The Field

Ice-cold drops of water sprinkled down. Seeing them, it was almost as if they were falling in slow motion. They were in a state between true snow, and true rain, caught in between two worlds, not knowing what they were. The drops made contact with blades of grass, flowed down them, and rolled across the ground like beads of crystal. In the center of flow, there was a tree, its leaves spread out creating an umbrella for the figure under it.

I brought my head up. It was hard to see through the rain, and the leaves that hung in front of me, but the field was generally flat so I could see farther than I thought. There was a single person standing in the distance. I couldn't tell who he was. He was in dark clothes. Or perhaps the clothes were just wet. It doesn't matter. He looked like a messenger from the devil. He came closer. I could see the droplets of water and a few snow flakes on his trench coat. The sparkles on him made it seem like God was trying to attack him, like white blood cells attack a foreign body. My heart was beating harder as I felt a lump in my throat.

There was an explosion. Fire was everywhere. It was hot. Beads of sweat were floating in the thick smoke, and I could hardly see anything. I blinked rapidly so that I could manage some sight for the time being. People were running every where. There was the sound of machine gun fire getting closer. Then there was another explosion. It knocked me onto my side, and I landed on the street. Looking in front of me, I vaguely made out a figure, in black, walking towards me with specks of white ashes on his dark jacket. I could not see his face.

The rain seemed magical. It was dropping in slow motion still, half frozen. The man walked forward, looking at the woman under the tree. "She's probably just another homeless girl," he muttered to himself. "I wonder if she even speaks... A timid creature she is." He walked closer, bending down under the umbrella of the tree, his eyes fixed upon her, one hand on the weapon in his belt.

He was awfully close to me now. I noticed his hand on something metal behind him. I didn't know what it was at the time, but I was suddenly very awake. Thoughts and emotions flew into me as if I was shot by an arrow. I thought he was simply another one of those brainless boys that tried to take advantage of any girl who he found alone. He was also a black figure, wearing a dark jacket with white specks on it. I knew it was snow, but I felt hatred. He was there thirty years ago. Did he remember? I did not care. I blamed him for what happened that day. Between those two explosions, I had lost my family, my school, my life. This tree was the only sanctuary I had left. He was not going to take it away from me.

The man came closer, and then he was right next to the woman. They were looking at each other with an intensity unknown in the mortal world. His expression became suddenly kind. "Do you remember me, my dear?" he whispered.

"What kind of man are you?" I screamed. "You take away my family! You took away everything from me!! You have no morals, men like you. You're just a freak of war. One of those people who kill for fun. What do you want with me? I don't deal with people who lack a soul, or those who are so corrupt that saving them is beyond God himself." I was angry, sad, scared, and out of breath all at once. My heart was beating very hard and fast now. I was ready to kill the man where he knelt.

"Excuse me? I did none of those things ma'am. I don't think you remember the events of that day correctly. Perhaps you passed out because of shock. I saw the explosion, and then ran towards it to help people. When the second explosion happened, I saw you on the ground, barely alive. I ran to you, picked you up and hid. The soldiers came through the town after. They killed everyone who was left. As if they were playing some game, they relentlessly murdered maybe fifty or sixty people all at once! I saved your life!"

I looked at him, taken aback. I had thought this man was the mastermind behind my pain for thirty years, and here he is not the man I have been looking for. I felt that lump in my throat again. I could not tell if it was tears or rain that were flowing down my face, but whatever it was, I felt depressed, mournful, and sorrowful. The man came closer and embraced me. Typical. But it was nice. I felt very tired now. I thought I had finally found the man I needed to kill, but instead he was the man who let me live. But for what? I live in pain. Should I thank him or should I not? What should I say?

The man looked at the woman. He had a look of pity on his face. She was not the type of woman who he thought she was. She was strong, and lively. She had gone through a lot of pain and survived it all. "I would have never survived through even three years let alone thirty if I had lost what you have lost." he said in a voice that was low and steady.

Both judged each other simply based on the gender and appearance of the opposite, without knowledge of the actual person. Both were wrong. Outside forces can often skew our thinking, and make us form assumptions about ourselves in our minds. We must remember that the only constant in our world is within ourselves. Gender does not exist in the soul. It only exists in the physical world. If we base ourselves within, then we can avoid such pains, and such sorrows in the millennia to come. 

A Passage Through Time

I do not know whether the dinosaurs had gender inequity problems, or if they thought about that before deciding to attack each other. I do not know if birds, snakes, sharks, monkeys or apes have gender inequity problems, or if they think about it. I do not know why it is that we, human beings that were a part of the natural world, happened to create this gender inequity problem or how we created it. As creatures of nature, this inequity should not exist, as it does not exist in all other species (or the other species simply do not recognize it). I do not know whether, when we first evolved around 60,000 years ago, we had gender inequity problems. I do not know whether we had such problems even after then, closer to the times we are familiar with. I do not know when discrimination defined by gender started, but I know that it exists today.

If we travel back to the start of the twentieth century, it is clear that gender inequity has changed in form. Back then, the discrimination against women was more evident and clear to see. Women were made to stay in their homes, look after children, following the "Cult of Domesticity" as it was called. Advertisement was not as large scale as it is today. The inequity across genders was focused more upon work opportunities and what people did for work rather than on the way women were looked upon.

Today, advertisements have reached a new level. The ways in which advertisers put down women have become more and more intricate and subtle as people start to realize how they have been manipulated throughout the past few years. Similar to how new technology sparks during wartimes, new strategies of advertisement are sparking now, as advertisers fight a war against a population that is becoming ever more aware of the trickery that has been thrown upon them. Along with the advertising world, new computer software has made it possible for advertisers and modelling agencies to create pictures in magazines that I find it hard to call human. I feel like images in magazines that are modified by computer software are the work of evil. They might seem nice to look at, at first. However, in the back of the mind, it creates doubt. In the Beauty Myth, Wolf stated that "To airbrush age off a woman's face is to erase women's identity, power, and history" (83). This doubt is doubt in one self, doubt in one's abilities, in one's power, in one's knowledge, and in one's appearance. This doubt is created because somewhere in the back of our minds, when we see those pictures that aren't human, we know it is not possible to be like that. But as human beings, we always want what we cannot have.  Knowing that we can never be a computer generated image, we start to doubt ourselves because of the constant failure to achieve something that is unachievable. This is the evil that comes with advertisement.

Is The End Just a New Beginning?

The theme of death is present in a great many books, including Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. I personally find this theme a bit frightening. Some people say that death is the end, that there exists nothing after it, that time stops. Others choose to believe that death is a new beginning, perhaps to another life, either here or in another realm. I believe in the idea of reincarnation. But at some point, I start to think that all these explanations of life after death are made simply to minimize the fear of death. In the book, Mrs. Dalloway, one of the characters, Septimus, a World War I veteran, commits suicide. During his time in the War, he had felt great loss, including the death of his friend. He is suffering from a form of post-traumatic-stress disorder, and as a result, no longer feels a part of this world. He is losing touch with reality and so chooses to end his life. I find this whole scene quite frighting, that events in one's life such as a war could have such devilish effects on the mind. However, when I think about it, the fact that Septimus had this disorder after the war is not very surprising at all.

I have been brought up believing that any form of killing is bad, no matter in what situation, that it is a move against nature to harm the soul of another creature. Now, imagine that this is what you have believed your entire life. Suddenly, you are drafted into the military, against your will. You must go to fight an enemy that you do not know, in a world you are unfamiliar with. All that you do know is the person next to you. However, nothing is constant. Your world is shaken out of balance. The people next to you die, or are injured and replaced with new recruits, who also die or get injured. The only constant is within yourself. You run around, diving into holes and behind walls for your life, and as you do, you realize that you are standing on a column sticking out of the pit of hell, and a single wrong move in either direction will lead to a long fall into a bottomless pit. This is how I feel Septimus's mental state was after the war. I think it is truly horrible to have to think like this, because just writing it down made me feel very uncomfortable. To have to live through it is another task entirely. 

Identity Part II

For a lot of people, first impressions are important. Sight is the first interaction between two creatures. As humans, we are designed to utilise our five senses to make judgements about our surroundings, and creatures surrounding us. Because of this, first impressions are important. The things we see become primary for those we do not know. The way we dress, therefore, makes different impressions on different people, in different situations. In Mrs. Dalloway, the uncle, Uncle William, said that "a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves" (8). This means that a lady is known by what she wears, not by what she says. This, I thought, resembled an older time's thought, as at some point, women were to just be silent and stand as figures. What women said was not always important, but what they wore was because it made a statement, as everyone only looked at them from afar. I think this idea has come forth in many ways. For example, when one goes to an interview, one generally dresses up nicely so that the interviewer will get past that first barrier of sight, so that he or she will not judge based on appearance. For example, when I went for my college interviews, I dressed up so that my interviewer would pay attention to what I am saying rather than my appearance. I think that perhaps this may be more evident on the female side, as this statement made by Uncle William is trying to say. I think that because women are or were seen very much as physical objects of desire rather than people of equal status, they were judged more harshly on their appearance. Using this image, I find it hard to imagine myself, if I were in that position, to be able to dress to an interview where my interviewer does not judge my appearance as soon as I walk in. This brings me back to the idea of identity. What is a woman's identity if she is seen as the clothes she is wearing rather than the words she speaks or what is in her mind? It seems that the female identity in this situation, according to Uncle William, has been written out by an outside force. It was not decided upon by the females, nor was it agreed upon. But this outside force unfortunately has constructed a wall in between the true female, the mind and soul, and the perception of females. As a group, we must fight to break down this wall that his blocking us from seeing the true women.  

How Accents Make a Book More Bearable, And a Bottomless Gorge.

When I first heard the name of this book during an all-high-school-meeting, I thought I had heard wrong. I later asked a friend what the name of the book was. I was somewhat amused to find that the book was indeed titled The Vagina Monologues. At the time, still in my junior year, I did not think I would ever read such a book. Yet here I am, approximately one year later, having pulled my way through it. The book contains a great many graphic images and it is by far the most revolting book I have ever read. Phrases in the book such as "You cannot love a vagina unless you love hair" made me very uneasy (9). Following this chapter, which is called "Hair," there are a number of sections that are ever more descriptive and detailed. By the time I got to page 24, I was ready to put the book down and never even glance at it again! One small caption on page 25 saved me. The caption, which reads "Jewish, Queens accent" helped me lift my head above this grotesque cloud known as The Vagina Monologues (25). I read this chapter, called "The Flood," with what I thought would be a "Queens accent" and was able to find the chapter a bit more amusing than I found the previous chapter. What I needed to do was to read the book as "amusing" rather than "disgusting" and in doing this, I could walk through the book mentally unharmed.

The way The Vagina Monologues is written also helped me get through it. Although I did not initially realize this, the book is written in a very "quick" way. What I mean by "quick" is that the speaker changes almost every paragraph. At first, I thought it was the same person speaking, but when I realized that it was a collection of phrases from different people, I found it very interesting. The way that Eve Ensler, the author, put these phrases together to make this monologue, making sure that it made sense the whole way through, is an incredible feat. This also made the book easier to read for me because I wasn't, in a sense, lingering on the same thought for too long. Lingering on a single thought in this book for too long could be fatal. What I had to do was to keep moving quickly from one idea to the next, never stopping until I reached the end. It was like running across a gorge with skinny pillars as stepping stones, where if I stood on a single pillar too long it would crumble from my weight. I have to be light and skip through it, not letting the gorge take me. I suppose this is quite a dramatic example for a book, but this is the first book, and hopefully the last, that I have read with such endless uncomfortable imagery. I am glad it is over. Moving on to Mrs. Dalloway is a nice change, coming back to the ground on the other side of the gorge. 

The Emotions of Starvation

Reading the Hunger chapter in The Beauty Myth,  I was intrigued to find a few details that confused me. In my previous post, I stated that exercise was the correct way to be thin, not by dieting and not eating. However, Wolf states that "One fifth of women who exercise to shape their bodies have menstrual irregularities and diminished fertility" (192). I am confused as to what she is saying here. Is it that exercise is bad? I find it hard to believe that exercise at a good level could be bad for a human being, knowing that we were once built to run for hours based on the persistence hunting hypothesis (before the time of weapons, we used to run after animals until they could not run anymore because they do not have a cooling system that is as sophisticated as ours).

Another point that I found interesting is Wolf's explanation of the emotions hunger brings out. When we hear the phrase "like a hungry animal" many of us think of a wild beast going crazy. I never put this idea into context until I read this chapter. Wolf states "Hunger makes women feel poor and think poor" (197). At first I did not understand why she specified women in this statement. After some thought, however, I came to the idea that perhaps she specified women because when women get hungry, the body not only becomes starved, but the women also feel the need to think about what they are eating, how much they are eating, and if they should eat. Because of this, I feel like although a woman may have all the food in the world in front of her, she may still feel poor because she cannot bring herself to touch it. Wolf also states that "Hunger makes successful women feel like failures" (197). I took this in the same context and thought that women who are starved are using all their power to think about what to eat and what not to eat, and so are too tired to think positively of themselves and so dive into negativity. This, I think, also applies to men in many cases, simply because hunger makes us all feel like we can't do anything because we physically don't have the fuel to do so.

The Disease

Having just read the Hunger chapter in The Beauty Myth, I felt a bit horrified. I originally thought that the "not eating to get thin" idea existed but not too wide spread. The statement that "Many are hospitalized, many die" scared me to a certain degree (179). How is it that people know that not eating is harmful in many situations and that both women and men (but mostly women I think) do this often if they feel pressured from the outside world. The idea that we need to be thin has been there for a long time, but the ways in which we get thin have been chosen for us by the media. Advertising of things such as cigarettes, diet tablets, and other sources of "thinness" point us towards the wrong way of being thin.

I also think that being thin and being fit have been confused. They are not one in the same thing. Being fit often results in being thin, but simply being thin does not at all mean that you are strong and fit. The goal should be to be strong and fit, not thin. Exercising and physical activity is what we were built for, not staying motionless. Therefore that should be our primary cause. Wolf wrote that Vogue stated that a woman who had become thin unnaturally "'look as though she has not had enough milk as a baby and her face has that expression one feels Londoners wore in the blitz'" (185). The second part of that phrase, I think, brings out how women feel when they put themselves through the torture of not eating. It is an awful expression to have on one's face. The face loses all color and expression, looks deflated and sickening, and scared. I personally have never understood why everyone connects fatness to eating directly without first going to lack of exercise. I suppose it connects to the fast food industry as well. As people have been realizing that fast food makes us unhealthy and obese, I think they have decided to not eat fast food without replacing it with other food. They have assumed that it is the "eating" part that makes us "fat" and not the fact that fast food is wildly unhealthy.

Something that scares me is thinking of the future. If we keep going down this road to thinness in the wrong way, a lot more people will have many problems. We need to emphasize exercising a lot more than we do today and decrease the emphasis on beauty and fat. The negativity that comes with the word "fat" is astonishing, and it should have never been there.