Reading My Choices: Reflection on a Conversation (Part I)

Don't we sometimes talk about ourselves as social agents? I choose to express myself as I do (braless) knowing that many people will receive it primarily in one of two ways: as a form of resistance (referring back to the concept, "the personal is political"), but this (I think) is harder to read without some knowledge/education/experience (but this is where I stand); as a reflection of ignorance, class position, etc.

One reason for this is that we're constantly told (through media, in person, etc.) that how we look tells people who we are; less frequently discussed is the issue that the image is always constructed - that is, it's generally a topic limited to academic circles. We do, however, talk a lot about masks and how we present ourselves differently depending on who we're with; but I don't follow this rule either. What this comes down to is: You can't really ever know someone without getting to know them - but this is a different discussion for another time!

So, anyway, this girl and I are talking on the bus one day; she's also a student at FCC. I'm explaining to her how my choice not to wear a bra is associated with my expression of feminism which I connect with the history of our (women's) sexualization. Before we develop breasts, I said, our upper bodies look like those of boys; yet by around the ages of five or six, we're told to start covering up our bodies. As a result, we're unconsciously being given a message: We have something to hide, and that what we're hiding is wrong (but there are lot of girls who aren't going to make the leap to their sexualities); a lot of girls question this, and parents/guardians/whatever often say: It's because girls are different from boys. Then later we're told to add another layer even when we're not yet ready for them; that's the joke I see played a lot on TV regarding training bras. So I'm essentially talking about the socialization of girls at this point, but the girl I'm talking to isn't ready to follow me there.

Instead, she tells me her mom had a mastectomy because she was physically uncomfortable with the size of her boobs. So she suggests that I should consider one. First, as I shared with her, I'm comfortable not wearing a bra; but, of course, I have big boobs and they sag - and this is what's bothering her; she can't imagine that someone like me wouldn't be bothered by them. I told her I was aware of people who made similar complaints about their breasts, and that the reason I don't think I have an issue with mine is because of my posture; good posture helps align your body the way it's meant to be. (Let's ignore the whole issue of trauma involved with our evolving to upright forms, assuming you accept the concept of evolution.)

She tries then to convince me that women need bras. Her first example - the corsets women had to wear especially during the Victorian era - was careless; I told her that a lot of women fainted as a result of how tight they were, and that this reified the view of women as helpless and weak compared to men, etc. She tries to tell me that, biologically, we need them for support, and that they otherwise cause back pain because of all the weight. I ask her about women who have firm breasts and don't need to wear bras. Would she have a problem if they chose not to wear bras? Also, I told her that women have different shaped breasts, and some actually have proportions that make them more like men's breasts, and that some men have breasts - what she insists on calling pecs - which look like they belong on women; but it's the same thing.

This is one of the problems: We're talking about women but also introducing men into the conversation. So I open another thread by raising the issue that men's bodies have been desexualized. I share that I like looking at men, and that when I see a good looking man with a nice chest, yes, I get turned on by that; I'm not going too much into this right now, but I would argue against anyone who claims that women don't respond the same way by pointing out that just because we aren't able to visibly display our attractions in the same physical ways that men do (and I'm not talking about orgasms, etc., but the immediate response to sexual stimulation that anyone can observe even when the person's covered) doesn't mean we don't get aroused by looking at men (with clothes on, partial or nude; I think it's very possible that if we had scientific instruments which could detect the buildup of fluids associated with arousal, we'd find that women and men respond the same). I mean, we're always talking about the sexualization of women - in music videos (uh, I see a lot of men in sexualized roles, but where's the literature criticizing this?; it's almost always been, from what I've read/heard/whatever, about women), pornography (uh, they get naked, too!) - because we've connected women with sex in ways that we've never really done with men, even if this is changing.

As for me, I've been around different states - Texas (home state), Montana (summer 1996), California (Aug. 2003-Dec. 2004), Connecticut (Aug. 2005-May 2006), Michigan (May 2006-Dec. 2006), and now Maryland (since Dec. 2006) - not to mention other places I've visited around the U.S. as a result of conferences and school activities; I haven't had many opportunities to travel internationally, but I've been to Monterrey and Puebla, Mexico; Manchester, England; and Ontario, Canada. So I've seen a lot of men in person but also through the media, and I know real men exist who could use bras (not just fat men, but also overly muscled men); in fact, Seinfeld played a joke on this by introducing "the man bra" in one episode. Yet men aren't required to cover up their pecs/breasts/whatever.

Women, however, are burdened with that. Even when it's the hottest day of summer, we have to put on that extra layer. I don't think it's fair, and I refuse to be sexualized. Even ignoring that I'm fat - and I tell people I'm fat and ugly; even if I had no excess weight, I'd be fat and ugly because our society has dictated an image of what a woman should look like that, because of how my bones are structured, even if I were at my least weight possible, I'd still be fat and ugly next to that image; so I don't bother - women are still seen in terms of their bodies, even when we have women in power positions who show that they're more than their bodies.

Before the conversation ends, she's telling me it's "not normal" for women not to wear bras. So I question her. I tell her that I'm aware of African women who don't wear bras and are able to function within those societies. Why, I ask her, do you think women have to wear bras? I'm comfortable not wearing one, and I'm comfortable enough with myself that I have no problems openly challenging the position of women as sexual objects. If it were not for images on National Geographic* - and I didn't see the connection until last night - would I have had that knowledge? Would I have been able to connect it, even unconsciously, with why I choose to continue doing what I started doing all the time since Fall 2007? (I'm braless wherever I go: stores, banks, etc. I mean, it took me about four years of experimenting before I went full at it.) The fact is, images don't just sexualize women. I understand the point, however; we're talking about showing only the women. But if we were to see them together (that is, the men and women), wouldn't we still be complaining and focusing in on the sexualization of women?*

That's something I'm only recently thinking about: this idea that it doesn't matter what the object of criticism is, even when there are men involved, we make an issue out of the women within a patriarchal context. That's one of the fallacies, I think: We have so much of an entrenched view of women as sexual objects that when we are forced to confront both sexes in the same industries (uh, there are gigolos, or male prostitutes), we too often narrow in on women and stigmatize men as the culprit behind the successes of those products. Why aren't we ever looking at men? So, yes, I'm coming back to this idea later!


* For my PSY 209 class, we were assigned textbook readings; of those we addressed last night, the discussion concerning the selection from Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins' book, presented in the section as "Excerpts from Reading National Geographic" (from Grewal and Kaplan's An Introduction to Women's Studies, 2006), sparked today's post. I'm really starting to think more now about the problematic nature concerning the sexualization of women that also stigmatizes men as the primary culprits behind it.