I'm preparing for my ninth move in four years. I'm looking forward to settling down for some time, to being able to decrease my carbon footprint* by not flying across the country every four months. I hope there will be a post at some point about my new apartment with space to grow things to eat, a worm composting bin, and secondhand furniture. This is not that post.
I was going through my books, sorting out what I wanted to go with me and what I wanted to give away or sell, and I came across Wendy Shalit's books, A Return to Modesty and Girls Gone Mild. I hesitated over which box to put them in, because the books are problematic in many ways; someone once described them as encouraging women to find happiness by baking cookies.
The fact remains, however, that when I read Girls Gone Mild, something about it clicked with me even as I recognized there was a lot I disagree with. In retrospect, I think what I liked about it has to do with being asexual. Women face, or at least I face and faced, a lot of pressure to be sexual, sexually active, and sexualized. I experienced this in feminist circles as well, at least some of the time. It's kind of odd how sex positivity and patriarchy can both make women feel they should be having sex, or that they ought to have sex, or that something is wrong with them if they aren't having sex. While I think Ms. Shalit argues for a world where women are less sexualized for reasons with which I disagree, parts of the vision she paints are still attractive to me: a world where it's not considered odd that I want my social interactions with the vast majority of people to take place on the level of the brain, not the body; a world where I can call "time out" from being automatically seen as sexual, in both the sense of an orientation and the sense of something to be exploited; a world where virgin-shaming is just as unacceptable as slut-shaming.
What I think Ms. Shalit is wrong about is that women can bring about this change in any substantial fashion by what they do or how they dress, or that they are responsible for this change insofar as it applies to themselves. (What I mean by that is that men aren't the only ones responsible for slut-shaming, the objectification of women, and basically the kyriarchy in general; women reinforce these norms all the time, too, so we have the power to resist them, but we don't have the power, or the responsibility, to change how others perceive us.) I also think she's wrong in advocating a return to traditional gender roles, for obvious reasons-- the first and foremost being the older I get, the less I fit into them-- and wrong in reinforcing the double standard for male sexual behavior vs. female sexual behavior. If that seems like a whole lot of problems with the books, well-- consider, then, how rare it must be for me to hear "it's okay not to have sex or be sexual" if I kept them anyway.
At some point I want to reread them critically, from an asexual and feminist point of view, to see what positive things I can get out of them. Maybe I'll give them away after that, once I've gotten what I can out of them. Maybe this time I'll be so frustrated by the anti-feminism that I won't be able to get through them; it's been known to happen. (For a brief period in high school, for example, I very much enjoyed Twilight. When I went to reread, I gave the book to Goodwill.) We'll see.
*it's been months since I blogged in any substantial way about being green, and I regret not being more active about it, but at the same time it's comforting how many green things have been incorporated into my life to the extent that I do them even when I'm stressed. I still do the baking soda for my hair, I've barely turned on the heat or the air all year, I still line-dry my clothes, and though I get some conventional, not-ethically-raised dairy products sometimes, I'm a full-out vegetarian now, at least for the moment-- no humanely-raised meat. I still love my DivaCup, I can't remember when the last time I used a conventional cleaning product was, and I have a jar of sprouts going in the fridge now.
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