I’ve had an abortion.

Over at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ place at the Atlantic, there is a lively discussion surrounding one simple statistic:

35 percent of all women of reproductive age will have had an abortion by the time they’re 45.

Now, one can argue with the efficacy of statistics that are dependent on the use of the future perfect tense (“…at current rates, more than one-third [35%] will have had…”), but it’s not like we’re looking at a possible reversal of the trend. If the folks behind the statistic, the highly regarded Guttmacher Institute, are off, they’re off by a matter of percentage points. So I feel entirely comfortable with the phrase “roughly one-third.”

Entirely comfortable, and entirely unsurprised. Abortion is one of the greatest open secrets in American society. We all know that it happens a lot — we just don’t talk about it. God forbid! We need to feel ashamed, horrified, and deeply guilty! Or, if those of us who have had abortions don’t feel that way, we at least know better than to raise the fact publicly. We know how thoroughly we’re judged before anyone even opens their mouth. (Aside from anything else, we’re admitting that we’ve had sex. Shhhh!)

But if we don’t start talking about it, if the roughly one-third of us who terminate a pregnancy in the course of our reproductive lives don’t get more honest and more bold, the Stupak amendment may well do more to take away our right to this entirely legal surgical procedure than any other anti-Roe move before it. As Jeffrey Toobin explains in the New Yorker (thanks, Ta-Nehisi):

Today, most policies cover abortion; in a post-Stupak world, they probably won’t. With a health-care plan that is supposed to increase access and lower costs, the opposite would be true with respect to abortion. And that, of course, is what legislators like Stupak want—to make abortions harder, and more expensive, to obtain. Stupak and his allies were willing to kill the whole bill to get their way; the liberals in the House were not.

He goes on to say (and I can’t tell you the depth of my gratitude when I hear a man saying it):

…as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed not long ago, abortion rights “center on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.” Every diminishment of that right diminishes women.

This matters. It really, really matters — the right to choice matters as much as health care reform, because it is health care.

We have to fight against the Scott Roeders of the world (who, by frightening doctors away from late-term abortion practices, are the very definition of “the terrorists are winning”), and we have to fight against the Bart Stupaks (D-MI [D!! In the course of writing this, I discovered that he's a Democrat!!]), and we have to fight against the powerful tendency among politicians to behave as if women’s health is somehow negotiable. As if we are an interest group of some sort — and not half the country, a third of whom will need access to an important reproductive health option in the course of their lives.

You can go to Planned Parenthood, read up on Stupak, sign their petition and send them money (and while you’re at it, you might also look into Medical Students for Choice). You can also call or write to your Representative, Senators, and President and tell them how wrong-headed Stupak is, and why. I frankly think that this is the more important of the activism options, because our elected representatives have to understand that freedom of choice matters deeply to the people they serve, and they will hear that better in personal notes and calls than in any petition delivered by anyone.

Write to them. Tell them your story. We do not need to be ashamed. We need to have our rights defended.

***********************

In 2006, I ran the first of several pieces that I wrote for daily newspapers about the secrecy surrounding abortion. Each opened with the line “I’ve had an abortion. Have you?” Here’s the one that ran in the Chicago Tribune:

Maybe You Just Don’t Know

By Emily L. Hauser
Chicago Tribune
March 16, 2006

I’ve had an abortion. Have you?

The recent decision to ban virtually all abortions in South Dakota has generated a great deal of raucous arguing; many abortion opponents hope the new legislation will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and lead to the reversal of Roe vs. Wade. As usual, the argument suggests the existence of clear-cut opinion, the “supporting” or “opposing” of the act itself.

What is not discussed, of course, are people’s hearts.

Women readers, of course, know their own answer to my question; many of their men would be surprised by it.

Many men don’t know that their wives, sisters or mothers have, in fact, terminated a pregnancy. They don’t know because the women they love fear their response. Will he see me differently? Will he — figuratively or literally — kill me?

So, as a nation and as individuals, we largely don’t talk about it. And when we do, we’re often not honest. The shadow of perceived opinion is very long. We speak publicly as if there were two clear positions — but in private, most of us know this isn’t the truth.

My abortion is a thing of which I’m neither ashamed nor proud. I wish that I hadn’t had to do it, but I did.

The average reader will want to know why — because most of us have a sliding scale of morality.

Even some staunch opponents will agree in cases of rape; others where there is genetic defect; a larger number, if the abortion takes place early in the first trimester; many, of course, think it’s always a woman’s choice.

I believe there is a vast middle ground made up of most Americans, those who feel abortion is neither irredeemably evil, nor free of moral implication. Witness polls conducted recently by the Pew Research Center: 65 percent of respondents don’t want to see Roe vs. Wade overturned; 59 percent feel it would be better if fewer abortions were performed in this country.

At least some of our ambivalence may be cultural. Japanese society maintains a standard ritual, mizuko kuyo, to memorialize aborted or miscarried fetuses and stillborn babies. In a paper discussing the rite, Dr. Dennis Klass, a Webster University psychology of religion professor and a grief expert, writes: “The abortion experience is seen as a necessary sorrow tinged with grief, regret and fear which forces parents to apologize to the fetus and, thus, connect the fetus to the family.”

This describes my own experience well — but I’m an American. I carry a different culture, and I fear that in apologizing, I accept some notion of personhood that somehow “makes” the entire thing — murder. So, I hesitate.

I ask myself: When I aborted my first pregnancy, did I kill a baby? I honestly don’t think so. But did I stop the potential for life? Absolutely. Insofar as life itself is simultaneously the most mundane and most divine fact on our planet, this means something.

But I’m willing to say that I don’t know what that something is. I can only function in the cold reality of my own world — and as such, I alone can judge whether my abortion was a moral choice. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t happy, but it was the least-bad of two bad choices. It was moral.

I don’t know anyone for whom abortion is easy; I don’t know anyone (any woman, at least) who sees abortion as birth control. These choices are stunningly complex. When we deny that, when we talk as if we are all 100 percent clear on this issue, we deny our humanity. And we deny our grief.

And why, in the end, did I have my abortion? I’m not going to record that here. You and I don’t know each other, and my reasons are personal. I don’t need to defend them, and neither does your neighbor, the stranger at work — nor, perhaps, your girlfriend.

Emily L. Hauser is a freelance writer living in Oak Park.

Normal eating.

“Who started the lie, anyway, that [we] shouldn’t have an appetite?“

**********

I have been thinking for some time about how we don’t know how to talk about our bodies. That the language we use (at least in the English-speaking and Hebrew- speaking worlds, where I can hold conversations and read what folks write) to discuss weight, shape, and health is so warped, so freighted with moral implication and the post-modern delusion that science grants us control, that it is no longer a vehicle for communication — because none of us really understands what everyone else is talking about. We may not even be sure about ourselves.

Most of the freight, of course, is dumped with a mighty THUMP on top of the seemingly benign issue of eating. Every living thing needs fuel to survive; the human animal feeds itself off and on over the course of 24 hours; the human lives another day.

“BUT NO!” I hear the voices that I suspect you hear as well, even as you read these words. “IT MATTERS WHAT WE EAT! DONUTS ARE NOT ASPARAGUS! BACON IS NOT LOW-FAT YOGURT!”

We can’t even state the most obvious fact about fueling our bodies without triggering the immediate response of our internalized social cues.

And of course, no one (least of all me) is suggesting that donuts = asparagus. It does matter what we eat. Some fuel is more useful, a more efficient way to help us survive not just today, but long-term. If, say, a wolf spends a season eating prey that has been infected with some sort of, I don’t know, vitamin-A destroying virus, it will not get what it needs from its fuel, and this will affect its health (assuming wolves need vitamin A). Same for us. If we don’t get enough of what we need, or too much of what we don’t, it will affect our health. The quality of the food we consume matters.

What I am suggesting is that we don’t have a truly functional, or even honest, way of sorting that out. We speak in broad generalizations, using language that suggests that “average” is a consistently useful concept ( “Do you know what ‘average’ means?” a professor once asked us back at Tel Aviv University. “Average means that you have one foot encased in ice and the other engulfed in flame, but on average, you feel comfortable.”), and pile so many value judgments on top of the whole steaming pile that we come away not knowing how to answer a simple queston: “What is normal eating?”

And so, finally, to my point – this is a post about someone else’s post: What Is Normal Eating? Indeed, it is a post about someone else’s post about other people’s posts. But stick with me!

Over at PsychCentral, author Margarita Tartakovsky, MS says this:

Today, the definition of normal eating is blurry. It’s gotten lost amid buzz words like “diet,” “restriction,” “willpower” and “flat abs.” It’s sandwiched between the sizable stacks of “shoulds”: I should diet. I should abstain from dessert. I should count calories. I should avoid “bad” foods. I should have an invisible stomach, smaller hips and thin thighs.

She goes on to quote Ellyn Satter, an author, dietician and clinical social worker who wrote the following very wise thing:

Normal eating is going to the table hungry and eating until you are satisfied. It is being able to choose food you like and eat it and truly get enough of it—not just stop eating because you think you should. Normal eating is being able to give some thought to your food selection so you get nutritious food, but not being so wary and restrictive that you miss out on enjoyable food. Normal eating is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad or bored, or just because it feels good. Normal eating is mostly three meals a day, or four or five, or it can be choosing to munch along the way. It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful. Normal eating is overeating at times, feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. And it can be undereating at times and wishing you had more. Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating. Normal eating takes up some of your time and attention, but keeps its place as only one important area of your life.

Tartakovsky also quotes Karly Pitman (who is, apparently an “MT,” but I can’t figure out what that is! But as she, too, is wise, I’m cool with it), who writes, among many other smart things:

Who started the lie, anyway, that women shouldn’t have an appetite?… I have no qualms about getting a second helping, rather than undereating to be socially acceptable…. But eating normally is more than freeing yourself from food: it’s adding trust, an inner knowing that you’ll care for your body excellently in your food choices. It’s trusting that if you give yourself permission to have dessert, you’ll still eat vegetables. (Note: I paraphased that first bit a little above, because I wanted the men to keep reading. Sorry. Social conditioning, and all).

“Rather than undereating to be socially acceptable…. Eating normally is… adding trust, an inner knowing that you’ll care for your body.” These lines really struck me, because so much of how we deal with our bodies and food has far less to do with the self, or Truth, than with what others will think of us when they hear — and see — us.

We hear a lot about the “obesity epidemic,” even though the notion of an epidemic has been debunked by the very people still touting it (the CDC), among others. We have observed the continuing reification of the Body Mass Index, in spite of the fact the NIH panel that established BMI standards is significantly linked to the weight-lose industry, including pharmaceutical companies that specialize in weight loss drugs — and in spite of the fact that BMI flies in the face of common sense, being as how it “is interpreted using standard weight status categories that are the same for all ages and for both men and women” and takes neither ethnicity, nor muscle mass, nor bone density into consideration. (This woman, for instance, is BMI-overweight. As is this man). And as a society, we appear to have a genuine, visceral sense of outrage toward those who tip the scales a bit more than someone, somewhere said they should.

And thus, what should be a simple descriptor, “normal,” about an activity crucial to our survival, “eating,” becomes so much meaningless noise, lost in a roar of condemnation and shaming — when really, bottom line, it’s just food.

I’ll be honest: I don’t think we’ll figure this out in my lifetime. But I am hoping to provide my children — and most especially my daughter — with the mental and verbal tools to at least hack through the underbrush themselves, and possibly come out on the other side for their own kids. And to eat normally, myself.

*********

Credit where it’s due: I first found the Tartakovsky post at Jezebel, last week. (What? I still read the posts now and then!)

Also: Satter asks the the following be included when the above passage is quoted: “Copyright © 2009 by Ellyn Satter. Published at www.EllynSatter.com. For more eating competently (and for research backing up this advice), see Ellyn Satter’s Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family: How to Eat, How to Raise Good Eaters, How to Cook, Kelcy Press, 2008. Also see www.EllynSatter.com/shopping to purchase books and to review other resources.”
*****************

UPDATE: This probably should have been tagged on to the end of my post about ruining my children’s summer, but it hadn’t been published yet, so here we have it, now! A Newsweek slide-show called “Fat on Film: What pop culture tells us about being obese in America.”

The middle years.

In case you’re wondering, here’s a quick checklist to help you determine whether or not you have entered the middle years of your life.

Ahem:

1. The time it takes you to emerge from the bathroom after your morning ablutions keeps getting longer. If, for instance, you need to not only shower and shampoo, but must also: put fancy skin-doctor-recommended cream on the dark circles under your eyes; apply body lotion; apply sunscreen to face and neck; apply not one but two leave-in conditioners to the hair that already has been conditioned in the shower; apply not one but two different kinds of cream to that wonky bone at the very bottom of your leg/top of your foot, because decades of being a little-smidge pigeon-toed have thickened and discolored the skin on those bones to the extent that a loved one once asked you “What happened there? Did you get kicked by a horse?” — you’re middle-aged. (You may also be a woman).
   
2. You’re attracted to middle-aged people. If you look at beautiful people in their early twenties and think “well, aren’t they silly and cute!”, but notice a cute, gray haired, wrinkly parent on the school playground and find yourself thinking “hubba hubba!” — you’re middle-aged.
3. Certain songs bring you back to a certain place and time — you just can’t remember why. This happened to me just this morning. A song from the early 80s came wafting out across the kitchen (and in a delightfully illustrative bit of coincidence, I now can’t remember what the song was), and I was there, man, in an instant: BOOM! Transported back to an emotional state, filled with a kind of pleasant longing. And I have no idea why. If this happens to you? You’re middle-aged.
4. You have glasses. Sometimes. More than once now, I have sent my children off to look for the glasses that I can’t see very well without my glasses. I tell them that my grandmother used to pay me a nickle to do this task, and that the glasses were more often than not someplace clearly visible. They laugh, while I weep a little, on the inside. If this happens to you? You’re middle-aged.
5. You use a multi-tasking facial cleanser. If you clean your face with a product containing both alpha hydroxy, “to smooth fine lines,” and salicylic acid, “a proven blemish fighting ingredient” — because you not infrequently have pimples on top of your wrinkles? You’re middle-aged. (And, again: Possibly a woman).
6. You have come to realize that each day really, truly only has 24 hours. This is the one that gets me the most, actually. I’m not a big fan of the wrinkles, or the lost eyesight, but the real sorrow is the growing realization that I will literally never get to do all I want to do, whether it’s seeing the world or visiting friends or writing letters or reading books or watching movies or watching my kids — I’ll never get to it all. I joke that I will die with a pile of unread books next to my bed, but I now know, in a way that is only just beginning to hit me, that I will also die with unknown beauty on stage and screen, unseen glories over the horizon, and unspoken words in my heart. The hours will pile up until each day ends, the days will pile up into all the years, and the time will come when the years will close and be done, whether or not I’ve read enough about Lincoln, whether or not I’ve gotten to see Liam Finn perform again, whether or not I’ve wandered the streets of Paris or Yazd. Whether or not I’ve found that friend from whom I haven’t heard in so long, and we’ve spent another day with coffee and laughter…. If you, like me, are getting a little weepy right now? You’re middle-aged.
7. If you’re reading this list and it all sounds like I’m speaking a foreign language – you’re not middle-aged. Yet.
8. If you’re reading this list and it’s making you smile at the memory of a more innocent time – you’re not middle-aged.
   You’re old.

And, because I love you, Liam Finn:

Good stuff: eat food.

I think that the average American Like Me — educated, middle/upper-middle class, blog-reading — has a pretty complicated relationship with food. It’s not just delectable fuel that allows us to move through our days, a way to enjoy the company of those we love or resolve the disputes of warring parties ( “breaking bread,” and so on). No, food is: reward, punishment, medicine, poison, sin, status. We don’t eat food; we agonize over it.

In looking for a particular quote by New York Times’ writer Mark Bittman earlier, I was reminded of his TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk, a smart, funny, challenging discussion of our food consumption in general, and of meat in particular. His basic philosophy boils down to: Eat food (real food), mostly plants, not too much — it’ll be better for you, and better for the planet. I don’t usually watch videos on the intertubez — something about the screen and the angle and me being weird — but this was well worth it, and I say that having just watched it again. I must once again thank my husband for pointing it (and the whole TED oeuvre) out to me. I don’t often like to admit it, but he not infrequently knows what he’s talking about!

And what led me to re-watch Bittman’s talk? The following news, which I first gleaned from Ta-Nehisi Coates: KFC has introduced a sandwich consisting of bacon, two different cheeses and [I presume a fat-o-rific] sauce between two pieces of fried chicken. No bread — not even white bread. Just: Fried chicken.

Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.

*************

UPDATE: I should have of course noted that the line “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” is a (very) slight paraphrase of the words of food writer Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food). Bittman says something very similar in his TED talk, but it doesn’t have the punch of seven words and three periods. Bittman has said (though of course now I can’t find a link!) that his thinking on this has been influenced by Pollan. Thanks for pointing it out, erniebufflo! 

Women’s rights = human rights.

I read a powerful and disturbing commentary concerning violence against women the other day, written by, of all things, a man: Bob Herbert, at the New York Times.

I’ll admit that when I see a man grappling with these issues, I sit up and take notice more quickly. It is the rare man who publicly confronts the problem of misogynistic violence, a problem I confronted directly during my five years as a rape counselor, a problem that shapes women’s lives everyday.

And yet the thing that I found most disturbing in this piece was the way it caught me by surprise, and made me wonder if Herbert had internalized something about which I may still be in denial.

In talking about the recent shooting deaths at a LA Fitness location near Pittsburgh, Herbert tied George Sodini’s rampage to the 2006 massacre of Amish schoolgirls in rural Pennsylvania, and pointed out what should be an obvious fact:

There would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.

…

We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

I think about my not-quite ten year old son, to whom I recently had to explain the word “rape.” I think about myself walking carefully down the middle of the street, without my iPod, when I go for a walk late at night. I think about the voyeristic media attention paid when pretty young women get hurt or disappear; I think of slasher movies, and TV crime procedurals, and beer commercials. I think of Rihanna having listen as people absolved Chris Brown of the vicious beating he dealt her ( “She probably made him mad for him to react like that.”). I think of all the teenaged girls who think that getting beaten by your boyfriend is normal.

When you are a member of an oppressed group without equal access to socially acceptable power, there is a point at which you absorb the hand you are dealt as — normal. Normative. The history of the various civil rights movements is a history of convincing people — African-Americans, gays, migrant workers — to shed this vision of reality and recognize it as dysfunctional, a weapon in the hands of those who would maintain their power. Think about Black folks under Jim Crow, just trying to get along. Think about all the gay men who hide their faces when leaving gay events. In order to battle segregation or homophobia, you have to first recognize each as the pervasive evil that it is.

You have to notice it.

I think that, on a very real — and again that word, disturbing — level, I have not yet really noticed that I am “living in a society saturated with misogyny” — not, at least, with the fuller understanding that individual acts of “barbaric treatment of women and girls” are actually just small parts of a broader, pervasive social ill, one that warps the lives of every man, woman, and child (because if 50 percent of your population must live in fear in order to live in safety, then, honestly, 100 percent of your population is fucked, one way or another), a systemic illness that invades every home, every family, every school, every workplace, because every woman knows the fear, even if she hasn’t felt the blows on her limbs, or the tearing of clothes from her back.

Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.

I remember the sick horror I felt reading Khaled Hosseini’s wonderful A Thousand Splendid Suns — the realization that the evil visited upon Afghanistan’s women was like that visited on Europe’s Jews. That you were to be shunned, despised, discarded simply for being who you are. That your value as a human being was negated the moment you emerged from your mother’s womb. As I read, I would sneak into my daughter’s room and hold her close and mourn the many mothers who had been unable to save themselves, or their daughters.

But I didn’t entirely grasp the extent to which these horrors applied to her, to me. That we, too, could be hurt “just because” we’re female. That while my life as an upper-middle class American female means less exposure to the horrors, and far greater exposure to men who understand them to be horrific — that doesn’t mean that I can’t still be picked out of a crowd and raped, hurt, or murdered, because the Holy One, Blessed Be He chose to make me a woman. That my daughter can’t still be picked out of a crowd….

A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so…. There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.

It’s not so much that individual men are bad (though some surely are) — it’s that the entire system, all of human society, is constructed in a way that encourages and rewards that badness in those who have it, as long (of course) as it doesn’t go “too far” (or, in some cases, especially if it goes too far). It’s not so much that we have to learn to protect ourselves (though we surely do) — it’s that we have to bring about a massive shift in human perception, so that women and girls will no longer have such a screaming need for protection. Herbert concludes:

We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.

He’s right. And as I mourn for the women in Afghanistan, and the women in the Congo, and the roughly seven women battered every single minute in these United States, I must also raise my son and daughter to see this truth for what it is: The architecture of human society rests, at least in part, on a rotten, stinking substructure that presumes that one half of humanity does not rise to the level of the other, and may be smacked around at will.

And to do what I can to change it, before they go out into that truth on their own.

Threat level: pink.

My daughter turned 6 last week, and I’ve found myself thinking about the following essay, written just after she turned 4, finally published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune the day before she turned 5 (ah, the joys of freelancing!). I suspect that some do not see political ramifications in the fantasies we offer our daughters (and the colors in which we offer them), but when I consider the many social ills faced by fully half of society (from professional limitation, to culturally engendered body-loathing, to sexual assault), I believe these fantasies have deep significance on many levels. They are personal, yes, but they are also political.

**************

Isn’t she pretty in pink?

The color symbolizes the princess culture with which we surround our little girls. But what exactly are we teaching them?

July 22, 2008

By EMILY L. HAUSER

My daughter Maya recently turned 4, and Sweet Baby Moses, I thought I’d drown in the pink.

Her party netted her puzzles, markers, books — and a mother lode of “girl” items: a pair of Cinderella mules, a Disney Princess purse (complete with sunglasses and faux camera, which emits such phrases as “you’re pretty as a picture!”), a “lipstick,” brush and mirror set, not one but two fairy dresses, and three arts-n-crafts sets that are, it goes without saying, pink. The tissue paper? Pink. The gift bags? You know it.

It’s not that I begrudge the child her girly things. Her wardrobe is full of flowers and butterflies, and she lives for her dolls. Indeed, we were made aware very early that she could make a “baby” out of anything — down to and including rocks — and we’ve been happy to provide her with any number of cuddly creatures, humanoid and other.

It’s just that, for four years, her father and I have held at bay the combined forces of the Disney juggernaut and the relentless American effort to turn little girls into mini-women, and pink has come to symbolize it all for me.

And so, bags and bags of gifts and hand-me-downs have been hand-me-downed further because they were tainted with pink. The girl’s poor grandmothers are now afraid to give her anything that falls anywhere on the rose-to-blush continuum — “but it’s coral!” my sainted mother once protested when I announced (ill-naturedly) that her gift would be returned.

As we sat among the rosy/bubble-gum-y leavings of the present-opening, I asked my 8-year-old son: What does a princess do? Understandably, he was a bit bemused, so after a moment I said, “Pretty much just sit there, right?”

To which he replied: “And look beautiful. I guess.”

There’s the rub.

For all that my girl likes skirts, playing mommy and putting her dolls to bed, she also likes building bookshelves, playing firefighter and giving soccer balls a good, hard kick. She is, in the parlance of literary analysis, a fully rounded character.

And what a character! We took early to calling her Maya Warrior Princess, because she commanded respect from the earliest age. Ask her what a princess does, and you’ll get a very different answer.

“Help the animals get back to their homes,” she told me one day, “like in the jungle.” She paused. “And fight witches.”

But as she moves further into the world, we fear that the mainstream consensus regarding the central pursuits of a “princess” will flood past us, and she will learn what her culture wants most in its women: Sit there. And be beautiful.

Be beautiful — not in your own curly-headed, twinkly-smile way, but in a grown-up way, a way that says that even grown women are not, in fact, beautiful enough. We worry that the lipstick is only the first step to a life of being told to do something about herself, and the mirror the first step in a life of double-checking her own worth.

Of course, we can’t know what’s going on in that head, and on the day after her party, Maya made an enormous show (in a lavender top and pleated skirt) of demonstrating her muscles and explaining her regimen for staying “so, so, so strong.”

So I do not despair. But I do wish that we could show greater creativity as a society as we try to shape and teach our girls. They bring many more colors to the table than we are encouraging them to show.

Emily L. Hauser is a freelance writer living outside of Chicago.

© Minneapolis Star-Tribune 2008

On ruining my children’s summer.

My kids go to this insanely awesome camp. They come home dirty and tired, telling god-awful jokes and roping me into games I’ve never heard of, telling tales of kindness (“I got Camper of the Day! Because I helped the little kids!”) and singing really annoying songs, like for instance, “This Is A Song That Gets On Everybody’s Nerves.” Summer camp, just as God intended!

But, as is often the case in human endeavor (I don’t know if you’ve noticed), the occasional imperfection slips through. One song that came home really bugged me — that is, not in the way it was meant to.

To the tune of Ironman: “I’m the ice cream man/ running over fat kids in my van/ when I ring my bell/ all the little kiddies run like hell/-icopters/ but they won’t get far/ cause I have a sniper in my car/ when I shoot them down/ a hundred days later/ their blood turns brown/ then I start again/ because/ I’m the ice cream man…”. Etc.

Can you pick out the one word that resulted in a lecture about social justice?

Nope. No, not that one either. “Sniper”? Well, good guess, given that we’re a gun-free house, but: Nope.

“Fat.” The word “fat.”

I don’t know what the word “fat” means anymore, because for the most part, we tend to apply it to anyone over a randomly arrived at size that a rough majority of society has determined is “best.” Women use it as a weapon against ourselves, whether we’re a size 2 or 3X, and entire wings of the advertising industry are predicated on our fear of it. I know that some people, in consultation with health care professionals (emphasis on the word “professionals,” as opposed to random passers-by with a set of eyes), can determine that they are objectively obese, and need help in order to achieve a healthy weight, but I’m not sure we’re talking about anything objective when we haul out the word “fat.”

We do, however, use the word “fat,” or the suggestion of it, as a tool of comedy. Because, see, “fat kids” are funny! And running after the ice-cream van, in that completely uncontrolled mania that fat people display toward food? Hee-sterical!!

It matters not that neither of these images has anything to do with reality. There’s nothing objectively funny about size, and saying that one size is funny and worthy of finger-pointing tends to, oh I don’t know, diminish the humanity of those who are of that size, suspect themselves to be of that size, are accused of being that size, or – you get my point.

Then there’s the fact that the so-called “fat” don’t necessarily eat any more or less — or have any greater or lesser tendency to run down the ice cream van — than anyone else. Some people of a socially-acceptable size are chow-hounds and wish they could gain weight, and some achieve that socially-acceptable size through a punishing program of self-denial. As my husband pointed out when he chimed in on the lecture, to a very large extent, size is a lot like height: It’s in your genes.

And finally, the underlying idea of fat humor (one of the very few remaining ways in which Americans allow ourselves to make fun of a group of people for being who they are) is the sense that the “fat” are somehow less worthy than the not-fat. That it’s ok to laugh at a fat kid, because all he really wants is ice-cream, and he doesn’t count for much, anyway. I have a theory that this may be because Western society is so thoroughly soaked in Christian notions of shame and guilt that even though many of us no longer subscribe to any religious creed, we still see self-indulgence as a sign of moral weakness — and surely people are “fat” because they are gluttons, and thus, morally inferior. It’s a theory, anyway.

So there I am, telling my poor kids, who were just singing a silly song (and hey, kudos on teaching them the tune to Ironman!) that “fat” is not funny; that if you feel yourself to be fat, are frequently told that you’re fat, or are in fact bigger than the average bear, and you hear that song, it will certainly cut you to the quick; that the notion of unrestrained fat people is wrong; and that FURTHERMORE, human value should not be assigned according to size (and then dad added genetics. Oh, it’s a barrel of fun by us!)

Look, honestly, I get this kind of song. Kids need to mess around with notions of death and horror, kids are amused by stuff that adults have gotten over, kids need to walk on the very edge of respectability in order to find just where the line is. I get it!

But you know, and I know, that there are a million-zillion kids everywhere, learning to hate themselves a little more every day, because they don’t conform to some amorphous and ill-conceived notion of a “right” size, and shit like this DOESN’T HELP.

So while I surely did not take it upon myself to talk to the wonderful folks at the near-perfect camp about one word in one song (I promise), I did talk to my kids, to help them hear their words’  impact, and try to see the world around them a little more clearly.

Honestly, couldn’t the ice-cream man have run over “little babies,” or “old people”? Dark humor, people, it’s what all the cool kids do!

The body.

I would submit, humbly of course, that we don’t know how to talk about our bodies.

We know how to talk about other people’s bodies, and we know how to talk about an image that we have been given about how a body such as our own should look and act — but we don’t really know how to talk about the actual body that we actually have, devoid of social expectation or moral implication, without a sense of shame or need to hedge our bets. At least, that has not been my experience — our bodies are sexual, or sources of humor. Something to be ogled, or something to be overcome. Not an integral part of a healthy sense of self.

And this is not just true for women — though I do believe that women and girls suffer more as a result than do men and boys. It seems to me that every woman I know has battled (or is battling) demons regarding her body image (and in this I absolutely include myself). Women refusing compliments as they refuse food, women of brilliant minds hating themselves because of a series of numbers (weight, size, BMI), women who feel themselves less worthy for not looking like — someone. Something. I don’t believe that we are ever entirely clear on what that Thing is, but we know that we have not achieved it, and it can drain our entire sense of worth as a human beings.

But the problem I’m considering is different, or bigger, or (possibly) partial cause for this particular affliction. We seem to have no real conversational structures, we hardly have language, for talking about our physicality in the same way as we talk about art, or thoughts, or the backyard, or going on vacation. (Or even our emotional state, which is no easy thing to discuss). Indeed, I’m having a hard time even verbalizing these ideas, because it’s very hard to say what it is that we don’t say.

We don’t discuss passing gas — that’s disgusting. We don’t say “I love my hair” — that’s vain. We don’t talk about how knitting needles feel in the hands, or a keyboard underneath them. Summer sun on the skin vs. winter sun; bathwater vs. rainwater; the strain of muscle that has learned something new, vs. the strain of muscle that has forgotten something once known. This is, to the extent that it comes up at all, the stuff of poetry, not conversation.

I want to love my body. I want to treat it well and think of it fondly and enjoy its many gifts, and I barely know how to even think about it.

In pondering this the other day, I asked each of my kids, separately, what they liked about their bodies. They both said, independently of each other: “My brain.”

That my not-quite-6-year-old girl and not-quite-10-year-old boy would have a love of the mind is kind of thrilling — and to anyone who knows our uber-geeky family, not all that surprising.

But I hope to help them learn to value their skin and bones, too — not as agents of sexual attraction (merely), but as them. As much them as their brains.

First I have to figure out how to talk about it.