"Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying."

--Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”

(via WYSIWYG)

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference; those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older, know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can call all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us  temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.  And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

--Audre Lorde

(via Sister Outsider) 

For a woman, self-acceptance is civil disobedience.
 

--Miss Plumcake, Self Praise and Other Endangered Species 

 

Increase tenfold for every way in which said woman varies from hegemonic White, wealthy, straight, thin, Christian, married-with-children womanhood.

My first gynecological exam

wasn't nearly as weird/scary/uncomfortable as I thought it would be. I found it somewhat patronizing to have her sit there and explain the virtues of condom usage and how various STDs can be spread, but that is information that a lot of people do need, so I won't complain too hard about it. She talked to me about the HPV vaccine and it sounds like something I should look into in the future (if my insurance covers it), so that was helpful. I didn't have a problem talking about my sex life--this is something I do regularly--but it was weird having all of the actual clinical terms injected into that conversation. 

Actual conversational excerpts:

Her: You're currently sexually active?
Me: Yes. I'm not in a relationship, but I'm sexually active.
Her: Okay. When was the most recent time you had intercourse?
Me (with zero hesitation): The 13th.
Her: Wow, you knew that right away.
Me: Well...I was celebrating having turned my thesis in...

(later)

Her: The penises that have been inside you are way bigger than my speculum.


So as she pulled the curtain for me to get undressed, I distinctly recall thinking that as a person who has streaked a semi-public place twice, I really didn't need this privacy to get naked, lol. She taught me how to do a breast exam and that it's important to start now so I get to know "my normal" and anything that recognizes multiple normalities is cool with me. We talked about methods of hair removal, and it was nice to talk about those things with an actual doctor. The stirrups had a fabric covering, so they weren't cold, and the speculum was plastic so it was also around room temperature--no "Nazi steel stirrups" and/or "cold metal ducklips" as The Vagina Monologues had me worried about. (Yay progress?) I actually found most of the experience of the exam itself to be vaguely pleasant, if anything. The pap smear swab tickled--I wanted to laugh. She's not the first person to open it up and look at it, either, which might have also contributed to how not weird it was--I've had that experience (again a la VagMos) with a guy before. Everything was fine and kind of nice except the part where she had to push on my stomach to feel my ovaries. That kind of hurt, but it was still kind of cool that she could feel them being physically present in my body. I like it when things I can barely conceptualize become more concrete and extant in the world.


The part I'm most disappointed/annoyed by is that my insurance company is being stupid and I have to go drop my pap smear results off at this lab like two miles from campus, which means bumming an awkward ride or calling a cab or riding my friend's bike, none of which sounds like fun. Sigh.

Anyway, to anyone else like me who has been avoiding it because people say it hurts or it's awkward/uncomfortable: I felt silly having avoided it for so long because none of the actual exam was a big deal at all. It took a matter of minutes. So go forth and be safe.

I'm slowly becoming more and more aware of what it means to be made cognizant of myself as a target of discrimination based on my womanness.

Reblogged from

La Bella Vita

How to tell if you are a "real woman":

Step One: Do you identify as a woman? (Yes/No)


If you picked yes, then congratulations, you're a real woman.

(Reblogged from come correct)
 

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

--Audre Lorde (via Choosing Pancakes)

Ideal womanhood?

Reblogged from Indie. Radiant.

I'm sure I'm supposed to find something wrong with this

or at least I would be supposed to if I was a hardcore enough feminist, but mannnn...I think this shit is hilarious. Mad props to B for sharing it with me.

Taboo Subject Number Next

Disclaimer: I am going to talk about porn. If this offends you, there is non-sexual social commentary in the previous post; keep scrolling.

I am talking about porn for two reasons. 1) Because one of my favorite bloggers, Ev'Yan over at Sex, Love, and Liberation, asked me to, and 2) because I think it's stupid that society treats it as something that shouldn't be openly talked about, especially by a woman. And we all know I don't stand for stupid. 

So, Ev'Yan, followers, people of the internet: I have a declaration to make. I, too, am a woman who enjoys watching porn! I also like reading erotic literature [the real stuff, though I'll settle for a "romance novel" if I'm feeling particularly sappy], but the visuals get me off faster. When I have a nice extended period of time to devote to self-pleasure, I like to read naughty stories with real porn playing on a separate tab so I can hear it--the combo of words and sounds drives me crazy. 
She asked what my first experience with porn was like. I'm not sure I've told anyone this story in full, so yay secrets time! I was twelve. This may seem shockingly young to most of you, but it should be noted that getting my period at the age of 9 meant learning about my body very early, including how to make it feel good. I had been masturbating for quite some time already, but I discovered porn when I was twelve. I discovered it by accident, with my female cousin (age 11 at the time). We had been watching some movie on Cinemax earlier in the day [small things I miss about living in a two-parent household: we could once afford movie channels] and then we put a DVD in to watch with my little brother and sister. The movie finished after whatever time Cinemax becomes "Skinemax," and when we switched back to TV mode from Video mode, two White couples were just starting to get busy in the middle of a campsite. There were children present (my brother and sister, who were 7 and 8 at the time), so we switched the channel as soon as we recognized that there were boobies on the screen--they barely had enough time to say "Ewww." Then, since it was late, my cousin and I sent the kids upstairs to bed, then settled back down in front of the TV. I don't remember how we came to the agreement that we were going to turn back to Cinemax, but we turned the volume nearly all the way down [the better to potentially hear people coming down the stairs] and got under the blankets we were laying on on the floor and pushed the last button on the remote. It should be noted that this cousin and I talked about sex a lot--whenever one of us would hear something from a friend or catch a glimpse of something we shouldn't have seen in a movie, we would dutifully report it to the other the next time we hung out. Our Barbies had sexytime. So this didn't seem weird at all. We were laying on our stomachs, eyes glued to screen, and sometime during the movie I realized that I was more turned on than I had ever been in my entire [short] life, and my hand began to drift downward. I tried to not be that into it, lest she notice, but eventually I could tell she was paying attention and so I stopped and slowly brought my hand back up. When it was back outside the covers, she grabbed my wrist, pulled my hand towards her face, and inhaled, then said, "You nasty." I gave her an I-don't-know-what-you're-talking-about look, but remember feeling relieved that if she recognized the actions and the scent, that meant she did it too.
We began to seek out porn late at night whenever she was sleeping over at my house, which was pretty often back then. Eventually my family cancelled its subscription to Cinemax, though, and my days of watching porn with another person were dead until I was with J the summer after my senior year of high school. He noticed that watching people give blowjobs turns me on. (It still does, as long as there's no spitting.) Oh that's right, Ev'Yan also wanted to know what kind of porn I like.
I'm pretty open: I have gotten off to M-F, M-M, F-F, M-M-F, M-F-F, MtoF-M, all kinds of crazy orgies...I think that's about it. I watch two-person straight porn the most frequently by far, though. I can't fuck with old people, very overweight people, BDSM, or gang-banging though. Or anything illegal. 

"My porn preference says nothing about who I am as a person; yours most likely doesn’t either.People like what they like because they like it, & to have our identities wrapped around the kind of erotic images we gaze upon is dangerous. I believe that the porn we view has little to do with the inner workings of our personalities & more to do with raw, instinctual carnality.

We fuck, therefore we enjoy images of fucking." --Ev'Yan

In light of that, I feel comfortable revealing to you all that my go-to kind of porn is pretty degrading, the kind that feminists and really just women everywhere are/should probably be against. I really really love public-drunk-party-girl sex. Like, in the middle of the kind of wild crazy house party one associates with "college" but I will never actually see the likes of, when people just start getting it on on the couch in the living room with a crowd watching/cheering/recording. The person-who-cares-deeply-about-the-state-of-humanity and was-she-really-in-a-state-to-consent in me is shut up entirely by the wannabe-exhibitionist who is entirely enthralled. I'm also a big fan of threesomes, particularly if they feature an MMF train. Nuru massage porn is the shit too--I actually wanna try that shit. I tend to watch more White porn than Black porn, just because it's harder to find Black porn that isn't audibly degrading to the woman involved, imho. Visually, I'm a big fan of amateur porn and will turn it off if there is music in the background distracting me from the sounds of sex, but when it comes to erotica I like there to be a story and can get pretty caught up in like, series. There is also one genre of erotica that I love to read but would never watch porn of because it would be disturbing, harmful to the people involved, and illegal. I'm not telling any more than that.

"Every girl learns to hate her body by watching other women hate theirs or hate on each other’s." -- Lisa Bloom

 Ladies, look in the mirror and repeat after me, "Girl, you are gorgeous."

Remembering my namesake for a moment

"Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?"

--from Still I Rise by the glorious Maya Angelou

Stephen Colbert is winning so hard

in the game of my affections right now. 

I wanted to blog about these ads last week, but didn't know how to type STEREOTYPICAL, RACIST, and CULTURALLY INSENSITIVE in large enough letters. Or how to convey that I'm fucking sick and tired of women being told that their bodies aren't good enough at every damn turn. SUMMER'S EVE, YOU ARE CREATING A PROBLEM HERE TO INCREASE YOUR REVENUE (and exacerbating lots of other problems in the process). So much shaking my goddamn head here. 

But that's just me whining. Colbert did something so much better than whine. He launched a counter-attack [though I must say that the fact that simply making a very similar ad tailored to men reveals the ridiculous nature of the situation just goes to show how accustomed we've become to women's bodies being problematized in the media...]: 

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

 

Big Scary Topic Time!

Three images:

A statistic: "while black women make up about 13 percent of the U.S. female population, they account for 30 percent of abortions performed in the U.S." This may be true--The Guttmacher Institute sounds kind of legit--but even so it results from a lot of systemic problems like the options presented to African-American women by both the heinous conditions of the cycle of poverty and government initiatives like Planned Parenthood, whose agents don't always tell women about all the choices they have.

And a confession that I am not comfortable with: When it came time for the ex and I to talk about protection and whether we'd been appropriately safe, one of my very first thoughts was What makes him think I would keep it, anyway? I legitimately stopped and looked around to see who could possibly have thought that, because it certainly couldn't have been moi. ...But it was. Almost instantaneously. From some place deep within me that I didn't know existed. And it was unequivocally the truth. If by some incredibly unlikely series of unfortunate mishaps happened that caused both of our forms of protection to fail and me not to notice in time to take a Plan B pill and I found out I was pregnant, I who have always been pro-life (having been a perfect candidate for abortion myself) to the point of the most heated of debates with people I love and respect, would not have carried the pregnancy to term. Although there are some who would argue that if all that happened to get me pregnant, I was "meant to have" this hypothetical child, I don't believe in anyone who's up there making up "meant to"s, and in that instant I understood the right to a choice. The right to not have my entire world turned upside down irrevocably. The right to live my life by my design. The right to not be screwed over after having tried to be safe. The right to not be sacrificed to a biological system I never asked for. The right to bring children into this world when (if ever) I am ready for them in every way, and not a moment sooner.

Go ahead and call me a hypocrite. I feel like one. My only defense is that I didn't understand until I could legitimately see it happening to me and could visualize all the other lives that would be affected (ruined?) by such an accident. If we had done everything we could and been failed by that which we relied on, I just...I couldn't give up my whole life, everything I've worked for. I've come so far. I don't even like kids. And I know what it is to grow up and feel like you ruined your mother's life, what it is to have a single mother who wasn't ready for you, what it is to be afraid to get too close to the men your mother brings into your life because there's no telling how long they'll be around. And come on, me, with a kid? I AM A GROWN-ASS WOMAN KID! 

...So why do I feel like such a bad person?    

Period.

Dear Pad Commercial Designers,

Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but your vials of

blue liquid convince me of absolutely nothing.

Touchably dry, my bloodstained fingertips scoff.

Your free floating cartoon pad drifts like a magic carpet

across my screen, and as it loop-de-loops, it promises

to stretch to fit my body’s natural curves.

Problem with that statement number one:

You sound like a Pamper’s Cruisers commercial.

Two: someone once told me a “regular” sized pad is designed

around the body of a size 6 woman, and I don’t like

what you’re implying about my “irregularity”.

And seriously, anyone who was just dying for a thong pad

is in dire need of a reality check.

But don’t think you’re getting off the hook that easily,

Tampon Commercial Designers. No, I’ve got a complaint or two for you.

Who are these actresses you cast? What menstruating woman in her right mind

really wants to lounge flirtatiously on a pool chaise in a bikini

between overly muscular gentlemen, or chase her dog barefoot

through the wet sand, or go clubbing in the tightest of black dresses,

or nail that difficult new yoga pose while sporting white spandex?

Sorry to be the one to break it to ya, but no one trusts you that well.

And just because you make it tinier (read: easier to leak) and dress it up

in a polka-dotted case does not make me want to show it off to my class,

and I won’t be the first person in line to twirl in slow motion through the field

of flowers or splash gaily in the waterfall either. Now is not a good time to discuss purity.

Of course, not everyone paints periods as a pocket full of sunshine, but Midol and Pamprin

Commercial Designers, you’re next on my list. If I see one more woman get half out of bed

then fall back in, or poke her water weight in the mirror/struggle to button her work pants,

or moan in agony while grabbing her waist/back/head, I’m going to scream.

Yes, it hurts. We all know that. We’ve all known that from tender ages of innocence.

We also know that the cute tight pants are out of commission for a few days, and no matter

how tight the budget is, that morning coffee is a must this week. We know we’ll be crying at

the sappy movies and not having the energy to move, but the real world expects us

up at our normal times and moving at our normal rates and not taking twice as many bathroom

breaks because we either feel like we’re back in diapers or our tampon is so small we can’t feel it

and that’s worrying but either way popping two pills doesn’t stop the feeling that we’re dying

so either show the woman with the clenched jaw and the halfhearted smile who suffers invisibly 

or shut the fuck up.

That last bit is meant for all of you.

Signed,

Your Consumers

BIG Questions

I'm wrestling with two pretty big and somewhat linked issues right now, as I move towards a better and deeper self-understanding. I suppose it's somewhat impossible to study college's effect on student ide entity without pondering my own identity and the way Princeton is molding it. Anddddd I guess one of the purposes of even starting this blog was to get back in touch (or perhaps even in touch for the first time) with who I really am. 

Well I can't know who I am until I can definitively answer these questions:

1) Is my blackness or my womanness more important to me? Which comes first, and is that firstness justified?

2) Fact: I might actually be more non-black than I am of African descent. What does that mean for my identity as a black person? And for my ideas about black people in general?

Relatedly, I identify as a Black American. I don't like the term African-American as relating to ME, because I feel it should be reserved for first/second/third generation immigrants, like most other -American groups use the hyphenation, and that does not apply to me or my people. Not to denounce my African roots in any way, but I'm not even sure the majority of my blood comes from the motherland (I'm also German, French Canadian, Native American, Portuguese, and probably a few other random things). .I feel like the term African-American doesn't give respect to the fact that my ancestors are not all just from Africa. They come from... all over the world. My skin is not that of an African's. Neither is my hair. I know from conversations with my African friends, neither are the vast majority of my ideas and perceptions of the world. Those things and more all come from the eclectic blend of cultures and heritages within me, and within most of us who have descended from slavery--we all know that wasn't an institution built upon preserving the separation of the races--and I believe "black American" is the most fitting term (of those we have to choose from) to represent that blend. I also like "multi-generational African-Americans", a term Imani Perry tossed out in precept last week...

I always chuckle slightly to myself when I put a mug or a glass down after taking a sip of my drink, and see the perfect imprint of my lower lip marking the rim of the glass in some shade of red or brown lipstick. I like the way seeing that makes me feel. I can't really explain it, but it makes me feel...adult somehow. "Strange/ like I [am] a woman or sumthin". Kind of sexy, too, even though those fancy (read: expensive) lipsticks that don't rub off are supposed to be sexier now. I can understand that, but I like the idea of leaving a little piece of me behind on my mug, or on that spot where a guy's neck becomes his collarbone [my favorite spot to kiss]. A lip-print I might be identified by. A reminder that I am a woman who takes the time to look "put together", and I was here.

Most of the time...

I love being a woman. I love that I can be soft while being strong, that caring always wins out over somewhat-overbearing. I love that I can be identified by my laugh, that I'm not afraid to draw attention to my curves or draw paw prints on my breasts. I love that it's okay for me to always want to give/receive hugs, that I can pepper my speech with the words "love", "honey", "dear", and "darling", that I can give myself freely and wholly to as many people as possible without any repercussions. I love the slop of my collarbone and the curl of my hair, and I love how it feels to be the only one who knows I'm wearing sexy underwear. Most of the time, I love being a woman. 

But on days like today, when I wake up needing to take 2 maximum strength Pamprin and 3 Advil, which are currently doing nothing to combat cramps from hell and the fact that every muscle in my body aches as I try to move, and all of the soda at the luncheon is caffeine-free, and I'm hungry but I don't have the energy to even eat a bowl of soup, and I can't trust how I feel because it might just be the hormones feeling, and all I want to do is sleep when all I need to do is work, I must admit, I get angry. I get angry that men don't have to deal with this shit. I get angry that I have to go spend a bunch of money at CVS on pads and tampons and pantyliners and spray. I get angry that my vibrator is going to lay around unused and unusable for the rest of the week. I get angry that the world expects me to keep on keepin on and be so fucking strong when my insides are literally crawling out of me. I get angry that the world doesn't recognize exactly how many sacrifices women make to keep up appearances and keep everything running smoothly. 

I still love being a woman. It's society that makes me angry.