My previous post about race has me all riled up. Actually, it's not the post so much but the statistic--I'm still in shock. Shame on us, Minnesota.
Warning: Heavy Feminist Hand Ahead
Here's a poem by Joan Larkin:
A Kiss
The hardness
with which you still hate
your body
is a kiss for the fathers.
This is old-time, down-home feminism of those bra-burning, free-loving sixties. Larkin's poems are about rape and incest. Hers was a body that suffered the worst our culture has to offer women.
But take away the word 'fathers' and I can acknowledge how very hard it is to be truly 100% comfortable in this female flesh--flesh that both traps and baits, is desired and reviled, sells and is sold.
I threw out the family scale a few months back. Actually, John did it for me because I didn't have the strength.
Do I feel liberated? Well. . . . now I have a pair of jeans that I must try on every single morning to insure they fit exactly like they did the day before.
Boy, I need all kinds of revolutions today.
9 comments:
See how much good info I get when I come here? I'd not read that poem before. It sums up (in this "post-feminist" world) how much power and energy we body haters hand over so easily.
I have had several frenzied weeks, to the point that I said to my husband, "I'm so stressed out and generally whacked that I haven't even thought about my damn weight and how much I hate it for two weeks." His response was, "That's kind of healthy. Maybe you need to work more and stay stressed."
"Well. . . . now I have a pair of jeans that I must try on every single morning to insure they fit exactly like they did the day before."
Thank you for saying that because it made me laugh and I REALLY needed to laugh. :)
Bring on your feminism. We can take it!
I know these jeans. I have them and I hate their stinking patriarchal guts.
Perhaps a march on Washington is in order? You know, all the women? Setting their jeans on fire? I would totally do that.
Well, well, Tootsie. Now that would be a sight! I'd love to see us, depanting by the thousands. !
So hard to love your own body, isn't it? Why can't we be as forgiving of 30+ year old women's bodies as we are of toddler's bodies or young children's bodies, or even babies' bodies (which, when one thinks about it, are kind of the weirdest looking of the bunch...)?
It is so hard to be liberated. Really.
Can you imagine how different the world might be if women devoted as much time/thought/energy to cultivating their minds as they do to their bodies?
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