I Remember When I Wasn't This Big

On Self-Esteem, Selfies, and the Culture of Thinness

About a year ago, I woke up one day and realized that I had spent the last few years hating myself. Specifically, I hated my body. I dressed poorly, without any care for my appearance. It was a miracle if I put on anything other than poorly fitting yoga pants unless it was for work. If it was for work, I put in as little effort as I could get away with.

This wasn’t a case of me rebelling against a patriarchal society’s expectations of my appearance or a refusal to give in to the incessant demand of the male gaze. I wish I could say that it was. I wish I could say the whole thing had been an intense intentional act of rebellion towards an objectifying world, or a subconscious need to express that I consistently feel like an outsider, like the way I have worn a pair of doc martens for every single one of my graduations without intentionally every remembering I’d done it before or making a proactive choice to do so.

The truth was that I was revolted…by myself. I hated everything about my appearance – including and especially my size. I had done everything to try to get it under control, to get back to the weight of my early 20s. I’d done weird crash diets and gone through periods of extreme disordered eating, trying to keep my caloric intake under 500 calories a day. I’d done gym memberships and paid hundreds a month for a personal trainer, all for not. I’d tried every type of workout under the sun, from trendy things like yoga to Pilates, to retro things like step aerobics and jazzercise, to fad things like hip-hop abs. When I could no longer face the internalized shame of going to a gym because I was too self-conscious about my size, I bought expensive gym equipment for my house, so that I could hide both my shameful body and my attempts to regain some semblance of control over my fitness.

It wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, I was a serious dancer. I danced sometimes four to five hours a day. Despite the ominous warning from my mom and grandmother at the tender age of eleven or twelve that I was fat, and if I wasn’t that I would be soon if I didn’t start watching my weight immediately, I’d never worried too much about it. I was never a petite girl. I was always broadly shouldered and thick-thighed, and I was never very muscular, but I was also limber, with powerful calves and a comfortable kind of grace. Clothes in stores fit me, and I tended toward feminine clothes, veering away from jeans and t-shirts, and toward dresses and skirts.

When I turned twenty-five, everything changed overnight. I started gaining weight at an astonishing rate. I put on fifty, then sixty, then seventy pounds in a year. I had terrible stretch marks, and none of my clothes – which, as a working, full-time student putting myself through school I couldn’t afford to replace – fit me. And the thing was – I hadn’t changed anything. Not the way I ate. Not my level of exercise (which, if anything, increased). In desperation, I went to my doctor and asked her to test my thyroid. Women in my family have struggled with thyroid problems for years, and I strongly suspected I was the latest genetic victim.

My doctor gave me a dim look. “You’re getting older,” she explained with a kind of bored patience, “your body is changing. It happens to women. You have to start watching what you eat and exercising more.”

“Please,” I begged. “Just run the test anyway.”

Turns out, my doctor owed me an apology. My thyroid levels were so low as to be “dangerously low.” The secret to my weight gain, and the decade of self-loathing that followed, was genetic.

Since then, nothing has helped. Through medication I have gotten my weigh to stabilize somewhat, but no amount of effort has helped take it off. Add to that a scary pregnancy-turned-emergency surgery that left me alive but with an ugly scar across the entirety of my abdomen, and I couldn’t stand the way I looked.

I didn’t care if my clothes didn’t fit, as long as they hid my hideous body. I didn’t do much with my hair; I wore no makeup. I didn’t even care all that much if things matched. If I walked past a mirror, I avoided looking at myself, and if someone took a picture, I would go through great pains to avoid being in it.

Me, as an Angel, at the live performance
of Welcome to Nightvale, February 2014

During the time this was going on, which spanned entire years of my life, I genuinely hated myself. I didn’t even want to shower because it meant seeing myself without clothes on. Eventually it affected everything. The insecurity bled into other aspects of my life. I thought I was entirely unattractive. I lost confidence in my marriage. Even my professional confidence suffered. When I didn’t get a job, I was convinced it was, at least in part, because I wasn’t attractive enough.

Then sometime last year, it occurred to me that most of the disgust I felt was entirely in my head. The specific impetus for that revelation isn’t really relevant. What is relevant is the sudden revelation that the biggest problem with my body was how I saw myself.

Right about that time, I saw an essay from a woman about body image and selfie culture. FN1. Amidst a sea of essays about selfies were absolutely the worst thing to ever happen to women and/or culture, here was a woman talking about how selfies were helping her. She talked about how she hid from photos because she was ashamed of her body until she had a life threatening illness. After she recovered, she realized that there were no photos of her for years prior to her illness, and that had she died, her friends and family – who loved her and had come swiftly to her with support when she became ill – would have had nothing to remember her by. So she decided then to stop hating her body – her plus sized but otherwise healthy body – and accept that she was loved for who she was, a fully-abled, capable, beautiful woman. She even went on to see, in the photos she no longer avoided, things she liked about her appearance.

At the beach, Christmas 2013

This was a strange kind of revelation for me. It doesn’t take me than fifteen seconds online to find photos of women who don’t fit the current slim beauty standard being berated for showing their bodies in the public sphere, digital or otherwise. Any woman over a size six who has the audacity to demonstrate any kind of pride in her appearance will be immediately raked over the coals. Youtubers like Cora at VintageorTacky and Loey Lane take unbelievable amounts of criticism over their size positivity pieces. FN2. I actually expect I’m going to get some similar comments just for posting this piece. I occasionally get them now, without writing about body positivity. FN3.

So I started taking photos…of myself. I no longer took empty landscapes. On my frequent solo road trips, I held out the camera and put myself in the photo. When a friend wanted to take a photo of us together, I leaned in, instead of away. And yes, I succumbed to that self-congratulatory trend of the moment – the selfie. I take selfies all the time now, sometimes several times a week. And I don’t just take them – I post them. I put them on my Instagram and my Facebook page. I make David lean in with me at weddings or on vacation; I take them with my cats when I am happy to be home.

And I am here to tell you something, dear reader. Every day that I take a photo of myself and think, “wow, I like this; I am posting it,” I gain back a little bit of love for myself. Because, yes, there is something about selfies that is both self-congratulatory and narcissistic.

But let’s look at the real meaning of those words. As a woman who does not conform to stereotypical beauty standards, it turns out that celebrating myself, congratulating myself on my own inner and outer beauty, establishing my voice and my style and my self-expression as something I feel comfortable putting out into the world because I can find something everyday – even something small – to love and appreciate about myself? That’s a radical act. That’s an act of rebellion. And, perhaps most importantly, that’s an act of love.

I am not going to spend the rest of my life hating myself because I don’t look the way the world tells women we should look. I am going to take better care of myself – of my body, of my appearance, of my being. Because what my disheveled appearance of my past days was reflecting was an inner feeling that I wasn’t even worth my own time, much less anyone else’s. And I refuse to live like that anymore, to be embarrassed or ashamed or afraid. Because that is not who I am when I am being my best self.

As Ani DiFranco once eloquently wrote: “I wanted to take up lots of room. I wanted to loom.” Women who take up space in the world take a lot of flack for it. We’re culturally trained not to be too loud, too assertive, too physically or spiritually large. Where men are culturally trained to assume that any and all available space is absolutely their purview, women get literally and symbolically squeezed out and shunted to the side.  But some of us were not meant to make ourselves smaller. Some of us were just made that to take up space; we talk loud, we laugh loud, we speak up, we challenge authority, we make our own way. We even make love loud.

I am one of those women.  I am never going to be smaller than my shadow on the wall. And I don’t want to be.

El Hubs and I, getting pretty
for a wedding, August 2013

I’m not one to promote empty vanity, but I’m here to tell you that self-loathing can be equally, if not more, destructive. So my selfie indulgence and my Sephora VIB Rouge status doesn’t mean that the world should revolve around me, that my self-worth is equivalent to the size and cost of my make-up collection, or that I am only as good as that tilted angle selfie I took today. It doesn’t mean that I mistake surface for depth, or that I will trade substance for shallowness. It doesn’t mean that I will determine my own worth by my exterior.

But It does mean that I will no longer let my exterior define my value. I will no longer neglect myself because I think the world doesn’t value my appearance and I have no right to be seen. And I will no longer kill myself to fit into a box that was never big enough for me anyway.

I am a fully-abled, educated, assertive, smart, attractive woman. And it is about time I started acting like it. And one of the things that made me realize all these things about myself was taking self-portraits. Was forcing myself not to look away. Was confronting who I was, and learning to love it, piece by piece, one dreamily filtered digital Polaroid at a time.

When I leave this world, I will leave behind me a stream of bits and bites that show that I was here, and that reflect who I am: someone who lives big and loves big, who likes good food and good friends and a good show on a Friday night. Someone who enjoys music and art and travel. Someone who was generous and kind and had a full life. Someone who was worth seeing, worth knowing about, worth the space I took up.

New Orleans for my
birthday March 2014

And yes, I will also be someone with a massive collection of perfume and make-up, someone who enjoyed the occasional manicure, and someone who learned a little something about skin care. Someone who learned to love and protect and appreciate herself enough to take the time to appreciate the body she was in and the life that came with it.

As a student of history, this is part of my way of telling others, “I was here.” As a feminist, it’s my way of saying, “I am here, and I am proud, and I don’t care if you don’t like it.” And as someone who loves and is loved by others, it is a way of letting the people who can’t be with me every day see a little bit of my life.

And the craziest thing is that –when I began to allow myself to love and appreciate and even celebrate my appearance a little – how happy it made the people who loved me. How celebrated my confidence was by the people who wanted me to be kinder to myself. How glad they all seemed that finally I could see a little of what they see in me all the time.

I’m not saying that this doesn’t make the beauty industry less opportunistic or exploitative. I’m not saying it alleviates the psychological or emotional perils of the problematized self in a digitally curated age. I’m saying that – as with all things – the answer is often in the implementation. For me, loving myself enough to be willing to face myself, and to let others see me? That’s progress. And I appreciate the selfie as a tool in the ceaseless war of self-doubt.

So here’s three cheers for the selfie, and for the small role it can play in the struggle for self-acceptance in an often critical world that can force one to internalize a lot of unrealistic expectations. I appreciate that, in a year of selfies, I can see that most of what I disliked was all in my head, and I can now focus less on unrealistic and, given my medical restraints, impossible goals about my weight and focus instead on having a healthy, active lifestyle in the body I have, no matter what size it is.

“I remember when I wasn't this big,
and now ya'll wanna act like you helped me get here, yeah.
Oh, now everybody wanna love me?
Try to knock me down but I'm strong,
did all this on my own.
Ain't got no time for no new friends,
so for now just leave me alone.
I don't need y'all anyway…

And if you wasn't here when I was down,
then you won't be here when I'm up.
Now the same one you looked over will be the same one that blew up.
Ain't it funny how this life thing works?
Just when you think it's finished is when it all begins.
Go from doubts to having the thought it might work.
It goes up and down and then it starts again…”
~ “Don’t Need Y’all,” Iggy Azalea

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FN1. I tried very hard to find this essay. If anyone sees it or knows the one I’m talking about, please let me know.

FN2. I think Loey’s piece, “Why Men Hate Fat Women”, is particular poignant.

FN3. Not that you will see them, because I filter like a mo fo, and if you don’t like that, well, I don’t give a flip, because this is my corner of the internet, troll.

And for that one special ex who likes to call me names specifically targeted at my size whenever he gets the opportunity, let me tell you something – I may be large, but you’re cruel, and if I had to choose, I’d rather be me any day of the week. So you? You can suck it.

Being John Wesley: A Few Words On Art, Life, and the Unknown Impact of Others

This weekend marked the anniversary of my ten-year college reunion.  I was on my class committee, but unfortunately ended up extremely sick on Friday.  Consequently, I was stuck in bed most of the weekend and only rallied to make it to the retirement party of a beloved campus icon and staff member today because there was no way I was going to miss the opportunity to celebrate a staff member who meant so much to me.

Unfortunately, being sick meant missing the opportunity to spend time with the one person I really wanted to see at reunion: my sweet friend Bonnie. Bonnie was a tremendously talented woman I had the good fortune, not only to meet in college, but to work closely with during our individual and joint quests to top each other as the bigger overachiever in the Lewis & Clark College History Department.  Bonnie was every bit as passionate as I was about studying history, learning the research and analytical skills to be a good historian in her own right, and ensuring the stories of those who were likely to be overlooked or lost to the sands of time be captured and retold, so that we might learn from all those who went before, not only those who were privileged in moment of their lives.

Bonnie made me a better student.  She was my partner when I faced the rare and dreaded group project (something I have never been a fan of); she was my reciprocal support system and study buddy when the nights of research went long; and she was someone I respected enough to want to compete with, to want to earn the respect of, and whom I desired to share my work with, so that it might be improved in the sharing.  When it came to history, Bonnie was my cheerleader, champion, critique partner, and friend. 

But Bonnie helped me grow in a different and arguably more important way.  When I met Bonnie, she was far further along in her feminism than I was.  While I was trying to figure out what feminism meant to me and the kind of feminist I wanted to be, Bonnie was helping found the Womyn’s Center, organizing The Vagina Monologues, and single-handedly putting together a week of Take Back the Night events.  Most of the truly feminist programming that happened while I was a student at Lewis & Clark was run, in large part, by Bonnie.  I spent most of my time in college being a feminist academic, learning to parse thick texts and integrate my radical feminism into my already established philosophical framework and life experiences; meanwhile, Bonnie was busy being the hands-on activist and advocate it would take me years to become. 

When I met Bonnie, we both had the same dream: to become American historians and professors of history like our shared academic mentors. However, as way led to way, Bonnie stayed on the path to academia, while I stumbled into other interests and opportunities.  I don’t regret my choices, but I will say that my own inability to maintain the kind of passion and dedication we once shared deepened my respect and admiration for Bonnie as I watched her press on in the face of adversity where I would have turned back.

I discovered today, upon receiving a copy of Bonnie’s now completed doctoral dissertation, that my name appears in the acknowledgements.  Bonnie calls me her “first friend to love history.”  But if I am her first friend to love history, then Bonnie was my first true feminist friend.  Without her, I wouldn’t be half the person I am today; I am also fairly certain this blog would not exist. 

What stunned me about finding my name in Bonnie’s dissertation acknowledgements most was that  I had no idea I’d made such an impact on her life.  Similarly, I suspect she has no idea she had such a significant impact on mine.  At the time, we were just two young women who shared a passion for history, story-telling, and the secret untold stories of women and children.  We ate together, studied together, grew together, and never once did it occur to us at the time that we were shaping each other into the adults we’d later become.

The last thing shared by our outgoing Vice President of Campus Living at his retirement party today was this charge to all in attendance, borrowed from John Wesley: “Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.”  I’ve been thinking about those words a lot, and about Bonnie’s dissertation note, and about those two girls pouring through the books in the reference section of the library over a decade ago.

You never know who is going to happen into your life and, though you don’t know it in the moment, change you in a subtle but fundamental way, like a rock thrown into the pond of your being, rippling out and out forever.  It may be the girl with the stripped stockings and spiky blonde hair with pink bangs who is willing to match you late night minute-for-sleep-deprived-minute on a research project, and in turn teaches you not just about history or feminism, but also of how much you are actually capable of when you are pushed to do your best.  It may be the lovely woman with the vintage dresses and classic sense of style who introduces you to your first beautiful perfumes, sparking a passion for olfactory art that changes forever the way you interact with the world.  It may be the kindly old vice president who encourages you to stand up for yourself when you’re fighting with the entire theatre department to bring new works of art and new collaboration to a college; it may by the young, passionate sound designing roommate whose work on a beautiful play inspires you to think about what art is and what it means to create something, then to pick up a pen and start writing again for the first time in weeks.

You never know who will change your life; you never know when you might change someone else’s. And since you don’t know, since you may never know, whose life you are changing in the moment, then perhaps that makes Wesley’s charge even more timely, and therefore appropriate:

Do all the good you can.
By all the means you can.
In all the ways you can.
In all the places you can.
At all the times you can.
To all the people you can.
As long as ever you can.

You just never know when you might be the person who makes all the difference.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a copy of The Student Body: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890-1940 to read.

I cannot believe it.

Review of By Kilian Good Girl Gone Bad

I cannot believe how long it has been since I last posted.

Have I stopped loving perfume? No.

Have I stopped wearing perfume? No.

Have I stopped buying perfume? No. I admit I've slowed down some, but I've already made my first purchases of 2014 and we're only a month in.

So why did I stop posting?  Some if it has to do with decreasing free time and increasing work responsibility.  Some of it has to do with feeling like I don't have much to say, which is silliness because actually things are happening all the time. So the answer is, no good reason certainly.  And time to correct it, I think.

One of my coworkers told me around the holidays that I always smell like "Christmas and deliciousness."  That's a pretty nice compliment. (Though I was wearing Jo Malone Bitter Orange & Chocolate at the time, so it was also quite accurate).  Another coworker sent me this NPR piece Friday entitled, "Perfume's Scents Of Subversion? Sweat, Musk And Patchouli" and said, "At first I thought it was you."

So obviously, perfume? Still a huge part of my life.  Right now Portlandia is covered in a crazy ice storm and I am wearing By Kilian Good girl gone Bad while I watch vampire movies and try to entertain my cats.  Part of the "In the Garden of Good and Evil" collection, the scent is described as:

A sensual and unrestrained temptation. The perfume opens on the fresh innocence of the petals of Jasmin Sambac and the Apricot sweetness of Chinese Osmanthus. Letting go of their demure appearances, the flowers toss off their inhibitions and reveal their decadent side! The Rose of May gives off its honeyed heat. The Indian Tuberose nakedly exhibits its milky roundness, while the narcotic sensuality of Egyptian Narcissus surges forth, uncontrollable and deliciously haunting. Notes of Virginia Cedar and Amber open up and try to assert their dominant character.

I have to say, I'm usually a sucker for By Kilian scents, but this one isn't what I expected.  Maybe it's because I have sweat, musk, and patchouli on the brain, but this one just isn't happening for me.

According to LuckyScent, the notes are plenty floral but there seemed like there was enough dirty fleshy bottom notes in the mix I thought I might like it: Jasmin Sambac, osmanthus, rose, tuberose, narcissus, violet accord, plum accord, cedar wood, amber, patchouli, vetiver, musk.

I've tried Good girl twice now, and I have to sadly report that for me? It does not work.  Nope.  It landed on my skin as a hot mess of florals and screechy white musk, overwhelming amber, and fake woods. I do get some peachy stone fruit in the middle, which is nice-ish, but it is just ruined by the almost headache inducing noise of the rest.

I feel both relieved and disappointed. On the one hand, I love a lot of the By Kilian perfumes and they are so expensive that it gives me and my wallet great sadness. So in that sense, I feel like I missed a bullet.  But on the other hand, there are folks out there who really like this one and get a lovely scent I wish I had the chance to experience.  Seriously.  I wish I was getting "slut in a lovely Dior gown" but that is not what is happening for me. Instead, the whole thing feels like a terribly awkward seduction. It's like a preteen with braces trying too hard to be sexy in her middle school frump wear. In fact, it most called to mind that scene when Dawn tries to seduce the lead singer of her older brother's band in Welcome to the Dollhouse. FN2. That is not attractive.

Victoria did a nice little rant on the name of the scent, which I feel inclined to agree with. I'm not much for slut shaming, and I tend to think she's right that this what the "gone bad" is meant to imply.  You know, in the same way that terrible Robin Thicke song wants to do things with 'a good girl.' FN1. I understand the need to feel subversive, but at the same time, you do kind of question whether playing into the the madonna/whore trope is a good idea.  I think the name would bother me less if the copy cut against the idea, but alas, alack, it doesn't.

In the end, Good girl gone Bad is a pass for me. But maybe you'll get lucky like some of the other reviewers who really liked it.

Want more? Try...
~ A review from The Non-Blonde
~ A review from EauMG
~ A review from That Smell
~ A review from Make Perfume, Not War
~ A review from My Perfume Diaries
~ A review from Ça Fleure Bon
~ A review from Perfume Posse

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FN1. Can't believe it took me this long to get around to posting the Feminist Parody, Defined Lines, on this blog.  LOVE.IT.


FN2. If anyone comments on the name similarity,  I will be most displeased.  

Halloween Make-Up Fun!: Once Again, With Feeling

My third and final costume, and the one I actually wore for Halloween since my work had our official dress up day and costume contest on Wednesday, October 30, was a last minute idea.  I was actually working from home on Halloween because I was fighting the creeping ear/nose/throat crude. 

Costume Number One: Mystic Falls Vampire

I've always used a vampire as a fallback costume because it requires nothing more than fangs, but since I was on a fancy make-up roll this year, I decided to look at different vampire looks on Pinterest. I was surprised by the varied approaches to doing vampire make-up (though I noticed absolutely no one was covered in sparkly glitter).  One that appealed a lot to me, though, was surprisingly simple when I started looking at how-to videos.

What really appealed to me was the messy wet mouth look, the one that says, "Hi, don't mind all the blood, I was just eating." I would never have thought to get all crazy smear-y before looking through photos, but once I did, my immediate presumption was that it would require some costume make-up.  Given that I was more or less housebound due to unwell feelings, I did not have the inclination to go out to buy anything.

Luckily, it turned out it was a pretty easy look to do with what I had on hand. But first! The face. Once again, I used  MAKE UP FOR EVER HD Microperfecting Primer in Mauve to move my natural paleness even further toward ivory. Then I mixed on my normal base, MAKE UP FOR EVER Mat Velvet + Matifying Foundation in Ivory, with some of my leftover MAKE UP FOR EVER Aquarelle in Pearly White. Thanks to the amazing powers of the BEAUTY BLENDER, possibly the greatest single improvement in make-up application ever, I ended up appropriately and wonderfully pale without feeling coated with make-up even though I was, in face, covered.

For my cheeks, I used URBAN DECAY COSMETICS Naked Flushed to add in shadowing under my cheekbones and some contouring around my hair and jawline.Lastly, I added an extremely light coating of MAKE UP FOR EVER HD Microfinish Powder to set my face.

Now that I was thoroughly and deathly pale, I went to work on my mouth.  It turns out that if you want a crazy, "Don't mind me, I was just feeding on the blood of the innocent" look, it's actually surprisingly cheap and easy to obtain.  

The first thing I did was outline my lips and then fill them in with the bloodiest lip pencil I could find.  I tried a couple but the real winner was the cheap but surprisingly creamy and luxurious MILANI Color Statement Lipliner in True Red. Seriously, this $4.00 lip pencil kicks serious butt. 

Then I applied a healthy layer of WET N WILD GLASSY GLOSS Lip Gel Through the Looking Glass, a clear glossy gloss that cost me a whole $3.00. Next -- and this was the crazy, hilariously easy part that never would have occurred to me if I hadn't seen a how-to video to prove it -- I took the pads of my fingers and dragged them through my freshly done lips, down my chin and even over a little to my cheek. Then I reapplied the lipliner and gel and did it again! Yep. That was the secret.  Fill, cover, drag your hand over your mouth until you reach desired disgustingness.

Once I was appropriate covered in smears I outlined by lips one last time, added a light coating of MAKE UP FOR EVER Rouge Artist Intense in Moulin Rouge, and then finished it off with one last coat of the lip gel to complete my wet lip look.

Moving to my eyes, I knew I wanted a dramatic look to match the eyes. I looked at red eyed looks and decided I would do one that was both heavy on the black and the red, because really -- when else does a girl get to rock that look on a random Thursday?  The first thing I did was use a  cheap black liquid liner, MAYBELLINE Eye Studio Master Duo Eyeliner in Black, to put down a heavy black base outlining my eye. I used a smudge brush to diffuse the line.  The I laid a layer of URBAN DECAY Crave over it, covering my lid.

In the crease, I laid down a layer of SEPHORA COLLECTION Colorful Eyeshadow in Cherries On Top, then used a brush to blend it up and outward with both, carrying the colors across the whole of my lid.  I then blended the crave into it, adding more as needed to fill in my crease but maintaining a defused red aura around it.

Next, I added an additional layer of Cherries On Top below my lower lid eyeliner, then used an angled brush to create a streaky veined accent down into my cheek. These reddish veins were a last minute impulse accent, and it wasn't until someone pointed it out to me later that I'd essentially done something similar to the vamp face on The Vampire Diaries that I realized that's where I'd pulled if from.  Subconsciously all I knew was that my eye look didn't seem 'finished' without them. I added a white eyeliner along the inside of my bottom lashes to bring up the contrast, which I think worked out nicely.

Lastly, I added a set of SEPHORA COLLECTION Fringe Benefits Lashes along my top lashes, filled in with a little extra eyeliner, and then swept them up with a lash curler and a healthy coating of BENEFIT COSMETICS They're Real! Mascara.

I added a fake bite on my wrist and neck as final make-up touches.  It was surprisingly easy to make the bites look a little bloody.  I made two heavy dots with BENEFIT COSMETICS Benetint, a rosy lip and cheek stain that I adore, and let the stain run a little, then added a teensy dot of the aforementioned black eyeliner in the center. 

For a costume, I wore a short sleeved, floor length maxi dress, which was very comfortable and a pair of dangly rhinestone earrings to add some bling.  The whole thing was comfortable, easy, and meant that I looked like I'd put a lot of effort into a costume that took me very little effort.

Sadly, we didn't have a single trick-or-treater this year. By the end of the evening, I was feeling a little better, and David took me to the local 24-hour diner to get soup and pie. It wasn't an ideal holiday this year, but it was plenty enough for me.

And thus wraps our Halloween make-up review!

I have to say, one of the great things about this Halloween was how much I got to experiment with make-up.  Growing up today must be so different for girls without mothers. My grandmother was never one much for getting creative with the beauty products, and though my mom was an adept hand with a make-up brush, she was gone by the time I could have really used her help.

Nowadays, there are blogs and articles and even whole YouTube channels where talented amateurs and even professional make-up artists will teach you everything you need to know.  I love that.  I love that this crazy community of people can come together through the silent electric pulses down the wire to provide the kind of guidance I never had on a whole host of topics, including how to do your make-up so you don't end up with a lot of unfortunately teenage photographs.

I love that they will tell you how to do it on the cheap, and which drugstore lipsticks are duplicate colors for the expensive kinds I could never have afforded as a girl. I love that competence in blending in can come a little easier for some girl out there like me.

And, as a feminist, let me say this: I like make-up. I like the art and artistry of it. I don't feel compelled to wear make-up. In truth, since I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I've been made fun of more often for wearing make-up than not.  I wear it because I like it. I like the costume aspects of it. I like the way it allows one to acknowledge the constructed nature of gender.  In that way, perhaps my attitude toward make-up is something akin to that of someone who enjoys drag.

As Ru Paul once eloquently pointed out, “We're born naked, and the rest is drag.” Perhaps one of the nicest things about the how-tos of cosmetics in the digital age is that has never been more apparent how much of what women are being sold is constructed, which not only makes learning to control and vary our own physical appearance easier, but also allows us all to see more clearly just how fake it all was to begin with.

That's some crazy strength.

Neko Case has a new album out. I love her, so I bought the album the day it was released. The next morning, I was playing it as I got ready for work. All of the sudden, track six, “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu” came on, layers of a cappella singing ringing round the tile and mirrored room.

Hey, little kid that I saw at the bus stop one day.
It was nearly midnight in Honolulu.
We were waiting for the shuttle to take us to the aeroplane
when your mother said, your mother said,
like I couldn't hear her, she said,
"Get the fuck away from me!
Why don't you ever shut up?
Get the fuck away from me!"

I was struck silent and still by these lines. There was something so painful and familiar about those words. I can't remember if those exact words were ever said of me. I'm missing a lot of time. But I know the sentiment was there, often enough, in both my parents, when I was a kid.

Recently, I was talking with someone who seemed not to understand what it means to be haunted, literally, by your own past. To be stalked through your dreams by loved ones trying to kill you, reliving moments that are like something out of a scripted nightmare or a gritty after-school special. Even today, I live with a hyper-vigilance, and it isn't against my triggers anymore as much as it is against myself.

I am constantly afraid of my own body, of the way a song or TV show will cause my breathing to catch or my hands to shake or my body to shudder out of control. In that moment, my own nervous system will betray the cool, calm, collected professional exterior I manage ninety-nine percent of the time and I won't even be able to breath, tears rushing down my face and words I don't want to say aloud tumbling from my mouth. I can't stop it when it happens. I have to just sit there until I calm down. Sometimes it takes a while. And the whole time, I wish for nothing more than for it to stop.

I live with the constant fear that this will happen in public. That it will happen in a movie theater. In a restaurant. At work. I am sitting in a coffee shop in Nashville right now, and as I write this to you, I am crying. I wonder what the lady sitting across the table from me thinks of the tears I can't contain as I write this.

Well, I just want to say that it happened,
'cause one day when you ask yourself,
"Did it really happen?"
You won't believe it, but yes, it did.
And I'm sorry.
And I'm sorry
'cause it happens everyday.

There is a tendency, particularly in people complicit in abuse by their silence, by their ignorance, or by their reluctance to intervene, to deny its reality. Though they are doing what is natural, protecting themselves from the brutality of the world, their denial gives them a role in that abuse. They contribute to its perpetration, its perpetuation, its prevalence in the lives of otherwise bright and hopeful beings, sometimes long after the abuse has ended.

This denial of what has happened has a tendency to eat away at survivors. Our abusers are already skilled at crazy-making, brilliant liars and manipulators whose strength depends on communal silence in the face of horror and our isolation as victims. It takes a lot to admit what has happened to us. Our abusers condition us to keep our mouths shut, to deny it if asked, and society furthers that effect by its tendency to ignore and marginalize. That those around us, even years later, will minimize, deny, or otherwise ignore the truth of our past compounds that pain, makes it difficult for us to name the ghosts in our heads, in our hearts, even after we've long since accepted and acknowledged the truth of them.

They won't believe you
when you tell them.
They won't believe you
when you say, "My mother, she did not love me.
My mother, she did not love me."
No, no, no, no.
No, no, no, no.

If you are ever confronted with a survivor, do us a favor. Don't pretend it didn't happen. It happened. You don't have to like it, or like your role in it, but don't pretend it didn't.

Also, don't pretend you know what we've been through. If I've learned anything from my own abuse, it is that this kind of horror is deeply personal. Even two people – a mother and child, a brother and a sister – experiencing the same abuse, won't experience it the same way. Don't assume that your pain looks or feels like what ours looks like.

Just accept what we tell you. Say it's horrible. Say you're sorry it happened. Say you're proud of who we are now. But don't deny us, or say you know how we feel.

You don't.

And I, for one, am glad you don't. I wouldn't wish my bad days and terrible nights on you. I don't want this kind of suffering for anyone.

Some days you feel like a cartoon
and people will rush to make excuses for you.
You'll hear yourself complain
but don't you ever shut up; please,
Kid, have your say...

I recently dropped something about being an abuse survivor in passing conversation to someone I thought already knew my backstory. We've known each other for the better part of a year now, and I just assumed it had come up already. When I realized I'd just dropped a bomb, I gave him the shorthand run down. “I had no idea,” he said. “I would have never guessed any of that.”

I hear that a lot. When I left the DV unit at the DA's office, I sent out a thank you to everyone in my department. I'd been there for over nine months and I'd never told most of them. When I wrote that they'd helped me heal and that I wanted them to know that there was at least one survivor who saw how committed they were, how hard they worked, how much they tried, and was grateful, some of them were shocked. “We didn't know,” one said, surprised etched across his serious face. “We had no idea.”

Of course not. You'd never know it to meet me. You can know me for months and months, maybe even years, and never know. Not anymore. I'm glad of that. I'm glad that you can't always tell just by looking anymore. But just because you can't see it, that doesn't make it any more or less true.

The friend I told recently speculated in passing that being survivor had shaped my feminism. “Of course,” I said. “How could it not?” Truthfully, though, it shapes everything. I don't always say that it does, but I know in my heart of hearts, the experience is indelibly imprinted on who I am and how I see the world as much as those unseen bruises used to be.

I've occasionally run into people who are curious as to why I would ever tell anyone, especially when I can hide it if I choose. They ask: “Aren't you passed it?” and “Don't you want to be passed it?” and “Aren't you worried that continuing to talk about it continues to allow it to victimize you?”

No.

God, yes.

Absolutely not.

The truth is, I can be healthy. I can be happy. I can be a functional, contributing member of society. I can be, by any measure of the word, a success in life. But I will also always be a survivor. I will never stop being a survivor. And there are a lot of us out there. I have lost count of the amount of my smart, successful, educated friends, most of them women, who are all those things despite being abused and assaulted by someone they believed was safe and trustworthy, someone who was supposed to care for them. I can tell you that when I tote up their numbers, the survivors outweigh those that aren't, and that's just the ones I know about.

The truth is, we are all around you, every day, and you may never know it. And as an adult with a happy life and a healthy relationship, I write these pieces because I know how scared I used to be of my own voice. I know how many people ignored all my not-very-subtle cries for help. I know, from working with survivors first-hand, how many of them feel like I used to: feel crazy, feel ignored, feel like no one will listen, and even if they do, that they still won't believe.

I am an educated, upwardly mobile, full-abled, cis-gendered, relatively young, relatively attractive white woman in the first world. I live in a privilege position now, socially speaking, and talking about my experiences is one of the ways I take what happened to me and I make something good out of it. I speak for those who right now cannot speak for themselves. I speak for those who are still too afraid to. I speak so that we are not invisible, and in the hopes that someone else will hear me and know they are not alone. That they know they will be believed if they talk to me. That I am here, and I can help. That they can get through it and get past it and make something fine from their lives.

Every time I do this, I don't feel revictimized. I feel empowered. I feel my own strength. And those ghostly shadows in my life grow a little smaller compared to the truth of what was then and what is now. And by talking about it, I also acknowledge the ways in which I am still a work in progress, and the areas I still have to work on. It keeps me humble. It reminds me that there are still miles to go. And, I've found, far more people believe me than I ever would have imagined. Far more people love me despite my flaws and my fears and my demons than the abused little kid I once was ever would have believed. In acknowledging the truth, I find acceptance. I find a kind of peace.

'Cause I still love you
Even if I don't see you again.

“That's some crazy strength,” my friend concluded when I had finished telling him my story.

“Yep,” I replied, because that's the truth.

That's some crazy strength.

Every survivor I know has it, whether we feel it every day or not. I have it. You have it. And we are successful despite everything that has happened. That is our true secret superpower. We are not defeated, and every day that we get up and keep going, we are demonstrating a kind of super-human strength.

So if you're reading this, and you feel alone, or broken, or lost, know this: It really happened. It may still be happening. But you are a superhero. Every day that you go on breathing in spite of it, you are a success. You can get out. And, in spite of it, you will be okay. Even when you're not. You will still be okay.

Because I believe in you.

And I did it.

And you can, too.

And I love you
even if I don't see you again.

'Cause she knows that it's demanding to defeat those evil machines...

Thoughts on Rape Culture, Advertising, Feminist Aesthetics, and Warrior Fatigue

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. ~ Virginia Woolf

I haven't blogged about advertising and feminist aesthetics in a long while. It happened for a handful of reasons: lack of time, lack of energy, distracted by shiny objects. But also? Sometimes, I get warrior fatigue. Sometimes I feel lost and alone, orphaned by my own movement, and generally defeated. It is hard to always be fighting.

Oh yes, this completely
nude woman totally makes
me want to buy Shalimar...
no wait: I meant puke.

I also sometimes wonder, dear reader, if you aren't a little tired of hearing it. I feel like I am writing to the choir. If you already know this stuff, what is one more post going to do?

“There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.” ~ Adrienne Rich

I was always a feminist. I don't know why. I think probably because being an abuse little kid raised by crazy people who kept insisting they were normal forced me to make a choice. Either they were right, and I was awful and deserved awfulness, or they were wrong, and the world was a weirdly biased and inherently unjust place.

I did what any child desperate to survive would do under those conditions.

I chose myself.

I chose not to accept that I was awful, not to let their poison change my mind. I made that decision one terrible day in a hospital, though I didn't know it at the time. But I do remember thinking, very clearly, that it wouldn't always be this way, and it wasn't worth my life. I stopped taking out the awfulness on myself that day, on my own body, and I started living, just out of spite. If I was going to die, it wouldn't be by my own hand. I would no longer be complicit in my own defeat.

Nearly twenty years later, I've seen enough of the ugliness in the world to wonder: how many women have had to make such a choice...

Dear Tom Ford, thanks for making it easy
to despise your entire product line.

All oppression creates a state of war. ~ Simone de Beauvoir

That my father had a position of public power that made normal channels of relief unavailable to us underscored the power of status and privilege. That I am naturally highly empathetic meant that when I got older, my sense of personal injustice seemed easy to extend to others when I came to see the world in all its horrible inequity.

These things made me, like fire tempers a blade.

Call it coincidence or the juxtaposition of fate and genetics, a little nature/nurture combo, but whatever it is, I am who I am: a feminist from first breath to last. But when I am tired and weary of a world where people genuinely seem to hate women, and especially hate those who attempt to fight against that hatred, even I have to take a break.

Sometimes I just can't do it anymore. When I see students protesting rape culture at a top tier college being told they deserve to be raped and at another university, a Take Back the Night week is protested by a crazy man who says the students marching for safety are sluts who should be raped, sometimes I just feel like nothing I do matters.

“Patriarchy has no gender.” ~ bell hooks

If we could see patriarchy,
I feel like it would look
a lot like this...

Patriarchy is so big; it is so everywhere and every time and every culture. It is like The Silence in Doctor Who. It's influence is always there, just outside your field of vision, pervasive and persistently changing the world for the better. And as soon as you look away, even for a moment—you forget. You can't remember where that sick feeling in your stomach came from because you're too busy just trying to live your life. You forget that the silence, and here I mean the silencing influence of patriarchy, is standing behind you, influencing your thoughts, your decisions, even your actions.

The most stunning, terrible, mind-melting eleven words I have ever read was a short line in Catharine A. MacKinnon's “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory.” They were these:

Feminism does not begin with the premise that it is unpremised.

The piece—a thick diatribe against our broken understanding of rape and our failed ability to properly prosecute it, as well as a whole lot more—drops this nugget of wisdom in two paragraphs out of maybe a hundred containing just as many ideas. And yet, it scrambled my brain all around. She goes on.

That is, the equality of women to men will not be scientifically provable until it is no longer necessary to do so. Women's situation offers no outside to stand on or gaze at, no inside to escape to, too much urgency to wait, no place else to go, and nothing to use but the twisted tools that have been shoved down our throats. If feminism is revolutionary, this is why.

Who needs a woman
then they can have an
object and woman in one!

Even if we are revolutionary, even if what I do is a fight worth fighting, it is only because I continue to exist in the face of this vast awful thing that premises me. This is both a literal and philosophical truth in my case. The abuse of a developing child premises the adult they become; the oppression of women underlies my understanding of the world, the entire world's understanding of itself.

It affects men and women. It premises our understandings of ourselves and each other. Patriarchy is terrible for everyone, and we all cannot escape it. We literally cannot imagine a world without patriarchy. The driving animus of my life, feminism, exists because of patriarchy. Patriarchy and an inborn sense of wrongness, of injustice.

That realization, that moment when I see the horrible thing I always feel standing behind me, raising the hair along the back of my neck and I know it's real and true and awful, the moment just before I forget again, it is terrible and sad and it takes all the fight out of me.

“How else to make a dent in an object as immovable as patriarchy itself...?” ~ Dalma Heyn

Yes, my dear, sweet, lovely, and perhaps saddened reader, I get tired. I believe we all do, from time to time.

But then I see something like the video below, and I remember. I remember what it is like to feel the rage of first knowing, or of realizing the truly awful depth of the problem, and to think, “I can change it. Maybe only a little. Maybe only for one person. Maybe that person will just be me.” And with humor and angry and sadness and creativity, they begin to struggle against the wrongness without and the rage within.


And I think, that is why I write these. Because if one of you is new, or has just found this piece, or is reading any of these words and considering these ideas for the first time, let me say:

Yes, it is a terrible thing. Yes, it is okay to feel sad and frustrated and angry. But know this: you are not alone. And every single one of us, to the best we can, are fighting with you.

Until that unpremised day, viva la revolution.

Or, to put it another, particularly Whovian way:

Sooner or later, Silence will fall.


"...'Cause she knows that it'd be tragic
if those evil robots win.
I know she can beat them.

Oh Yoshimi, they don't believe me,
but you won't let those robots defeat me."
~ Flaming Lips, "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots"

Observe the blood, the rose tattoo, of the finger prints on me from you.

Aftelier Perfumes Wild Roses EdP

Dear reader:

I am currently captivated by a song called "Marlene On the Wall." Suzanne Vega wrote it about a poster of Marlene Dietrich she kept on her bedroom wall, and what Marlene might think of Vega's life if Marlene could talk. It is an intriguing song about the elegant and coldly beautiful Dietrich's observation of Vega being her own worst enemy in love:

Marlene watches from the wall.
Her mocking smile says it all
as she records the rise and fall
of every soldier passing.
The only soldier now is me.
I'm fighting things I cannot see.
I think it's called my destiny
that I am changing.

The song is about a woman with serious trust issues, a woman who's inability to connect is makes it impossible to know when/if she's met someone she can really trust. Though she seems to be breaking out of this pattern, it is unclear how that will effect her current relationship. I've listened to the song more than a dozen times, and I settled on two different and conflicting meanings.

In the one sense, Vega seems to be unable to reach beyond her own boundaries, the walls she constructs for emotional safety, to reach a deeper connection. The song seems to ask if she will be able to muster to the courage to be vulnerable with her current paramour, to allow him to reach into the heart of her, not keep him at arm's length.

My second reading is of a woman who cannot break out of a bad pattern with a man she loves, but whom she remains in a self-destructive loop with. Whether that loop is one she repeats with different men who are all lacking in the same specific way or the same man she can't break free of seems ambiguous. The point is that, whomever the soldier(s) is/are, he is interested in Vega for her body only, and Vega cannot keep herself from falling into bed with a man/men who have no interest in her beyond what he/they can get from her physically.

I love the tension in the song. Will she be able to love? Will she think well enough of herself to demand love in return? If she is changing, is it for good or for ill? The narrative arch, left unresolved, allows the song to contain both hope and hopelessness in tension, both the bitterness of betrayal and the disappointing knowledge that one has allowed oneself to lose something potentially stunning out of fear.

I also enjoy the (admittedly mildly) feminist overtones I find lurking in the text.

"Don't give away the goods too soon," is what she might have told me.

I consider myself a sex positive feminist. I generally think that talking about sex clearly with your partner is good, that reproductive freedoms are fundamental, and that shaming people around sex is counterproductive to health and safety. At the same time, I think it's worth admitting that, emotionally and physically, we have a tendency to give ourselves away sometimes thoughtlessly to people who neither respect or deserve what we have to offer. I think women in general are often inclined to do this for a variety of reasons that revolve around the historical commodification of women's bodies, mass media messages about beauty image that are anathema to self-esteem, and competing messages about the value of virginity and the desirability of sexual prowess. There is something to be said for thinking highly enough of yourself to believe - regardless of whether this is your first, fifteenth, or fiftieth partner - that you are worth of love, attention, admiration and respect on your own terms. Virginity isn't magical, but human intimacy is a valuable experience, and not one worth wasting, as Laini Taylor's surrogate father Wishbone so accurately puts it in the terrific YA novel Daughter of Smoke and Bone, on "inconsequential penises." Or inconsequential partners, for that matter.

I like the idea that Marlene Dietrich, if she could talk to Suzanne Vega, would tell her, "if he's using you, don't give in, or at least have the good sense to be aware of what he's using you for." I always think of it as the Norma Jean approach to navigating the sexual pitfalls of modern pop culture commodification. You only have two options: don't play at all, or decide what you want to get out of it and play on your own terms. While I find it odious that the world constantly decides a woman's value based, at least in part, on sex appeal, I have a hard time telling the girl who would be Marilyn that she's a sell out for attempting to harass her own sexual agency for benefit and profit. Instead, I'd rather tell her to keep in mind that you have to know what your giving and what you're getting in return, and you better be sure it's worth it it in the end. Also, stay away from the Kennedys.

What does all this have to do with Mandy Aftel's new perfume, Wild Roses, well, in my mind, a lot actually.

If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times: I love rose scents. Roses and vanillas are the two kinds of scents you can almost bank on my running toward. As a result, I've smelled a lot of roses on the market at a lot of different price points, from low dollar minis of Demeter Fragrances Pruning Sheers to L'Artisan Voleur de Roses and Drole de Rose to niche scents like Teo Cabanel Oha, Agent Provocateur EdP, and Juliette Has a Gun Lady Vengeance to true independents like DHS Perfumes Beach Roses and the now sadly defunct American Beauty. And that's just naming the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Name a rosy category -- patchouli roses, dirty roses, leather roses, powdery roses, realistic roses -- and I've probably got a fav or two.

So when I tell you Mandy Aftel has created in Wild Roses an inventive take on the rose that might merit the creation of a new subcategory, it's worth taking note. Aftelier Perfumes describes Wild Roses as follows:

I wanted to capture in perfume the experience of walking around my garden and smelling each rose, as their perfumes blended in my nose. Wild Roses perfume evokes the garden in our imagination and memory -- the book of a hundred petals unfolding: balsamic, spicy, apricot, and honeyed roses, mixed with the smell of warm earth and herbs.

The apricot-rose heart is perfectly rooted in a base of tarragon absolute -- its herbal round anise aroma giving a nuance of both earth and leaves. The balsamic vanilla absolute and the whiskey-ness of aged patchouli support tarragon’s warm, powdery aspect. Indole contributes the almost animal aspect of ripeness in a rose. The heart is punctuated by pimento berry, lending its nuances of clove, ginger, and cinnamon. The candied-orange flower aroma of methyl methyl anthranilate, the soft powdery floral of heliotropin, and the slightly floral citrus of bergamot contribute a modern freshness to the opening.

Top: rose CO2, heliotropin, bergamot, geraniol, m-methyl anthranilate, damascenone.
Heart: apricot, Turkish rose absolute, pimento berry, p-ethyl alcohol, rose petals attar.
Base: tarragon absolute, vanilla absolute, indole, aged patchouli.

Upon application, Wild Roses is a sweet, dark cocktail of rose petals swirling in a sweet berry liqueur and strong shot of vodka. Slightly stringent or medicinal, this largely candied opening slides across the olfactory palette like a good drink or a terrible poison, the kind one imagine was concocted by a dark Queen with a serious grudge. It is a kind of biting sweetness, a traditional beauty that cuts, the thorn of the proverbial rose that, pricking a finger, sends one off to a dark sleep. As it ages on the skin, the medicinal aspect fades, leaving a berry-oriented jammy rose.

Wild Roses has a realistic quality, but clearly isn't meant to be exactly like a smelling a rose. It's more wearable than sticking a bloom in your hair. It's a rose plus a sweetness that draws you closer so it can take a bite. It manages to be both pretty, strong, alluring, and vulnerable, but without the direct sexiness of a patchouli rose or the delicate femininity of a powdered rose. 

Lots of terrific samples!

And the reason I told you that whole thing about Suzanne Vega and her Marlene Dietrich poster and my general sex positivity being tempered with a desire that we simultaneously promote sex respect is this: Every time I tried Wild Roses, I heard the song in my head. I imagined this vulnerable woman acting tough and trying to protect herself from being hurt and acting like she doesn't care when she really does, and this is what she smells like.

Beautiful. Vulnerable. Strong.

It's a heartbreakingly lovely audiolfactory experience.

So let's all welcome the new world of the candied rose! It's decidedly worth trying. Wild Roses EDP is available direct from the perfumer in 30ml for $170. Samples can be purchased $6.

And even if I am in love with you,
all this to say:
What's it to you?
Observe the blood, the rose tattoo,
of the finger prints on me from you....

Other evidence has shown
that you and I are still alone.
We skirt around the danger zone
and don't talk about it here.

I tried so hard to resist
when you held me in your handsome fist
and reminded me of the night we kissed
and why I should be leaving.
Marlene on the wall...

___________________
In the interests of full disclosure: this perfume sample was provided by the perfumer.

Mitt Romney and the Myth of Women's Work

Thanks Binders Full
of Women tumblr!

Last night, while driving back from dinner, David and I pulled up to a light.
D: "Oh no! Mitt Romney has been here!"
Me: "How do you know?"
D: "Look!" *points to papers and broken binder scattered on ground in middle of road* "Binder remains!"
Me: "But where are all the women?"
D: "This is the Pacific Northwest. They knew they could flee for safety here."
Me: "Run, women! Run for your lives!"

. . . . 

Okay, all binder hilarity aside (and there is some good stuff out there, my favorite being the customer reviews on Avery 1" binders for sale on Amazon -- Thanks to Carli R. for the link), there was something former Governor Romney said in the debates, something inaccurate and truly sexist, and it didn't have anything to do with binders full of women, or even a flexible work schedule being required such that working women can get home in time it make dinner. FN1. The moment that I keep returning to with fire in my belly got buried between those two more obviously tone-deaf moments, and because I can't let it go, dear reader, I'm going to talk to you about it.

Okay, here's the critical snippet of transcript, reader. Let's play a rousing round of "Spot the Sexist!"

Romney: "Now, one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort, but number two, because I recognized that if you're going to have women in the workforce, that sometimes they need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can't be here until 7:00 or 8:00 at night. I need to be able to get home at 5:00 so I can be there for -- making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said, fine, let's have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you."

Did you catch it? It's probably all those logic puzzles I had to do in preparation for the LSAT, but ever since then, if/then statements really jump out at me. "If" implies a condition, something that may or may not happen. It's only a precedent possibility. It isn't a foregone conclusion. It's something that isn't necessary or inevitable.

"I recognized that if you're going to have women in the workforce, that sometimes they need to be more flexible."

"If."

If.

This is the torn in my paw, the splinter in my skin, the pea under my mattress, dear reader. And I'll tell you why this bothers me so much.

First, it offends me as a feminist because it implies the work a person - male or female - does at home (keeping a home, raising a family, cooking meals, shuttling kids around, etc.) isn't real work, that they aren't part of the 'workforce.' This argument is, of course, completely nonsensical, as we all know that housekeepers don't work for free, daycare isn't provided gratis, personal chefs don't volunteer their services. These are jobs that have market value. We've determined, even under the most mercenary capitalist calculations, that these services have a value.

This is an assumed benefit, you see. Like a hidden cost, it rides for free in the market place, never being thought of for its true value. However, if every person doing home care shifted one home to the left or right, did their neighbor's work, and submitted a bill to said neighbor who in turn paid them, these individuals would no longer be 'invisible' members of the "workforce." The idea that society requires this sort of task shifting in order to fully acknowledge the monetary value to this benefit is, in a word, stupid.

BUT, even if I set this feminist objection aside, the historian in me is appalled by the sheer willful ignorance of this statement. This historian, with her very expensive education in American women's history, is the yelling voice in my head, and her secondary objection actually gets to the far more problematic part of Mr. Romney's privileged point of view.

As far back as this country has existed, women have worked. Puritans like John Cotton and John Rogers remarked as they settled in Plymouth, Providence, and Massachusetts Bay on the work performed by women of the native peoples. Be they Pequot, Narragansett, or Mohegan, these women completed all agricultural work except the growing of tobacco. All the food stuffs planted and reaped and prepared in those times, you know the ones that kept the settlers from starving in those first rough winters? Women created those goods for gift, trade, or purchase.  These same Puritan men set about building a City on a Hill; meanwhile, their Puritan wives canned goods, wove cloth, dried meats, and preserved and created other goods to be traded, sold, and purchased between the colonies and with the natives.

During the American industrial age, women worked in factories and manufacturing from its beginnings in the mid-1700s all the way to its end in the 1900s. Women worked during both world wars. Poor women, immigrant women, and women of color have worked in domestic positions for white families for pay in this country virtually forever. FN3.

Women have always worked. They have always been part of the workforce, even when you limit the definition of "workforce" to work done outside one's own home. They have been paid teachers, nurses, factory workers, craftswomen, midwives, trade persons. Even during the Victorian period, wealthy white women worked as novelists and writers and educators.

National Women's Law Center's report
on pay inequity is available here.

This notion that there was a magical historical past where women did nothing but kept house and raised their children is a myth. If it has ever existed, it was only for the very, very wealthy white women of the Victorian era and for a handful of years to a select group of middle-class white women living in the suburbs in post-WWII America, a lot of whom had been forced out of jobs they enjoyed when the war ended and they  'went home,' giving their positions to returning veterans. And let's not forget, as documented in detail by writers like Betty Friedan, these women were deeply miserable, to the point that they inspired the second wave of the feminism movement and its efforts to obtain equal access to the sphere of public work and employment opportunities for women. FN4.

There is no "if." This fabled "if" has never existed. Women are an integral part of "the workforce," both in the public and private spheres. The work they have done and continue to do remains underpaid, under appreciated, and often unnoticed, but make no mistake: it is WORK. We are part of the workforce. We have always been part of the workforce. We will always be part of the workforce.

That former Governor Romney believes that this fact is at present -  or has ever been - conditional demonstrates how completely out of touch he is with the reality of the vast majority of women's lives. He also seems crazily uninformed about American history for someone who seeks our highest office.

And that, my friends, is what makes me most afraid. How can we expect someone to govern our country with our best interests in mind when he truly does not even see half of us? He is blind to the lives of all but the most privileged women, and he presumes that the work they do is both inherently less valuable and should come second to their familial obligations, as though men do not have to and should not have to share these same responsibilities. He is fundamentally blind to women and to his own male privilege, in the same way he is blind to poor people and his corresponding wealth, to working class people and his corresponding family purchased opportunities, to people of color and his own whiteness.

No wonder then-Governor Romney and his male cohorts 'could not find' any qualified women to join his cabinet. He never saw them in the first place. FN5. And in his own words, as recently as just this last week on prime time national television, Mr. Romney has revealed that he still doesn't.

"Through their own words
they will be exposed. 
They've got a severe case of 
the emperor's new clothes."
~ "The Emperor's New Clothes," Sinead O'Connor

_______________
FN1. Though don't mistake me, all of that was some heinously sexist b.s.

FN2. Yes, a historian, professional feminist, and attorney all sit around, yelling different arguments at me /the world in my head, while the 'fumie just sits in a corner, sniffing at her wrists and muttering, "pretty!" Doesn't everyone's head work like that?

FN3. Well, you know, after we stopped enslaving them.

FN4. Again, it is worth noting here that this 'workplace struggle' was largely lost on their impoverished sisters in arms as well as women of color and immigrant women, all of whom never had the luxurious option of staying home and remaining outside the public sphere of work in the first place.

FN5. And in case this whole binder business wasn't offensive enough, it turned out to contain an incredible amount of spin. The real story involves being approached by a women's group in Massachusetts with a request to include more women in government, not a concerted effort on Mr. Romney's part to find women for his cabinet.