Make New Year's Resolutions

It’s officially the time of year that people are hating themselves for not keeping up with last year’s resolutions. That gym membership they got in January hasn’t been used since the end of shorts season and their vow to stop eating junk food ended with a bang during the Hostess crisis. Sometime during this period of self loathing, almost every person will ask themselves whether it’s even worth it to set goals for the next year when they know they’ll never stick to them.

Yes, it is.

It’s always worth it to try to be a better person. It may only last the month of January, you may only make it until March or July or November, but that’s at least 1 month of being the best person you can be.

If your resolution is to commit one random act of kindness every day and you only make it 2 months without fail, that’s still 61 random acts of kindness that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. That’s 61 people you impacted in a positive way. If your resolution is to write a little everyday and at the end of January you’ve only written a couple pages and give up, you’re a better writer having written those 2 pages than none at all. If your resolution is to hit the gym 3 times a week and you give up by June, at least you were healthier for half the year.

Even if you set the same goals every year and each year you fail, maybe this year you won’t. Maybe this is the year you become addicted to the smile on a stranger’s face when you hand them something they dropped. Maybe this is the year you become truly inspired and write an entire novel. Maybe this is the year you learn to get joy from the burning in your lungs and the aching of your muscles.

By the end of the year, you’ll probably forget how you succeeded and instead focus on the ways that you failed. You’ll wonder whether the hope of doing better is worth the disappointment of failing. But usually you’ll still make those resolutions. Whether you write a list or simply think of them, you’ll find the ways to improve yourself because we all want to be better.

So yes, New Year’s resolutions are worth it. Now get off your ass and make some before 2013 is over.

Stay rad, pals. And happy new year!

Home for the Holidays

It’s not a breath of fresh air. There’s nothing new or vitalizing about it. It’s breathing in the air that you knew at 8-years-old, your lungs finally feeling at home again. It’s comfortable. It’s relaxing.

It’s not autumn or spring. The leaves aren’t blossoming or bursting into color as they prepare to fall. It’s the winter tree. You can’t hide your scraggly branches underneath vibrant colors. You’re stuck with the part of you that exists year-round.

It’s not hard liquor. It’s not vodka or rum or tequila. There’s no burn as it rushes down your throat, little doses taking you away from the stress of daily life. It’s more like a cold beer, not pretending to be anything more than what it is. It’s smooth and refreshing and, most of all, thoughtless.

It’s the chip on that coffee mug from your brief clumsy phase. It’s the blanket you used to eat pizza on while watching Disney movies and calling it a picnic. It’s the pet turtle that you found by the fire pit when you were 5 that’s still alive. It’s the place in the ceiling where water dripped for a week and you quickly learned to avoid the huge bucket in the middle of the room.  It’s the bookshelves that hold your childhood favorites and books you somehow haven’t gotten to yet. It’s familiarity and recognition.

But it’s also a snowflake on your tongue. It’s temporary. It’s rare. You have to be sure to appreciate the moment both despite and for its fleetingness.

Blink and it’ll be over, so make sure to close your eyes and take it in.

(shhhhh I'm allowed to do more creative writing stuff once in a while. Stay rad, pals.)

#VSFashionShow: Twitter's View on Women

So the annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show happened recently and if you went on Twitter, I imagine many of you had the same experience as me. The #VSFashionShow hashtag pretty much exploded with body-shaming, objectifying, and just generally misogynistic commentary. Just by looking through my timeline, I was close to throwing up. Here are some highlights:

These reactions perfectly demonstrate society’s treatment of women’s bodies in 3 ways.

1)      The impossible standard of perfection.

Women are shamed for being too fat, and they’re shamed for being too skinny. People try to disguise their body-shaming by saying it’s about the person’s health, but how much can you actually know about someone’s health just by looking at their body? People love to make the assumption that a skinny woman doesn’t eat normally and that a fat woman eats too much, but that’s not true. Different people have different healthy weights and bodyshapes that you can’t understand by just looking at them. The point is that there is no universal “healthy” image, so people can stop pretending that exists and acknowledge their unrealistic expectations for a woman’s body. Only by acknowledging that there’s no “too fat” or “too skinny” can we move away from this culture that keeps trying to put circle blocks into a square hole.

2)      The pressure on women to meet that standard.

I don’t think I screen capped any, but there were hundreds of tweets from girls talking about their plans to diet and/or exercise to try to achieve the Victora’s Secret Angel Body. Many of them expressed guilt over what they had already eaten for dinner, and even more mentioned feeling depressed because they’ll never have the perfect body. Although this pressure definitely comes from a male dominated society, women are also responsible for creating an environment that encourages and perpetuates these concerns. I’m not saying that this is their fault, but there are endless sources of support for self-hate. For example, every major magazine that’s targeted for women had someone livetweeting the fashion show and reinforcing the pressure to fit that image. If anyone could look at these tweets and not see a problem with the culture surrounding women’s bodies, I suggest looking at their medical history for brain damage.

3)      The value of a woman being decided by her appearance.

This is a hard one to summarize in one sentence, as it refers to all sorts of judgments made about a woman based on what she shows on the outside. Revealing clothes = slut. Make up = insecure. Nice/expensive clothes = stuck up. Uggs/leggings = dumb, rich, white girl. They can get a lot more complicated, but you get the picture. There’s this ubiquitous idea that a woman who puts effort into her appearance has something to hide, or at least isn’t comfortable being her true self. Guys have decided to counteract this idea by telling women not to wear make-up because they find the “natural look” more attractive. First of all, this implies that women should base their appearance on what they think guys want to see. And second, what most guys are really saying is they want a girl who looks pretty without putting on make-up. Regardless, there shouldn’t be any label or value applied based on the way a woman chooses to present herself, whether “fake” or “natural”.

All I'm saying is that maybe it's time we stop acting like we have a claim on every body of a woman that we see, and stop feeling justified sharing our opinions on them. Also maybe everyone should acknowledge that we don't treat men's bodies the same way at all. If there were a male equivalent of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, the reaction would be completely different. Maybe we should be teaching women that there is no "wrong" body. It still astounds me that that's not universally recognized, and I'm sure you feel the same way. Stay rad, pals.

Pro-Life vs. Anti-Choice: A Look at Rhetoric

The time has come to acknowledge the importance of words and the intentional choices we make when using them, friends.

There’s a reason both sides of the abortion debate are “pro”. Nobody wants to be recognized as fighting against something, they want to advertise what they’re fighting for. It makes sense: pro-life is fighting for the life of the fetus and pro-choice is fighting for the bodily autonomy of the pregnant woman. Depending on your morals, both can seem like perfectly worthy causes. That’s great, but only in theory.

Let’s go a step farther: let’s look at the policies these different movements support. (I’m going to connect pro-life to the Republican Party and pro-choice with the Democratic Party, not because I believe all Republicans are pro-life and all Democrats are pro-choice, but because that’s how the political parties align.)

In the big picture, pro-choice supports legalizing abortion so that women have safe options available to allow them to make an educated choice if they don’t want to continue their pregnancy.  Pro-life supports banning abortion so there’s nothing to interfere with the fetus’s life. I see the thought here: that if that option isn’t readily available to women with unwanted pregnancies, they’re more likely to carry to term. However, this does nothing to stop the women who cannot or will not proceed with their pregnancy. We’ve all heard of the coat hanger procedures desperate women will resort to, and I don’t think anyone really wants that. But overall, I guess these policies reflect the names of the movements supporting them.

When we look closer, though, it gets a lot fuzzier. In the state of Wisconsin, only 15% out of the 55% of people identifying as pro-life support legalizing abortion in the case that it will save the mother’s life. This confuses me. What could a woman possibly do to make an unborn fetus deserve life more than her? How can a group of people be considered pro-life when they’ll willingly let a woman die in hopes that her child will live to grow up without a mother? I’ve mentioned the idea of quantity of life over quality of life before, but this seems to be condemning both of those goals.

In Texas, there have been about a million and a half bills brought up to regulate abortions since Roe vs. Wade. During this past summer, there was House Bill 2, brought to national attention by Wendy Davis’s 11-hour filibuster.  This bill is meant to impose ridiculous regulations on what circumstances are okay for abortions. The most publicized part was the need of admitting privileges at a local hospital (context is important: many hospitals are Christian-based), but there were also requirements for room size and the need for doctors to administer an abortion pill themselves. (Coincidentally, only 6 of the 42 abortion clinics in Texas would meet these requirements.) It would be hard to justify how this bill represents a pro-life ideal. Instead, it’s actively working to restrict the choices available to women with unwanted pregnancies.

Then we can look at policies that don’t directly deal with abortion, but life itself: the death penalty and gun regulation. The Republican Party, which claims to be pro-life, is in favor of the death penalty. I hope I don’t have to point out the contradiction there or explain anything. They’re effectively saying a fetus’s potential life is more important than its mother’s, but criminals are disposable. When it comes to guns, the Republican Party doesn’t care who buys them, even when it’s causing more than 30,000 deaths a year. Who needs consistency, am I right?

My point is that the pro-life movement isn’t about saving lives anymore, if it ever really was. It relies on emotional manipulation and the elimination of options for women with unwanted pregnancies so they’re forced to carry to term. They aren’t advocating for life in reality anymore, they’re just trying to control women and I’m sick of the pro-life rhetoric obscuring what the movement is actually pushing for. It’s time to be honest about it and call them what they are: anti-choice. We can talk about pro-life when they start caring about other lives.

Stay rad, pals.

Why I Walk Home Alone

Here in Madison, the buses stop running at midnight and I live far enough off campus that walking home takes between 20 and 30 minutes, depending where I’m coming from.  So Friday night when I’m a little tipsy at 2am and just want to sleep in my bed, suddenly there’s this big dilemma. I can’t count how many times someone’s suggested to me that I find a guy to walk me home at the end of the night so I’m not alone. And I get it: people think that a man on the street is less likely to approach me if I have a man with me. What they don’t realize is my greatest risk of being sexually assaulted actually comes from the man walking with me, not a stranger on the street.

But besides the actual risk involved, let’s talk about one of my least favorite things in the world: rape culture.

For those of you who are new to the feminist scene, rape culture refers to the way society treats rape as a result of a woman’s actions more than a crime committed by a man. People try to argue its existence, but we can clearly observe its effects through the questions rape victims are asked in court, the sentencing of perpetrators (or lackthereof), female-targeted rape prevention tips, and just the general reaction to a woman who admits to being sexually assaulted.

Rape culture relies on making women afraid to express their freedom. If a woman dresses in revealing clothes, she’s sending a message to men that her sexuality is freely available to them. If a woman gains a reputation for having sex with a lot of guys, why would any man think she would honestly deny him access? If a woman goes home with a man after a date, she’s obviously intending to have sex with him. If a woman gets too drunk to fight off unwelcome advances, she should have been more responsible. A woman walking home alone at night should have known better. Women are responsible for their own safety. Our society is hung up on the idea that rapists are going to rape no matter what, so a woman just has to make sure she’s not the one raped.

We make the night an unforgiving place and then tell women to stay away for their own good; taking away their freedom and making them rely on men. We live a contradiction: we need to fear men, but we’re also supposed to be comforted by their presence. They’re the biggest danger to us, but we’re supposed to feel safe around them. Whether good or bad, the power men have over us is constantly being drilled into our minds and influencing our habits.

But I refuse to live in fear, and I definitely refuse to let that fear control my life. I’m going to walk down the street at night like I belong there just as much as any man who doesn’t get questioned when he walks out the door alone. Because I do, and you do too.

Stay rad, pals.