FLYING: Confessions of a Free Woman

Claiming our beauty as women has many, many layers. It’s not just about body acceptance; we must claim the beauty of our minds, too. A few weeks ago a friend was visiting and he asked me a most interesting question. This is a man I have known since high school and our conversations include everything in the Universe. We were having one our expansive discussions and something prompted him to say, “When did you first know you were smart?”

 Wow! That set up an unexpected river of thoughts that continues to flow. It’s true I got good grades in junior high and high school, so I guess I had a sense of my mental capacity. But in college and especially in the workplace following college, doubts and fears began to arise and I experienced, what is referred to in the seminal book, Women’s Ways of Knowing, as a silencing of my voice.

 Women’s Ways of Knowing documents research about the way the female brain processes information differently than the male brain. Throughout the centuries of patriarchal domination in our culture, this way of knowing has been ridiculed, debased and silenced.

 I began to experience this as I moved up the ranks in my career. The more power I gained, the more unacceptable “thinking like a woman” became and the more resistance I received.  Such resistance often pushes women to become male-identified and to abandon their natural female intelligence and intuition. A friend told me once that some of her male colleagues complimented her by saying, “You think like a man.” At that time she was pleased and felt their acceptance and approval. It validated her adoption of male thinking patterns.

 But I made a different decision. Long ago I resolved to keep on thinking like a woman, to develop and strengthen my capacity to think like a woman, and to use my voice as loudly and as clearly as possible to advocate for a new appreciation for women’s precious and beautiful ways of thinking.

 My brain has been denigrated;

My brain has been so ignored.

Yet my brain holds the wisdom the world needs

For a future that’s free of the sword!

Gail Collins’ column today most likely gave Suffragettes, Sappho, and all of our Feminist Foremothers the vapors today.

Seriously.

How else to react to the following:

The health care reform bill currently being debated in the Senate contains a provision known as the Bo-Tax — so called because it would levy a 5 percent tax on cosmetic surgery procedures. The idea is to tax those who indulge in medically unnecessary procedures in order to pay for medical necessities for everyone else.

This sounded like a refreshingly good idea to me, until I read that Terry O’Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women, is against it.

“Now they are going to put a tax on middle-aged women in a society that devalues them for being middle-aged?” she complained to The Times.

The tone of Collins’ column is incredulous, as is my reaction to it. So many things to be concerned about in the Healthcare bill, and the President of NOW is objecting to the five percent plastic surgery tax?

O’Neill argues that middle-aged women face so much discrimination in the job market that many of them must lie about their age. In order to do that, they must appear younger than their years; hence the need for Botox, tummy tucks, and all the other things women do to themselves to erase the signs that they are passing out of their reproductive years.

Collins’ column is worth reading. And her questioning the fear that drives someone like O’Neill–that all women secretly fear  they are going to wind up as bag ladies, despite their wealth–is perhaps dead-on in its accuracy.

But I find myself unable to feel sympathy for these women.

First of all, plastic surgery is expensive and is not covered by insurance. So, an extra five percent is hardly Draconian. I doubt it will keep the privileged few who can afford it from getting it. And, if it’s true that middle-aged women are terrified that they will lose their jobs or not be able to find jobs without it, we are talking about women who are looking for jobs in the upper strata of the working world.

In other words, this sounds suspiciously like a white, upper middle-class feminist complaint. I thought that feminists had realized that they needed to embrace class and race as issues within feminism? If defending white middle-class women’s access to the Botox deprives a poor, white woman of an opportunity to get an abortion (because, say, someone trades their vote on the Stupak amendment for this Stupid amendment), how does that help bring women together?

I thought that, as older women, we were to have been taught to embrace our wrinkles. Our laugh lines. Our worry lines. Our creases. These are our badges of honor, they show we have lived, loved, and watched a world that is often unfair to us all.

My sense is that as feminists, we need to be fighting for things that affect us all, and I can’t help but see this as a problem that affects primarily white, upper middle-class women. Am I wrong?

The Guardian reports that a new drug, originally tested as an antidepressant, has been shown to increase sexual desire in women.

Women who took the drug during the six-month trial reported more satisfying sexual encounters and higher libidos than those who were given a placebo.

Doctors involved in the study said the drug may prove to be an effective treatment for low libido, a problem they estimate affects between 9% and 26% of women, depending on their age and whether they have been through the menopause.

The drug is flibanserin, and was tested in Germany as an antidepressant. Turns out, it was a lousy cure for depression, but women taking it reported a wonderful side-efffect: an increase in sexual desire.

The new drugs raises several questions for me.

1. How quickly will it be approved by the U.S. FDA?

2. Will insurance companies pay for this drug the same way they currently pay for male ED treatments?

But I have other questions, too. If both men and women go through periods of diminished sexual desire, (assuming that this is not a permanent condition), then can’t the decrease in sexual desire be seen as a natural rhythm in the life cycle? Are there times when nature simply doesn’t want us to have sex?

My most important question is this, however. We already have a horrible time in this culture accepting that women have sexual desires. We still categorize women by either the “girls-gone-wild” hook-up culture or the “Purity ring-wearing not-until-I’m-married” group. We think we’ve made progress on this, but evidence suggests otherwise. How quickly are women condemned for deviations from the sexual norm? How quick are we to label sexually active teens girls as somehow wrong in what they’re doing (even if they are being responsible and using birth control).

And what about the ultimate form of punishment: The withholding of contraceptive knowledge from sexually -active women as a form of social control. We insist on teaching abstinence-only education, try to limit young women’s access to contraceptives, and make it a crime to transport a woman under 18 across state lines to get an abortion. Given that there are few states left where one can get an abortion, we’ve de facto made it illegal to help young women get abortions unless it’s their parents who are directly involved. (And how come these same people who believe that these young women are too young to make the decision to have an abortion are therefore old enough to make the decision to bear a child?)

The same problems faced by young women are also faced by those women who do not have the financial means to travel interstate, or who do not have the money to pay for this medical procedure. And, if they do have the money to pay for the medical procedure, how much shit will they have to endure to get into see an ob-gyn who still performs abortions?

My point is that, once again, our culture will send mixed messages to women. Now, those whose libidos are going through a temporary cool phase will be told to get with the program and take a drug. Those who want to heighten their desire and take advantage of the drug will be seen as “loose” women for wanting to enjoy sex. And, while insurance companies may pay for women to have sex, they won’t pay for the consequences of sex.

What a mad world we live in.

Being fat in Japan is no longer a matter of shame or embarrassment: the size of your waist is now determined by law.

Concerned about rising rates of both in a graying nation, Japanese lawmakers last year set a maximum waistline size for anyone age 40 and older: 85 centimeters (33.5 inches) for men and 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for women.

Under Japan’s health care coverage, companies administer check-ups to employees once a year. Those who fail to meet the waistline requirement must undergo counseling. If companies do not reduce the number of overweight employees by 10 percent by 2012 and 25 percent by 2015, they could be required to pay more money into a health care program for the elderly. An estimated 56 million Japanese will have their waists measured this year.

An American journalist, living in Japan writes:

“I am back in Japan, living in Tokyo for a year, and one of my Japanese co-worker recently stopped joining the other men for lunch at restaurants; instead, he began bringing a small bento box. When I asked why, he said his wife believed he was getting fat and required him to eat her pre-approved portions.”

Not surprisingly, there are unintended consequences. Eating disorders are prevalent, especially among young women. When Ralph Lauren was criticized by the U.S. media after digitally altering an image of already-slender supermodel Filippa Hamilton to make her appear even skinnier, I was not surprised that a company executive said the advertisement had only appeared in Japan.

Maybe you are thinking, “Good. Too many fat people in the world. Maybe this is the way to get people to quit being so obese.”

I guess I don’t see it this way.

For me, regulating someone’s waistline is akin to telling a woman what she can do with her body when she is pregnant. It’s called privacy. It’s a matter between a person and his/her doctor. Your doctor may tell you that you need to lose weight to maintain your health. But the government? Mandating your weight?

I keep thinking about Ceaucescu in Romania, who, determined to see birthrates rise in his country, outlawed abortion. Women underwent mandatory pregnancy tests at work. And the orphanages filled to capacity with abandoned children.

How can a government tell a member of its populace what the limits of its body is? How can the government tell any woman that she must stay pregnant?

If the idea that someone could come up to you in a restaurant and tell you not to eat dessert because your waistline exceeds the national standard, imagine how it must feel to have a total stranger tell you that you must carry a baby to term?

For me, there’s no difference.

Privacy is privacy.

Body sovereignty is body sovereignty.

I’ve gone back and forth between entertaining the idea of having children and shunning it completely ever since it first occurred to me that I might someday be a mother. Being the youngest of three whose ages span three separate decades, I’ve got next to zero experience handling kids. If I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t dive in. So raising children has never been too serious a consideration.

There are two sides to the coin, as I see it. On one, you’ve got an adorable, inquisitive, toddling creature who absorbs knowledge like a sponge and has all the potential in the world inside of them. A delicate treasure toting stuffed hippos. Cuddly. On the other side, you’ve got a screaming, stubborn, volatile creature who has a megaphone built into its throat and a propensity to make its mother and father gray-haired, exhausted, and sexless. Red-faced, fists clenched. Not cuddly.

But when I spend enough time admiring well-behaved and glowy-cheeked children in the supermarket as I shop for whichever variations on pasta I will make for that week, I start to say things like, “aw.” Or, “what a cute baby. Look at the baby!” Or, if it’s serious, “I want a son first.”

Now, this last one is a sentiment I’ve held for years. If, in fact, I can get over the idea of labor, epidurals, my maternal family’s multiple brushes with death during childbirth, and the very scarring things I will probably say to my future husband in that window of time between water breaking and infant wailing, not to mention the whole experience of having an alien life in your belly (okay, I know, not belly) for almost a whole year and all the special experiences I’ll have as a super-duper hormonal pregnant lady, and if my future husband can get over those things too…well, if all of those things align, the idea of carrying new life is miraculous. A journey I’ll be blessed to take in the distant future. And I do, in fact, want a son first. Why is that?

I realized it Sunday night while driving home from a friend’s house. We’d had a long discussion about our experiences as artists, our hopes and purposes. Earlier that day, I’d eaten grilled hamburgers with other friends from my church and went swimming. Earlier than that, I’d played djembe for a couple of hours at church, pounding into the congregational music. From the beginning, it was a good day.

But in between each event, I felt like a soda can shaken to the point of explosion. My boyfriend was busy with his own activities, and less communication than usual led to me filling in the blanks with all kinds of misconceptions that were not in my favor. The storm was brewing in my chest. Apparently you don’t need to be pregnant to be super hormonal.

Maybe it was because of this, or maybe my mind just wandered and the dots really aren’t connected. But I realized for the first time, indirectly, why I want a son.

I don’t know how to be a good woman.

I had the idea that I could shape a son into a good man. That I could explain life from a woman’s perspective, and that he would grow to be a defender of the more often marginalized and objectified gender. Or maybe, if I’m honest, that I want to fix everything about men that hurts and agitates me. Zing.

But what on earth would I teach a daughter? I thought through the many ways I feel inadequate, the negative ways that I perceive my body and my soul. The ways I react out of those skewed perceptions. I thought about the way women are told that their power lies in sexuality while advertising mocks us for unending insufficiencies; how those who no longer allure per our culture’s very narrow definitions are discarded. Do I really want to bring another woman into such a raw deal? I wondered about my daughter’s ability to believe in herself when I don’t believe in myself. Could she learn to reflexively fight for her dreams when I decided mine were unrealistic? Could I teach her to be whole and independent when I feel like shards of glass searching for someone or something to glue me back together? And now, on the familiar verge of reacting to imaginary threats and spreading misery, do I really think I can teach someone what love is?

I used to think the fear of a daughter came from my relationship with my own mother, the ways I resented her unfairly, and knowing that my daughter will resent me, too, whether fairly or not. It’s a defeating thought, but even more defeating is the idea that I don’t even know how to be my own person, or one in which I take pride. I’m twenty-four years old. I know there’s no time limit on these things, and life comes in stages, but it’s frustrating to look back and realize I had a better sense of self four years ago than I do now. Life’s parameters were different, sure, and I was in that hopeful and free-spirited period of assembling my future. I chose detours and deconstruction, gradually relinquishing my joy in exchange for empty promises. I still fixate on the idea of retrieving my old self, but besides the fact that my naïveté is overly romanticized, it is an impossibility. I have to rebuild the structure. With energy I don’t fully possess.

A couple of things propel me. First, the memory of how happy I felt one sunny afternoon in college after a dance class. Walking over to my bike, I felt strong and very present. I knew myself and I liked myself. Though I was already in the process of traveling a path I now recognize as a long detour, for one moment, away from addiction, I felt good in my skin.

The second motivation is my relationships. I cannot love people when I do not love myself. I’ve tried, only to watch myself burn bridges in frantic self-protection.

Perhaps someday I’ll be a good mother. Before that, the life I mold is my own. And when the time comes, I hope that my first months of expectancy are filled with the calm of solidly knowing I am a good, steady, and whole woman, even in my imperfection.

I was at the mall recently. I loathe the mall, and yet, I find myself there fairly frequently. It is the closest place to my apartment for basic necessities—the Target there has a food market, so I can pick up eggs, or milk, or my prescriptions without having to drive downtown.

As usual, I was people watching. The mall seemed full of locals, and I started noticing something. Virtually everyone was carrying around extra weight. Lots of belly fat. Some of them were so slowed up by the extra weight that they lumbered. I started looking for lean people. There were a few, but as a percentage, it was less than 20 percent.

I know that we’re engaged in a national crisis over American obsesity. We blame television, and our sedentary lifestyles, and the availability of cheap, high-fat food. We drink too much soda. We eat too much candy and potato chips and fast food. We don’t exercise. It’s all our fault. We’re the richest nation on earth and we’re a bunch of slobs. Blah Blah Blah.

I’d like to offer some thoughts.

I have been re-reading Caroline Knapp’s brilliant book: Appetites: Why Women Want.   In it, Knapp (who died way too young at 42 of cancer) wrote of women’s appetites: for food, for sex, for material goods. She did not condemn desire. Rather, in a complex argument that I’m treating schematically here, she looked at how desire is twisted in our culture. For white, middle-class women especially, (and Knapp admits that her observations/experiences are based on her own position as white and middle class) thwarted desire lies at the heart of many of our cultural maladies.

It is the illusion of choice that thwarts the desire. It is the illusion that a well-educated, intelligent white woman is going to have access to real power in this culture that ultimately turns desire in on itself, twists it, cripples it, so that the thwarted desire becomes the source of suffering. In a way, it’s the Noble Truths of Buddhism. In another way, it’s what it’s like to be told you have power in America when you do not.

And Knapp argues that for women, who despite the seeming accommodations made for women’s liberation by the powers that be, are especially affected by this thwarted desire. As I said, she’s writing as a white, middle-class woman, and how this thwarted desire manifests itself in other groups of people is not in her expertise.

But her argument spoke to me.

Knapp was an anorexic. In a way, this provokes a “ho hum” reaction in me. After all, just how many more books do we need to read about white anorexia? But this book spoke to me because I also have an eating disorder. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’ve dealt with bulimia for the last several years. I thought it was a thing of the past. Occasionally, (but not for the past ten days, thank god) bulimia called to me. And sometimes, I answered that call.

It’s embarrassing to admit. What sane, dignified, intelligent person wants to admit that sometimes, after eating a meal, or a bar of chocolate, or an ice cream sundae, she would stick her finger down the back of her throat and vomit? Especially one who is the mother of two daughters and who is desperate for them to not emulate that kind of behaviour? I found ways of being secretive about it, including going outside and vomiting in the backyard, away from the house. In the dark. Alone. So no one could see. It wasn’t a full-scale relapse. But it happened often enough that I could smell relapse in the miasma of my own vomitus.

My bulimia is fueled by a few things. Basic brain chemistry, for one. My genetic line on both sides of my family condemn me to craziness of various stripes. I am beyond grateful that my brain chemistry can be treated with drugs, and I no longer worry about the fact that I have to take antidepressants. Illness is illness. Despite the fact that I am in the happiest relationship of my life, that I am in love, that I am loved, that my children are doing well, and that nothing, at this moment, seeks to harm me, I feel powerlessness and a need to run. It’s a potent combination, and there have been  days in the past where that combination has knocked me on my ass. Or, knocked me to my knees, bending over a toilet.

I will tell you one more thing before I get back to those folks at the mall. Every time I threw up in the past, I was entirely conscious of what I was doing. The conversation went something like this: “Throwing up is not going to solve your problems.” And the response in my head was always something like, “Fuck you. It’s going to make me feel better.” In a situation where I cannot seem to move myself out of the position I’m currently in, the fact that I could manipulate my body endorphins, exercise control over my food intake, hurt myself, was moving myself. It was power. False power. But power nonetheless.

I am starting to take my power back. I am working my ass off on some writing projects that I hope will get me somewhere I want to be. I am reaching out to people who I love. I am running, or biking, or hiking, and loving the world in which spring tentatively claims the frozen earth.

But,  I look around and I see a lot of folks who are obese. And I found myself wondering why there has been such a growth of obesity in the past couple of decades. And all the reasons in the third paragraph still apply.

But I think obesity is a metaphor. I could just as easily be focusing on the need to shop. Or the need to drink. To take pills. To obsess. But, just for now, I want to talk about food, because food, for me, is an issue.

I think that my problem with food is reflective of a larger problem in our culture. We, as a nation, do not know how to make ourselves feel better. We do not know how to move ourselves out of the positions that the vast majority of us find ourselves in. We have been gradually stripped of our power. We cannot afford to buy the toys that we could that distracted us. When I was a kid, many, many people had RVs, and boats, and a new car every year. Middle class folks. But the middle class is drowning, and the poor, well, the poor are long underwater.

So, what do we have? We have food. Cheap, fattening, sweet food. And our televisions. The solace of food is what many of us give ourselves because we have nothing else. We can see what we want: it’s there on our television sets every night. Taunting us. But we cannot have it. We send our children off to fight in an unjust war. We work our barely-getting-by jobs. We struggle to make ends meet. And we eat. It doesn’t change anything. But for those moments when that sweetness is on our tongues, we feel better in our powerlessness.

As is typical any morning, I woke up a couple of hours before anyone else, and I started reading papers on the Web. This morning, on the Guardian, one of the major stories is about a new wave of crime in South Africa that is being called “Corrective Rape.”  This abomination in terms is the belief that if a lesbian is gang-raped by men, the lesbian part of herself will be driven out, and she will emerge from the violence as a heterosexual.

I thought that I would devote an entire diary to this topic, but I found, this morning, that I just could not go there. Rape is epidemic: not only is rape a tactic of war in most of central Africa, I have read recently that rape is being used in Haiti to enforce social discipline, and now, in South Africa, to enforce heterosexual norms.

Not to mention the huge numbers of rapes that take place in the United States each and every day.

Instead, I went searching through things I’ve written before. I hoped to find something that would explain to me why, why, hatred of homosexuals and women continue to persist in this world. Why, for example, the fact that Obama is even considering not overturning the bigoted “Defense of Marriage” Act–a legal abomination if ever there was one.

So, what follows is my wrestling with what it is about homosexuality (and by that same logic–women’s bodies) that frightens fundamentalists so. (And I mean fundamentalists of the three major religions–all of whom have strictures on the female body and against homosexuality.)

This diary is not intended to offend anyone, and yet, I have a feeling it will. It’s not intended as a criticism of Christianity; it’s an attempt to understand why theocrats hate and fear homosexuality so much. If we lived in an Islamic country, I’d be making similar arguments, but the majority of the theocrats in this country are Christian. Therefore, I ask these questions of the relationship between Christ and those men.

The theocrats’ hatred of the body is a particular fascination of mine. It’s a topic that haunts me, and, as things get increasingly worse in the United States in terms of the attacks on privacy, and as I feel the water getting hotter and the frogs still not jumping out of the pot, I search for answers, for words, for a way to understand them, extend compassion to them, and change their minds. Yes. I want to be the queen of the universe and make these people see the light. I really want to release them from their fears, because I think they are a people driven by fear. Fear is the basis of addiction. And fundies act like addicts in ways that I’ve articulated before.

And so, I feel obliged to try to feel my way through the relationship between the erotic and the spiritual. The sacred and the profane. Here’s my thinking.

Attempting to find the connections between the sacred and the erotic seems a fool’s enterprise. Immediately, my own intellect begins to mock me, presenting images of lascivious priests, porn shop editions of the Kama Sutra, or jokes about the ResERECTION or the Second Coming.

But, when I can release myself from the shackles of my rational self, I can admit some things. I don’t know if god exists. But I do know that my understanding of the sacred, those moments when awe replaces fear, is linked to my understanding of the erotic-those moments when the distance between two bodies is breached by contact. The hum of flesh against flesh.

I recognize this aspect of myself, this desire, need, to find my connection to spiritual bliss in genital contact. After all, so many of the feelings used by mystics to describe their encounters with the divine have always sounded to my ear like descriptions of orgasm or its afterglow. When scholars make this argument, that religious ecstasy is sexual ecstasy sublimated, they are accused of reductionism. But what of persons such as me, who feel in ways that we are not always able to articulate, that sexual intimacy is as close as we’ll ever come to feeling the fire of the divine? Am I the only one who feels this way?

To speak about sex as if it is capable of elevating us is to risk being accused of not being spiritual enough, of living only on an earthly plain, of privileging the body over the soul. But why? There are few religions that celebrate the body as the gateway to the divine. Mostly, we are advised to subjugate the body to the spirit, to discipline it, to control it, to prevent it from carrying us into excess. And this has never made sense to me.

It has on an intellectual level. I understand the notion of dualities: sacred and profane, suffering and pleasure, good and evil, man and woman. As someone who has studied gender in historical context, I could riff for hours on the association of women with the body, men with spirit, and how both women and the body became the gateways through which evil, the Devil, sin found ways to enter the world.

I look at the scriptural justifications for the ways that Fundies behave in the world, and most frequently, they cite Leviticus, or other books from the Old Testament. Or they quote Paul, who was not Jesus. Or, as I read in an issue of Harper’s, they cite the kick-ass Jesus from Revelations. That kick-ass Jesus scares the bejesus out of me, but perhaps he is easier for certain men to relate to.

When I was in Florida a few months ago, I saw a plethora of bumper stickers that read “Real Men Love Jesus.” I’ve been thinking about that bumper sticker ever since. What it means. Real men don’t love the faggy Jesus; you know, the one who had feelings, who wept, who felt suffering on the cross, who urged us to love our neighbors as ourselves, who commanded us to love one another. Love one another. Not to throw stones, missiles, drop bombs. That Jesus may well qualify as a sensitive new-age guy, a metrosexual, a wimp. How can a real man love that Jesus? Loving that Jesus means loving that part of themselves, and well, real men don’t seem to do that.

I cannot speak for other women, but I can speak from my position as a heterosexual woman. When I have read many accounts of male experiences of interaction with the divine, the most frequent image is that of a piercing or penetration by the divine spirit. The metaphor is important for several reasons. I would argue that one of the reasons that there has been such an insistence on separating sex from the sacred is the fear that describing sex and the penetration of the soul homoeroticizes the relationship between men and their gods. I have never seen an instance where a male mystic refers to being engulfed by the divine.

In many hagiographies or confessions about the coming to the divine, there is a sort of negotiation that goes on. A negotiation in which the stubborn soul refuses the love of God, and then at some point, there is surrender.

The negotiations between men and women are similar. And what is the point of the negotiation?  The point of the negotiation is surrender. What is it for a man to surrender to a woman? Is it to imagine what it is to be the glove, rather than the hand? To be the sheath. That is what vagina means, you know. Sheath. From the Latin. I find it fascinating that a part of the female body, the canal through which women bring forth new life, the first journey we experience as human beings-sliding through a fleshy tunnel into the light and cold-that the name for that conduit is not related to its function in birth, but rather, bears the name of a holder of a weapon. A scabbard-the covering in which you insert your sword.

Is this what men think of their penises as? Weapons? Swords? But a sheath is where you keep your knife to keep it safe, to keep it when you’re not using it for violence. It’s a place for it to rest until the next time it’s needed. When you place your sword inside its sheath, you’ve put down your weapon, you’ve disarmed yourself, you’ve made yourself vulnerable. You’ve surrendered.

In many of these hagiographies, men lay down the life of the sword for the life of the spirit. In many of the images of the warrior Christ, he bears the sword of justice. Perhaps I’m being oversensitive to phallic imagery, but I am speculating as to why the most fundamentalist of religious extremists hate and fear homosexuality so much.

What is the experience of spiritual surrender? In the accounts I’ve read, it’s the sense of penetration, of becoming whole, of feeling a divine presence move into your body. It’s not unlike the experience for women of heterosexual sex. I’m not a gay man. I don’t know if penetrative gay sex inspires the same feelings.

But I come back to the fear again. I come back to the fear of homosexuality. If your deity is male, and you want to be infused with his spirit, what is involved in that process? How can you maintain a distance between your experience of the sacred and more bodily experiences?

In November of 2005, I underwent a hysterectomy. I was 42, and I had suffered from a condition that weakened me. In the weeks leading up to the decision, I blogged about it. I needed to. I was frightened beyond measure that losing my uterus would somehow take away some essence of my femaleness. I was terrified that I would never know sexual pleasure again. I was especially scared because I had been told when I was younger that women who had hysterectomies did so because they were too sexual, and this was their punishment. It was a lot of crap to work through.

I’m combining two blog posts I wrote. The first was written just before my surgery. It goes like this:

Karen Novak, one of the most brilliant people I know, frequently says the kinds of things that wind up staying in my head, tucked away in some back room, and then, sometime later, re-emerges when that piece of wisdom crashes into some life experience I’m in the midst of.

In this case, we were talking about time. About whether it was possible that men and women had different conceptions of time. She argued that men see time as linear; women see time cyclically. “We can’t help it,” she said. “Every month, we are reminded that we are part of a big cycle. We bleed. We stop bleeding. We ovulate. We bleed again.” Time gets broken up and its repetitive nature is literally written onto our bodies. Men, as far as I know, have no regular reminder that time is cyclical. I imagine that it moves forward for them.

Okay. I know that this reeks of essentialism, the kind of essentialism that makes me crazy. But, I also think there’s some validity to what she said. And while all women do not currently menstruate, or no longer menstruate, the cultural reminders of women as monthly, cyclical creatures is there all around us.

On November 18, I will no longer be among the women who bleed. I’ve alluded to health problems before in this forum. For reasons that may elude a lot of you, I want to talk about the fact that I’ve chosen to have a hysterectomy in just over three weeks.  And I use the word “choice” deliberately. My uterus is a sick organ. It is making me sick, to the point where I have been in the hospital recently, so anemic that I could barely stand. I’m experiencing chronic pain. Two weeks out of the month, I feel like an overripe kumquat—squishy and swollen—and, if kumquats had feelings, my guess is that being overripe would make them as cranky as I’ve been. Cranky, and sad, and angry as hell that I’m a hostage to my body.

And yet. It’s my uterus. The organ within which I carried three pregnancies and from which I delivered two healthy children. The organ that, every month since I was 13, has made its presence known. It’s not like my liver or my spleen or my heart. I mean, I know they’re there, doing their jobs, but it’s not like those organs send out an all points bulletin to the rest of my body that special attention must be paid to it.

And my uterus is such a political organ. Our culture is engaged in an all-out war about what women may do with their uteri. Whether my uterus belongs to me, or as some would argue, it belongs to the government or my neighbor or anyone else who is anti-choice. And, truth be told, hysterectomies get a lot of bad press. Once upon a time, doctors removed uteri like they took out tonsils—if you were done with it, what the hell did you need it for?

I admit. As women I’ve known have chosen to have hysterectomies in the face of health problems, the thoughts that have gone through my head have been uncharitable. They were downright arrogant. They went something like this: “You are a victim of the male medical establishment. If a man had a small problem with his prostate, would we advise castrating him?” I really wanted to believe that most hysterectomies are unnecessary, that women have them because it’s more convenient to take out a uterus rather than work to fix a problem, that women’s reproductive organs are only valuable if they’re producing babies.

And then this happened to me. And so, I’ve avoided this surgery. I’ve tried alternative treatments. I’ve been determined that I should hold on to this part of me. And then, some other voice started speaking to me. The one that asked me questions like, “If this was your spleen causing you this many problems and pain, would you even be having this conversation? Wouldn’t you have gotten the damn thing taken out immediately?”

My uterus is not the essence of my being. I’m not a “womb-an.” I have a disease that is going to get progressively worse. Its symptoms can be treated—in my case, unsuccessfully—but its cause cannot be eradicated without removing the organ where the disease is.

And so, I’m making this choice. To be healthy. To make a decision in which I choose not to suffer any more.

So, that was the first blog post. I underwent surgery on November 18, 2005, and then spent about a week convalescing. I had lost a lot of blood during surgery, and I was weaker than I expected. I was also a bad patient.

A friend of mine, a nurse, who had offered to take care of me while I was laid up, got so tired of listening to me whine about how much I wanted to get out of the house and go to Target that, three days post-surgery, she took me to Target. Within five minutes in the store, I had passed out. She got to say “I told you so,” and I got to learn that my body is not superwoman’s. 

We still laugh about this incident now. My stubbornness. Her exasperation. My being wheeled out of Target in a wheelchair.

I wrote my next blog post about the experience about six months later. I had kept to myself that right before my surgery, an anonymous e-mail had shown up in my inbox. A woman was furious with me, claimed that I was making it okay for women to subject themselves to mutilation, and that I would suffer dire consequences as a result.

I wanted to tell her that I had tried everything: an IUD, hormones, iron supplements, but the reality was that my uterus had become the focus of my existence, because on any given day, the amount of blood that pouring from it could affect even my ability to stand.

I remember when I got the letter, I showed it to my best friend. I also called my gynecologist, Heidi, whom I would trust with my life, and I had her read the letter. They were both angry on my behalf. And I was angry, too.

           How dare this woman send me a letter bomb a few days before surgery that I was already terrified of having? How could another woman (calling herself a feminist) be so cruel?

Anyway, this is the blog post I wrote later, to show people that I had come through with flying colours.

Shortly before I underwent a hysterectomy in November, I received an anonymous letter via e-mail. I had not been shy about my need for surgery. I am more than aware that my uterus is a political organ. I fear that just as SCOTUS has recently ruled that there’s no need for a “knock-knock” before violating civil rights, so too, it will soon be permissible to enter a woman’s vagina without her consent. Or, as the case is more likely to be, to tell a woman that she can’t make decisions about what may or may not enter and lodge inside her uterus.

And so, knowing that the personal is political, to quote what was once a revolutionary statement but which seems to have lost its meaning, I chose to write about my decision, and my fear, in undergoing this procedure.

Thus, someone out in the blogosphere decided to send me a letter, under a pseudonym, in which they denounced my decision to be public about what I was about to undergo. In the letter, the person described to me how I’d been duped by the male medical establishment, how six months after my surgery I would begin to suffer the horrible effects of various blood vessels dying in my pelvic region, how I would feel like shit. And worse, this person pointed out, I would be responsible for the positive push I may have given other women to have the same operation done. That by talking positively about my decision to have my uterus removed, I was contributing to the ruin of other women.

All of this vitriol arrived just a few days before my surgery.

And so, given that it is now over seven months since my operation, I feel that I should check in with the world, and let other women know what the effects have been of having my political organ removed.

I feel fantastic. The condition that necessitated surgery was adenomyosis, a condition in which I bled profusely throughout the month. It was unpredictable, and frequently, in the middle of sexual intercourse, I would start hemorrhaging. I have never been squeamish about sex during menses, and I’ve been fortunate that I’ve had partners who were also not turned off by blood. So, the blood was not the issue. The issue was the constant pain, and the weakness caused by anemia. I felt sick all the time. My uterus was approximately the size of a 13-week pregnancy, and for someone who is tiny like me, it meant that my stomach bulged. Again, no big deal. But I felt permanently bloated.

We tried other therapies to alleviate the problem. They didn’t work, and in fact, made things worse. One night, after having hemorrhaged for the entire day, and now, too weak to stand, a friend took me to the emergency room. My gynecologist came in to see me, and we decided then that there was no point in putting off the surgery. It was time to overcome my fears and do what was best for me.

My biggest fear about hysterectomy was about sex. And so, I want to talk frankly about that here.

I was deathly afraid that I would no longer be able to have orgasms, or if I did have them, that they would be pale shadows of their former selves. For me, orgasms build, and when they reach their crescendo, I feel contractions deep inside of me–intense, starbursts of pleasure that I had always assumed was the result of my uterus responding to the electricity racing across my flesh. How would I experience that level of pleasure if there was no uterus to contract?

I was haunted by the idea that I would lose a sensation that is of paramount importance to me. Perhaps it makes me shallow, this desire to feast at the full banquet of sex. But I believe that there are few things that are freely available to us, and for me, sex–both the connection I feel to another human being and the loss of boundaries I experience during orgasm–is an integral part of who I am.

I was terrified of losing that.

After surgery, one is advised not to have intercourse for six weeks. For the first couple of weeks after surgery, I felt awful. I lost a lot of blood during the procedure, and my iron level was down to 27 (normal is 42). So, I wasn’t thinking a lot about sex. But, things started to wake up, and I decided to take matters into my own hands, so to speak. When the orgasm came–complete with the deep sensations of contraction and vibration–I wept. I wept. I called my closest friends. I shared my joy. I felt no shame in doing so. And, when I was able to resume intercourse, it was to discover that everything still worked. In fact, it worked better, as I now did not feel this sluggish, clogged-up sensation in my pelvis.

And life without periods has been interesting. I don’t bleed, of course, but since I still have my tubes and my ovaries, I experience a normal cycle, complete with bloating, crankiness, and breast tenderness. Woohoo!

I realize that for many, this may be too much information. But I was open about having the procedure before I had it done, and I feel an obligation to let those who reached out to me prior to surgery know that I’m well. I’m fabulous.

It’s three years later. Sex is better than it has ever been before. Multiple orgasms. No periods. No cramps. No worry about getting pregnant. I’m 45 now, and menopause is setting in. (Heidi told me that on Monday, when I was telling her about my mysterious hot and cold flashes. I had been pretending they were something else. )

I know that hysterectomy is not the choice for everyone. But I feel as if I need to de-mystify this operation that so many of us fear.

I still believe that there are some doctors out there who perform unnecessary hysterectomies. And Heidi took only what she needed to take out, so I still have my ovaries and my Fallopian tubes.

But I don’t feel any different than other women out there. My sexual desire level is high—but I expect that’s normal for being in my 40s. (It is true what they say: being in your 40s is awesome!) My lover and I take every opportunity that we can to touch and snuggle and caress, lick, penetrate and come.

In an odd sort of way, I feel as if my hysterectomy freed me to be even more sexual.

And I refuse to say that that’s a bad thing.

I am alive. I know this because my pen hits paper occasionally. I have been reminded time and again to write if for nothing more than the importance of staying present. Focusing on the here and now. I write to remind myself I exist, that the day before last actually happened and, that a month prior to that I was in a room full of women telling me their deepest secrets, all disturbing, all frightening, all of which I related to. I write until my hand hurts to remind me I have a hand. I write long enough until I disappear into my own head and can fight what distracts me all day. I scare myself. I startle those who read, but I do not hide. I have been away for much too long and this diatribe is overdue.

I live with that awkward feeling every day. To hate the body I possess, the person I am. I write to distract myself long enough to catch a breath– convince myself I deserve each one. Every day that my pen hides is another day I devote to self-pity, self-hatred, and waste of self. I am nothing when I do not write. I remember the day, the hours, the mundane reactions, and my words are the references to my life, one that I still have a hard time existing in. Each day that passes without a page or two filled with words leaves me absent, vacant.

I cannot afford to avoid writing. The breath of my mind, body, and soul are dependent on it. To wake and write is the most painful. My body is ridden with guilt until my thoughts are released, on paper, or in a room alone because I am scared someone will hear. I feel as though, at times, my thoughts are autonomous, can be removed. Or is that what I wish? Like cancer they spread from my mind through my body. If there were only a way to remove them without enduring and expending the painful energy it takes to pick up a pen.

I feel as though it takes some greed to acquire the spirit, wherein lies my reluctance to let go of my writing. I feel everyday sensations that I ache to define and it does require more everyday, more energy, more time and more pain. I have hopes of living a life less ordinary; more passionately with extravagant ideas that others will want to know, but must I hoard my writing until something makes sense? And when do my greedy little fingers let go of my soul?

Someone needs me to write. Someone is just as confused and I want to share my self-exploration in hopes of reaching them. I want my writing to eclipse my environment and become me. I want self-pity to dissolve in the ink I use. I want to indulge my inspirations and let them wake me up at night. I ask all of this of my soul and spirit both of which I’ve stifled for so long. Knowledge fulfills my empty longings. I want to spread what I know to those who feel empty. Let my soul be full. I want to edit in the daylight.

The urge to write has been there my whole life, and one event triggered another to bring me where I am today, admitting to myself that I am a writer and with that admittance, I am accepting the future tasks at hand. The hours spent in front of blank pieces of paper, the hours deciding whether I am worthy to pick up the pen, the hours I will spend walking away from my work and the endless guilt I’ll feel until I return to fill that empty page with presumably nothing. I do not know why I have accepted this job. There is always doubt.

I do this to live. I write because my mind craves it. There is no medicine I have tried that makes this go away. Meretricious my words, my face, my voice, my thoughts are disgusting, putrid, toxic and must be extracted with urgency, but they’re nothing in the end– only to be put in a jar with the other specimens like it, nothing different, nothing clearer– just a few moments of peace until something else invades my body.

There is death in my body and I fear that a thought might trip a wire, cut a vein. I cannot keep track of the verbal purges, at times- I am frightened to look back. I try to think it’s possible to explain my purpose of writing and that it is a purpose I am worthy of having. There still remains inside of me guilt for wanting some recognition for my pain, but I let that go by believing someone could feel connected to my words. These thoughts are so unique, so uncalled for, so confusing, how could anyone understand?

I feel guilty for having the ability to be aware of my feelings and put them into words. The strength that is preparing me to share all of this is frightening. I want to share. I was taught to share. I was very giving as a child, with my toys, smiles, and friendship, but something changed and someone took all I had and made me feel undeserving of what little I had left. The world came fast and hard. It all came exploding on me at once. I had to grow up, but I felt as though it was a punishment. Writing is a reminder I did nothing wrong.

As my confusing, disjointed, written word permeated my life, I finally commit myself to writing. I try to encourage thoughts suitable for eyes other than my own. Feeling self-centered, I question who will want to read my writing or what could inspire them to trust my words.

Something inside tells me that to share what I write will make me stronger, truer, and beautiful. My poetry evolves from journaling, and from journaling I have gotten to know my penmanship as an old friend. One who is a bit moody. Sometimes strong, tight, and under control, while at other times she’s a mess, barely legible, and running off the page. It’s the time in between the words– that second the pen lifts off the paper to dot an “i” or cross a “t” that I get to catch my breathe and decide if I really want to keep going—knowing that I might not come back for a while. At times of seclusion, I feel as though I am the only one I will listen to, but I fight the hope my healthy mind tries to create. “Write Natasha. I keep trying to remind you to write.” If you must read, I’ll take my work out of the trash. I’ll sew the pieces back together and prick my fingers all the way - inflicting pain to try to stop. “But someone cares to read this.” I will try to convince myself, but pinch, stab, blood. “It’s not out of conceit, you are a worthy person. You deserve to feel. Don’t block yourself from the rest of the world as you’ve done for years. Write! I beg of you.” Here take it. It’s no longer mine and I will not put my name on it. I am nothing. It leads me to wonder when my spirit will confess to me. Tell me the truth. Remind me I have something to share.

Now I sit here feeling full, satisfied, but I know there’s something missing. I know something is not ok. I am not the same. I can’t be. The desire for some sort of release still has not gone away. Whatever health I’ve had has diminished. This all makes me feel the least and most human, most disconnected from my soul when I try to fight these thoughts. I repeat a sentence over and over in my head so I don’t have to write it down, so I don’t forget it. Writing makes it real. It’s a maddening process. The more I try to forget, the more I cannot let go - the more I think. It is only when I let thought turn into words that I am released. It reminds me of when I would play games alone as a child. Convinced I needed no one, I would choose a word, write it down, and try to forget it so I could play Hang Man with myself the next day. I remember all of those words today.

I do still do this now, pick the words and try to forget them, but this is not a game. This is life. The words I choose are my life. They can haunt me and bring me peace. In poetry, words remind me of safe places and let me illustrate childhood memories silently so I can reenact them in more adult form. Sentences let me get away from life. This is enjoyable, these times when my words carry me to safe places, when my handwriting is almost childlike, illegible. This is the most rewarding place my thoughts bring me, the secret places of written words, the wonderment of descriptive tree houses and the open backyards of youth, the desperate plea to stay up one hour later or for one extra cookie.

How is it that now I fight my initial cravings? I once had cravings that let my imagination spin me upside down. Now I deny myself pleasure in the simplest forms. I am so tired. I feel like I have nothing left to give. I want all this buzzing to go away and my cravings to come back. Insatiable as they are, but so nice to have. Indulge them- feel them- let them stay. Keep the words in my mind. “Do not pick up the pen. Keep it to yourself, no one wants to know.” The paper growls again. It’s only been a few hours; you can not possibly want more. There is nothing left. Nothing is coming out. I am tired and starving, lonely and full.

How much did this passage stop me from accomplishing? I could have finished washing the dishes that were distracting me. I could have been sleeping the sleep my body doesn’t need. What has this passage done for me? Most likely nothing, useless unless I let myself read back, but I will run. I will fight it. I am scared it will go too deep. Shards of wood are thrown at my body with each sentence I let myself reflect on. I do not trust the tweezers my mother held, so I kept most of the splinters I had. I should be an oak, I wish I were, but all I have now are splinters to protect me from my mind.

Staggering to sprout, shamefully expressing thought through movement, rooted but barely existing, this tree is falling over. It is needed, sought after, invaluable, and a treasured resource. Each leaf sings a song before falling and reenters the earth to give more than before. The oak knows not what it does because it can’t see. It’s been blinded by the earths beauty, but it is in the tree’s own beauty where true strength lies.

Two years ago, I realized that my identity had been stolen. Credit card debt had silently been accruing under my name for a couple of years on purchases I never made. It was terrifying to face the possibility of being held accountable for thousands of dollars (which I didn’t have), but even more terrifying to accept that someone could assume my identity. Which, in this case, meant my reputation in the American system of credit, a system built on invisible people. Who was Angela Vicente then? A series of numbers, a couple of faulty security questions and someone else.

Really, in the age of computers, we have all become invisible people. Consider the personas we take on behind our monitors. We can re-imagine ourselves, calculating our personalities and exploring our extremes. We can say the things we’re too afraid to say in person. We can experience a wide range of interactions, visuals, sounds, and information, and all entirely anonymously, our public identities untouched by our words and activities. Sometimes I think that this level of detachment and hiding brings out the worst in us because we feel hidden. Is that who we really are, when no one else can see us?

A few days ago, my boyfriend asked me whether I thought his identity was my perception of him or his own perception of himself. Thinking of how different eyewitness accounts can piece together truth, I proposed that our identities are the sum of our own and each others’ perceptions. But what if our perceptions are both wrong? Even if this is how we perceive identity, what is it that defines the truth of our identity?

Throughout the course of my life, my defining characteristics have been “musician” and “Christian”. But as of late, these names don’t fit comfortably. My roommate, also a jazz vocalist, wondered at my listlessness and asked me, “You have fun when you’re singing, right?” And I paused for a moment before I realized out loud, “No.” To be clear, I love singing. I love the physical and spiritual aspects of sound. But for a long and frustrating period, I’ve heard sound fall flat without meaning. Spiritually, I feel the same disconnect. So I’ve slowly backed away from actively practicing both music and Christianity. To call myself a “musician” and “Christian” feels dishonest at this time. But when these things are taken away, am I less me? Or just different?

I look at my body in the mirror. I spend a lot of time shopping for clothes with a particular cut that will hide the parts I don’t like. After twenty-nine months of office work and dwindling activeness, my body has changed. I scrutinize the stretch marks and round belly. When did my chest start looking that wrinkled in the morning? Why is my face suddenly older? For two years, I didn’t use a full-length mirror. Returning to this view was startling. I remember the distinct feeling that I was no longer living in my real body, and that if I could chisel away the excess, the real me would be found underneath. Vain as that all may sound, my body represents me. Inwardly, I feel the bewilderment of a six-year-old, but I just turned twenty-four, and my body feels the fatigue of a much older woman. Which one is really me?

For my sister, ethnicity is an important part of her concept of identity. We are multi-ethnic, but we’ve had different experiences with that reality, having grown up in different decades. Our parents were married in the early ’70s when mixed marriages were less common. My sister recalls being a kid and running into some skin-heads who taunted her with, “Don’t you wish you were white?” Confused, she thought to herself, “But I am white!” Conversely, when I tell people these days that I am part Filipina, half of the time I hear back, “I thought you were just white.” While I didn’t grow up as immersed in Filipino culture as my sister did, the judgment usually has less to do with consumption of traditional foods and more to do with my skin color and eyes. But without the characteristic physical features or any involvement in the Filipino community or culture, how much does–or should–the technicality of bloodline count? Is it that my grandpa was Filipino but I am not?

The day after Obama’s election, my sister called me. “Guess what! Obama is multi-ethnic,” she reported. “Everyone talks about him being black, but he’s really multi-ethnic.” He hadn’t been her candidate, but she now feels a kinship with our new president over the experience of multi-ethnicity. It is the very first time in history that our country has elected a person of multi-racial heritage to represent and lead us. How apt for a country as diverse as America. We are still figuring out our identity, in so many ways.

Me, too.

I was sitting here writing about my relationship with my fiancé, a free write to try to summarize the conversations we have been having the past few weeks, and as I was reading over my stream of conscience, self-indulgent rant about the hard times we are going through, I found myself incapable of letting it be a post.

I find myself censoring details of our relationship to other people because I am worried of how other women will perceive me. One of those stereotypes, the jealous girlfriend, the controlling girlfriend, the needy girlfriend, the ungrateful girlfriend who shouldn’t be complaining because she has a wonderful man who loves her waiting for her in bed every night.

I don’t consider myself a self-conscious person in any sense other than the concern I have with the way other women see me. It goes beyond how I am seen in regards to my personality and may stem from my unhealthy fixation from when I was sick of comparing my body to other women’s bodies. A year into recovery and I still catch myself every once in a while doing it. But when another woman makes a comment about my body, no matter what comment, I become alarmed and upset, like someone was spying on me and saw my body, something I try not to display or accentuate.

I wear the most neutral clothes and show my taste with colors and jewelry as opposed to fabrics, cut and fit. A woman caught me last week and said, “You’re so skinny.” Not slender or thin, but skinny. A comment I strove to attain in 2004 is one I was insulted by in ‘08. Why was anyone looking at me? Why did she say something? Why was my response, “I’m doing really well, so…” Like she knew what that meant. Like that stranger knew I struggled with anorexia or bulimia that I became so close to these diseases I knew them by name, I knew death all too well. That there were times I woke up with my fiancé’s ear to my chest and when I asked what he was doing, he would respond, “I was hearing your heart. I read your heart gets really weak when you’re severely underweight.” I was so skinny I was being questioned whether I was alive.

I am at a point where I no longer feel like explaining my relationship with my fiancé, my family, food or myself, but how else are you able to get close to people? How else does someone know who you are unless you share? The more I think of it, the scarier it is. It seems like the older you get, the more you have to tell people for them to understand you.

Isolation is now my nemesis. No longer am I haunted by food, but by the tempting silence and warmth and darkness of my bedroom. I wonder if I will ever be able to share who I am with women friends.

This is a part of who I am. It was all I was. A group of healthy, beautiful, confident women greet me. They tell me that I will be challenged in a way I have never been before. Do I tell them that I already have the challenge of three meals a day? When I was accepted to be a summer intern at High Rocks Academy — a non-profit organization in Hillsboro, West Virginia, whose purpose is to educate, empower, and inspire girls to have the confidence to enrich their lives — I was dreading the decision to tell them about my eating disorder. As the date to leave for West Virginia drew closer, I quietly became stronger. My healthy mind reigned as I let the High Rocks group know that I struggle with an eating disorder. I was warmly accepted and thanked for my honesty. All of these new feelings arose: I became more passionate, more natural. With each meeting the staff and interns have preparing for camp; I remember that I will be in a position of leadership where young girls will be looking to me as an example of womanhood and confidence. My craving for living a healthy life grows as the preparation for camp becomes more intense and the starting date nears. Being honest with myself and the staff let me struggle aloud, ask for help, and reconfirm my commitment to recovery. Two days into camp, Sarah, the same co-director who I had been most open with during my stay, asked to speak with me. She thanked me for all my hard work and openness, but asked me if High Rocks was the right place for me to continue my recovery. As devastated as I was with the thought of leaving this amazing community of women, I knew Sarah saw what I could not. I trusted her and said goodbye to High Rocks. I was able to trust because I was giving so much of myself to others. When the time came to leave High Rocks, a well of emotions broke, but I was able to feel all of them — the sadness, gratitude, acceptance, fear, abandonment, and triumph — because I had been taking care of my body and in turn, my body let me feel. I am still in shock from all the progress I made. There have been so many contributing factors in my recovery that my memory could not recall all of them, but the nearest thing I have is High Rocks and the women there who gave me the strength to accept my femininity and helped me find the keys to access my gifts.

23 year old New Jersey resident, Natasha, is a College Graduate who is in recovery and spent her last semester at Kutztown University organizing programs about eating disorders. She wants people to know about her struggle with disordered eating and her path to healing.

“If I only knew then what I know now” – something I have heard adults say throughout my childhood – is a phrase I have always hated. Yet, now that I am in my forties, I find myself wanting to utter it too sometimes, but knowing that it won’t work for me any better than it worked for them. Honestly, I am not even sure what I would want to tell my young self if I could.

Then two days ago I was out with my girl friend Pat Cisarano for dinner in Soho and she said:

“Oh my god I saw a picture of myself in my twenties, and I realized I wasn’t bad looking, I was actually pretty.”

I felt like saying, “Duh!” but I controlled myself because she still thinks she is ugly today and the same thing could be applied now.

“But you know that fat thing…” she continued, “It was always hard to think I was pretty when I was overweight.”

Of course, I see Pat’s attractiveness – I am outside her inner story. Pat being heavier than the twiggy American ideal doesn’t detract from her beauty; it is and was always part of her beauty.

Pat’s comment made me think of my Aunt Shirley who always dressed meticulously and has never let her weight get over 105 pounds at 5 feet 5. I recently saw a super 8 movie of my mom and dad returning from their honeymoon on a ship from Bermuda. Greeting them at the dock were both of my grandmothers and my aunt, who must have been about 28 years old. All of them were dressed to the nines, with white gloves and little hats and their patterned dresses cinched tightly at the waist. My aunt was gorgeous; she looked like Elizabeth Taylor with black soft curls and big brown eyes and an hourglass figure. She was giggling and flirting with the camera (my father) in that oh-so-feminine way that took my breath away. This was my aunt who never married and who considered herself the ugly duckling compared to my mom (even to this day). I wonder what her life would have been like if she could go back and change her feeling about herself when she was younger.

Recently I enrolled in a writing class with the writer Martha Shulman at the Open Center . Last week she assigned us an exercise, and I began writing it as I always do. It went something like this: “Homely child makes big effort, and therefore gets boyfriends, who always leave her because she isn’t pretty enough.” It is true I was never a great beauty, but looking back now (as with my Aunt) I wonder what choices I would have made differently if I didn’t think I was so ugly and unlovable? Trying to write this story memoir for Martha’s class, I realized that the reality of my life actually contradicted what I felt: because from a young age there was a stream of boys and men that were attracted to me, leading to a continuous line of relationships (in which most commonly I broke up with the men) to the present.

I actually was shocked at this sudden new picture of my history. How could that homely girl attract the opposite sex all her life? Why was it that boys and men wanted to be with her (even when she didn’t try, because half the time she was so sure she would fail that she didn’t make any effort)? I have carried around this “ugly girl” story around like a precious parcel until now.

In the back of my mind, I have always attributed any male attention to other causes: they like me because of my girlfriend, Pat (who is a cool musician); they like my profession, filmmaking (also very cool); they like my family, American, (which, when I was younger, it was still cool to be); they like my loft, which is big (and again, way cool); and of course there was always the possibility that they like me because eventually I was willing to have sex, (which of course was the coolest of all); the list goes on and on. Never did I ever think that a man really liked me for myself or that I could be alluring as I am.

And of course when I was younger, I traded sex to make up for my perceived ugliness. And sex goes over well with boys. I thought that if I didn’t give sex, no guy would look at me - but now I see that I may have been wrong. My self-perception led me down many roads that perhaps I never would have traveled if I had thought differently. I am still struggling to integrate the idea that my “story” may a different one than I think it is. Because if this story, the one I’ve been telling myself my whole life, isn’t true, then who am I? I wonder… what would it mean for all of us – Pat, My Aunt, and me (and most women I know) – if we saw our beauty in a real way?

I was always short. My older brother was twice my size and used to pummel me as soon as my parents left us alone in a room. Then he would turn around screaming when they reentered, lamenting: “she hit me, she hit me”. My dad would start to yell at me and I would cry back, “he’s lying, he’s lying” - but it would be too late. My dad would decide that we both must be lying and he would punish us both. Not only was my brother twice as big - he was twice as smart, twice as quick, and two years and two days older than me, so two was a major theme. I never could get out the first word.

My grandmother always used to say, “Be glad you’re short; men like short women.”

This always made me angry. “What do I care what men think?”

“Look, this way you can date anyone you want, short or tall,” would be her response.

“You’re crazy,” I would say, “I would never want to go out with a short man!” She would shake her head hopelessly.

“Good things come in small packages.”

But what did she know? My mom was short, like I was – and look at her! It was clear: my Gram was the stupidest woman I knew.

All of my brothers turned out to be tall like my father; even my younger sister, who was nine years younger, had five inches on me. Only I was like my mother. My mother and I shared the same figure, which was even worse than being short. My Gram used to say, “Be grateful you are like your mother! You don’t want to be like me!” She would make a motion of throwing a ball over her shoulder. “Look how big they are? I could throw them over my shoulders.” My Gram told us over and over how she grew up in the flapper era when the fashion was to be flat chested, so her sister used to wrap her chest in cotton so tight that she couldn’t breathe. Everyone back then wanted to look like a boy. She would shake her head and sigh, explaining that back then, women didn’t know how it would ruin their breasts.

But her stories failed to move me. I wanted something else; I wanted cleavage like the black and white women on the TV set that arrived at our house in 1964. But my Gram was having none of the woman on the tube. She used to yell at me: “Your mother is perfect, your mother is perfect!” What did she know?

I was my father’s daughter, and it was his jokes that interested me: “Oh yeah!” he used to say, us five kids sitting at the dinner table rapt with attention as my mom dished out the pot roast, “After I married your mother, I stuck my hand inside her bra but there was nothing there! Flat as a board!” He would laugh so hard and we’d all laugh too, while my mom would turn bright red. I knew how she felt, yet I knew how he felt too - as if he’d been cheated out of something. I felt I had been cheated too. My two-times-me older brother would tease me mercilessly about what I didn’t have and never would have. Not only was I missing height; I was missing something essential to being a woman.

My grandmother would tell me how wrong I was - that the perfect breast should fit in a champagne glass, like my mother’s did. But I had hugged my mother and felt the bones beneath her chest; I wanted to be full and plump and padded like Sadie, who cooked and cleaned for us after my grandfather died. Sadie was round as a ball, but when you hugged her, you felt something. When a man hugged me I wanted to imagine him feeling all warm and enveloped like I felt with Sadie, like I wished I felt with my mother. I didn’t know how my dad could put up with lying in bed with my mom’s bony frame. For a long time, I used to wonder how I could make myself round and cuddly and tall and thin at the same time.

But it didn’t matter what I wanted. Much remained the same for forty years until now, when I couldn’t care less about my height or my breasts. Sometimes I wished I was skinnier like my mom is now – she has shrunk in half over the years. I admit that I have hoped that, being so much like her, I have that gene too; it began for her when she was sixty, so it is not that far off for me. Now I am glad my breasts don’t sag like my friends who have bigger ones. And the champagne glass thing does hold up much better over time – I can attest.

My Gram is long dead and I never got to tell her she was right about some things – about anything. In fact, other than our breast sizes, my Gram and I share a whole lot more than I ever noticed before. To begin, we share the same height as my mother. And I must say, I look more like her than like my mother – we both have long thin faces and big noses. She always thought she was ugly (she was; I am too). But she always thought my mother, her baby daughter, was the most beautiful woman in the world, with her round face and turned up gentile nose. “Your mother can ‘pass’ you know?” she would chuckle, “No one ever knew she was Jewish.” Not like her and not like me.

But my Gram could sew and she was an artist. And she was a good dancer – up to just weeks before she died, she would tell me: “My brother and I would start the dancing in the ballroom when were children; my mother would push us out to the floor to get the guests started.” Then she would show me how she could dance by doing a little two-step. When I was a girl, she took me downtown on the weekends to shop at Wanamaker’s, the big department store in Philadelphia back then. We’d look in all the windows and talk to all the sales people endlessly and go in search of free “samples” in the bakery department, then we’d talk to the baker. My grandmother grew up in a hotel, and her mom used to ask her talk to the guests in the hotel to make them feel at home. Even though she was long widowed by the time I knew her and regulated to be our nurse and caretaker, she still behaved as if the world was one big hotel lobby and talked to anyone and everyone she met on the street.

Now, as an adult, I find myself talking to cabbies, fellow passengers, and street people everywhere as I fly around the world. Just the other day, it dawned on me that I would never be lonely because I can always just go outside on the street, walk into a shop, and talk to the salesperson. Not everyone can do that. My Gram always said having a good personality was more important than the way you looked (that and knowing how to dance). That’s how she met my grandfather, who was exceedingly handsome – so handsome that she never knew why he liked her. I guess when you are ugly you have to think up some alternative skills. That’s what she told me, and that’s how she helped me get by in the world as a short, flat chested, Jewish woman with a big nose.

I read an article in Vanity Fair a while back by Christopher Hitchens. Read it, but be forewarned, it may cause intense rage. In it, Hitchens explains “why women aren’t funny.” I don’t even know where to begin! Hitchen’s seems to be missing the point. There is a larger issue of pervasive sexism throughout the representation of women in media that Hitchen’s is only feeding into with his ridiculously superficial evaluation of why “women aren’t funny.”

It makes this article by David Denby, all the more important. He talks about the evolving (or rather, devolving) role of women in romantic comedies. I read this article just after I saw the delightful comedy, Juno (written by a woman, about a young woman) and I couldn’t agree more. If you went to the movies last year, I’m sure you noticed the abundance of blank female characters in comedies across the board (Juno and a few others excluded). Denby criticizes this trend in a way that I could only hope to articulate.

I wonder how much sway the media actually has over young girls. I feel as though there is an overwhelming message to women these days, that to be attractive, you must be rather flat and well, boring. You shouldn’t be feisty, or funny or smart or difficult. Instead, you should be incredibly bland, an unwavering straight man to act as a beacon of maturity for your man to navigate himself by. I don’t want to give too much credit to the media. I’d like to think that young girls today have enough sense to see beyond the superficial and hollow representations of themselves, they see almost every day. I’d like to think… but I’m not so sure I do. What do you think? How much does the media actually effect your own self image?

Bob Herbert, in his op-ed piece for the NY Times for the NY Times asks, “Where has everybody been … We’ve become so used to the disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous and even violent treatment of women that we hardly notice it. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed against women and girls every day. Fashionable ads in mainstream publications play off of that violence, exploiting themes of death and dismemberment, female submissiveness and child pornography.

If we’ve opened the door to the issue of sexism in the presidential campaign, then let’s have at it. It’s a big and important issue that deserves much more than lip service.”

I’m proud to have made FLYING and to have shown so many women being “real,” i.e. complex. And please, if you haven’t seen FLYING - we’ll send you the first two chapters for free for a House Party with your friends. Then you can let me know if you think FLYING portrays women in a unique way and how it makes you feel to experience that in a film? Too often women are regulated to supporting characters in both film and the real world. I am curious if you think the flat female characters in pop culture affect the way you act in real life?