body politics at the pool: an old bird goes swimming

Remember how I got all fired up about body image after watching Miss Representation? I posted my fat roll on the internet; I railed against misogynistic media moguls; I stood my ground: forty-something; pudgy, and proud? Remember that?

I went to the rec center to swim yesterday evening.  Because I tutor after school, I usually workout in the mornings when everyone else is at the office.  That means I take yoga with people who need instructions like: “Don’t cross the midline on this if you’ve had a hip replacement!”  

Old folks.  I just love ‘em.  Not only because I’ll be one soon, but because they have a certain humor and humility about them.  Also, they understand that a fully functioning body is a thing to be revered, but not necessarily looked at.  When I do yoga or swim with them, no one judges my ass.  If pressed to express some kind of interest, they’d only make a functional inquiry like: "Can you still sit on it?"  Who wouldn’t want to hang out with folks like that?

However, when I entered the locker room at 5:30 last night, I discovered the lovely old folks had taken flight.  In their stead, a ginormous gaggle of high school girls greeted me; their swim team apparel flung like exploded feathers in a great mess about the place.  As they chirped and primped en masse, I marveled at the crowd of them.

I think I’m a typically modest person.  I fall somewhere between the lady who needs a private dressing room and the lady who blow-dries her hair wearing nothing but a pair of skimpy flip-flops and bright red toenail polish.  But I love my body, remember?  So I found a smidge of a spot where I could put my bag and began to unpack and undress.  I tried to blend into the crowd around me, but I couldn't help it, a song from my childhood began to play in my head.

 

 

 

So true.  One of these things just doesn't belong!  I may as well have been wearing that hat with the twirly thing spinning on top. I slithered into my suit as fast as I could and got the heck out of there, seeking the cover of water.

But it didn’t end there.  Apparently, I'd missed the flyer that announced "beautiful hour" at the pool.  Usually, I could find all of my old-folk friends in the deep end doing water aerobics to Rock Around the Clock.  Instead, as I came up for a breath, I noticed a whole crowd of 20-somethings gathering on deck.  They appeared to be looking for a place to swim.  Weren't they supposed to be at happy hour somewhere? To my chagrin, a hot young guy ventured over and got in my lane.  Really?

I suppose now is as good a time as any to remind you that this is the season of armpit hair.  Sigh.  I haven’t shaved my legs in more than ten years, but every summer, I succumb to suburbia’s poolside imperative for shaven pits.  I just can’t take the pressure.  Once the summer pool closes, however, the razor goes away.  I’m not a very hairy person, but after two full months of growth, trust me, there’s enough there to note.   Plus, my very tight swim suit has gotten even tighter over the past year, so parts of me clamor to get out of it as I lumber across the pool.  This is no fashion show.

Wondering if I'd have the guts to do backstroke, I pretended to clean my goggles so I could check out my new friend.  He was brown, muscular, and sort of beautiful in the water.  He had a sun tattooed on his shoulder and some kind of mesmerizing bird across his shoulder blades.  I realized, as I forced myself back to my workout, that aside from my very sweet niece, I almost never spend time with 20-somethings.  My house regularly bulges with young men--but they are teenagers.  When I look at them I see boys, and you can bet that when they look at me, they see an old hag.  And that feels exactly like it’s supposed to.

But this guy was no boy.  When he finally started to swim, I thought I might save face on technique.  I followed him with a surreptitious eye, hopeful that he’d turn out to be a flailer in a fancy suit, but alas, he had a smooth stroke and an intense flip turn—an ex-swim team type for sure.  

I can’t compete with that!  Even if I could do a flip turn, no way was I going to tip myself over, like a duck diving for fish, and show my padded backside to everyone on deck! 

 

So what to do? 

Well.  I think you already know.
 

Just keep swimming.

Yup.  Just keep swimming.  And try not to look quite so freaked out as Dory while you do it.  Oh.  And try not to think about her buddy, the whale:
 

You'll be pleased to know that eventually, I got into my workout and forgot about Mr. Beautiful with his svelte body and his trendy tattoos.  When I finished, I heaved the bulk of my sodden self out of the water, shook myself dry (right down to my padded tail feather) and waddled walked, unvanquished, to the locker room. 

The moral of the story?  Of course, all of us middle-aged folks can and should love our bodies.  But a word to the wise: it's a hell of a lot easier to pull that off if you can steer clear of beautiful-hour at the pool.

over 40 and gone polka dotty

Olivia and I went bra and bathing suit shopping yesterday.  How interesting for a 45 year old woman who is approaching the end of her reproductive (i.e. seductive) years to run this errand with an 11 ½ year old girl who is approaching the beginning of hers.  We needed the biggest and the smallest bras, the biggest and the smallest bathing suits. 

With that, I shouldn't say more about what Olivia needed. Considering she nearly decapitated me when I said the word "underwear" too loudly in the dressing room, I feel certain that advertising her intimate purchases on the internet might cause her to melt into a puddle of seething mortification not to be forgotten in this lifetime.

Conversely, I have no problem embarrassing myself.

The shopping for me went something like this: 

Me: "Oooh, this is cute!"  

I toyed with a hot little pink polka-dotted number.

Olivia: "Mom, that says JUNIORS! OMG, you can't wear that!"

"Oh.  Woops.  But wait, why can't I have polka dots?"

"You're too old.  You're so weird." 

So we strolled around the corner to where the "women" shop - you know, us old and fleshy nonbeings who, apparently, have an aversion to color and anything pretty at all.

"Mom, Look!" Olivia giggled as she fit her entire head into a beige double-D cup as if it were a furless aviator cap pulled snugly down around her ears.  Then she remembered that she has graduated from playful child to awkward pubescent tween, at which point she threw the offending garment at the rack, shuttered in a heeby jeeby kind of way, then bolted across the aisle as if it had bitten her with its forebodings of coming womanhood.

After collecting herself, she held up another hefty specimen and admonished, "You cannot wear this."

Hmmm.  Cute and sexy is weird.  Full and frumpy is gross.  My mom-body doesn't fit into the one-dimensional notions of  femininity she sees every day in the media.  Big surprise.

"Where are all the polka dots?!" I asked, ignoring her comments.  We checked the other aisles hopefully, but only found rows and rows of white and beige. 

Practical.  Comfortable.  Supportive. 

Fine.  I admit I want those things, but I fail to see how a little pattern interferes with the more functional aspects of underwear. 

I meandered back to the Juniors, musing to myself, "Doesn't 'Junior' mean teenager? Why are we sexifying bras for teenagers?" 

I answered myself, "Maybe it's just meant to be cute and fun.  You know, slumber party fodder." 

Standing there surveying the colorful selection, I decided to try a few on.  Just call me crazy like a fox.  I don't actually need "the biggest bra."  I just said that earlier for effect.  I'm more of a C cup if you must know the nitty gritty, and Juniors do dare to go that high (do they think D and F cup girls don't like dots?).   

The blatant injustice of the drab women's section helped Olivia envision me in, egad, a pattern.  I think she saw it as the lesser of two evils, and after all, no one would really know except her and daddy.

I tried on the Junior bras, and guess what?  Most of them were of the push up variety.  They even had labels to that effect.  They put a little steroid in the push up too.  Even with my relatively slight bosom, I felt sure I could not wear them without banging my chin on my cleavage when I chewed.

It didn't help that I've never been a big fan of showing cleavage.  I think it looks a bit like an extra butt encroaching on an otherwise perfectly civilized conversation.  I suppose men like seeing a butt no matter where it's hanging out, but regardless of whether or not you find cleavage appealing, I think we can agree it isn't "cute" in a slumber party kind of way, right? 

So they had sexified the Junior bras after all.   

Forty-somethings get 3 hooks in thick beige spandex.  Teenagers get purple push up with strategic padding? 

This is all wrong.  No need to explain why we shouldn't eroticize teens.  But a quick word about 40-somethings.   I know I said I was approaching the end of my seductive years, but "approaching" is the key word there.  It ain't over till it's over, right?  Who's to say when the real end will arrive?  Older people don't seem in a rush to disclose that information.

Personally, I think women my age have a lot going for them.  We have  knowledge, experience, nerve, and skill in the bedroom (I make it sound like a trapeze act, but don't let your imaginations run away with you!).  Perhaps the problem is that we also have expectations.  We know what we want and how we want it.  Do men feel intimidated by that?  If they do, I don't think dressing naive teens up in alluring underwear is the answer.  

I suppose the rest of the problem is that we also know when we want it (as in, NOT every day.  Or let's be honest folks, not even every week, or month for some).  But hey, when the time comes, we know how to make it count. And perhaps some sexy underwear would help the time come more often!

So I found a few "Junior" bras that were not of the push-up variety and brought them home.  This morning, feeling all young and new-womanish, I stepped out of the shower and donned my gay apparel. 

Apparently, bra executives have invested in some new lift-and-separate technology because, as I was getting dressed in the rest of my clothes, I noticed I kept bumping my arms into myself.  As in, my breasts seemed to be a lot closer to my armpits than they used to be.  I hadn't noticed that at the store.

So now I'm walking around in my cute polka dots trying to feel all young and sexy with my arms held stiffly out to my sides to make room for my rearranged appendages. 

I guess I should be happy that there's no chance of cleavage! But really, I just resent how the underwear aisle so narrolwy defines women as teen/attractive or not-teen/frumpy.  There's a lot of gray area in there.  Let the young girls have fun, but in a modest way (will Olivia really be asking for a zebra striped push up bra in a year or two?).  Meanwhile, we women need hot pink bras with 3 hooks, polka dots on 2 inch straps, and double-D and F cups in prints.  And personally, I could go for a cute bra that positions my breasts somewhere on the front of my body where they belong!

take that mr. media: reflections on "miss representation"

I took Olivia to see the excellent film, Miss Representation, this week. Since I cannot spare her from the all-penetrating gaze of men, society and the media, I have striven to teach her early to look back—to know the power of her own gaze. I hope that if she learns to keep a critical eye trained on the digitized she-fantasies of media moguls, then perhaps she will be less likely to turn that eye on herself.

The timing of this film is perfect for us. Olivia has just begun to look in the mirror with expectation. So far, however, she hasn’t found anything unacceptable there--saved, perhaps, by the great irony that, at age 11, she still lives in the kind of body to which the rest of us grown women are supposed to aspire. Like so many ears of corn, we’re to forever strip ourselves of our husks, our silken hair, and our many plump kernels of goodness, until there’s nothing left but a hard narrow cob to be accessorized with a boob-job and a pair of low-cut skinnyjeans. How truly hilarious that would be if it wasn’t so completely not funny at all.

I wish that someone had shown me Miss Representation when I was eleven. I did see a similar film, Killing Us Softly, in college. It’s about the ways that women are systematically sexualized and objectified in advertising. The message came too late, however. By the time I saw it, a fast/binge/purge pattern of disordered eating had long since entangled me in its ever tightening noose. I would follow its lead like an obedient dog, well into my twenties.

I do not want Olivia to skip out of her childhood into that snare.

Despite all the graphic and horrific images of women portrayed by Miss Representation, the most pernicious thing I learned is that men own the increasingly consolidated media. You don’t have to dig too deep into the theories of political science to learn that he/she who owns the means of communication in a society, controls that society. I did not realize how few women work behind the scenes (producing, writing, programming) in news and entertainment.

Suddenly I’m wondering, do we need a woman president?—or do we just need to take over Fox News? I hear they’re in search of a new figurehead anyway, what with good old Rupert being “unfit” and all. With the standard so low, surely even a woman could do that job!

No wonder women have taken social media by storm. What the male dominated communications industry has tried so hard to contain has come oozing out in blogs, on facebook and in tweets.

On the internet, we can redefine the terms, giving women: power without the bitch, intelligence without the nerd, humor without the ditz, emotion without the hormones, sensuality without the debasement, and of course, beauty without the objectification.

However, while we encourage each other to celebrate the portrayals of women that achieve these ideals (and reject the ones that don’t), we also need to look inward. I think there are a lot of women like me: ex-bingers, ex-anorexics, ex-selfhaters. We look and sound healed, but when this film asked me to examine that more closely, I admit, I discovered a residue. A dirty film left on my psyche by the colonizing eyes of men.

Case in point: I had to abandon my usual workout routine last fall because I injured my neck in a car accident. Instead of exercising my body all winter, I had to exercise patience, standing quietly by as I gained nearly 15 lbs.

It’s really no big deal. I know that.

Except, I lied about my weight on my driver’s license renewal last week.

And, I wonder, what is the first thing you see when you look at this snapshot, taken at Steve’s birthday in March?

The cake? the candles?...Perhaps the roll of fat hanging over my pants in the background? Or if
we really want to take it apart, perhaps my veiny arms? Or my right hand? It looks sort of like the three-fingered claw of a sleestak from that 70s show Land of the Lost, don’t you think?

When I saw this headless photo, I picked everything about my body apart and piled the wreckage of it on the table next to me, a trophy to my inadequacy.

Even though I already knew it, watching Miss Representation reminded me of the insidious nature of such behavior. What’s so bad about a roll of fat? Who cares if my body type doesn’t fit the arbitrary beauty-norms of the late 20th/ early 21st Centuries?

I fit in perfectly if we just go back a bit.

Here I am sitting on a sofa one day in 1876. I know I look a bit sad, but do you think I’m worrying with Renoir about the roll of fat that would have tumbled over the front of my pants were I modest enough to wear any?

Nah. I think I’m just feeling a bit resentful of this painter who wants me only for the beauty of my form.

Here’s another shot of me after the hunt.

I know what you’re thinking: I’m ashamed of my plans to binge on yet another
deer. I’m gripping my bow, trying to talk myself out of the slaughter, reminding myself of the heft of my ass on the rock. It seems, doesn’t it, that I’m calculating the time: can I eat the beast, hide the evidence, and throw it up before my knight in shining armor comes along with a barrel-chested horse to sweep the tremendous bulk of me off my feet?

Nah. I think I’m just marveling at my excellent shot and wondering how the heck I’m going to get that thing home by myself. I’m also feeling a bit irked that I’ve been asked to go hunting then sit on a rock in the nude. Really, Pierre!

Renoir, known for his misogynist views, was said to have stripped women not only of their clothes, but of their agency in nude paintings where he equated their bodies with the earth. How interesting, however, that my body fits so easily into his objectified form, yet fits so badly into the expectations of beauty today. The men with the means to represent are just making this shit up!

Amazing, isn’t it, how the context and the narrative around our bodies so dramatically shapes our vision of them? If Renoir had painted my gelatinous belly in the background of a birthday cake, would art historians note it as a thing to be reviled, rejected and erased?

No. But if I ran for office in a few years and this picture that I’ve so recklessly shared on the internet, were discovered (as it would be), do you think it would make CNN? Would they get out the digital pens and circle the evidence of my weakness for emphasis, marking me as “unfit” for public service?

Even if you deplored the news story, would you inwardly cringe at the up close exposure of my belly roll?

You might. Or perhaps I should say, I might (sympathetically), if it were your belly, spread out over the expanse of a wall-sized flat screen TV.

If women like me, who have bent under decades of programming, want to honestly critique the unnatural standards of beauty foisted upon us by a male dominated media, then we need to start in earnest with the mirror.

We cannot truly reject the random fantasies of men until we fully accept the varied realities of women. With that, we can model for our daughters the self-love we so desperately want them to own.

So there you have it, for Olivia’s sake and mine:

My belly.

My veins.

My sleestak
fingers.

Take that Mr. Media.