Race, Class, Beauty-- Can you have one without the other? (Make Up Blog)

"We had defended ourselves since memory against everything and everybody, considered all speech a code to be broken by us, and all gestures subject to careful analysis; we had become headstrong, devious, and arrogant. Nobody paid us any attention, so we paid very good attention to ourselves. Our limitations were not known to us—not then."

Imagine thinking that you will never be good enough. Now imagine thinking that and constantly being told that. Would you be able to keep your head up? Would you be able to mentally, physically or emotionally deal with it? While reading the Bluest Eye there was a constant struggle to be in a healthy and compassionate relationship with another person. I tried to think of how it felt to be in Pecola’s shoes and it was painful to even think about, but I also came to agreements that I never knew lied within myself. I, like Pecola, have a connection with blue eyes and beauty. I can note that I am a part of a “superior, white race” but I still connect blue eyes to a primal sign of beauty, and I do not have blue eyes. I do not know if it is because they are “unique” or just stunning to me, but I definitely can understand Pecola’s thoughts. The difference is, not having blue eyes does not make me feel like I am inferior or that my whole life would be different if I just had that one characteristic.

The girls had to constantly defend themselves, and by defend I mean, mentally physically and emotionally. Throughout the book the young ladies carry a feeling of worthlessness and I think the quote gave me a feeling of brunt hope for them. Brunt hope to me is thinking “Well, this is the hand we were dealt and we have to be tough to get through it”, but even then some cannot come out of the situations alive and well. It is sad to have an attitude, so strong, that it came off to be confident, and then to still be broken down by those around you. I think it takes the entire book for Pecola to realize her limitations, or at least how limited she really was. She often seemed to be strong and to deal with things better than most but there is only so much a human can take before they break. After Pecola get raped by her father there is a monologue between her and somebody. In class we discussed who or what that somebody may be and while I was reading I was brainstorming a couple of people/beings it may be. I came to the conclusion that I think it was her talking to herself, or an alter-ego. The only way she could have dealt with the pain of what had happened was to distance herself from her body. This alter-personality was what she created to tell her she has the blue eyes she has always wanted and that she is worth something, which is something she had never heard before.

Race and class is an obviously prevalent issue in the book. I think Morrison took the issues deeper than most books I have read because she was generally raw in how she wrote. There are not just hidden messages throughout the book but also messages that jump out at you. Race, beauty and class are all interconnected. Beauty can elevate a person’s class. Race can diminish a person’s class. Class can assist beauty and race. They all play parts in how society will view you and how far you will be able to get, and I often think this is still a problem today. An example I have is a documentary I watched in a Sociology course at Allegheny called, People Like Us. It went into the American culture and explored class. The people a part of the highest class were generally “better looking” than the lower classes. By better looking I do not always mean physical characteristics (a handful of the wealthy were obese, which reminded me of Fat Shame, when the wealthy were glutinous), but their surroundings were more attractive. Where they lived, what they wore, and the community they were surrounded by was clearly an advantage to them. That was an advantage that some of the people in the lower class would never have. It is a constant struggle to work your way up in society, especially when you have everything against you.

Doesn't Mom Matter?

Picture this: There is a pregnant woman out to dinner with her husband at a nice Italian restaurant. She is nearly full term and is craving that glass of wine she has done without the past eight months. She hesitates to order a small glass of red wine but decides that one glass would not hurt. When the waiter comes to the table and the mother-to-be places her order for a small glass of red wine, the waiter seems to look confused. The woman is obviously pregnant and pregnant women are not allowed to drink, so how does the waiter go about this situation. The waiter denies the mother-to-be her wine order explaining that the staff is not allowed to serve a pregnant woman.

What amount of control does this woman have of her body and choices right now? When women get pregnant I feel like everyone around them feels like it is their obligation to tell the mother-to-be what she can and cannot do during her pregnancy. So now this woman and friends, family members, bosses, and doctors telling them how to treat their body for the next nine months (imagine nine months, that’s an entire YEAR here at Allegheny). Don not forget about the biggest contender of all, the law. Bordo lists some rules such as discontinuing the use of “alcohol, cigarettes, or other possibly harmful substances, forbidding them from continuing to work because of the presence of fetal toxins in the workplace, forcing them to take drugs…” (81). It seems like something that can be so great, such as pregnancy, has turned into an intrusive loss of freedom to make your own choices. Women can be put in jail for using substances while pregnant but then once they are in jail, they are not even offered a therapy program (83). If the mother cannot stop using while she is pregnant, what do you think is going to make her stop using when the baby is born, so she can successfully raise the child? On page 82 or Bordo’s work Cal Thomas asks “what’s the difference between wanting to protect a child that is newly born and one that is about to be born?” (this was said in regards to serving alcohol). The difference is the fetus cannot live without the mother when it is in the womb. It cannot make its own decisions, it cannot feed itself, and it certainly cannot breath on its own. The mother can live without the child, but the child cannot live without the mother therefore the fetus is “no more than tissue or an appendage to the mother” (88). We too often separate the mother from the fetus, subsequently placing more importance on the fetus, when in reality the mother and fetus are one system. They are not a part of separate entities where the mother is the “fleshy incubator” (84), without any feeling, emotion or choice for herself, but society often forgets that.

So what happens when a pregnant woman does not want to “follow the rules” our society and government have so compassionately made (sarcasm).? Or worse: What if a woman wants to have an abortion? Is that not her choice? I think choice is there for a reason. I find it respectable, if a person who is pregnant knows that she cannot provide for this baby, could not stay healthy during the pregnancy, or feels unable to have the child for any other reason, to have an abortion (I know adoption is there, but work with me). Unfortunately this case is controlled the most in our society. There is a plethora of research going into defining “when life begins”. If we can all agree on that, we get closer to all agreeing on when a woman can and cannot have an abortion. I respect the law that abortion cannot take place in the third trimester, mostly because if the woman has gone that far, I feel like 1. There was an extended period of time that she considered having the baby and 2. There is not much time left in the pregnancy and the baby can still be placed for adoption. Disregarding all “rules” and laws around abortion why is it not the mothers choice to carry or abort the child? Her life is on the line too and she can make her own decisions, feed herself, and breath on her own. We often ask: Why don’t woman have control of their body during pregnancy, but if you think about it, do women ever have control of their bodies?

My Realistic Passion

Combining sports and school is my dream. I was raised as that girl with a dad who loves sports and a brother who played every sport out there. By the time I could remember I was throwing around a ball. I was playing with with harbors and cooking sets that they sell but my interest was in active sports. I was playing catch with my dad at the age of 5 and since then I have had an outstanding interest in sports... And more broadly competition. At age 11 the genre difference took control of my life. When I played on an all boys team until age 11, people were confused as to why I could "keep up". Honest to God, I've neve been more confused in my life. I didn't understand why, as a girl, I had to leave a team evacuee I was becoming a pre-pubescent age. As I grow older I get that society wanted us to be separate... But why would we have to separate if I was "keeping up".

In the readings it talked a lot about if all people, men and women, we're trained equally our differences would be so minuscule. For 6 years I was trained on the same pace as "the boys" and was equal and beyond the standards of a competitive athlete. I regularly out-shown boys of my same age it it was insisted that we were separated.

I've been through it all as a collegiate female athlete. I get the lesbian talk, the "you're too good to be a girl", the "why are you stronger than me?!", but at the en of the day no matter how strong I am physically

I thought curiosity was a good thing...

Staring is a complex biological function that our brain does to figure out situations and visions we are curious about. I can think of an endless amount of times I have starred at something to figure it out and to process it, but the most recent and effective example is, this Sunday I was in the hospital and in the bed across from me there was a woman of the older population who had fallen and torn a part of her lip off, and I mean TORN. So I snuck my stare through an opening in the curtain between us and watched the ER doctor attempt to put her back together. I could not take my eyes off it. My friend who had accompanied me to the hospital started laughing and asked what I was looking at because I was in a deep stare and my jaw was open and about to hit the floor. I laughed back and pointed out the event on which my eyes were locked. My friend then engaged in the same stare I was in. I honestly was not staring to be rude, I was just trying to figure out what happened and if her lip was going to be fully repaired. By the end of her hospital stay she had been sown up, but she still looked like she had a slightly clef pallet, not to mention other parts of her face were bruised and scraped as well. I was happy to be hidden in my own room so nobody else could see me staring, but I couldn’t stop looking and it was exciting trying to figure out what had happen. Something that I think was particularly interesting is if my mom was at the hospital with me, chances are she would tell me to stop staring and I would look down, but since my friend is not an authority figure she just asked me what I was staring at and she joined me. I wonder how much age and roles of people in your life effects situations in which people stare.

I was staring to solve a mystery. I probably had these feelings “because we both crave and dread unpredictable sights, staring encounters are fraught with anxious contradiction” (19). As I said before, I was not intending on being rude, I just wanted to figure out what was going on because “Curiosity is the itch to know; it shifts desire of the eye to desire of the mind” (47). I feel like a core theme of Garland-Thomson’s work thus far is built on the idea in which the behavior of staring evokes a plethora of contradicting feelings and behaviors. We want to look at something because we are curious, and being curious can help you learn, but staring is bad. So how can we learn and discover the mysteries of our sight if we cannot even look at what we are trying to figure out. It does not make sense. It’s as if we are trying to solve a math problem. Picture this: You have a test in front of you and written on it you have this extraordinary Calculus 4 problem that you must solve to pass the class. I don’t know about all you math whizzes out there but I would have to stare at the problem a LONG time to even begin to start figuring it out. Imagine if on that test you were just shown the problem briefly and then had to work it out in your head. It would be frustrating and most likely, near impossible to complete. If we are staring at something whether it’s a car accident or a disabled person, we are doing it to figure out the math problem. The way we do that is by staring to work it out. Is curiosity so bad because ignorance is bliss? Are some things just not our business and are there things our brains just shouldn’t work out? Why is “wanting to know more than what is good for you” (63) so bad?

Beauty is in the EYE of the Beholder

The world is full of different meanings of beauty. Most people do not recognize the beauty in the world, nor do they recognize the beauty in the mirror. In Toni Morrison's, The Bluest Eye, Pecola is a main character that does not realize the beauty within her. She dreams of being beautiful and her recognition of beauty is through blue eyes. She knows the white girl look is a beautiful look and she constantly yearns for it. You see the world through only your own eyes. No matter what their color, the way you see the world is personal because your eyes are the only eyes that see the world the way you do. Maybe Pecola believes that if your eyes are beautiful your thoughts are beautiful. Pecola struggles with her beauty because she feels if she is not beautiful she is not worth anything. She is not worth happiness, she is not worth health and she is certainly not worth anyone's time. The eyes are also symbolic in the way that you look into someone's eyes when you speak to them. If you are at all intimate with something, the most intimate thing you could do is look into someone's eyes when you are making love to them. If your eyes are "ugly", who will ever love you? If someone cannot stare into your eyes and fall deep within your soul, nothing will never amount to anything more than a sexual relationship. In the beginning of the novel, Pecola asks how you make a man love you and the child around her cannot give her a straight or realistic answer. Maybe Pecola believes that if her eyes were beautiful, men could fall deeper within her soul, and then truly love her.

Although the story is based in a different time period than where we are now, it is relevant to the times we live in now. The novel is based strongly around skin color (which could be considered in this time and day but not as strong) but if you broaden the subject to visual beauty, even our generation struggles with that. Yearning for blue eyes like Pecola makes me think of Fat Shame. There are so many visual aspects of the body that people want. There are so many images that are worked into our mind that mean "beauty", it is no wonder Pecola could not find the beauty within herself without thinking she had blue eyes. People in our society do not feel beautiful without being the size 2 of the models we see and some are constantly working towards that, even if it is unrealistic. It seems like the hopelessness that Pecola had through the book. Outward beauty advances you, no matter how much people deny it. It is not wrong in my eyes, to wish for that so you can advance yourself and it is never wrong in anyone's eyes to make yourself more beautiful. No matter how happy or healthy you are, if you keep molding yourself to the picture of perfection in your society, you will get complimented and praised for your hard work towards perfection.

Silly Shifting Stigmas

“You’re fat”. We’ve talked about it 100 times. When you hear that phrase you sink into yourself and immediately suffer a lower self-esteem. We all know that is from the negative stigmas we have built ourselves in the past years. In the past being overweight showed that you were wealthy and could enjoy a life of leisure, now it shows that you are disgusting and you have no self control. In Fat Shame it thought that the shift of views came during the suffrage when women were fighting for basic rights and the “poster woman” for that was a thin, healthy, “beautiful” person. I think there was then a general connection with being an ABLE woman is being a thin woman and the rest is history, literally. Now we go around calling people fat and using it as one of the most painful insults. Have any of you seen someone being called fat and you can’t help to think to yourself “wow, she really doesn’t look fat to me…”? I know I certainly have. So if people go around calling people fat and using judgments, who is the one to make the final call on who qualifies as fat or thin?

Many people are at a healthy weight but dance on the fine line of what society call “thin”. Fat Shame notes that the balance between thin enough and too fat is hard to attain because of so many people’s differing opinions(34). Farrell calls it the “medium between leanness and obesity”. This is something that has always, ALWAYS blew my mind. How am I supposed to attain this perfect body that society makes me want so bad if I do not know the fucking standards because they are always changing? And even if I feel like I have finally fit into this perfect body standard, someone can still make their personal judgment and call me fat, making all my hard work worthless, because I still did not become this image that I have wanted so badly. Then, for someone to think I have no self-control, like Ferrell says, just because I have “few extra pounds” is very insulting. One person thinks I am not thin enough and then I get all the connotations that go along with it. “I lost the battle with fat”, “disgusting and huge”, “lower status”, “uncivilized”, “abnormal”. Bodily fitness became a key sign of “fitness for citizenship” (95). Now we all have to fight this stigma that has been placed on us. Someone PLEASE help me understand this.

I would like to imagine one day not having these stigmas hanging over our society’s head. I wonder if we could have another shift in our judgmental society as we did during the suffrage. Will another feminist movement, like the suffrage, cause a shift in the way we see the female body, or are we too stuck in our ways and stigmas related to the “fat body”? For example, if we make a revolutionary change of gaining equal pay in the job market in the future, would that begin the new shift of stigmas of the female body? Give it a thought!

Does Health Even Matter Anymore?

F-A-T. I don’t know what you think when you see that word, but I, like most of modern day society, think “I do not want that”. I do not want to eat it, I do not want to feel it, and I certainly don’t want to be it, at least that’s how I felt before reading the first half of Fat Shame. Here’s the thing, just because I am in this Bodies class doesn’t mean I am not susceptible to society and the media, and I am sure you can all understand that.

Growing up I was never “skinny”, but I was very active, so I was never generally worried about my health. Then due to a serious injury I couldn’t play sports for an extended period of time and had gained a lot of weight because of that. One day, I just stopped and said “I don’t feel healthy anymore”, so from that day on it was my quest to lose weight and become healthy, which in Fat Shame can be noted as two completely different things (11). Some days I felt more unhealthy in the way I chose to lose weight, then I did being overweight. I didn’t get body altering surgery, but I also did take great care of my body, but in my mind I was still on track to be healthier. Looking back healthier connoted a prettier, thinner self, and perhaps aiming towards trying to fit in to a sorority. Losing weight is one of the hardest things I have ever done. I was literally in “the war against fat” because I did feel it was my greatest enemy (10). “Women bear the brunt” of the society’s standards for “perfect” bodies and that can take a toll on any of us physically, emotionally, and mentally (19). It was not just my body that was changing because it consumed every part of me. I was constantly telling myself “you can’t eat that”, “you’re eating too much”, “do you want to be fat again” and that was honestly one of the most emotionally/mentally draining things I have been through. Weight loss was responsible for my highest highs and lowest lows, and I knew my body and mind were forever changing.

My feelings of self were not the only things that have changed, so has the American standards of the body over the years. In Namibia, fat would be paired with the word attractive and in France in the 1800’s a stick thin figure would be unattractive. In our American history when food was scarce, being pleasantly plump was an indicator of a higher class. Because you had the leisure of laying around and eating, you clearly were a higher member in society’s hierarchy. Those who were thin and frail were written off as lower class because they could barely afford to nourish themselves. To me, this concept makes sense, NOW 180 that concept and you have the general concept of modern society’s ideas. Fat portrays “lazy, gluttonous, greedy, immoral, uncontrolled, stupid, ugly, and lacking in will power” (4). If you ask me, I would say most of those words could describe characteristic of someone living in the way upper class because they don’t have monetary constraint in their lives so there is no need to be frugal. The thing is, people would link these words to a lower class or at least lower standard of living. In some ways society has built us to be shameful of an imperfect body, but is any body perfect? Who makes the rules of what is and is not acceptable? Where is the line drawn between healthy thin/fat and unhealthy thin/fat? Does health really matter…?

Labeling Helps Understanding...Right?

Something that was important to learn growing up was organizational skills. Although there is a part of us that organizes categories in our head naturally, there are also the organization skills that are taught to us. Humans do this to help keep information organized mentally and to simplify the way we think of things. At first, you can’t think of any negative effects these organizations would have. If you step back and look, those organizations have become labels and now we live in a world run by labels. The first label we take on is the label of our sex from the moment of birth and from then on the labels flow freely through our society with intent to help us “better understand” the world. More recently I think a few of us have had a conflict with labels diminishing our understanding as opposed to actually aiding our understanding the topics we have recently discussed.

The term “transgender” was discussed in class for an entire class period and most of us were still trying to unravel the meaning. Now think about this: we are a part of an educated community and we actually study the meaning of phrases such as “transgender” and we struggle understanding it fully. How informed to you think the more general public is? Not very. Valentine focused a lot on gender being how a person visually looks in regards to what they wear, their hairstyle, and the way they carry themselves. After discussing what gender is my own definition is: gender is determined by the person’s feelings of femininity or masculinity and they choose which characteristics they will take on based on the feelings they have about themselves. The part I don’t fully understand is when we fulfill our gender, part of that is filling the stereotypical roles that gender would have. An example is: a biological male feels “he” is a “she”. To portray that “she” feels this way “she” would perhaps dress in feminine clothes, grow “her” hair longer, perhaps take hormones etc. So they just take on a different stereotype/label. (I put the pronouns above in quotations so the reader could follow what I meant, but Serano notes that society has a problem with the use of pronouns with transgendered people.)

The transgendered umbrella term used in Valentine (37) keeps the definition so wide open that it shouldn’t even be considered a definition. While discussing Valentine’s work in class my group had come up with so many situations that we have encountered and labeling the situation “correctly” made our heads spin. I actually caught myself saying “that blows my mind”. Here’s an example: Born a biological female, dresses and is perceived as a “preppy” male, sounds like a male, identifies being a girl, loves being a girl, and id attracted to girls. WRAP YOUR HEAD AROUND THAT and start trying to label the situation. It seems funny that something that was supposed to help organization in out head is only causing a problem in this circumstance. Who is the one to determine the final label of what you really are anyway?

Serano said “to be male is to have something and to be female is to not have” (240). This is probably the most off-the-wall connection I could make but, my roommates and I were on the dominoes website ordering pizza the other night and when you click the toppings menu the categories were “Meats” and “Non-Meats”. So you could either have meat on your pizza or the absence of meat. Like I said, it is a weird connection to make but never-the-less it is exactly how Serano believed our sex was organized. Labels have good intentions but when dissected, labels can certainly cause more confusion than organization.

Double Standards at Their Finest

“Now anticipating being on display to a roomful of spectators, they suddenly realize how it feels to be judged as women routinely are, sized up by another pair of eyes.” (174). Women are endlessly being criticized for the way they look, from head to toe. It is something we are accustomed to so much, that even we, ourselves, look in the mirror and try to reshape our body and attempt at achieving perfection every time we walk out the door. In Susan Bordo’s, The Male Body she brings up a film The Full Monty, in which men were attempting to prep themselves to get scrutinized like a female would. A man felt “a little chubby” and did not continue on with the competition. I’m not sure about how in depth these evaluations but if you line up a group of girls they are used to the scrutiny of others. I’m sure there breast size would be something to come up. How perky they are and are they too big, or too small? Funny thing is, how many times have you heard society scrutinizing the size of a male’s penis? A better question may be, how many times have you seen society allowing a penis to be seen? It seems like a sick double standard. The women versus men double standard has been around for literally centuries. In my Women and Literature class I have been learning more about the double standards as far back as the 1700’s. Women are expected to be virginal, but seductive, and educated but not smarter than a man, as well as they should be scrutinized but never make judgments. Bordo states “getting caught in moments of fantasy are shameful” for a woman (172). On the other hand you have men exploiting women they sleep with and being open about even their filthiest fantasies.
It makes me wonder when the standards of living of men and women came about. Bordo commented about Greek Gods in The Male Body and that really struck me and stood out. So all the way back in ancient Greece we have this epitome of a “ able body”. We have these statues that were carved hundreds of years ago and they were symbols of perfection. We have those representations because we have ads with those carved statues, they are just called something along the lines of “Abercrombie/Gucci models”. The males in these ads are still deemed as powerful and they center of attention, therefore they keep their masculinity. In the adds we saw in class, if men and women were in the ad the woman would be almost “relying” on the male physically. The “beauty” of a man compared to the “beauty” of a woman is completely warped in comparison. Beauty for a man is strength and grit and if that is seen in a woman she is deemed “too big”. or “too strong”. The definition for beauty for a female is “perfection”. I can’t go through one entire day without seeing or hearing something that is telling me how I can better myself. Something has to give. In a world as advanced as ours, how is it different sexes can’t have the same standards for living, let alone the same standards of scrutiny?