Have you seen the new Axe commercial for their Cool Metal body wash? If not, pause your reading and take a watch…Axe Cool Metal, Keep Your Cool.
Makes you say WHAT?! Right? When I first saw this commercial all I could think was “quite a stereotype they’ve got there, huh?”
As you can tell from my username, I love vintage stuff. I’ve been this way my whole life. I was that dorky little kid who listened to the Beatles and Buddy Holly, and when you came to my house to play Barbies with me, the story had to take place during World War II on the home front. By far, my favorite aspect of vintage culture was always Archie comics. Does anyone remember Archie, the redhead teen from Riverdale? When I was maybe seven or eight, my mom bestowed upon me her huge collection of Archie comics from her 1970s childhood, and about a year later, my aunt sent me an anthology of Archies from the 1940s entitled Archie Americana Series: Best of the Forties. I was obsessed. I was particularly taken with Veronica, Archie’s spoiled, snarky, and bee-you-tiful girlfriend.
This Thursday I had to dress myself and body in a way that I don’t necessarily agree with. I am originally from Iran and this week I was invited to go to NYC to participate at a dinner party that was hosted for the president of Iran. Going there itself was a little controversial but I decided to go and explore my surroundings. In order to get in to the event or maybe I should say “fit in” I had to dresses within Islamic rules. Continue reading
In a print based society, we’re trained from an early age to find meaning in marks. I’m going to look at some of the ways that we ‘read’ bodies today.
An acquaintance of mine recently made a pretty generalizing statement that sparked some dissonance in me. My friend and I were chatting about a celebrity entering another stint in rehab and he said to me, “Drugs really kill a woman’s face. Us men are lucky.” As I ingested some chunks of this comment, a river of thoughts came crashing in.
Not too long ago, it was really difficult to take a picture of yourself. It was time-consuming! You needed to find your camera, strategically hold your arm out, press the button a few times, and hope that your face ended up in the frame of at least a couple of the pictures you captured. Uploading them to your computer and choosing one to make your profile picture on MySpace was then an entirely separate event. It was an ordeal and the selfie was quite rare.
Today, ‘selfies’ are everywhere. We all take them and it’s nearly impossible to scroll through Facebook and Instagram feeds without passing one. Smart phones with front-facing cameras and constantly expanding social networks have revolutionized the way we’re able to share ourselves with others.
In my notes from one of the first days of class, I have written, “embodiment -> we know because of our body; ways of knowing that exceed rationality.” This simple concept – that our bodies are sources of knowledge – is something I’d never consciously thought about, but as this idea about embodied knowledge started to sink in, I realized that my head has been learning a lot from my body recently.
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I started the week with particularly active butterflies in my stomach, for no particular reason. I assumed that they would ebb and flow as usual. But they didn’t; they stayed.
The next couple of days, my body started experiencing anxiety in different ways. My heart would race. I wasn’t digesting my food. I would shake a bit. I cried more than usual. I always felt on edge, like I was just about to have a panic attack but without the relief that can come after one. Continue reading
I came back to my apartment the other night to my female roommates sitting together and discussing their bodies. Bodily dissatisfactions were exchanged, such as, “I wish I has bigger boobs,” “I want a toned butt,” “I hate my hips,” etc. I stood in the kitchen fixing myself dinner, occasionally chiming in but mostly observing this conversation (as a possible topic for a blog post was brewing in my mind). My roommates gathered around a laptop and began to look up pictures of their desired physical attributes. I listened to exclamations such as, “See, that’s the kind of ass I want!” and “She has perfect skin!” However, the tone of these comments quickly changed; cries of “I do not like her body,” “Eww, her boobs are so far apart,” and “That’s not a cute butt” abounded.
Generic photo of female judgment
Courtesy of allparenting.com
http://www.allparenting.com/my-family/articles/968537/women-judging-women
I found it interesting how, in just a matter of seconds, their comments went from positive affirmations to scathing criticisms, but I remained cool and collected as I was acting as a secret agent of the Unruly Bodies class. However, after I heard one of my roommates say, “I hate when thighs touch. I think it’s gross,” I was taken aback. This wasn’t a put-down of an anonymous woman’s touching thighs on the internet, but a put down of touching thighs in general—thighs that I happen to have. Suddenly I had become one of those women with an undesirable body.
An international coalition of researchers recently released the results of a study conducted throughout 6 Asian nations, China, Bangladesh, Cambodia. Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Papua New Guinea. They surveyed over 10,000 men and the responses were startling (although, not really, but I refuse to ever become desensitised to rape statistics). The survey found that, on average, 1 in 10 men admitted to raping a woman who was not their partner and when partners were included, it was around 3 out of every 10 men. The researchers were careful to not use the word “rape” because then it just sounds wrong so they side-stepped around it by asking if they had ever forced a woman to have sex, ignored when she refused, or had sex with a woman who couldn’t consent (either she was drugged or too drunk). This allowed the men to be more candid. Of the men who acknowledged forced intercourse (bka. RAPE), over 40% said it was because they were angry or wanted to punish the woman and over 70% admitted that their reasoning was because of sexual entitlement. They felt entitled to have sex with women, any woman they chose, any woman they had access to. They were entitled. Entitled to someone else, who isn’t really anybody because all we are is a body. A body for sexual pleasures.
Unruly Bodies 