Nov 28, 2007

November 28, 2007

sittin' here with my mama, eating an oyster po' boy sandwich and making fun of all the manufactured drama on the dr. phil show. what is UP with that dude?

the strongest woman i know tires easily. she is aging. though her strength is more potent, it is much less visible to the naked eye. she is the leaves out in the yard; the flowers in the vase; the sunshine through the windows; the water in the glass.

what does this have to do with "slut energy theory"?


well, my four women - sophie, lorna, u'dean and tulsa - all have mamas. as young girls, neither believes she has the mother they want. as older women, each realizes they had exactly the mother they needed. in between, they all learn to mother themselves.

when my sister describes our mother, her description does not match the mother i know. we share 5 brothers and there is a 6-year difference in our ages. and while i could go into all the sloppy-crazy-ridiculous stuff that our intense sister-love is composed of, all i know is that it often feels like we live on two separate planets.

but the four women in "slut energy theory" have the same thing in common that my sister and i do: the viewpoint of our body image was formed, not by nurturing attention, feedback and information from female family members, but from messages both covert and overt from males in our family, in our neighborhood and even complete strangers on the street. messages that implied the sole purpose of having breasts was not to nourish babies, but to attract men. to lure them to us, tempt them, please them. if we are to believe men, the main purpose of a vagina is not for birthin' babies, but for receiving a man's penis.

and so on and so on.

the questions these two considerations alone raise are many and disturbing.
a few of them are: what do little girls do when this viewpoint is thrust upon them? what did it do to me? to my sister? our mother? our grandmothers?












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