Some final thoughts of 2007

So I realize since I've been back in Canada, I haven't updated my blog at all - my apologies...I was rather busy spending time with all of you in person! The Christmas dinners, movie nights and dessert outings with all my friends and family have been a perfect refresher of home. Coincidentally, New Year's Eve happens to be the mid-point of my visit. I can't believe the time has passed so quickly.

There are a few things I wanted to share with everyone. First of all, if I wasn't able to tell you in person, my belated Christmas greetings to you! I hope you spent your holidays with the ones you love most. Check out our family e-greeting for a laugh!

Second, I know you're all probably tired of reading my bra-burning, feminist rants, but I just couldn't let Benazir Bhutto's assassination pass without making any type of commentary. It was truly a sad day for womankind. It was such an exciting time with Hilary Clinton's campaign and Bhutto's return to Pakistan...so much potential for both of them to win their respective elections. I think the most dis-heartening part of all this, is to know that in this day and age, people are still uncomfortable or threatened by the idea of women running for head of state positions. There's always a lot of talk about feminism being 'over'; women have achieved an equal status in society so what's there left to fight for. Clearly, a lot. Bhutto was definitely a fighter till the very end, refusing to allow threats to prevent her from doing her job. I hope that's how she is remembered.

And lastly, I recently came across this video from a friend's post and found it quite interesting...any thoughts on this North American Union? Is it real? Are you concerned?

I didn't think I could really top this year, what with graduating from university and getting into graduate school and moving away from home. There's been so many positive changes and I've always felt like I was guided in the right direction. But I'm actually looking forward to 2008. I get to finish what I started, graduate again, and begin a new search (read: career). I hope you all have equally exciting opportunities coming your way in the new year.

Peace.

The (supposed) cost of delaying marriage

So in about another 4 days I will be back on Canadian soil…and although I should probably make my last post in Leicester for 2007 about how excited I am to come home for Christmas, I’d rather leave you with this excerpt below. My friend Kathy had this posted on her facebook profile today, and I was entranced by every word. These days between Christmas shopping and packing, I’m working on my next paper, which deals with how the media shapes our social construction of gender, specifically femininity. Anyone who knows me well enough will realize that what I've posted below is a concept that I disagree with wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, as a fellow writer, I can appreciate the quality and style of her prose. I’ve included some of my thoughts at the end too. And I realize it’s a very long excerpt (sorry) but I honestly think it’s worth the time to read: men and women.

By Danielle Crittenden

Our grandmothers, we are told, took husbands the way we might choose our first apartment. There was a scheduled viewing, a quick turn about the interior, a glance inside the closets, a nervous intake of breath as one read the terms of the lease, and then the signing – or not. You either felt a man’s charms right away or you didn’t. If you didn’t, you entertained a few more prospects until you found one who better suited you. If you love him, really loved him, all the better. But you also expected to make compromises. The view may not be great, but it’s sunny and spacious (translation: he’s not that handsome, but he’s sweet-natured and will be a good provider). Whether you accepted or rejected him, however, you didn’t dawdle. My late mother-in-law, who married at twenty, told me that in her college circles in the mid-1950s, a man who took a woman out for more than three dates without intending marriage was considered a cad. Today, the man who considered marriage so rashly would be thought a fool. Likewise, a woman.

Instead, like lords or sailors of yore, a young woman is encouraged to embark upon the world, seek her fortune and sow her oats, and only much later – closer to 30 than 20 – consider the possibility of settling down. Even religious conservatives, who disapprove of sex outside of marriage, accept the now- common wisdom that it is better to put off marriage than do it too early. The popular radio host, Laura Schlessinger, traditional in so many of her views, constantly tells her listeners not to consider going to the altar much before thirty. In 1965, nearly 90 percent of women aged 25 to 29 were married; by 1996, only 56 percent of women in this age group were. Indeed, the more educated and ambitious a woman is the more likely she is to delay marriage and children, the Census Bureau reports. And if she doesn’t – if such a young woman decides to get married, say, before she is 25 – she risks being regarded by her friends as a tragic figure, spoken of the way wartime generations once mourned the young man killed in battle: "How unfortunate, with all that promise, to be cut down so early in life!"

I remember congratulating a young woman upon her recent marriage to a friend of mine and commenting perfunctorily that both of them must be very happy. She was 24 at the time. She grabbed my hand, held it, and said with emotion, "Thank you!" As it turned out, I’d been the only woman to offer her congratulations without immediately expressing worry that she’d done the wrong thing. Her single female friends had greeted her wedding announcement as a kind of betrayal. A few had managed to stammer some grudging best wishes. Her best friend nearly refused to be a bridesmaid. They simply couldn’t fathom why she’d tossed away her freedom when she was barely out of college. And she, in turn, couldn’t convince them that she really had met the man she wanted to marry, that she didn’t want to keep going out to bars in the evenings and clubs on the weekends, postponing her marriage for half a decade until she reached an age that her friends would consider more suitable.

In this sense, we lead lives that are exactly the inverse of our grandmothers’. If previous generations of women were raised to believe that they could only realize themselves within the roles of wife and mother, now the opposite is thought true: It’s only outside these roles that we are able to realize our full potential and worth as human beings. A 20-year-old bride is considered as pitiable as a 30-year-old spinster used to be. Once a husband and children were thought to be essential to a woman’s identity, the source of purpose in her life; today, they are seen as peripherals, accessories that we attach only after our full identities are up and running.

And how are we supposed to create these identities? They are to be forged by ourselves, through experience and work and "trial" relationships. The more experience we have, the more we accomplish independently, the stronger we expect our character to grow. Not until we’ve reached full maturity – toward the close of our third decade of life – is it considered safe for a woman to take on the added responsibilities of marriage and family without having to pay the price her grandmother did for domestic security, by surrendering her dreams to soap powders, screaming infants, and frying pans. But here is a price to be paid for postponing commitment, too. It is a price that is rarely stated honestly, not the least because the women who are paying it don’t realize how onerous it will be until it’s too late.

I remember having, in my early 20s, long and passionate conversations with my female friends about our need to be strong, to stand alone, to retain our independence and never compromise our souls by succumbing to domesticity. And yet at the same time, we constantly felt the need to shore each other up. We’d come across passages in books – paeans to the autonomy of the individual, replete with metaphors of lighthouses, mountains, the sea, etc. – copy them out carefully (in purple ink, on arty cards), and mail them to each other. It was as if despite our passion for independence, despite our confidence in ourselves as independent women, we somehow feared that even a gentle gust of wind blowing from the opposite direction would send us spiraling back into the 1950s, a decade none of us had experienced first-hand but one that could induce shudders all the same. Our skittishness was all the more surprising given that most of my friends’ mothers, as well as my own, worked at interesting jobs and had absorbed as deeply as we had the cultural messages of the time. When I look back upon it, I think our youthful yearning to fall in love must have been enormously strong and at war with our equally fierce determination to stay free. We were fighting as much a battle against ourselves as against the snares of domesticity. And if one of us were to give way, the rest would feel weakened in our own inner struggles, betrayed by our friend’s abandonment of the supposedly happy, autonomous life. For the truth is, once you have ceased being single, you suddenly discover that all that energy you spent propelling yourself toward an independent existence was only going to be useful if you were planning to spend the rest of your life as a nun or a philosopher on a mountaintop or maybe a Hollywood-style adventuress who winds up staring into her empty bourbon glass four years later wondering if it was all d--- worth it. In preparation for a life spent with someone else, it wasn’t going to be helpful.

And this is the revelation that greets the woman who has made almost a religion out of her personal autonomy. She finds out, on the cusp of 30, that independence is not all it’s cracked up to be. "Seen from the outside, my life is the model of modern female independence," wrote Katie Roiphe in a 1997 article for Esquire entitled "The Independent Woman (and Other Lies)." "I live alone, pay my own bills, and fix my stereo when it breaks down. But it sometimes seems like my independence is in part an elaborately constructed façade that hides a more traditional feminine desire to be protected and provided for: I admitted this once to my mother, an ardent 70s feminist … and she was shocked …. I rushed to reassure her that I wouldn’t dream of giving up my career, and it’s true that I wouldn’t."

Roiphe then goes on to puzzle over how a modern woman like herself could wish for a man upon whom she could depend. "It may be one of the bad jokes that history occasionally plays on us," she concluded, "that the independence my mother’s generation wanted so much for their daughters was something we could not entirely appreciate or want."

Unfortunately, this is a bit of wisdom that almost always arrives too late. The drawbacks of the independent life, which dawned upon Roiphe in her late 20s, are not so readily apparent to a woman in her early 20s. And how can they be? When a woman is young and reasonably attractive, men will pass through her life with the regularity of subway trains; even when the platform is empty, she’ll expect another to be coming along soon. No woman in her right mind would want to commit herself to marriage so early. Time stretches luxuriously out before her. Her body is still silent on the question of children. She’ll be aware, too, of the risk of divorce today, and may tell herself how important it is to be exposed to a wide variety of men before deciding upon just one. When dating a man, she’ll be constantly alert to the possibilities of others. Even if she falls in love with someone, she may ultimately put him off because she feels just "too young" for anything "serious." Mentally, she has postponed all these critical questions to some arbitrary, older age.

But if a woman remains single until her age creeps up past 30, she may find herself tapping at her watch and staring down the now mysteriously empty tunnel, wondering if there hasn’t been a derailment or accident somewhere along the line. When a train does finally pull in, it is filled with misfits and crazy men – like a New York City subway car after hours; immature, elusive Peter Pans who won’t commit themselves to a second cup of coffee, let along a second date; neurotic bachelors with strange habits; sexual predators who hit on every woman they meet; newly divorced men taking pleasure wherever they can; embittered, scorned men who still feel vengeful toward their last girlfriend; men who are too preoccupied with their careers to think about anyone else from one week to the next; men who are simply too weak, or odd, to have attracted any other woman’s interest. The sensible, decent, not-bad-looking men a woman rejected at twenty-four because she wasn’t ready to settle down all seem to have gotten off at other stations.

Or, as it may be, a woman might find herself caught in a relationship that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere or living with a man she doesn’t want to marry. Whatever her circumstances, the single woman will suddenly feel trapped – trapped by her own past words and actions – at the same moment other desires begin to thrust themselves upon her.

So much has been written about a woman’s "biological clock" that it has become a joke of television sitcoms: career women who, without warning, wake up one morning after thirty with alarm bells ringing in their wombs. Actually, the urge for children and everything that goes with them – not just a husband, but also a home and family life – often comes on so gradually that it’s at first easily brushed away. What a woman is aware of, at around the age of 26 or 27, is a growing, inchoate dissatisfaction, a yearning for more, even if her life is already quite full. Her apartment feels too quiet, her work, no matter how exciting or interesting, is less absorbing, and her spare time, unless packed with frenetic activities, almost echoes with loneliness: Think of an endless wintry Sunday afternoon unbroken by the sound of another voice.

She starts noticing the mothers all around her – especially young, attractive mothers – pushing strollers down the street, cooing at their babies in supermarkets, and loading up their shopping carts with enormous quantities of meat, vegetables, cans, jars, boxes of detergent, and packages of diapers, as she purchases a few meager items for her own dinner. All the horrors she once connected with babies – their noise and messiness, their garish plastic toys, their constant crying and demands that wear down and dull even the most strong-minded of women – are eclipsed by their previously underestimated virtues; their cuteness, their tiny shoes and mittens, their love and wonder, and, perhaps most enviable of all, the change of life they cause, pulling a woman out of herself and distracting her from her own familiar problems.

Alas, it’s usually at precisely this moment – when a single woman looks up from her work and realizes she’s ready to take on family life – that men make themselves most absent. This is when the cruelty of her singleness really sets in, when she becomes aware of the fine print in the unwritten bargain she has cut with the opposite sex. Men will outlast her. Men, particularly successful men, will be attractive and virile into their 50s. They can start families whenever they feel like it. So long as a woman was willing to play a man’s game at dating – playing the field, holding men to no expectations of permanent commitment – men would be around, they would even live with her! But the moment she began exuding that desire for something more permanent, they’d vanish. I suspect that few things are more off-putting to a man eating dinner than to notice that the woman across the table is looking at him more hungrily than at the food on her plate – and she is not hungry for his body but for his whole life.

So the single woman is reduced to performing the romantic equivalent of a dance over hot coals. She must pretend that she is totally unaware of the burning rocks beneath her feet and behave in a way that will convince a man that the one thing she really wants is the furthest thing from her mind. She might feign indifference to his phone calls and insist she’s busy when she’s not. When visiting friends who have small children, she might smile at them or politely bat them away or ask questions about them as if they’re a species of plant and she’s not someone particularly interested in botany. Whatever she does, though, she cannot be blamed for believing, at this point in her life, that it is men who have benefited most from women’s determination to remain independent. I often think that moderately attractive bachelors in their 30s now possess the sexual power that once belonged only to models and millionaires. They have their pick of companions, and may callously disregard the increasingly desperate 30-ish single women around them, or move on when their current love becomes to cloying. As for the single woman over thirty, she may be in every other aspect of her life a paragon of female achievement; but in her romantic life, she must force herself to be as eager to please and accommodate male desire as any 1920s cotillion debutante.

A woman’s decision to delay marriage and children has other consequences–less obvious than the biological ones and therefore harder to foresee. It is not simply the pressure of wanting a baby that turns those confident 25-year-old single career women you see striding through busy intersections at lunch hour, wearing sleek suits and carrying take-out salads to eat at their desks, into the morose, white-wine-drinking 35- year-old executives huddled around restaurant tables, frantically analyzing every quality about themselves that might be contributing to their stubbornly unsuccessful romantic lives.

By spending years and years living entirely for yourself, thinking only about yourself, and having responsibility to no one but yourself, you end up inadvertently extending the introverted existence of a teenager deep into middle age. The woman who avoids permanent commitment because she fears it will stunt her development as an individual may be surprised to realize in her 30s that having essentially the same life as she did at 18 – the same dating problems, the same solitary habits, the same anxieties about her future, and the same sense that her life has not yet fully begun – is stunting too.

For when a woman postpones marriage and motherhood, she does not end up thinking about love less as she gets older but more and more, sometimes to the point of obsession. Why am I still alone? she wonders. Why can’t I find someone? What is wrong with me? Her friends who have married are getting on with their lives – they are putting down payments on cars and homes; babies are arriving. She may not like some of their marriages – she may think her best friend’s husband is a bit of a jerk or that another one of her friends has changed for the worse since her marriage – but nonetheless, she will think that at least their lives are going forward while her gearshift remains stuck in neutral. The more time that passes, the more the gearshift rattles, the more preoccupied the woman becomes with herself and all her possible shortcomings in the eyes of men until she can think about little else.

This may be the joke that history has actually played upon us – and a nasty one it is. The disparity in sexual staying power is something feminists rather recklessly overlooked when they urged women to abandon marriage and domesticity in favor of autonomy and self-fulfillment outside the home. The generation of women that embraced the feminist idealization of independence may have caused havoc by walking away from their marriages and families, but they could do so having established in their own minds that these were not the lives they wanted to lead: Those women at least had marriages and families from which to walk away. The 33-year-old single woman who decides she wants more from life than her career cannot so readily walk into marriage and children; by postponing them, all she has done is to push them ahead to a point in her life when she has less sexual power to attain them.

Instead, she must confront the sad possibility that she might never have what was the birthright of every previous generation of women: children, a family life and a husband who – however dull or oppressive he might have appeared to feminist eyes – at least was there. As this older single woman’s life stretches out before her, she’ll wonder if she’ll ever meet someone she could plausibly love and who will love her in return or whether she’s condemned to making the rest of her journey on the train alone. She might have to forgo her hope of youthful marriage and the pleasure of starting out fresh in life with a husband at the same stage of the journey as herself. She may have to consider looking at men who are much older than she is, men on their second and third marriages who arrive with an assortment of heavy baggage and former traveling companions. These men may already have children and be uninterested in having more, or she’ll have to patch together a new family out of broken ones. Or, as time passes and still no one comes along, this woman might join the other older single women in the waiting rooms of fertility clinics, the ones who hope science will provide them with the babies that the pursuit of independence did not.

From a feminist view, it would be nice, I suppose – or at the very least handy – if we were able to derive total satisfaction from our solitude, to be entirely self-contained organisms, like earthworms or amoebas, having relations with the opposite sex whenever we felt a need for it but otherwise being entirely contented with our own company. Every woman’s apartment could be her Walden Pond. She’d be free of the romantic fuss and interaction that has defined, and given meaning to, human existence since its creation. She could spend her evenings happily ensconced with a book or a rented video, not having to deal with some bozo’s desire to watch football or play mindless video games. How children would fit into this vision of autonomy, I’m not sure, but surely they would infringe upon it; perhaps she could simply farm them out.

If this seems a rather chilling outcome to the quest for independence, well, it is. If no man is an island, then no woman can be, either. And it’s why most human beings fall in love, and continue to take on all the commitments and responsibilities of family life. We want the noise and embrace of family around us; we want, at the end of our lives, to look back and see that what we have done amounts to more than a pile of pay stubs, that we have loved and been loved, and brought into this world life that will outlast us.

We strengthen a muscle by using it, and that is true of the heart and mind, too. By waiting and waiting and waiting to commit to someone, our capacity for love shrinks and withers. This doesn’t mean that women or men should marry the first reasonable person to come along, or someone with whom they are not in love. But we should, at a much earlier age than we do now, take a serious attitude toward dating and begin preparing ourselves to settle down. For it’s in the act of taking up the roles we’ve been taught to avoid or postpone – wife, husband, mother, father – that we build our identities, expand our lives, and achieve the fullness of character we desire.

Still, critics may argue that the old way was no better; that the risk of loss women assume by delaying marriage and motherhood overbalances the certain loss we’d suffer by marrying to early. The habit of viewing marriage as a raw deal for women is now so entrenched, even among women who don’t call themselves feminists, that I’ve seen brides who otherwise appear completely happy apologize to their wedding guests for their surrender to convention, as if a part of them still feels there is something embarrassing and weak about an intelligent and ambitious woman consenting to marry. But is this true? Or is it just an alibi we’ve been handed by the previous generation of women in order to justify the sad, lonely outcomes of so many lives?

What we rarely hear – or perhaps are too fearful to admit – is how liberating marriage can actually be. As nerve-wracking as making the decision can be, it is also an enormous relief once it is made. The moment we say, "I do," we have answered one of the great crucial questions of our lives: We now know with whom we’ll be spending the rest of our years, who will be the father of our children, who will be our family. That our marriages may not work, that we will have to accommodate ourselves to the habits and personality of someone else–these are, and always have been, the risks of commitment, of love itself.

What is important is that our lives have been thrust forward. The negative – that we are no longer able to live entirely for ourselves – is also the positive: We no longer have to live entirely for ourselves! We may go on to do any number of interesting things, but we are free of the growing wonder of with whom we will do them. We have ceased to look down the tunnel, waiting for a train.

The pull between the desire to love and be loved and the desire to be free is an old, fierce one. If the error our grandmothers made was to have surrendered too much of themselves for others, this was perhaps better than not being prepared to surrender anything at all. The fear of losing oneself can, in the end, simply become an excuse for not giving any of oneself away. Generations of women may have had no choice but to commit themselves to marriage early and then to feel imprisoned by their lifelong domesticity. So many of our generation have decided to put it off until it is too late, not foreseeing that lifelong independence can be its own kind of prison, too.

From What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman by Danielle Crittenden. © 1999 by Danielle Crittenden. Published by Simon and Schuster. Reprinted by permission

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I have never been one to tell others what they should do with their life or how they should do it. Crittenden on the other hand, paints a pessimistic portrait of what life looks like for the single 'older' woman, who decides to maintain her independence and develop autonomy instead of marrying and having children at a younger age. I guess it's her attempt at convincing young women to 'settle down' (God I hate that expression...really, who settles on a person?!) through the employment of fear tactics.

I've never understood why it always has to be either one or the other. All women should either return to their pre-WWII roles as mothers and wives OR they all should be working and rejecting traditional female roles. I always thought the whole point was for women to have the same freedom as men to choose how they want to live their life. Instead we have radical feminists arguing with the liberal feminists on the correct definition of 'woman' when we should all be encouraged to decide what our own path is and follow it, without judgement.

We never hear about how men need to take greater responsibility as fathers and husbands to create a more cohesive environment in the household. And yet, it's a social pandemic that women are putting off marriage and kids by a few years - even though our life expectancy has increased anyways to compensate for it. Although Crittenden includes many statistics, what she omits is that couples who marry later in life greatly reduce their risk of divorce. Instead, she wants women to get married before the age of 25 (and notice how she puts no expiry date on men). Do you realize that your brain doesn't finish growing until the age of 25? I have trouble picking vegetables at the store, and you want me to choose a husband? No thanks. And as for having children at a young age, if you're ready to have them then by all means you should. But seeing as how it's more likely that I will raise puppies or some other species of baby animals before a human one, I'm going to need all the time I can get to prepare for the greatest responsibility of my life. And whatever experience, knowledge and wisdom I gain in the time I use to develop my autonomy will become a great asset if/when I decide to raise children/a child.

I'm not saying it's impossible, I know of several young married couples. They are fortunate enough to find that person who compliments them perfectly and the search is over. That's great for them. And my mom once told me that you're only ready to have kids when you've found the right person to have them with, so maybe marriage and children are a package deal. But for those of us who are pursuing higher education or who wish to travel or who would like to earn a career and hope that one day, women will be paid the same amount as men and not 30% less, we should not be frowned upon for chasing other dreams.

A few years ago, I remember an uncle of mine telling me that he thought women should marry young, that they shouldn't be educated too much because knowledge is power and when women are educated they gain too much control. I think that was the defining moment I decided I wanted to do my phD. It's that type of mentality that scares me when I read excerpts like the one posted above. Because if women start returning to these social 'rules' out of fear, and planning their life according to the availability of men, where does it end? If we as women, look at ourselves as viable only for a certain period of time (and only for certain types of roles such as wife and mother), how can we expect men to see us any differently? Along with sexism, will we also have to deal with ageism? Will older women be considered worthless? Don't get me wrong. I think that being a wife and/or mother is even more of a full-time career than most occupations. It requires a lot of skill and intelligence, which I don't think every person possesses naturally. In fact there are many people who would be better off contributing to society in other ways than increasing the global population. I was reading an American survey not too long ago, in which the majority of men said the reason they want to get married is for companionship. Not for love, not for an exchange of intellect or emotion - they just want someone to appease their boredom. Are we giving them any reason to think otherwise by scrambling about in our early 20's to latch onto them? You get a roommate or a dog for companionship, not a wife. But that’s what we are comparable to now, man’s ‘playmate’. I refuse to just be someone's playmate.

By the way...

I've been putting off uploading these pictures of town...so here they are! It actually looks a lot better in person but, you can get an idea from these quick shots I took:

Oh and before I forget - my best bud Mel sent me this link to an article from the Globe and Mail about 'push presents'. Essentially, they're expensive gifts, usually jewelry, that new dads give to their partners for all their hard work in the delivery room. Oh yes, nothing says "I appreciate the nine months of carrying our child and the 8 hours it took to get her/him out" like a Tiffany's stackable diamond celebration ring. I'll bite my tongue from saying anymore about this phenomenon, but Mel and I thought it was just too fitting after last week's entry on commodification.

My brain is depleted...

Forgive me if I don't make any sense this week...I've just submitted my essay and I'm running low on brain power at this point.

The problem with academia sometimes is that it makes you feel so negative about everything. You're constantly problematizing life - journalism is bad because of commercialisation and they don't really report on truth anymore, just whatever sells. Images in media are really just creating a false reality, which in turn creates false needs that are resolved through capitalism. We're all living in a hyperreality, where our consciousness is duped into wanting stimuli and nothing more so we never pursue true fulfillment because we choose fantasy over reality. Monsieur Jean Baudrillard, theoretical genius, gives the example of a casino. You go inside a casino and everything is bright lights, constant supply of booze, happy people, games galore, you never know what time of day it is and the room is being pumped full of additional oxygen (betchya' didn't know that one!)...and you feel like you're in a fantasy land, where everything is a dream. They do that on purpose so that you think your money is also a part of the dream and spend it senselessly. Going to a casino becomes not about winning anymore, but just about experiencing the stimuli all at once and escaping reality.

You begin to question a lot of the choices you've made in the past. Like, are my desires really genuine, or have I just been brainwashed by what I see on tv and in movies to want those things? Especially with regards to the portrayal of women in media. I think it's something I'm so passionate about because I'm trying to find the answer myself. A lot of people don't realize it, but every day we're bombarded with such a limited view of women's roles in society and what femininity actually means. If we see ads of women at work, they're constantly in these fitted power suits with red lipstick and perfectly coiffed hair. If they're pregnant they're smiling and glowing and serene. We're constantly being defined by these roles of daughter, wife, mother, sex-object...have we come to regard women only through this small lens? And more importantly, have women come to only desire these 'accomplishments'?

Look at something as silly as cellulite. We see the ads all the time, the creams and the procedures to get rid of it. We've come to see cellulite as yet another unsightly imperfection of the female body. Do you know what feminists have to say about that? They see thinking of cellulite as an undesirable condition that needs to be treated harmful to women. Cellulite is a natural occurence in the body of post-pubescent women, and treating it would be no different than treating enlarged breasts or menstruation. It's yet another example of the pressure for women to maintain a more pre-pubescent appearance. And I'm sure at this point a lot of people reading this just felt really uncomfortable or awkward. What does that tell you about how we've been conditioned to regard the female form and its functions?

I just don't think it's realistic to look at life that way...we've created such unattainable expectations for ourselves. Correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I checked marriage, work and having children were no walk in the park - let alone trying to do them AND looking fabulous all the time! And what's worse, is I think that we get disappointed with ourselves when we don't achieve these high expectations, and then commodities are there to make us feel better. Buy yourself a new pair of shoes and you'll temporarily cure that emptiness inside (and fuel the capitalist agenda that the economy thrives off of). That is until the shoes lose their novelty and you need to buy something else.

We all do it. We live in a consumer culture. After Z and I submitted our papers today you know what we did? Went to town to do our Christmas shopping. I finished writing a paper on how images in the media drive consumerism and I decided to celebrate by making a few purchases! Oh the irony...mind you, they were mainly purchases for other people - but I'm just trying to make a point here. We satiate our true needs with fleeting material desires.

But on the other hand, we kind of need media to keep everything together. On Friday our lecture was about globalization, and media's role in the nation-state and how countries depend on a national form of media to propagate patriotism and national identity. Everything from a national newspaper to reality shows that get the country involved (read: American Idol) help to build the nation-state. I don't know how many of you know this but I found it really interesting to learn that Belgium is actually divided into two parts: the French-speaking Wallonia and the Dutch-speaking Flanders. The country has apparently been having a lot of difficulty electing government officials and maintaining national identity because of this divide. One of the things we're going to discuss next week though is whether part of the reason they can't unify as one community has to do with the lack of a national news/media outlet. There is no single governing news forum for the entire country. Maybe if they had things like reality shows or a nation-wide news channel the two regions could bond more. Of course there's an obvious language barrier that would need to be resolved first. I guess everything would have to be issued in French and Dutch (and then the 10% German-speaking Belgians would feel left out no doubt).

And I guess in a nutshell, that's why media studies is so interesting. Because there's this constant dichotomy between good and bad. In some ways the media can be seen as having such a negative impact on people - shaping our minds with propaganda, masking reality. And in other ways, it's the glue that binds us together. This blog, for instance, would not be possible without media. I wouldn't even be able to share my thoughts with you on media without this medium. Interesting, isn't it? Or maybe it's not and I'm just a big media nerd.

So my last essay for the term is officially done. I still have a week left of classes and a total of ten days here before I come home for Christmas break. And now, I'm going to sit back, put my feet up, and watch the rest of A Very Merry Muppet Christmas while I indulge in my other love-hate relationship: brownie.

And so this is Christmas...

Well, it's been another one of 'those weeks'...not much to report on really. Everyone is getting in the Christmas spirit - myself included of course! I went into town last week to start my Christmas shopping and the streets were filled with festive decorations. It was too dark to take pictures, but I will show you all next time I go to town (which probably will be next Monday after I submit my paper!).

Z and I were also in a bit of a baking mood. She made chocolate cupcakes with a mousse filling and I made blueberry muffins (from scratch!). They didn't last very long...Actually one great thing about living on your own is you get quite resourceful. Sometimes if we feel like cooking something different, we look for recipes online and try to find a dish that requires all the ingredients we have in the house. I've really expanded my repertoire of culinary skills!


I also felt like decorating our flat to give it that Christmas feeling - so I bought a small tree and some other items - within budget of course. I still wasn't pleased with the level of 'Clause-ness' so I decided to get more creative and make 3D paper snowflakes and stars. Now I know what you're thinking...the same thing Z did when I told her what I was doing. She was under the impression I was making those really juvenile 2D snowflakes that you make in elementary school. I don't know if the pictures will do them justice, but they're actually very pretty and delicate snowflakes. I highly recommend trying it with older kids or even on your own - I'm a little addicted because we have this huge roll of white paper and nothing to do with it. But I can imagine them looking even better with glitter or blue paper.



Other than that, both of us have been doing a lot of reading and focusing on our next essay. I heard about all the snow and ice at home - as my dad would say "drive carefully!". It's been quite mild here - the other day we walked to school without a jacket. It seems that it's even been a slow week for news...can you believe this teddy bear business? It's all over the news here. I'm seriously considering re-naming some of my stuffed piggies Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Allah and Bramha just out of spite...ah well...it's called extremist for a reason, right?


Wish me luck on this essay!

Happy Birthday Swami!

This past Friday was a very auspicious occasion, as we celebrated the 82nd birthday of our spiritual guide and teacher, Sri Satya Sai Baba…

Thankfully for Leicester’s large South Asian population, I found a few Sai Centres and got in touch with some devotees here. So on Friday, I attended a program at the Leicester Ram Mandir.

I couldn’t believe how many people kept coming and filling the massive hall. Only in India have I seen a larger gathering of Sai devotees. The program started with about 20 minutes of Veda chanting (chanting of verses from our holy scriptures) by a group of youth boys. Everyone sat with their eyes closed and just meditated to the sound of the chanting. Then the youth conducted bhajans (devotional songs praising God). Many of them sang so sweetly and the musicians played their instruments with such skill – I was really impressed with their talent. The centre had also set up a screen, projecting video and images of Swami listening to bhajans in India from previous occasions so it gave the feeling that he was actually there – well, I know Swami’s always there…but you know what I mean!

The SSE children performed an informative but also hilarious play titled “If God had voicemail”! Basically, the premise was set around this girl who felt very frustrated by school, friends and family. So she has a dream that she calls a hotline to speak with God. She reaches an automated recording where the operator says:

“Hello, you’ve reached Guidance On Divinity, also known as GOD. Unfortunately all our Gods and angels are currently occupied. Your position in the queue is 108 – but don’t worry, that’s a very auspicious number! To leave a message for Ganesh, press one, Hanuman, 2, Krishna, 3.”

And then they show what all the different Gods are doing…Hanuman is giving this conference on bridge building to several monkey students, and Ganesh is climbing the Himalayas with some friends, etc…it was so cute to see all the little British children dressed up!

Of course at the end of the dream, God calls the girl back on her mobile, and tells her that she doesn’t have to call to reach him, but she just has to say Aum (the sound of creation) to connect, and that connection with God is stronger than any other technological connection possible!

A former student at the college in Prashanti Nilayam (compound where Swami lives) gave a very candid speech about his experience living there, and the interactions he had seen and heard of Swami. One of them was about a time where Swami won an arm wrestling match between himself and these two wrestlers. The wrestlers were convinced he had used some kind of divine power to beat them, but Swami explained he didn’t, but infact beat them because since birth, a negative thought had never entered his mind, he had never doubted himself – and so he won by using the strength of his mind. The student also gave the analogy of the Sai organization being like an ocean, where Swami is the epicentre. If a pebble is thrown into the water, it ripples throughout the entire ocean. If Swami says in a discourse this month to meditate more, people across the globe immediately start to mediate more. Anything Swami says or does has an impact on the rest of the world.

Of course the best part of the whole evening was the grand finale. Everyone started to sing a special Happy Birthday song for Swami and a giant cake was brought out, along with balloons, sparklers, confetti, Happy Birthday signs and little children dressed as different planets rotating around a poster of Swami.

I felt such peace being there that night. When events run smoothly and are well-organized and rehearsed it truly shows how much love and devotion went towards making it successful. I’m looking forward to attending future events here – it’s such a relief when you can connect with communities like the Sai organization away from home. I guess it’s just having some familiarity in your life that helps to keep you grounded.

(quick update: Z is back to her healthy self, and everything else is great!)

Just call me Dr. Mom

Well this weekend was pretty much a 180 from our last weekend. Zainah came down with possibly the worst bug ever. We tried everything: I made her chicken soup from scratch, put tiger balm on her forehead, gave her vicks to inhale. She took tylenol cold & flu, advil and paracetamol. Nothing worked! She couldn't sleep for two days because she was so stuffed up, feverish and in pain.

Then last night her tonsils got really swollen and at 6 this morning, we took a taxi to the infirmary. I felt so bad for her. But God bless the UK health system. They didn't ask for any i.d., all they took was her name and contact information and within 10 minutes we were seen by a doctor. Not a great doctor though. Infact, he was actually quite dodgy. First of all he was just wearing a knitted sweater with the words: Ghana in red on the front and a pair of khakis. No white coat, no name tag, nothing. He could barely speak any English, and he was afraid of catching whatever Z had. He would stand as far away from her as he could to take her temperature and check her throat. Then he just left the room, and came back in with two boxes of medicines. We had to ask him what was wrong with her.

He said she had tonsilitis and she needed to take a course of antibiotics to get rid of the infection. He also gave her some extra-strength ibuprofen for the pain. When we got back home she was finally able to get some rest. And now she's slowly recovering...and I am dosing up on echinacea and vitamins as well as disinfecting the house to make sure I don't catch her tonsilitis!

It's been a slow week otherwise. The weather is finally starting to cool down now. November is supposed to be the worst month in terms of rain and climate. So we're bundling up and doing our best to keep warm and dry :)

Oh, we have this new professor for our "Processes and Structures in Mass Media" class. He's really interesting. This week we were learning about how large corporations buy the rights to all sorts of images, and then sell them to advertisers or newspapers who need them. So for example if the Toronto Star had an article about the war in Iraq and they need an image of 'war' they'd pay one of these businesses like www.gettyimages.com to use one of their pictures. But the problem is these pictures aren't real. For the most part, they're models that are posing and they've been made very ambiguous so that one picture can be used in a variety of contexts (you make more money that way).

Another really interesting aspect to these companies is that when you search for let's say, images of Women and Freedom the pictures that show up are for the most part of women doing yoga on a beach or jumping in the air with their hands to the sky. So the question becomes: what does this do to our perception of these concepts? Why aren't there more political images of women trying to attain freedom? And what happens when our reality is constantly being symbolized as this perfect, symmetrical world, rather than documented as images that are true to real life? I found it all so fascinating because it builds on the stuff we learned about in semiotics - this idea of signs connoting other metaphorical meanings.

It also relates to advertising because a lot of advertisers use these image banks to associate their company with certain values portrayed in the image (which is what branding is all about). T-Mobile for example has these pictures of people doing yoga on the beach on their phone cards (yoga on the beach is a very popular image for some reason)...now what does that have to do with the services they're offering? Nothing. Except that I guess those values of peacefulness and freedom somehow become part of T-Mobile's values. So that when you realize you can only use the phone card once and then all your minutes are gone, you don't get as upset because the card has this tranquil person on it!

My next essay is going to be based on this topic as well. I'm hoping to examine how images in our newspapers, magazines and advertisements have changed over time and what role these image bank corporations have played in this transition. So it's much more interesting than my last essay, and I'm really looking forward to starting it.

Hopefully I'll have something more interesting to blog about next week! Hope you're all doing well back home - miss you lots!