Friday, September 28, 2007

generally, everyone else is generalizing

I'm thoroughly fed up with discriminatory comments about the promiscuity of women and girls. And just as a side note, let's think: when's the last time anybody gave fuck about male promiscuity. Never.


That's not the point I'm trying to make, though. What I am trying to say is that it's exhausting being so frustrated by generalized comments like:

Implicit in this argument [about whether girls should get the HPV vaccine] is the assumption that good girls don't get cervical cancer; only "loose" ones do—and they may get what they deserve. [Slate]

And therefore only the girls who, oh I don't know, want to save their cervixes from cancer, would ever want to get the HPV vaccine, and of course that means that all girls selfish enough to want their cervixes are automatically sluts.

It doesn't matter that "the CDC reports that at least 50 percent of Americans are infected with HPV over the course of their lives, and a whopping 80 percent of American women are infected by age 50." It's also not important to note that "approximately 13 percent of American women ... are or will be a victim of rape over the course of their lives."


I mean, if you're raped, then you "deserve" to have cervical cancer. Yeah.


I think I understand why feminists are generalized as being constantly pissed off. They are. People keep on with their stupid comments, and feminists are the only ones commenting (and yeah, mocking, a little) back.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

aNorEXING the unhealthy-skinny

Yesterday, a photo of this woman appeared in Italian magazines and on billboards sparking debate.

From this photo, she looks like she needs some sleep and a few hamburgers, but otherwise, she looks okay. That's only because from that angle, you can't see the breasts she doesn't have, because breasts are made up of fat, or the ribs protruding from her body, as if she has slipped from the Holocaust directly into today. That's what Italians woke up to in their morning papers on September 26.

This was a diliberate message about the dangers of anorexia by famous, and equally infamous, photographer Oliviero Toscani. Toscani is known for his outrageous photographs, so he is obviously well picked for the job by Nolita, whose message to fashion-lovers everywhere is that anorexia is not the pretty ideal of completely effortless "skinny" that most girls want to be.

"I've been looking into the problem of anorexia for years. Who's responsible? Communication in general? Television? Fashion?" said Toscani. "So it's very interesting that in the end a fashion company has understood the importance of the problem, and with full awareness has found the courage to take the risk that this campaign involves."

This comes from a guy who fights HIV through bare bottoms. But it also comes from a man whose aim is "to use that naked body to show everyone the reality of this illness, caused in most cases by the stereotypes imposed by the world of fashion." Reuters

Good job fashion industry, well, Nolita in particular, who went forward with the idea with the total support of Livia Turco, the Italian Minister of Health. She says that this can "open a communications channel" for youngsters hoping to make it into the fashion industry to "promote responsibility towards the problem of anorexia."

Well, maybe they're doing some good. Others, like the guy in charge of the Association for the Study of Anorexia, thinks that girls may use this as a competition for "extreme thinness."

Why would girls find this attractive? They shouldn't! Fashion week in Milan banned all those unhealthy-skinny chicks from the runway, just like Madrid. A BMI under 18 isn't just unhealthy, it keeps you from walking the runway.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Get pretty and get no respect

"You're a pretty girl," is what I was told by a man with a physical disability in a wheelchair. I thought this comment was sweet, reminding me of the kiss on the hand and the promise that I was pretty by another young man a few years ago before a concert I was to perform in. That was sweet. The man in the wheelchair, however, went on to say, "No, you're a pretty woman, because that's what you are now," almost as if he had been an observer of my growth process since I got my first period in the summer after fifth grade. It was at this point that I smiled politely and promised myself he meant it in the best way.
Let me here state that I wasn't offended by his comments; it just made me think about what it meant to be a woman, if that's what I am, against what it meant, or means, to be a girl.
Maybe Ms. Spears was a good role model (for once) in sharing her confusion of those in-between years of mixed girl- and woman-hood. She let the world know that even though she had the body of a woman, she had the feelings of a girl. This is a communal feeling among girls-becoming-women everywhere. And it's okay.
It's funny, though, what society expects of women and girls. Even yesterday, a man commented to me, "You women are all the same, all of you." I smiled politely, hoping my real opinion wouldn't show through in hopes of supreme Regal customer service, but he continued on. "You expect the men to carry it all for you." It's so hard not to be offended, not only because he honestly believes that all women are the same, but also because he believes he carries everything.
Think about it. Women, quite literally, carry everything. They carry a full separate human being inside of them for almost a year. Why? To carry on the line of that man's family.
Women also carry the stresses of today's highly judgemental social group without ever showing it. The current style for women is careless grace. Models depict sexiness by making it all seem easy. If you saw the real stresses that the model is facing, the strives she endures for her lean body, the family see never sees because of her busy lifestyle, the agent who wants her to weigh 110 pounds, even though she's 5'11", you'd never think she was beautiful. A man, though, who carries and shows his stresses can be sexy. Remember Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca? Remember the handsome, yet saddened look he carries as he awaits Ingrid Bergman's return to his cafe? Even in 1942, men could be sexy while stressed. Keifer Sutherland depicts this today in every episode of 24.
The spectrum between guys and girls seems to grow ever wider. Recently, my boyfriend enlightened me as to a custom among guys, one involving what seems to be dominance code. It's subtle, yet present. It's a nod. If a guy is checking out your girl, depending on how he responds to you, he gets a nod or a dirty look. If his nod says something along the line of "Good job," he gets the nod back. Anything else, the dirty look comes on full force.
Umm, what?
It's essentially condoning, even reinforcing, the attitude of women and girls as equal to something nearing an impressive breed of dog. The bitch (literally) who won the Eukanuba Tournament of Champions probably gets more respect.
I'll admit it; I like taking time to dress myself, straighten my hair, paint my nails, and, just for the record, I will not stop shaving my legs or under my arms (Note to the feminists: It's not just for the social standard; those tiny hairs are irriating!). It's true too that I like the attention and the compliments I get. It's not true, though, that I do it because:

"This current generation of young women... believe they will find any sort of satisfaction, emotional or sexual, through allowing themselves to become the sex objects of young men's fantasies..." thus "fueling a sorry state of affairs." Daily Mail

It's not true I like how, right under our noses, our very own guys are, perhaps unintentionally, carrying on a form of oppression through our own attractiveness. And it's right out liar-liar-pants-on-fire that the girls are to blame for this.
"They want to be taken seriously, but, by behaving like this, no one can blame the young men who treat them like sex objects and little else. "
Can't win.

Friday, September 21, 2007

slicing marriage after seven years

Maybe it's just me.

I'll accept that, because a lot of things are, honestly, just me. My continue forgetfulness and inability to recall, well, much of anything, along with a vague consiousness as to what, exactly, I am doing, definitely leads me to accept that, okay, it may be just me.

Let's back up. We all come from two parents, okay, technically an egg and a sperm. A guy and a girl. Whether the possessors of these gender-specific items decide to unite in marriage is completely up to them. Often, they try. Often, they love. Often, they hate. And often, they divorce. That's okay. It's legal. Let's not encourage any Robert Dudley's to (possibly inadvertantly) kill their wives just to get out of the marriage to get to their Queen Elizabeth I. Just divorce.

Or, as "glamourous politician" Gabriele Pauli puts it, dissolve.

"The basic approach is wrong ... many marriages last just because people believe they are safe," she told reporters. "My suggestion is that marriages expire after seven years." After that time, couples should either agree to extend their marriage or it should be automatically dissolved, she said.

Basically, she's saying that, since so many people who are married don't really belong together and aren't happy, they should just give up and make the whole situation easier by just letting it dissolve, you know, melt away, disappear, act as though it was never there.

Coming from a home of divorced parents, I understand that the "D-word" happens. But my parents didn't go into it knowing that if they didn't like how loudly their partner snored, they just had to get through it for a few years and it would be like it never happened.

Personal ads can now save 35 cents with the deletion of "divorced," because, after all, you were never married if your marriage was mutually dissolved.

Honestly, this woman has some serious cajones in suggesting this. She's been divorced herself twice, so perhaps she'd like to be viewed as more than a woman with two failed marriages. Maybe this would make her seem younger. Forget Botox, just dissolve your marriage! Takes those wrinkles right away! Then again, who wouldn't want to be shacked up with this beauty.
Mind you, she's a politician running for the leadership of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria, an organization created as "an answer to the spiritual and material hardship left as a legacy by the Nazi dictatorship... based on the Christian human image and Christian values."
She appeared in a popular fashion magazine wearing latex gloves, a smirk and a poufy white, well, thing, earlier this year.
The only satisfying part of this article was put so well, I have to quote it.
"Viewed as a party rebel, Pauli stands almost no chance of winning next week's vote." This is from the non-partial Reuters.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

It looks like you're posting bullshit to the Internet

Along my journalistic, feminist journey, I hope this message never pops up.

feast on this: feministing

I hate to say it. Really, I do. There's an addiction I've been feeding, quite irrationally, against any other sense I know. Oh, and while it's true that BK Mocha Joe's have recently been getting me through the week with its tasty, yet fueling, coffee loving goodness (I used to hate coffee, but then I let this one take my true coffee virginity, and I may be hooked!), that's just a pleasing treat. This new addiction just may be a way of life.
It's feministing. I'm regularly finding that this is a place that's just pissing me off- but in a good way. Serving as an eye opening expanse of real issues facing women today, this web site is pushing me toward an opinionistic outlook, and ultimately, a grasp on the journalistic world I hope to be entering in a few years.
Sorry Shel Silverstein (unintended, yet illuminating alliteration aside), but I feel I'm losing my connection to your clam. It's not all the same. There's definitely something, someone bigger out there than the clam. Of course it would all be the same within the tight protection of your shell, but your soft inside has so much talent, wasted talent in a shell. I'm no longer that clam.
I'm moving on to the larger world where it's a good thing that things piss me off. I've already decided that I will not be flying Southwest Airlines because of their rude treatment of guests and their decision to line up passengers like cattle before boarding the plane. I will not ever spend my money to be a numbered hunk of lifestock with a dress code. I've also put in my order of Sperm Counts, which I hope to be an illuminating and adventurous read.
Hmm... too bad I've put poor Humphrey Bogart biographies aside. I'm sure they'll come back around, Bacall and all.

Friday, September 14, 2007

Numb3ring the Positive

UPDATE: This article won honorable mention in the Ryan White Excellence in Journalism contest! (The 2007 list has not been updated yet!)

Numbers define human life. They tell how many years in a life, minutes in an hour, people in the world, cells in a body, dollars in a bank account and countless other countable figures that identify existence.

Since you've already got so many other numbers in your life, here are some more seemingly meaningless numbers: 25, 39,500,000, 4,300,000 and 2,900,000.
Let's take the first number, twenty-five. That's the number of years since HIV/AIDS (Human Immunodeficiency Syndrome) became an acknowledged world pandemic. Thirty-nine million, five hundred thousand is the number of people who newly tested positive for HIV in 2006. Two million, nine hundred thousand is the number of HIV/AIDS related deaths last year alone.
Perhaps these numbers aren't so "meaningless."
As the deadly virus spreads from one person to another, another tally is tacked on to a rising statistic; person number 6,525,153,392 becomes patient number 39,248,129 of the HIV postive population. Often, though, this person doesn't notice the new force overtaking their immune system. The virus affects each person differently.

Right, my fellow Thespians and I from troupe #4405 created this video to increase HIV/AIDS awareness using a scene from Cathy Sorensen's An Endengered Species: Waking Up.

Exposure spreads through means of unprotected sex, sharing of tattoo or drug injection needles or even from mother to child during pregnancy. In areas of non-AIDS/HIV infected people, blood transfusions are also responsible for the multiplication of the disease. Desperate searches from a supply of donated blood for sickle-cell and hemophilia patients result in a loss of te screening process for infection. These already ailing patients are now infected as well. In its final stage, HIV turns into AIDS, the most critical expression of HIV infectivity, leading to the destruction of white blood cells, or t-cells, that work to kill bacteria and viruses. In a world-society of careless sex, HIV spreads from one infected person to the next, lowering t-cell counts and breaking down immunity barriers; if one person has multiple partners, each of those is exposed. The cycle continues until new numbers show villages, cities and states of HIV-positive populations.
Worse is the fact that HIV/AIDS is most prominent in underdeveloped, poor nations whose concern is first for food, since the know they will never afford the treatment costs.
"The first thing poor families infected by AIDS ask for is not cash or drugs,"* said James Morris, executuve director of the World Food Program. "It is food."
Most of the world's positive population resides in the continent of Africa. From this area are even more numbers increasing by the minute: 11,000,000 and 31.
In sub-Saharan Africa, more than eleven million children are left orphaned by HIV/AIDS. By 2015, it is estimated that the population of Botswana will be thirty-one percent smaller than it would have been in the nonappearance of AIDS.
The United States has its own share of numbers too: 600,000, 35.7 and 27.
Lifetime treatment for HIV/AIDS in the U.S. costs more than $600,000. Most people lose an average of of 35.7 years of their life because of the disease. Of more than a million people infected in the U.S., twenty-seven percent don't know. That means almost three-hundred thousand people don't know that they are spreading the risk of exposure to every partner.
HIV/AIDS is a devestating disease spreading its increasingly influential claws over the lives of people all around the world. Adults, teens and children of all races, beliefs, and sexual preferences are learning how to live with the disease. How does it spread to so many different types of people? Well, a lot of it is sex. Focusing on the teen group alone, a recent study has found that sixty-five percent are sexually active by their high school senior year and twenty percent of those have had four or more partners. Just one unknowingly positive partner can spread the virus to an entire community of sexually active teens. This means that this is a preventable problem; teens can fight the epidemic through safe sex and abstinence.
"AIDS kills," said one man assisting AIDS-affected families in underdeveloped nations. "It's hitting closer to home... AIDS is not only in a particular group or in the poor only; it is everywhere."*
It is hitting home. Even the small retirement county in Florida I live in has some numbers: 9 and 6. The Florida Deartment of Health recognized nine HIV postive cases and six AIDS cases in 2005.
A lifetime of coping with this disease is difficult, but it's looking more positive as treatments become more available. On average, AIDS/HIV positive patients live 24.4 years with the virus, amost three times the life expectancy of 6.8 years in 1993.
"I am and will remain very much alive," said Matt, a young man recently diagnosed HIV postive. "I am each day learning to live positively."
Doctors are seeing more people living with, rather than dying from, AIDS/HIV.
Those are the first of some positive numbers.
*Quotes courtesy of http://www.avert.org and used with permission.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

starting out right

UPDATE: 9-20-07

September 2007 - So-called "vaginal rejuvenation," designer aginoplasty," "revirgination," and "G-spot amplification" procedures are not medically indicated, nor is there documentation of their safety and effectiveness, said The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) today in a new ommittee Opinion published in the September issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology. Moreover, it is deceptive to give the impression that any of these procedures are accepted and routine surgical practices, according to ACOG.


Starting this out right can only be accomplished through direct reference to the very essence of woman: her vagina.
It's a fascinating, yet subtle subject with so much news, well, news to me. Surgical procedures, both legal and banned, are rocking vaginas that were once peacefully natural. Women in the United States are having a cosmetic surgery done "down there" to take care of lumps they feel self-conscious about in bathing suits through labiaplasty, in effect removing the outer area of what God gave them. Actresses, models and, it is assumed, porn stars, undergo what is usually an outpatient procedure for thousands of dollars. Why?
According to Dr. Bernard H. Stern of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, "there is NO SEXUAL STIMULATION ASSOCIATED WITH THE LABIA MINORA [sic]," It doesn't make sex better; what does it do? It makes women feel better about themselves, more "free," as one woman put it.
Some patients, however, are left with painful results and sexual dissatisfaction. Is it worth it?
I couldn't tell you, but I agree with one woman. "I'm not saying you should do it on a whim," she said. "But if you think it'd make you feel better, why wouldn't you do it?"
That simply leads me to wonder how women feel about this procedure in Europe, where, although violence is strictly R-rated in movies, sex and porn is prominant and a socially accepted norm in the media, an exact opposite to our reserved sexual scenes and bloody-thirsty gore in the states.
That's not the case for Female Genital Cutting, a practice that's too common in Africa and way-illegal in almost everywhere in the world. Though not the technical term, it's known as female circumcision, and I'll admit that it was the term that triggered my research. The term itself, much less the actual procedure, is in dispute, because those who have undergone the "circumcision" are offended by "Female Genital Mutliation," and those opposed to it want others to know the perncious harm and lasting pychological and physical results. In settlement, the term "cutting" is used, perhaps as not to further hurt those who have gone through this by riling up their feelings.
If what they call it is disputed, it's not a good omen for the actuality of the process. In less brutal terms, the female "feel-good" parts are removed and depending on what level of "cutting" occurs (there are up to three types), these girls lose can lose everything but their peehole and their poohole, oh and a hole for the husband to go in.
So, the upsides: decreases promiscuity, preserves virginity (because it's then easier and more physically possible to tell and makes the girl a better suit for marriage), and ultimately takes out a part of the what women are, removing their very womanhood for the sake of a more expensive wedding.
I don't, and will never, see any guys willing to lose what makes them male for a better marriage suit.
Ultimately, here's one important fact: it's 2007. August 26 marked the eightieth year since female rights were officially recognized through the nineteenth amendment, and even that was a little late in coming. Then again, how do you give a woman rights who doesn't want them? It's her right to deny them as much it is her right to have them. These girls are translutely uneducated, and pushed toward this procedure by pressure from their parents and society. One teenager is quoted to have wanted to be like her friends and to be more desirable to a future mate.
I'll admit that I love to be desirable in the eyes of my other half, but I need to be desirable to myself first. You can't love someone else without loving and accepting yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_circumcision
http://www.4woman.gov/faq/fgc.htm#3
http://www.sos.state.ms.us/pubs/PressReleases/Articles/WomenRightVote.asp
http://www.labiaplastysurgeon.com/labiaplasty.html
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070524230339.aha5xr5x