it took me a long time to go back to school and only when i was married and a mom did i feel i could since i'd imagined that i was married an a mom and so, not attractive any more. as someone here said, you know you're old when the mothers are attractive. so, i'm not just weird. it's an objective reality that people joke about: women who've "calved" as one guy i know says, are no longer nubile and no longer attractive. only old men would be attracted! :) i was also happily pudgy from childbearing. i liked that layer of fat. i felt it protected me from such advances because i wanted to be taken seriously, not as a sexual object. it wasn't until grad school when i believed i could say that i was truly considered intelligent and saw the letters of rec and awards i got that i was willing to lose the weight.
i went through another process in which i learned to see myself as both a sexual object and as someone with an intellect--so that the two weren't in competition. i accept the fact that men look, that we look,, but they can learn to not notice just as women learn to not notice and make a public display of looking. some here know that i've had to learn that men can be inappropriately sexual when they don't even know what i look like. i liked the internet when i discovered it because it allowed me to leave that behind. i soon learned that it did no such thing.
when a dept chair inappropriately sexualizes me or any woman to a student, then i'm deeply ashamed because i would like to identified as "the woman dressed in blue who is our best grad student and winner of the Outstanding TA award"
those, rob, were _objective_ assessments of me because i was the dept pet, won all the awards and positions and was considered one of the best TAs in the uni. instead, he described me that way. so, this young woman found me and shared her bewilderment, to my embarrassment, that my dept chair would describe me that way. firstly, i'm not beautiful, but secondly it is inappropriate to tell a student that her teacher is beautiful when the student is someone neither of you know. she was looking to try to switch from one section to another i was teaching.
i have no problem with admiring one another, but that kind of behavior, combined withe everything else, is what constitutes inappropriate behavior. and it happens a lot. i didn't describe one dept chair, but several, since i've worked in several universities.
it is, plain and simple, an exercise of power, though very unconscious i'm sure. i would never, ever describe a man to one of my students in terms of how he looked as a subjective judgment of him that is. perhaps that he's tall or has glasses, but not a judgment on his attractiveness. this is just wrong in the workplace and wrong esp. in that context.
why not tell a student she was getting one of the best TAs, one of the best grad students? tell her i'd won a fellowship. whatever. those are appropriate things to say to someone you don't know in a professional context.
and then there's something that starts to plague me as i age. am i really good enough? maybe all of this was because some jackass liked my casabas.
thanks for assisting me in the task of remembering that part of my life once again. and thanks for making me see that i've been an utter fool to think it will ever change and that i will be told to be happy with what i actually got. and to know that the only people that will say anything are other women. the feminist men retreat and have nothing to say. carry on with mina, i'm outta here.
maryilyn frye on oppression:
The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one's life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby-trapped.
Consider a bird cage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. ... There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. ... It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.
It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care and some good will without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without seeing or being able to understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced.
That arresting of vision at a microscopic level yields such common confusion...One cannot see the meanings [of these practices] if one's focus is riveted upon the individual event in all its particularity, including the particularity of the individual man's present conscious intentions and motives and the individual woman's conscious perception of the event in the moment. It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic view and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see macroscopically, At any rate, whether it is deliberate or not, people can and do fail to see the oppression of women because they fail to see macroscopically and hence fail to see the various elements of the situation as systematically related in larger schemes.
marilyn frye, "oppression"