Newsweek

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Just think of the insults most prevalent in sports – male athletes berate each other by slinging words and phrases associated with femininity. From the elementary school playground to Madison Square Garden, men routinely call each other “sissy,” “wuss” and “pussy” or tell each other, “you throw (or run) like a girl.” Belittling a female athlete is to call her “butch,” “manly” or a “beast.”  The Frozen Closet – Newsweek.

I think it’s important to look at the underlying message behind these insults. I don’t think they are actually all that similar for men and women. The first set of comments has a much more global impact. For a male to be called effeminate, told they are a pussy, or a sissy, or told that they do anything “like a girl” impacts their masculinity. And in our society/world masculinity is linked with value as a whole person. Calling a woman “butch” or “manly” or “beast” is insulting, because it says that they aren’t a woman. But the real message behind not being a woman is…you’re not sexually attractive or pretty. Or, basically, I wouldn’t want to fuck you.

So, the message to men who show any kind of perceived feminine quality is “you, as a whole person, fail to live up to masculine standards”. The message to girls is “you’re not fuckable/marriagable”. The message to gender non-conforming males is all encompassing. The message to gender non-conforming females is less so. The implication is that they can still be good at what they’re doing. They can still be an awesome athlete, still be smart, funny, etc, but they’re just not fuckable. (And in a world where women are told from infancy that the most important thing they can be is fuckable, that’s a big deal, don’t get me wrong!) But effeminate men are basically told that they are something so much “less than” they “should” be. And what is that less than thing? Something resembling the always-and-obviously unworthy female. Putting females of any stripe at the bottom of the totem pole and only of value if they’re sexually viable for the straight men of the world.

Who has it worse? It’s hard to say. A woman is immediately at an eternal disadvantage by virtue of her femaleness and the fact that being female isn’t valued. A man, assuming he can “butch up” enough to pass muster in the world, is going to be head and shoulders above any woman in the world (heterosexual or not) simply because he’s a man (gay or not). But a man who is being targeted as too effeminate has it pretty bad, too. But the reason it is so bad is because their masculinity is being questioned. And masculinity is the definition of power and prestige and privilege in the world. If women weren’t seen as such a terrible thing to be compared to, if softness, artistry, gracefulness wasn’t seen as “woman’s work”, and if the words that mean “woman” weren’t used as insults, then there wouldn’t be this problem at all. If the things that are perceived as feminine were valued in the world then exhibiting non-masculine behaviors wouldn’t be problematic at all in our society.

Regardless, I feel like the quality of the insults are different. One is reducing a person who could have full privileges of masculine humanity down closer to the level that women already occupy. And the other is an attempt to strip the already low-on-the-totem-pole woman of her sole power–sexual attraction. Interestingly, though, I see that as much less worrisome or problematic, because if a woman is stripped of that power, but allowed to take on more privilege because of being stripped of it (acknowledged as strong, athletic, smart, etc) then it might not be that terrible of an insult. It’s still sickening that our world mainly values women for how much straight men want to put their dicks in them, but being called “butch” or “beast” might actually free a woman up to become so much more than a sex object.

(Though so long as society, and this includes other women, mostly value females on their sexual viability, it’s bound to make a woman feel bad about herself. BUT–and this is a huge but–the fact is that’s not what’s important about women at all, and learning to love a body that is athletic or capable, despite not being the world’s ideal of sexy, is hugely valuable.)

On the other side of the issue, taking a man’s masculinity, wadding it up, and tossing it away due to a perception of femininity in his interests or behaviors, reduces him from a place of human male privilege he was born into, and that reinforces not only homophobia but misogyny as well. There doesn’t seem to be anything freeing for anyone in that. Well, I take that back. It could be freeing if the man in question chooses to step outside of society and to value the feminine in himself and in others.

I think I’m rambling now. My main point was that the two types of insults have different end results. One involves the whole of a person’s being, and the other targets sexual attraction because THAT is already deemed the only thing valuable about that person because she’s female. But they are not actually the same thing at all.

cover-web-copy
Training Season can be purchased at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, ARe, and Smashwords. And also on iBooks.
Unquestionably talented figure skater Matty Marcus is willing to sacrifice everything for his Olympic dream, but his lack of discipline cost him the gold once before. Now the pressure’s on. He needs a coach who can keep him in line, but top coaches don’t come cheap, and Matty can’t afford to stay in the game no matter how badly he wants to win.
When a lucrative house-sitting gig brings him to rural Montana, Matty does his best to maintain his training regimen. Local residents turn out to be surprisingly tolerant of his flamboyant style, especially handsome young rancher Rob Lovely, who proves to be much more than a cowboy stereotype. Just as Matty requires a firm hand to perform his best on the ice, Rob shows him how strong he can be when he relinquishes control in the bedroom. With new-found self-assurance, he drives himself harder to go straight to the top.
But competition has a timetable, and to achieve his Olympic dream, Matty will have to join his new coach in New York City, leaving Rob behind. Now he must face the ultimate test. Has he truly learned how to win—on and off the ice—during his training season?

Sacrilege

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I have been thinking about this video for days, including while replying to my post about being an ally. It’s fascinating and so well done. Be sure to watch to the end.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/62820182]

Let’s Talk About All the Ways This Is Offensive

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1. Whore.

2. Male figure saying, “Calm Down.” This basically says that whatever the woman has just said or done is a result of hysteria or overemotionalism and thus invalidates it.

3. Overriding the woman’s self-definition with one the man proclaims more appropriate. And a demeaning one at that. Determining that the male way of doing something is the only ‘right’ way.

4. The Fake Geek Girl thing is utter bullshit.

As I said to the man who posted this:

It isn’t funny for a male figure to a) call a woman a whore, b) determine that a woman cannot define herself appropriately because his ability to define her supersedes her own, c) demean a woman’s self from the status of an intelligent human being (nerd) to a whore on the basis of, what? How she looks?

When I see something like this tossed up casually as “too funny”, I realize that we have so far to go. Then again, all I have to do is turn on the news, walk out of my house, and exist in this world as a woman to have that proved time and again.