Stubborn old goats

No matter what I did, they resolutely refused to look at the camera.




My post on women going shirtless got major hits from Reddit, StumbleUpon and other link-sites. I think I hit a nerve, particularly in this kind of heat.

This also means, if I may borrow a line from Rancid: And out come the wolves. Trolls, trolls, everywhere. As I've said before, I used to be jealous of the Big Bloggers, until I fully understood what-all they have to put up with. Yech.

Highly amusing was watching the anti-feminist trolls try to figure out what they should be fussing about. Ordinarily, men are lusting for women to be naked, so....what exactly is the issue? Unfortunately, the thread's Head Troll has deleted all of his convoluted comments in a huff, or you could chortle at the logic: We shouldn't be showing our breasts because.... men like breasts. In other words, they might see some breasts they don't like! Another fascinating argument was all about hard-ons: Men have involuntary reactions to breasts! And of course, this means women should live their lives to make men's penises more comfortable at all times. When they want hard-ons, we should be stripping. When they don't, we shouldn't.

That seems easy enough to figure out, huh?

Meanwhile, let's hope some hearty gals out there start organizing some shirtless-days for women... as several posters noted on Reddit, they can't arrest everyone. This is the same way women started wearing pants: en masse. The only way.

It was the 8th grade. The note was passed: JEANS ON FRIDAY. That was all it said. We all knew, yes. Jeans on Friday. Only a couple of goodie-goodies primly preferred to continue "dressing as ladies"--although I noticed that a few years later, they were wearing jeans with the rest of us.

And so, we wore the jeans on Friday. Fat, thin, middle-class and poor. Rich jeans, poor jeans. And I remember that day very well, because all the girls grinned at each other: haha, look at us!

We just kept wearing them. We didn't stop.

About a month later, an official school announcement was read: Girls can wear pants now! We laughed our blue-jean-clad butts off; we were already wearing them! And then we learned something important (also applicable to laws like jay-walking and pot-smoking): Your "law" means shit if nobody follows it. [1]

We might do the same with the laws governing the exposure of women's chests. Can they arrest hundreds of women on a beach at the same time?

Actually, that might turn into quite a party!

~*~

Speaking of pot-smoking, the New York Times ran a big Reefer Madness pot addiction story last week. We were even warned that legal ganja would result in a rise in "fatalities"--and silly me, I wasn't aware there was ever ONE fatality from marijuana-overdose in the entire history of the known world.

For those of us who know from addiction, the NYT article was like the proverbial fun-house mirror, as they offered the example of someone who kept a residence, job and dog for 20 years as an "addict"... say what?

Can somebody say raise the bar?

One of the problems with AA turning everybody into an alcoholic in the late 80s (no, everyone isn't, even if you were barfing into the toilet a few more times than you intended), is this kind of nonsense. Addiction is something very specific, and there are signposts. When you are homeless (I was), can't keep a job (I couldn't), systematically drive away everyone who cares about you (I did), start getting sick all the time (oh dear God)--then you got trouble. [2]

Just being extremely bummed out? No. That is called depression, and self-medicating is a symptom.

I have no college degree and nevertheless, I understand this distinction. As they say, it isn't rocket science.

What it is: AA was colonized by the middle classes in the late 80s/early 90s. In these suburban enclaves, if someone dared to speak honestly about something like sleeping in their car for months at a time, or jacking mama's last 3 bucks, the middle-class, still-gainfully-employed types would shift uncomfortably in their seats. [3] If you wanted gritty reality, you had to go to the meetings with names like Darkness on the Edge of Town (apologies to The Boss). Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12-Steps became transformed into a lifestyle-thing, rather like eating organic.

For some reason, the 12-Steps seemed tailor-made for the narcissism of the affluent. They jumped into the process with aplomb, as if it was psychoanalysis. And in the meantime, you couldn't get a genuine addict or alcoholic to even read the 12-Steps out loud without pausing to argue with you about them.

And the 12-Steps changed, and AA changed... and someday, I will attempt to grapple with the whole subject, and my feelings about that. And why I stopped being an active member, as my beloved late sponsor also did (for religious reasons of her own).

I heartily recommend Elayne Rapping's book, The Culture of Recovery, Making Sense of the Self-Help Movement in Women's Lives, a feminist reading of this whole phenomenon. And I hope to revisit the topic at a future date.

~*~



[1] William F Buckley was (believe it or not) in favor of legalizing (and taxing) marijuana for that reason. He believed marijuana laws turned regular, law-abiding people into criminals. He said law served people, people do not serve law, and if a majority of people want pot, keeping it illegal eroded respect for authority and law. (Ya think?)

[2] Notice the very dramatic addiction-themed TV show Intervention doesn't bother with "marijuana addicts"--which as one of my friends said, would consist of an entire hour of potheads watching TV and eating bags of Cheetos. (The "intervention" would be someone's kids complaining that they had to change the kitty litter: Do you ever think of MY feelings?!?)

Not exactly cutting-edge reality TV. And the proof is in the pudding.

[3] An AA friend once told me about attending a "rich" AA meeting in Hollywood. One woman's idea of "hitting rock bottom" was the day she was forced to take the kids to McDonalds for supper. (People shook their heads, wow, that is terrible.)

Lord have mercy, can you believe anybody would FALL SO FAR?

Women should have the right to be shirtless!

Photo of topless men from Legal Juice.[1]





I saw what I initially believed was a topless old woman walking a dog outside the apartment building across the way... Looking closely, I saw that the person was bald. But still, mincing along in his pajama bottoms, waiting for the dog to poop, you could clearly see that he had breasts. Like, pretty big ones. It is impossible to guess his age, but I wouldn't be surprised if he were over 80 or so.

Shouldn't he cover his boobs? Oh wait, he's a man, so he is allowed to have big old naked boobs.

So, why can't I?

~*~

I used to write for an alternative youth newspaper called Subversive Scholastic, and one of my first diatribes for said publication was all about how women are not legally allowed to go shirtless and men are. It still infuriates me, decades after I first wrote that.

It is one of the most sexist cultural conventions IN THE WORLD.

Women's breasts, originally intended to nourish babies, are greatly fetishized by men. In a patriarchal culture, this makes them sacrosanct, so they must be covered up as something dirty. Dirty = arousing to men. (Men's chests might be similarly arousing to women, but in a patriarchal culture, what is arousing to women is regarded as being of no real importance unless it suits male fantasy.)

Of course, as fetishized objects, boobs must also be made into ornaments (just like cars, also fetishized by men). So, they are primped and prodded, alternately bound and pumped up, displayed like prize ponies. Even if you don't want to. (Have you tried to buy a non-wire bra recently that didn't look like a Playtex Cross-your-heart? Good luck with that.)

When I first wrote the Subversive Scholastic essay, I got a lot of reactions from males who said, basically: You wanna take off your shirt? Hey alriiiight! Do it, babeeeeeee!

No, no and no.

If I should take off my shirt, I want you to be as lackadaisical about that as if your best male friend took off his shirt. Are you saying Hey alriiiight! to your best male friend and encouraging him to take off his shirt? Then I don't want that either. Optimally, it would be nice if you didn't even NOTICE.

Hey, says authoritative male voice, you can't expect guys not to even notice, okay?

Question: Do women act like asses when men shed their tops? You know, we might be as excited about that as you are, has that ever occurred to you? But we have learned to behave ourselves. I am utterly confident that men could learn the same, if expected to.

~*~

Now that I am older, I realize there is another reason women won't shed their tops. Not just a dislike of salaciousness, but a genuine fear of male ridicule. As I watched my old neighbor waiting good-naturedly for his dog to pee, I realized that he has never had that fear, and of course, does not have it now. He has boobs and doesn't care. By contrast, I would now be too afraid to take my shirt off, even if my boobs look better than his. Mine would be considered far more offensive that his [2] even though his are more unexpected and startling (and many would say unattractive and/or grotesque), since he is a man. I would still get arrested, and yet he is allowed to walk outside in the stifling heat, topless, without comment.

It's not fair.

But what would the world be like if the law were changed and women could go topless? Would only attractive women take advantage of this, as seems to be the case on various topless and/or nude beaches? Because if so, that will mean nothing... only when the whole group of us, every single one, takes off the shirt simultaneously, from 15 to 100 years of age, all colors, all body types, the fattest and the skinniest and the disabled and the one-breasted and former-breasted and everything in between... just like the men... only then will we be free of this SEXIST, FETISHIZING BULLSHIT, that keeps our sweaty boobies swathed in fabric as we swelter in 90 degree heat and pine for the sensation of ice-cold chlorinated pool-water on our nipples. Nobody should pay any damn attention... but of course, they do, we do, and it seems an impossible Daisy-dream, one I've had since I was a mere kid, back when I had pretty, perky boobs. Now, I am old, and mine tend to look like the dog-walking neighbor, but you know what? I feel the same. I still want it. I still want the freedom. Nothing has changed.

And I repeat, nothing has changed. We are still covering up them all-sacred titties.

I keep hearing we live in a post-feminist society, blah blah blah. And yet, one gender can shed fully half of their clothes outside, while another doesn't have that right, enshrined by LAW. All because one gender is the subject, while the second is the object; one gender makes the rules and defines the sensibility, while the other must live by those standards. [3]

...


[1] Ironically, Legal Juice (the blog I got this graphic from) mentions the fact that the town of Easton, Maryland, has made it illegal for any person (including men, children and babies) to go topless. This was considered weird enough to rate comment.

[2] Looking for graphics for this post, I found one guys' insulting, indignant blog post titled "Why do fat old women go topless?" Apparently, it has never once occurred to this fellow that we might do this for ourselves, and not for him or other men. God forbid! (Imagine the title "Why do fat old men go topless?")

[3] Paraphrasing Simone de Beauvoir.

[4] Nikki Craft and other radical feminists briefly took up this call in the 80s, but later abandoned it due to increasing co-optation by various unsavory profiteers. Craft was arrested in June 1986 in Rochester, NY, as one of the Rochester Topfree Seven. Interviewed later in Off Our Backs, I can still remember Craft's correction of a male reporter's coverage of the event, about "the right of women to appear topless"; Craft said she was supporting the right of women to BE topless, not to APPEAR topless, and to note the difference.

And I always have.