Graceful Embodiment

First, read the intro to this series here.

50 Ways to Be a Woman: #1

Practice good personal grooming habits. If you are going to have colored hair, keep your roots covered. If you are going to have fake nails, keep them filled. Take care of your skin, take care of your teeth. 

I want to go a few directions with this one, so please bear with me.  First of all, my inner feminist is screaming because at the top of the list of how to be a woman, we are told to cover our roots.  This superficial approach to our femininity can be seen as the cause and effect of so many gender problems of our society.  I could go off on a rant about these....

The Art of Womanliness

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am starting a series taking a Thought Catalog list of "50 Ways to Be a Woman" and annotating it, one item at a time.  I chose this list from convenience (it appeared on my Facebook) more than any completeness of the list.

Dancing, Dating, and Gender Roles

Sometimes, I read articles and think, “Oh, so close!”  Normally, these are blog posts that make really really really good points, but gloss over important nuances or forget something major.  In order to ease myself back in blogging (yes, I know it’s been a while -- I’ve been distracted), I am going to share two of these in a two part series that covers an easy target: dating.

The first is written by a friend, Daniel Paris, who works for FOCUS, a college evangelization program, and is about dating in a more general sense.

Men Who Get It

In the light of tragedy, a couple of good pieces on privilege have shown up.  These pieces strike me all the more because they are written by males.  The general perspective is that, while most men are not jerks/creepy/violent, violence against women stems from certain manifestations of male privilege, and so to change things, men must change.

Flirting (Or Sleeping) Your Way to Friendship

My poor deluded hubby doesn't think I'm awkward.
Bless his heart.

A while ago, I read a couple articles on flirting and posed a few questions about flirting and relationships.  One of these questions was: For what purpose is flirting acceptable?  Unacceptable?

I have had friends accused of being flirts, accused friends of being flirts, and (consciously and unconciously) flirted with guys in whom I had no romantic interest.  My flirty side tends to come out when I am meeting new people and when I am mingling in a large group.

Dating Advice for Men and Women

I'm going to take a slight risk with this post.  Recently, this blog about dating advice for men has been floating around Facebook.  And, men, read it.  Women, go ahead and read it too.  It is good dating advice for men.  But I want to offer a counterpoint to women, because, quite frankly, we don't always do things better than men do. So, with further ado,

Five Notes on Dating for the Ladies

1) Be clear.

If men need to be intentional, so do women. We often can get away with playing games, with blowing hot and cold, with sending mixed signals and misleading hints.  If we don't want guys equivocating, playing that pseudo-dating game, or defaulting into relationships, rather than straight-up asking us out, we've got to start straight-up answering.  Be honest with the men in your life, especially when they are being honest and vulnerable with you.

Part of the ability to be clear and honest comes from a deep self-knowledge.  How can you let someone else know what you want from a relationship, what you need in life, where you see yourself going through the year, unless you know can answer these questions?  How can you tell if someone shares your values and priorities, unless you can identify them for yourself?  The men I have seen be most hurt by women are wounded by women who don't know their own desires well enough.  For example, more than one man in my life has been told by a woman, "I don't want to date; I want to court/be courted" -- yet she could not tell him what she mean by "courtship."

We don't need to have it all figured out -- we none of us have it all figured out -- but we need enough to recognize ourselves in an internal mirror and communicate some of that image, so to speak.

2) Be rational.

That being said... be honest, but don't overdo the analysis.  I have two subpoints under this point 2).

a) Don't overtalk/overdiscuss it.  Yes, it is good to know where your relationship stands.  Sometimes this will require a DTR, depending on how the relationship started/progressed. But you don't need a DTR every day or every week, or even every month.  Let things grow and progress; let the relationship take its course.  You may need to reevaluate after a few months if it is not clear to you how things are progressing.  That's okay -- and it's okay to bring it up if you have a strong reason to think something has changed.  It just should not be an every single day discussion.

b) Don't overanalyze.  Some of the best advice on communication between the genders is simple arithmetic.  Men, when a lady speaks, take what you think she means, and multiply it by 3.  Ladies, when a man speaks, take what you think he means and divide it by 3.  Most things he says/does are not veiled hints, secret messages, or hidden meanings.  When he says he doesn't want to hang out tonight because his football team is playing and he wants to watch it with the boys, that does not mean he doesn't like you.  It doesn't mean he doesn't want to date you.  It doesn't even mean he's tired of you.  It simply means that he wants some beer and wings and to watch the Patriots play.  If your mind is going crazy over-analyzing things, you are going to have a hard time holding yourself to (2)(a).

3) Let him lead. 

If you have read anything on this blog (including that little bio of me on the side), you will have figured out that I am a self-professed feminist and a strong Polish woman.  That should tell you two things about number (3).  First, that I have a hard time writing it for fear of how some people may interpret it.  Second, that I don't mean look down and be a doormat.  I don't mean he has to make all the decisions or run your life.  In fact, stay away from those models!  Instead, find where and how he is a leader and affirm him in those areas.  Figure out intentionally how to incorporate these things into your relationship.

As a corollary: let him do those little chivalrous things that melt female hearts, but don't demand them!  This is a tricky balance to reach.  I had a couple of male friends who taught me something about the balance when I was too far on the other side.  They did things like run in front of me to open doors and flat-out refuse to go through lines before me.  Eventually, I learned to accept these gestures with grace, rather than rolled eyes. I also got to witness how this small, token affirmation of their masculinity helped them develop it in other ways.

On the other hand, many men are not taught to do these things, or are taught by the women in their lives NOT to do these things.  So judge a man by a greater picture of his heart than whether he takes the outside of the sidewalk.

4) Guard his eyes.

Okay, so guys were told to help guard our hearts.  Ladies, we have got to guard their eyes.  I tend to hate soapboxes on modesty and I am not going to tell you what to wear or how many inches below your neck your neckline should sit.  As I walk through the mall with my fiance, I find myself jokingly covering his eyes at times -- but only half-jokingly.  Because the fact is, I don't want him to see those parts of other ladies!  And as a general rule of thumb, the parts of other ladies that I don't want him to see are the parts of me he should not be seeing till we are married.  If I want him to entertain only pure thoughts about me, I need to be presenting myself in such a way that I encourage only pure thoughts.  It's not about blaming women for men's thoughts -- it's about love.  If I love him, I want to make it as easy as possible for him to keep his mind full of pure thoughts.

5) Girls struggle with lust too.

This is a direct answer to number 5 for men, on physical touch.

One day, I stumbled across a couple articles (I'm not sure that these were the ones, but they are good ones I found in retrospect) that focused on the fact that women struggle with physical desire. I was shocked at how freeing I found this point.  When we believe that we should not be having a particular struggle, there are two consequences: 1) we tend to deny that we are having that struggle, which leads us unable to combat it; and 2) we tend to think we are particularly alone and particularly awful for having that struggle. We are too often led to believe that lust is a struggle unique to men, that only men desire more physically than is allowable before marriage.  This is just not true.  We were born with the same original sin and the same concupiscent desires as men.  So ladies, read point number 5 for the men, and apply it to your own lives.  And maybe click the links in the first sentence.

Addendum I: Vocabulary for Frank

Frank asked me what the phrase “gift of self” might mean, with the disclaimer that as my “token non-christian reader” he didn’t know.  First of all, I want to give a shout-out to the other non-Christians who read this blog – I know that at least one other of my loyal 3.5 readers shies away from any religious persuasion.  Secondly, I want to give a shout-out to those Christians/Catholics who might read this and think, “Well, I don’t exactly know what ‘gift of self’ means either.”

It’s a hallmark John Paul II phrase, lifted especially from his Theology of the Body, so there is no way I will do justice to it in one post.  If you really want to understand the phrase, read Man and Woman He Created Them, JPII’s audiences on the theology of the body compiled into one book.  And read it with a competent moral theologian by your side.  (Ooh-ooh-pick-me-pick-me!  I’m looking for a job!)  I’ll do my best, however.

Gift of self, or self-gift, describes how persons relate to each other.  It means giving of oneself in a full and free manner, an openness towards the other that says, “I am yours,” and does not hold back.  It is a self-offering that is love.  For JPII, the preeminent example is the Trinity: the Father pours Himself out to the Son, the Son reciprocates this love to the Father, and the love bursts forth to be the Spirit. 

For my non-Christian readers, or the Christians who haven’t pondered the Trinity in this manner, the primary earthly example is marital love.  Husband and wife give themselves to the other in a love that encompasses all aspects of their being.  In the words of Scott Hahn, “this love is so tangible that nine months later you have to give it a name.”  It is total (hence, no divorce) and life-giving (hence, babies) and consists of an orientation of oneself to the other and a strong will for the good of the other. 

I feel like I’ve been talking around it for long enough now that hopefully this sheds some life on self-gift.  If not, question away, and I will revisit the topic – possibly while studying for my Theology of the Body exam!

What I Have Taught My Feminism, Part III

(Go do your catch-up reading if you've missed Part II!)

The discomfort of my feminism as I write that who I am as a woman makes no sense except in relation to man (and again as I type it, and again as I post it) is palpable.  I have, for years, been on a quest to find the true meaning of femininity.  As a good feminist, I set out to find the definition of woman without reference to man.  I found two extremes: defining woman by a certain cultural/historical set of behaviors and values or collapsing gender differences to create a false equivalency.  I was unsatisfied wherever I turned.  If we can define man without reference to woman, shouldn’t we be able to do the opposite?

When I read the beginning of JPII’s Theology of the Body, it hit me.  I’d been getting it backwards.  Man was defined in isolation, woman with reference to man.  I knew woman was misdefined, so surely the approach to defining her was wrong; I needed to imitate the definition of man.

But what if the definition of man was wrong too?  What if manonly makes sense in reference to woman?  This is the claim I make: masculinity and femininity are mutually referentialand only make sense in relationship witheach other.  Bodily, this makes sense.  Our physical bodies anticipate the opposite as complement.  I propose, once more following JPII, that our physical bodies give exterior shape to our interior selves.

In this case, it does woman no wrong to explain who she is with reference to (and in contrast to) man; it does man no wrong to explain who he is with reference to (and in contrast to) woman.  Indeed, any attempt at an isolated definition will do an injustice to femininity or masculinity,  It cannot but be a reductive view.

Does this mean that I have reached a perfect understanding of femininity, which I can now fully explicate for you?  Alas, no.  That is still a work in progress (though I hope to continue talking around the question here for a while yet).  A lot more work and research are necessary before I get there.  I am, however, making progress in developing the proper framework for asking the question, which is necessary for finding the answer.  

What I Have Taught My Feminism, Part II

Housekeeping Notes:

1. Read Part I first, if you have not already done so.
2. If you read Frank's comment (or if you are Frank!), do not fear!  I am writing an answer to his question... It will come at the end of Part III.

The necessity of vulnerability does not mean we must be completely open and vulnerable with everyone we encounter to be fully human.  Prudence allows us to respond to human sin.  Our relationships with other require a balance of prudence with openness, always guided by caritas.  It does mean that vulnerability is bad, is not something to be avoided.  It is a beautiful expression of our humanity.  And, because of the inherent risk, it requires a certain courage, a certain strength to live it out.

Now, you may have noticed an implication in this discussion of vulnerability, which leads to the next lesson I taught my feminism. 

If self-gift is essential to humanity, then no human being can truly exist in isolation.  We can only fully realize our selves as persons if we do so in relation to other persons.  What a blow to my ideal of self-sufficiency!  I like to imagine myself capable of complete independence.  Alas, JPII tells me otherwise. And it gets worse.  The ultimate self-gift – the opening of self and reception of other – happens in marital love.  Not only do I as a person not make sense except in relation to another person, but I as a woman do not makes sense except in relation to man.

What I Have Taught My Feminism, Part I

Now that you have done your assigned reading, it is time for the next chapter of Beth's feminist musings, "What I Have Taught My Feminism."

[Read the first series here.]

Now that I have begun, I might as well continue to develop a few more thoughts on vulnerability and gender. Again, I want to put these musings into a wider context; this time, “What I Have Taught My Feminism.” My feminism has taught me valuable lessons, but on occasion, I have had to instruct it, especially when I try to make it play nicely with my Church. There are two lessons in particular that I want to focus on, because of how crucial they are for correcting misunderstandings between my feminism and my Church.

First: Vulnerability is not a bad thing. The opposite assumption comes not just from my feminism, but from our society as a whole. And I am, as a stubbornly independent woman, perhaps particularly susceptible to it. As a basic, working definition I give, “the potentiality to be hurt.” It need not imply an actual being hurt: a newborn child, with the wisest, most doting parents, is extremely vulnerable. We don’t like vulnerability: it implies helplessness, weakness, and passivity. What about that sounds good?

The helplessness, I suppose, is part of the definition of vulnerability, but I mean to contend that the other two are not, or need not be. Vulnerability can be accompanied by an active strength, because it is can be primarily a factor of opennesss.

Or, to use the words of everyone’s favorite Polish Pope, it is about gift of self. The meaning of our humanity – of being a person – is the ability to make a gift of ourselves and to accept the gift of another. This is a huge starting point for his theology of the body. We are our bodies. In the beginning, this gift was safe because no one would think of harming another. Now, however, the gift involves risk – risk of exploitation or rejection. Thus gift of self = vulnerability. The catch is: gift of self = only true way to be a person. Vulnerability is intrinsic to our personhood and inescapable for our humanity.

Gendered Thoughts, Part IV

Here's the fourth & final part.  I hope you enjoy the ending... There's another series coming soon with more about vulnerability and gender!

I am not yet willing to shift from the world of “is” to the world of “ought.”  I do want to note a scene the vulnerability-dynamic can draw.  A man and a woman stand face to face.  As a female body before a male body, she has a vulnerability that she cannot help and he cannot have.  However, he has just told her that he finds her fun and charming (not to mention pretty) and would love to take her out to dinner.  He has a vulnerability before her that she does not have – he has no idea what she thinks of him.  If she accepts him, both will have made an implicit agreement to accept and guard – at least to a limited extent – the vulnerability of the other.  He is guarding her physical vulnerability and she his emotional vulnerability.  This dynamic, though by no means the only one at play here, sets the stage in an interesting manner for “traditional” gender roles in marriage, where the husband provides materially for the family and the wife acts as emotional caretaker.  Often times, behavior that seems to fall to the other gender is constructed to fit the acting gender’s norm, a tendency that fascinated my sociologist self in undergrad.

Again, I do not wish to move from the realm of “is” to “ought” or to insist that any particular gendered interaction fits this perfectly, especially since it relies on purity of intention.  I also do not mean to imply that a marriage with “traditional” gender roles necessarily follows from the date scenario described before it.  I merely wish to explore these as interesting gender dynamics that are largely ignored, or, when discussed, inextricably conflated with other ideology.  

Thoughts on Gender, Part III

(To make sense of this, be sure to read parts one and two first.)

I’m not sure how to transition here from female vulnerability to male vulnerability.  Part of the trouble is that up till now I have been concerned with physical differences, and now I need to turn to social norms.

Social norms are always difficult to deal with, not the least because they tend to be amorphous and variable.  However, again simply based on my recent life, let me offer two norms in our society: malefold ask out femalefolk; malefolk propose to femalefolk.  I propose merely that this is the way, by and large, that things are done – not the way things have to be done or should be done.

Now I not something interesting: asking another person to go on a date with or to marry you puts you in a position of vulnerability.  (This assertion assumes that the other person is reasonably free to answer in the negative.  If refusal is not a viable option, this, of course, changes the power dynamic.)  In asking a woman out, a man says, “See?  I am an interesting person.  Please consider investing some time in me.”  Rejection can’t help but be personal – it is, in a small way a rejection of his person.  A marriage proposal all the more so.  I heard a young man describe his proposal as offering “everything” of himself and, on one knee, waiting to find out if it was enough. 

(Incidentally, this scenario illustrates why I dislike the pre-engagement decision that “we should get engaged.”  It’s like showing someone his Christmas gift and proceeding to wrap it anyway.  You don’t half-give gifts or commitments.  Either you are committed to marrying each other (engaged) or you are discerning (dating).  If you are both done discerning,  you need to be either engaged or broken up.)

This scenario (before my parenthetical aside) assumes that the man is seeking an actual relationship and not just a hook-up.  A relationship says, “I want to give myself to you.”  A hook-up says, “You will be fun for me.”  It is also complicated by the idea of the “waiting woman” – a common complaint that women are trapped sitting around waiting desperately to get asked out.  Doesn’t this change the dynamic?  Only if we assume that women need men to be complete – and I offer as a counterpart men who ask out dozens of women in a short span of time, yet do not find that any of them stick it out beyond a second or third date.  

Gendered Thoughts, Part II

If you haven't read Part I yet, go back and do that first.  It's short & I'll wait for you.  Ready...
...
...
...Okay.  Here's the next piece!


The gender-vulnerability-based fears that women have are heightened by two factors: negative masculine gender norms and instructions given to women. The “male” behavior associated with the patriarchy/ hegemonic masculinity/ rape culture (also, read this blog and links from this post; all these are distinct, yet present similar concepts of masculinity) teaches men to act in a way so as to objectify and degrade women. This lesson should not happen. Women are taught a different lesson: how not to place themselves in danger. While this lessons are not, in themselves, bad, they teach women an awareness of vulnerability – so that it is difficult to tell what fear is a response to male behavior and what fear is learned from these instructions. Either way, the fear is there and it is real.

Because of this dynamic, a healthy male-female relationship must include the communication, “I am not a threat to you.” My guess is that we have tons of social cues mean to communicate this message and that it happens subconsciously. Small things: tone of voice, word choice, posture, gestures, and physical proximity – along with things less subtle, from choice of meeting location to explicit words. I read an article recently wherein the author attributed this meaning to chivalry (read to the middle of the article; you are looking for Christina Hoff Sommers, but the whole thing is a good read). Thus, its gestures assure a woman that the man, who physically could harm her, has no intention to. Like a handshake, they guarantee that he comes in peace and respect.

(I can hear the protests now: “But men did not actually respect women more in the days of chivalry! Those were the days of misogyny and chauvinism!” Or those just the voices in my own head? Either way, I am toying with the hypothesis that this exact hypocrisy led to the eventual demise of chivalry. Women killed it because they recognized its lie. Perhaps – perhaps – if it actually communicated this reassurance, women would not mind it.)

I feel a need to interrupt myself to offer a disclaimer. Learned helplessness is, for a very good reason, a concern for feminists. I am starting to feel that I might sound like I am feeding into it. Let me be clear: women do not need to rely on men to “rescue” them and are capable, in a variety of ways, of protecting themselves without male cooperation. They just should not have to.

Gendered Thoughts, Part I

I recently started writing out a brief synthesis of gender-related thoughts that have been bouncing through my head lately.  Six pages later, I realized it would have to be more than one blog post.  Bits will appear in manageable chunks over the next few days.  I hope at least one of my faithful three readers enjoys reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I hope here to throw together into coherence some thoughts and ponderings I have had recently regarding gender relations and vulnerability. I will weave together several themes that have emerged in the past few months, in incidents, anecdotes, encounters, articles, and classes. It won’t be a fully developed system, but I hope it will be a consistent beginning of things. Please nitpick my assertions and my logic, so that I can see if this framework holds water and deserves to be developed.

Let me start with some initial premises, assumptions that will undergird my further thoughts.

1) First, I will be assuming that we all live gendered existences. I mean to leave out the question of which parts come from social constructs versus biological predispositions. No matter how gender is formed, we all live lives informed by how we do and experience gender. The vast majority of us live in the male-female/man-woman dichotomy and, although I recognize that exceptions exist, I will be working with a two gender system.

2) This gendered existence affects our daily lives and interpersonal interactions.

3) Women, based on their biological make-up, are physically more vulnerable in comparison to men and especially vis-à-vis men. This premise seems commonsensical to me, and I don’t have research to back it up, but if you want to challenge it, I will gladly go off questing for some. In other words, as a vast generalization, men pose more of a threat to women than women to men, physically.

4) Gender norms exist. I will be speaking about them in sweeping generalities. I realize that these generalities will have counter-examples; these examples do not prevent them from being norms. If I have misidentified or misrepresented a norm, please call me out on it. Just be sure you are certain of the definition of “norm” before you contest one. Then contest away.

Working with these basic ideas in mind, I propose: women, on a daily basis, experience a vulnerability that men do not. This particular experience informs how we live our lives and how we see the world. It colors our gendered interaction. This does not mean that women are, most of the time, in danger. (I leave that assessment to others to make.) It does mean that, as a rule, women experience a greater potentiality for being in danger than men do. Consider: a solitary female motorist stops to pick up a lone male hitch-hiker. For whom are you instinctively concerned? Why?