The word yellow wandered through his mind in search of something to connect with.
–Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The quote, of course, is from the scene in HHGTTG where poor Arthur wakes up, extremely hung-over, and spies a pair of bulldozers outside his home. In his post-inebriated state, the facts of the situation – bulldozer, yellow, home – take some time to percolate before making sense

Adams’ words quite reasonably describe how I often feel while reading non-fiction articles, books, and blogs. One comment might wander through my mind for days or weeks before connecting with something I’ve read previously, others might connect immediately.

The latter is the case for today’s idle thought. I picked up Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism after reading that Hugo Schwyzer added it to the syllabus for his Intro to Feminism classes.

So far, it’s all a given and rehashes most of the blog writing I’ve read from Valenti herself, as well as Amanda, Pam, and the gang and others.

One sentence though, about Valenti’s experience meeting former President Clinton and the resulting “Boobgate”, wandered through my mind briefly.

Valenti says:

If you’re a younger woman, no matter how much work you do, someone is always going to claim that your success is due to the way you look or to your general fuckability.

Somewhere around my move back to Oregon in 2001, I had a conversation with my friend Glenn in Boston. If I recall correctly, I was commenting on the career shift I was making at the same time, moving from doing counseling into working in computers. Glenn maintained that I’d have no problem at all finding a job in computers. Anyone would hire me, he said. Not because I’m smart, skilled, and have been working with computers and programming since grade school. No, of course not. I was young and female. The “quota” argument.

Once I started writing, the wandering thought connected with another, vaguely related, instance. A close friend of mine has spent several years now fighting the impression that, simply because she is an attractive woman working in a company with a large number of men, she MUST be sleeping with most or all of them. The men spreading this rumor never seem to take into account that A) she’s married and her husband works for the same company or B) she’s obviously not having this supposed affair with them.

Sadly, there isn’t a direct answer to this kind of problem. It’s education, one man at a time, one person at a time (because women are just as likely to accuse each other of succeeding based on our looks), that we are smart, intelligent, wonderful, organized, human beings.

I came across this in my morning trawl through feeds. This is all theory I’ve read before, but somehow, this made me think (briefly, in that half hour I get to myself before I have to lever myself towards the shower and onwards to work).

Her[Susan Bordo] essay “Hunger as Ideology” was included in the composition reader I used, and I assigned it to my students. Bordo, a feminist philosopher, analyzes numerous food advertisements in close detail (reproducing the print ads in the essay) to show the cultural messages that underpin the selling of food. Given that ads rely on pre-existing cultural tropes to get their messages across, they can tell us about the ideological underpinnings of our culture. Some of Bordo’s findings:

-Voracious hunger is considered a sign of manliness.

-Hunger for food and desire for sexuality are constructed as analogous, but this is a gendered analogy. When women are targeted, “their hunger for food is employed solely as a metaphor for their sexual appetite.” When men are targeted, the metaphor goes in reverse: eating delicious food is depicted as a sexual conquest. (The examples for this include hilariously awful ads of men whispering sweet nothings to their Betty Crocker desserts.)

-Female hunger is represented in terms of misogynistic fear: sex is imagined as a form of eating in which the woman consumes and destroys a male object of desire.

-The only acceptable female desire in ads is the desire to provide food for others.

-Women are depicted eating in private, secretly, and this act is explicitly represented as a “substitute for human love.”

from Kate Harding’s Shaply Prose

As a woman of some size myself who grapples with several weight-related body issues – health, cholesterol, attractiveness, even finding clothing that fits properly – reading this today made me think: is there any relation between sex and food in the years when I gained most of this weight? If I were to chart out, year by year, the process of going from 110 at 18 to 220 at 30, would I find any surprising correlations?

What do you think? Do you think you’d find any connection in your past between your relationship with sex and your relationship with food?

I was at my brother’s birthday party this
evening – he’s 27, but that doesn’t stop my mom from wanting to
bake a cake and feed everyone. A couple of his friends came, with
their respective wives and sons. Two little boys, generally under
the age of 2. I think Garrett is about a year and Dylan is about
7-8 months, but I don’t know his friends very well and I’m a
miserable judge of ages when kids are that young.

Dylan’s mother and Garrett’s mother were
talking about naps – Dylan doesn’t really take naps, she said, if
they’re lucky, he’ll lay down for 20 minutes. Garrett’s mother
was surprised, and said that Garrett usually takes a couple of naps
a day, sometimes for up to a couple of hours.

“Two hours?!? You could get something
DONE with that kind of time.”

…….

And people WONDER why I don’t want
kids. Because that was an honest reaction from a parent, that a
stretch of time two hours long is an astounding occurrence. I have
a hard enough time finding two hours NOW to get stuff done
in between working, cooking, and hobbies.

I’m just so utterly glad that other
people are willing to put the effort into child-raising that’s
necessary to propagate the species so that I don’t have to.

Note: I do have other reasons for being
childless, like not wanting to contribute to what I consider the
population problem we-as-a-planet will be facing soon enough. But
it all started with not wanting to put that time into child-raising
that it takes to do it right.

I couldn’t help but laugh when I
translated the upcoming comment into the terms of the discussion at
hand.

To wit: the discussion centers on the raised levels of awareness
(i.e., hypervigilance) that women are taught – and to which I could
provide examples if necessary. When a young tadpole by the name of
Ryan bursts on the scene with this brilliant question:

So tell me, if Im the “good guy”, and I
still get treated like Im any regular prick, then what is the
incentive to be a good guy.

More after the jump.

To truly understand the clueless nature of
this comment, we have to translate it into the terms of the
discussion.

So tell me, if Im the [guy who doesn't rape or assault
women], and I still get treated like Im [a stranger who may or may
not rape or assault women], then what is the incentive to [continue
my policy of not raping or assaulting women].

You see, Ryan just asked why he should not start raping and
assaulting women, since we’re going to be hypervigilant around him
out of trained wariness that men who rape and assault women don’t
wear labels and can’t be identified on the street.

Sounds to me like someone privileged enough to expect to be
rewarded for following the damn law. Someone who, as a kid,
probably had to be bribed into behaving.

More in the comments here (Great post, Chris,
BTW)