Resistance (is it futile?)

Our society is obsessed with numbers, appearances, sex, and quick fixes. How do these obsessions manifest themselves? How do women perceive their bodies and selves through these obsessions? I would argue that these perceptions can't helped being distorted and warped; that the majority of women in the United States do not have realistic, valuable, authentic frames of reference in relation to their bodies. Instead their bodies are objectified, sexualized, and displayed for male pleasure. As a result, women exercise to get buff, toned, sculpted, thin, and lean - words used to describe a marble sculpture, not a living, breathing human being. Women eat (or don't eat) to reach that magical number, whether it's on the scale, tape measure, or clothing. What if the word "diet" were eliminated from our vocabulary? What if women's bodies were treated as miraculous feats of biology, chemistry, physiology, and POWER?

So where does this diatribe come from? Well, professionally I want to teach at the university level and my goal as an educator is for students to take the theory from the classroom and see it and use it in their everyday lives. More importantly, I want them to actively resist those messages and ideologies that are unacceptable to them. Active resistance is different from awareness. While it's all well and good to recognize a television show as sexualizing and objectifying women, how do we resist it? What can we do since we do not participate in the production process? Women's magazines are a perfect example. Those that are supposedly for health and wellness are still saturated with images of thin, sculpted women, who are, at least to me, outside the everyday norm for women. The dominant message in the articles, workouts, and advertisements is about being sexy. While feeling sexy may be a personal triumph, it is still about men's pleasure, not women's health. How do we as readers resist these messages? Don't buy the magazine? Don't buy the advertised products? Start our own magazine? These are all good starting points but as the second-wave feminists asserted, the personal is political.

For my entire life, food has been my best friend and worst enemy. It's been my tranquilizer, celebrant, accelerant, and coma-inducer. I've been obsessed with what to eat and not to eat, literally every minute of the day, mentally calculating calories, fat, carbohydrates, and the possible weight loss/gain. The result is a closet full of clothes from size 8 to 18, a devasting body-image, and a destructive lifelong cycle of yo-yo dieting, setting me up for an assortment of debilitating diseases. Don't get me wrong - I do not blame my food/weight/body issues on the media or society. However, they play a significant role. The question is how do I break these destructive patterns and actively resist these dominant messages?

I've been considering the possibilities and think the problem is how I think about my body, which is the way many women think of their bodies. Instead of striving to achieve the unattainable perfection of TV, film, and magazines, with nonsensical diets and grueling exercise, why don't I begin thinking of my body as an intricate mechanism capable of incredible endurance and physical feats? I've never been an athlete; I hated PhysEd in school. I was uncoordinated, overweight, slow, and self-conscious. I was too inhibited to play sports for the pure fun of it because I just knew I wasn't as good as the other kids. But I am not a kid anymore, I am an adult who can change my life and the way I perceive of myself.

This introspection comes from season 2 of DietTribe on Lifetime - yes, television and popular culture can change lives! The show is about 5 friends ranging in weight from 174 to over 300 lbs. In 120 days, they trained to compete in a triathlon, and all five of them finished! While they also had weight loss goals and there were weigh-ins on the show, my interest was the triathlon. They did something they never, ever thought they could physically do. By participating in the triathlon they transformed their concept of their bodies.

Over the years, I've toyed with running in a 5K or the Virginia 10 miler but was too self-conscious and had too much of a self-defeating attitude to do it. Watching those women made me realize that if they could do it, I could do it! I'm going to participate in the Angels Race in April - a sprint triathlon (300m swim, 25K bike, and 5K run). Oh, this is so scary! But I don't have to wait until I'm the "right" number on the scale to be athletic. I can be an imperfect athlete (see Jayne Williams' Slow Fat Triathlete). By committing to this (oh my!), I'm resisting the dominant ideology surrounding what it means to be athletic and healthy. I'm also reconceptualizing my body image and transforming my relationship with food. So this is personal and political! I hope my publicly committing to such a scary proposition will inspire others to actively resist that which is destructive to their being healthy, happy, joyous, and free!

I guess now is the real test as to whether anyone is listening/reading! Having made this huge, frightening, overwhelming and PUBLIC commitment, is anyone interested in joining me?

Milestones

Well, I've reached a milestone in my life that is not so pleasant, not like getting your driver's license or first job or getting married. No, my milestone is that I realized I'm officially middle-aged YUCK! How did this happen? It's my parents that are middle-aged, at least in my feeble mind. Actually, that's completely unrealistic because if my parents are middle-aged that means their lifespan would be 130 years. Oh my! It hit me this past week when I started waking up at 7 am without an alarm clock - that's old! I used to sleep in 'til 2 or so when I was teenager. The best thing about having a day off was not having to set the alarm and sleeping the morning (and sometimes day) away. Another sign, according to my daughter, is that I like thousand island dressing and blue cheese on my salads. She says all the old people she waits on like thousand island and blue cheese. Of course, I'm also a grandmother even though my daughter was only 20 when she had Daisy. Finally, and this one is really God's joke on me, is I think I need reading glasses. That is just gross! I've been wearing glasses since I was 8 years old, starting wear contacts (hard) at 14, and am blind as a bat. It's not a question of being near- or far- sighted; something has to be on my nose before I can see it. Without corrective lenses, the world is blur of foggy colors. AND NOW, with my contacts, I need reading glasses! Not too much I can do about all this. I am 45, going on 46, so technically I am middle-aged, but now my body is forcing me to accept it even though I sometimes feel like the awkward, insecure teenager from high school. I guess this is also troubling because professionally, I've not finished my education or settled into my chosen career. Darn it! I just don't feel "middle-aged." It sounds so drab, boring, and settled - like there's nothing else left to do in my life.

NASCAR Fans: It's time for a revolution!

As most of you know, I'm an avid NASCAR fan but over the past few years, I've become less and less enchanted but now, I'm just plain frustrated, disgusted, and even bored!

First, Talladega: When is NASCAR going to do something about the "Big One"? Actually, it's not a Big One anymore, but Big OneS, plural, in the last ten laps with cars flipping end over end, drivers deliberately hanging back in 30th place, and 43 cars strung single-file around a 2-1/2 mile track. Is this exciting? Is this the best racing in the world? NO, NO, and NO again. Lives are endangered, the racing is boring, and getting through Talladega is more a question of luck than having a great-handling, fast car with a talented driver. Oh! but I forgot, NASCAR isn't necessarily interested in that - it's more interested in the Money, and lots of it. To hell with the fans and good racing!

Second, Texas: Just another example of the cookie-cutter 1-1/2 tracks across the mid-west and western United States that NASCAR promotes while dismissing the exciting short tracks across the South like Rockingham, Darlington, North Wilkesboro. Maybe I'm old school, but Chicago, Texas, Fontana, Phoenix, Kansas, are YAWN! But who owns these tracks? ISC wouldn't have an interest, would it? And of course, the France Family has an interest in ISC. MO' Money!!!

Third, Phoenix: It's ABC that I'm mad at with this race. With 43 cars in the race, the only two that mattered (at least to ABC and the commentators) were the leader and Jimmie Johnson. Actually, I only think Jimmie Johnson mattered. HEY GUYS!!! Guess what? There are fans out there who's favorite driver is not in the chase, and is not Jimmie Johnson. How about some shots of other drivers? Another YAWN! broadcast focusing on the Chase drivers to the exclusion of the other 31. I'm sure Homestead will bring more of the same.

Well, I've vented - thank you for letting me unload all of that. I've been considering what can I do to resist NASCAR's dictates that lead to boring races and ABC's spectacle-building that lead to a boring broadcast of a boring race. Of course, I can just not watch, but will that make a difference? I think next year, I'm going to patronize my local short tracks for good, old-fashioned Saturday night stock car racing. Racing, bumping, tempers, what it's all suppose to be - not big dollars, big sponsors, and the almighty buck! I understand racing can't operate without money but somewhere down the line, the money's become more important than the fans and guess what, no amount of money can make up for disenchanged fans. Maybe NASCAR is feeling the pinch since attendance is obviously down with all those empty seats I'm seeing every week; will they wake up and do something different? Or better yet, go back to their roots and what made it grow?

So I'm calling on NASCAR fans everywhere to email NASCAR, ESPN, ABC, your favorite driver, the team owner, the sponsors, everyone involved, and let them know how boring racing has become and that WE ARE MAD AS HELL AND AREN'T GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!!

Why Random?

I decided to name my blog, "Random Thoughts and Musings," because I feel like a typical postmodern person, with my mind and body flitting across time, space, and topics, about a hundred times a day. I'm not sure whether it's postmodern, or schizophrenia in the sense that Fredric Jameson's writes, or a unhappy combination of ADD and OCD. I'm not too different from most people I know who are balancing multiple identities; I certainly don't feel whole or coherent. I teach at two different colleges and then work at a restaurant. It's an unlikely combination of being a "professional" and "working class." With one, I'm using my mind and the other my body. When I'm at one job, I'm thinking about the others or thinking about home. At home, I'm thinking about the jobs. At the same time, I'm a friend, mother, grandmother, sports fan, and consumer of popular culture - all converging (and diverging) into an eclectic persona that defies conventional labeling and categories, but isn't that postmodern?