Category Archives: women

Because I am hoarding muscle and bone density like the compulsive cat lady and her bits of string

Friends: This quotation from a post by lymphopo keeps coming back to my mind as I consider my various healthy and unhealthy habits. Because I want to maximize the strength of my body and I want to be strong–both inside and out.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that the gym where I used to work as a personal trainer asked to help out with teaching a weight loss class. Never mind the appallingly bad taste in having an emaciated cancer patient get up and instruct anybody about how to lose weight. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is, trying to reeducate these women who’ve been brainwashed into the whole conventional starvation diet combined with excessive cardio mentality. They are slowly killing themselves with their unhealthy eating habits. They turn in their food logs, and when I see things like “Breakfast: 1 slice of toast and a Coke,” I want to scream and tear out my pitiful little peach fuzz (fortunately it’s too short for me to get a good grip and pull). No no a thousand times NO!

I try to tell them to stop thinking in terms of breaking their bodies down and literally destroying themselves, and start thinking in terms of building their bodies up. The way to be healthy and lean is to think good health, think excellent nourishment, think superb strength and beautiful muscle. But they refuse to listen. And I guarantee they will fail. I also guarantee that if they ever find themselves fighting for their lives, they’ll be at a severe disadvantage.

My favorite inspirational quote of the decade comes from my all-time top role model and weight lifting guru over at Little Professor. She says:

“My email inbox is full of women complaining about how strong they are getting, and how much they desperately want to be frail. I started weight training and now I am too big! Too strong! My shriveled sinews are suddenly plump and energized! My metabolism that I f*&ked up from years of ascetic rice cake rationing is suddenly zippy and industrious! I may not die a horrible death from a crumbled hip at 65! The horror!

What the f*&k is wrong with young women that 200 years after the first wave of feminism they are still whittling away at their bodies, starving, plucking, shaving, stumbling around incapacitated? Where are the daughters of the mothers who screamed Keep your laws off our bodies 30 years ago and now buy tickets to the Vagina Monologues? Do they not understand that they desperately need to hoard muscle and bone density and overall wellbeing like an obsessive compulsive cat lady hanging on to National Geographics and bits of string?”

blogher

Wow. My IWD post, “Is it because of all that armpit hair?” is featured on this blogher article about youtube feminism. Cool!

More and more, I feel that feminism is returning. I know the term itself has baggage, and that there are numerous women who feel that the movement is too fractured with vying groups for it to have any focus or effect. But I’m hopeful that it can and that it will.

As I predicted/prophesied at the Sunstone Symposium last summer, I believe that the Internet will be the biggest influence on the world of LDS feminism. By the same token, I believe the ‘Net will have huge impact on feminism at large–enough to initiate a new wave of activism and social change. When I see groups like Mojo Moms, Coalition of Women for Peace, Moms Rising, Women for Women, and similar organizations that are building a strong presence via the web, I am filled with hope.

Yes, I know that there are problems with attempting to organize feminists. There are factions along lines of identity politics and issues with essentializing gender. But I think there are things that we can agree on, and we can move forward with the movement by finding common ground.

is it because of all that armpit hair?

In celebration of International Women’s Day, Take a minute to watch this short video “Are YOU a Feminist?”

For whatever reason, feminism seems to be equated with armpit hair and lesbianism. That’s so odd to me, as I don’t know any female feminists that eschew shaving (tho a few male feminists that I know don’t shave their armpits) and only a handful of my feminist friends are lesbians. Why is the feminist label so maligned? Is this a legacy of the Equal Rights Amendment era? Or is this indicative of larger social discomfort with assertive women?

An anecdote: I’ve recently found myself in a social situation where I’ve observed several undergrads who have behaved belligerently towards an older woman in a position of authority over them. These same students treat a young-ish man with a similar position with much greater respect. Though there are many reasons why this might be happening in this particular situation, I suspect that much of it has to do with gender. Most people seem to be uncomfortable with assertive women, but not so with assertive men. IMO, this is a shame. Though the woman might be more qualified and more capable, the man is preferred. Why?

And, also in celebration of IWD and some truly radical feminist women (no hairy armpits, I promise). Take a few moments to watch and listen:

feminism 101, Part II

You can find Part I here.

From “The Combahee River Collective“, with my changes in italics to make this more relevant to Mormon women:

We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Mormon women’s lives as are the politics of class and religion. We also often find it difficult to separate religion from class and sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as religio-sexual oppression which is neither solely religious nor solely sexual, e.g. the history of polygamy and continued practice of insititutional polygyny by Mormon men….

In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving “correct” political goals. As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics. We believe in collective process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power with our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society…we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us.

Okay, so this is a ‘proclamation’ that I could stand behind. What about you?

Because today we must all raise our glasses to Virginia

From a must-listen podcast, The Writer’s Almanac (5 min of daily literary pleasure):

It’s the birthday of the novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, born Virginia Stephen in London (1882). She never went to school, but her father chose books for her to read from his own library. Her brothers all went to the best universities, and she wrote letters to them about her reading. She was only allowed to move out of her family home after her father’s death, when she was 22. She moved into a house with her brothers and sister, and instead of writing letters about what she’d been reading, she began to write literary criticism for the Times Literary Supplement, and she became one of the most accomplished literary critics of the era.

Woolf believed that the problem with 19th-century literature was that novelists had focused entirely on the clothing people wore and the food they ate and the things they did. She believed that the most mysterious and essential aspects of human beings were not their possessions or their habits, but their interior emotions and thoughts.

She considered her first few novels failures, but then in 1922, she began to read the work of Marcel Proust, who had just died that year. She wrote to a friend, “Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that!” Later that summer, she wrote in her diary, “There’s no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.”

Woolf’s next book was her first masterpiece: Mrs. Dalloway (1925) about all the thoughts that pass through the mind of a middle-aged woman on the day she gives a party. Woolf went on to write many more novels, including To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), but she was also one of the greatest essayists of her generation. In her long essay about women and literature, A Room of One’s Own (1929), she wrote: “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.”

birds of a feather

Today we attended a luncheon and prayer service at a local mosque. A lovely experience–learning about the faith and practice of our Muslim friends. Bonny wrote a lovely summary of her impressions. I found the most provocative part of the visit was joining the women in midday prayer. We covered our heads with scarves, knelt on the lushly carpeted floor, and observed. The women’s space was far off to the side from the main mosque room. The men’s room was richly adorned with curtains, symbols, and the like. The women’s room was completely plain except for a small cupboard with some well-worn books stacked in haphazard piles and a small stash of folded white polyester headcoverings for women who’d forgotten theirs. From where we sat and stood, we couldn’t even see the speaker who voiced the prayers.

On the drive home from the mosque we encountered this cloud up ahead:

Then, as we got closer we saw this:

And then this:

And this older gent shaking whole bags of crumbs out of crumpled bags in his grocery cart. It was obvious that these birds knew this man–their numbers were far too large for this to be a chance meeting.

We circled around the block to watch this spectacle until it was over. He balled up the empty bags and headed down the street alone.

And John and I resolved that when we are old, we will feed the birds.