I’ve had the same skin for 30 years now; one might assume that I would know it intimately…specifically that I would know how to avoid charring it. Apparently my 30 years has nothing on the globally warming sun. About an hour into the boat fun I ventured to on Saturday I realized that I had forgotten to lather with spf 45 a very important piece of my body…my entire back. I did my best to control damage by belatedly finishing the sun block job I had started, all the while knowing deep down that it was too late. That’s all it takes especially in what felt like 100 degree weather, one hour. Of course the rest of the day I conveniently lost myself in swimming and boating so as to put off the dread that awaited me. It wasn’t actually until the next morning that I fully realized the scope of my folly. My entire back was, and still is really, lobster red. And it hurt. It still hurts, although now it’s moving to the itchy phase, the worst part. Every time my skin ends up feeling flammable after a grave mistake like this I promise myself to be cognizant enough next time to avoid it. Nope. It’s sort of like how every time I move I tell myself that I’m going to hire movers this time, only to find myself grunting and cursing again over box after box. At any rate…
I’m now reading Promiscuities courtesy of Naomi Wolf. What can I say? I’m a sucker for feminist fodder, especially when it provides me a welcome escape from the reality of public transportation. The entire book is meant to explore how many girls in America discover their sexuality under a tightly woven blanket that even they can’t see under which causes some to end up disconnected from themselves. What I read today that I found fabulously interesting:
Because of the new dangers that awaited us in the form of “bad men” of all kinds, we were at once obsessed by physical freedom and fearful of it. Soon we understood that boys were, in effect, our body guards. A girl learns that the ecstasy of physical exploration is something she can now enjoy safely only in the presence of a boy. She intuits that the very same developing body that can carry her farther than her dependent childhood body ever could has suddenly made her a target as well. Why is it a cliche’ that a powerful car gets a teenage boy dates with the most desirable girls? Because the boy and his car have become the stand-in for the girl’s relationship to the vistas now forbidden to her. She learns to project onto love relationships all the drama, discovery, and meaning that she would otherwise find on the open road.
Awareness that sexual pleasure meant sexual danger and that our own guilt would be held to be a causative factor in whatever harm might come to us was a constant drain on our energy. The shock was still fresh. Over the course of the following years, we would swing from outrage to denial to despair. By adulthood, we would have become numb to it and learned how to live with this everyday emergency. Perhaps acculturation to the unthinkable is one of the definitions of what it means to become a woman.
We needed space so badly. When we discovered that, if we went with boys, space would be open for us, we found, to our surprise, that we needed boys. And yet boys were part of the danger. Thus, our balance of power with boys was thrown off. This inequity regarding moving fast into the world was the first real lesson I had about the inequities between men and women. We needed boys more than they needed us. We were more scared of them physically than they were of us. We did not know this, but we probably even desired them as much or even more than they desired us. If we chose not to go with them, we couldn’t go at all. But they were always free to choose to go with us
I got this. Completely and totally. Keep in mind that directly before this passage she details an experience she had as a ten year-old where some adult man lured her into bushes. Using wisdom beyond her years she managed to exit the situation prior to any physical harm and get to the summer camp that she was headed to that day. Unfortunately the counselors who spoke to her about the incident lacked enough compassion to give a ten year-old the impression that she had done something wrong to cause it. So, of course her comments above are colored by that situation as well as, I’m sure, many others to be fair. And even though I’ve never experienced anything similar to that particular scenario, I got what she was saying. When I was a freshmen in high school I got to go out late on weekends, do things that I normally wouldn’t have been allowed to do, likely because I was with a male. That might not be 100% accurate and is likely tinted a great deal with my own perception, but it sort of makes sense. One thing I can almost guarantee however, is how different it might have been moving to downtown Seattle with a male, than as how I did so which was without one. My lovely Mom worries about me as Moms tend to do. When I moved down here she was really concerned about me being in this area alone. I can almost pledge that if I was moving to this same apartment with a man the worry would have been dramatically reduced; I don’t think it’s a sign of how my Mom is necessarily (that is, it’s not about her specifically), as I lean towards how our culture is. I’m sort of with Wolf on this one.
All that said, I dreamt about lightning last night and it was nice to wake up to. It was stretching across the sky in electric purple tentacles and it was beautiful; like the lightning storm I watched the other night from the roof. It’s interesting to ruminate a bit about the precise reasons that we meet the people we meet at the time we meet them. Sometimes I think that it might have something to do with finding freedom.
