"A Woman's Place"

Naomi Wolf's Commencement Speech, Scripps College, May 1992

http://gos.sbc.edu/w/wolf.html

This commencement address by Naomi Wolf really struck me, because she covers so many of the terrible stereotypes that women face even after becoming very successful. Though Wolf gave this speech in 1992, I believe much of it still holds true today – women who are smart aren’t pretty, a woman’s value lies in her purity and women shouldn’t cause conflict or else risk being considered unfeminine. 

Wolf is right when she says “Sexist institutions won't yield power if we are just patient long enough.” People seem to believe that women have fully equality now or at least will soon with very little effort; that it will just come with the changing of the times. But women and minorities have had to fight for all the rights that they have today - they weren’t just handed over by those in power. Most of the time they were given unwillingly.

It is frightening that women put up with rape culture, an androcentric society and put-downs about their appearance every single day, and some believe that everything is okay between the sexes. Some women like Christine O’Donnell even spout off anti-feminist doctrine while claiming to be “for women’s rights.” What kind of rights are we talking about here? The right to choose, or the right to have someone tell us we have a choice when we don’t?

Virgins and Sluts

I thought Celia brought up a lot of good points with the clips dealing with conflict between women – how a lot of times it is between women who are more sexualized, and women who are “virginal.” In a lot of Disney movies, especially, there is that contrast and the idea that the right woman is innocent, falls in love only once, marries young and yet is desired intensely by men. 

The woman who isn’t wanted is the whore – the woman who takes charge of her sexuality and is proud of her appearance. Confidence isn’t much of a virtue it seems, in many movies that we show to young girls. Snow White is a pretty disturbing story on the whole – a dead girl is taken by a rich man to be his wife after her mother or step-mother poisons her because of her beauty. Certainly it’s not the most moral of tales. But it is the perfect example of what is valued in women. 

I think that though “slutty” women are becoming more mainstream and women have more power over their sexuality, we as a society continue to teach young girls that it’s important to be virginal and pure for your husband and that girls who don’t do that aren’t worth much. Why is a girl’s worth so tied up in whether or not she’s had sex? In sex ed classes across the country, that’s what we’re teaching, and it’s incredibly disturbing.

Lifeboat Ethics

                The article by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Lifeboat Ethics: Mother Love and Child Death in Northeast Brazil” really struck me out of all the articles on femininity that we have been reading as a class. I hadn’t ever thought about how poverty and starvation affects motherhood and babies, but clearly it has a huge impact on child development and infant survival. What is really sad is how common infant mortality is in the area, even when it may be prevented.

                Scheper-Hughes does a good job of trying to be partial and to paint a sympathetic picture of the mothers, rather than condemning them for abandoning their sick and dying children. She shows how the issue really lies with the culture and the lack of support these women get from the government and from the Catholic church. They really have no means to support their children, nutritionally, medically or emotionally.

                A friend of mine from Brazil had talked about how terrible the wage gap and poverty are in the country, especially in rural areas. This is certainly an extreme consequence of low economic status and governments and churches who are hostile to women and the issues they face surrounding reproductive rights, birth, and child rearing.

What a Girl Wants

                The video we saw in class today on the effect of media on young girls was interesting but the points were made were sadly pretty familiar to any girl who has grown up in the past three decades. The comments made by the girls really reflected the mixed messages of the media; the girls were able to see through the images of women on TV and in magazines, but they still tried to follow what they were being told, such as “be pretty,” “wear make-up,” “be thin,” and “be sexy.”

                I don’t think that anyone intends for young girls to feel as though they should be thinking about sex or trying to fit the thin, beautiful ideal of actresses and models. But it’s an inevitable side effect when you market these ideas to older women; young girls try to emulate women who they respect and admire, and this can lead to some pretty damaging things, like anorexia and sex at too early of an age.

                What would help most is to stop perpetuating these unrealistic stereotypes in the media, whether they’re marketed to older women or pre-teens. Education also plays a big role, and we should be teaching how to have a positive body image in schools. Too often schools focus on the negatives of health – they measure the body fat of their students to determine which ones are overweight or obese, they force tests of athletic skill, and they talk about sex as something forbidden. I think schools could play a huge role in improving both physical and mental health if they changed their tactics. Unfortunately, girls do face huge issues today related to body image and sex, and we can’t rely on the media changing anytime soon.

The "Price" of Equality

                As a hardcore feminist, the article “She’s Got to Be A Macho Girl” brought up some points that were a little painful to accept for me. It talked about how the equality between the sexes brought on by the feminist movement has led to some negative things, like girls being more aggressive and promiscuous in relationships. Overall it seemed like an article ready to point a finger at feminism for “ruining” our girls.

 One of the quotes that struck me was “As girls come to equal boys in student government, honor societies and athletic teams, they are also behaving much more like boys, Dr. Kearney-Cooke said, and several studies show that girls are smoking and drinking as much as boys are.” I’m not exactly sure this is “behaving much more like boys” as it is just equalizing the aspects of adolescent culture between girls and boys. I’m not sure I would qualify smoking and drinking as male behavior either.

The article also quoted Marty Beckerman, a 19-year-old college student who has written the book Generation SLUT, a “plea for a return to more chaste behavior.” Beckerman believes “that girls may be trying to transform sex into something as meaningless as they believe it is for boys.” I don’t believe that a return to more “chaste” behavior is possible, honestly, and I don’t think it’s the right way to go about fixing the issue of adolescent s having multiple partners and having unsafe sex. Clearly sex is a part of adolescent behavior and culture, the best thing that we can do is to give teenagers the right information at an early enough age. Yes, abstinence works – but not for everyone. We can’t demand that teenagers practice abstinence and then act shocked and shame them when they don’t.

More than that though, the author seemed to be pushing the issue that girls have become more aggressive in relationships and the negative impact this has on adolescents. I think this is a case of being afraid of change – are we supposed to expect women to continue to be submissive and wait for men to come after them? The article’s gist is that “equality comes with a price.” Personally, as a feminist, I’m willing to pay that “price” for the greater good of humanity and the cultural improvement it brings.

Tough Guise

                The video that we watched in class on masculinity, Tough Guise, brought a lot of little known issues to attention. I thought it was interesting how men obviously dominate the statistics about the perpetrators of violent crimes in the U.S., but we never think to see that as a problem with masculinity or culture. Like Jackson Katz said, usually the violence is blamed on the media and videogames – but of course girls are subject to the media and video games as well. The overwhelming statistics don’t make sense, even if you do include unreported cases of rape and domestic abuse perpetrated by women.              

                What I thought was particularly enlightening was how Katz discussed rape culture in the U.S. Rape isn’t really seen as the huge problem that it is, and though it is incredibly widespread, sexual violence is portrayed as okay in movies and in the media for the most part. It’s almost just seen as men being men, especially when it comes to athletes. Like Katz brought up in his discussion of the Glen Ridge rape case, athletes so often get off scot-free in cases of sexual assault because they’re “normal” and “good guys.” Many colleges have even refused to severely punish athletes who are accused of sexual assault because they don’t want to risk losing a great player. Sexual assault is definitely downplayed in the media and in our culture.

                I think a lot of these excessive ideals of masculinity lead back into the homophobic culture we live in. Like we’ve already brought up, the insults you can launch at men either feminize them or are jabs at their sexuality. It’s incredibly wrong in our society to be a man who has feminine or “homosexual” traits. This scares men into being overly-masculine and they try to assert their “maleness” in ways that are harmful not only to other people but also to themselves. I think part of the problem is that we so often try to find a third-party to blame, like the media, when in reality we need to look at the way we treat boys and girls and what we declare as “right” and “wrong.”