Why I'm Here

Hello, everyone! I’m sorry it took me so long to post. I was helping a friend move across states and it turned into the most ordeal-ridden adventure I have ever been on! But I am here now and so excited! I have always been interested in issues surrounding gender, especially womanhood and femininity. Our society is fraught with overwhelming and increasingly conflicting messages. Be sexy, but not too sexy. Be smart, but not too smart. Be athletic, but not too athletic. Be thin, but not too thin because you still need to have big boobs and a big butt. Be independent, but not too independent. Be driven and successful, but not too successful. In the words of the 16th century poem The Fairie Queene by Edmund Spenser: “Be not too bold.” As time goes on our ideas and expectations of individual’s gender expressions (for both men and women) become more and more complicated, I think. We are in a world where women’s bodies are seen as separate from themselves. They are seen as liabilities, as dangerous, as something to be feared, as something to be controlled and limited. And yet, women in most countries enjoy more freedoms today than they have at any other time in history. We can work, vote, go to school, live independently, join the military, support our families, own property, be government officials (even the president in some countries), choose who we marry, exercise options in family planning, expect orgasms, and we only wear corsets if we want to! Media and culture are inescapable forces that can be for either good or evil and women and girls must navigate them every day, all day. The better informed we all are, on the implicit and explicit messages, the better we can do this. Not only is this topic inexhaustibly interesting to me but also it is one that continues to expand and complicate itself more and more every day. I can’t wait!