Pygmalion’s Chisel : For Women Who Are “Never Good Enough” [1 ed.] 9781443848848, 9781443846110

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Pygmalion’s Chisel

Pygmalion’s Chisel: For Women Who Are “Never Good Enough”

By

Tracy M. Hallstead

Pygmalion’s Chisel: For Women Who Are “Never Good Enough” by Tracy M. Hallstead This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Tracy M. Hallstead All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4611-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4611-0

For Elise and Eva

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion. —Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947)

CONTENTS

Foreword .................................................................................................... ix Joan D. Hedrick Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... xi Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Who Are Pygmalion and Galatea to Us? Pygmalion and Galatea Retold Background Pygmalion at Home My Pygmalion and Galatea Story Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 15 The Reality of Patriarchy Pygmalion Within: Psychological Patriarchy and Contempt for Women Patriarchy and Abuse It’s Not About Women After All Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 27 Galatea’s Silence Pygmalion Without, Then and Now It’s Not What You Say but What You Are: Having No Right to Speak Galatea Wreaks Havoc in the Public Square: Fearless Maria Stewart Continued Havoc : The Grimké Sisters Confronting Shame: Our Grandmothers’ Lessons for Modern-Day Galateas Be a Man and Be in Control Pygmalion Now: A Silencing Force on the Internet

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Contents

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 47 Galatea’s Immobility in Woman’s Role and Woman’s Work Pygmalion’s Female Mouthpieces “Dirty Jokes” Women Need Not Apply The Pink-Collar Dilemma Summers, Pinker, and the Feminine Brain Devalued Work and the Devalued Self Galatea’s Guilt “Women Nag” Questioning the System: Harriet Martineau Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 81 Pygmalion’s Chisel on Our Bodies The Debate is Over: Eating Disorders Are Culturally Driven Eating: A Morally Charged Act for Women A Diet Industry that Primes Us for Failure Misogyny: A Coiled Spring of Emotion That Ads Release Patriarchal Backlashes Why Misogyny? The Dynamics of Pornography and Its Pull on Our Consciousness The Resistance of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Advancing a Responsive Feminism Appendix ................................................................................................. 115 Notes........................................................................................................ 117 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 121 Index ........................................................................................................ 133

FOREWORD JOAN D. HEDRICK

In the best style of second-wave feminism, Tracy Hallstead once again demonstrates that “the personal is political.” Written with passion and conviction, Pygmalion’s Chisel: For Women Who Are “Never Good Enough” has the current generation of young women in mind as they struggle with defining themselves and expressing their own voices. As the author notes, the “waves” of feminist thought and agitation in the United States have been followed by resistance and backlash in which patriarchal ways of thinking and acting are reinstated as normal and unquestioned. In this process, feminist voices of the past are denigrated, muted and lost. Thus each generation (alas) needs a retelling of stories and a rekindling of consciousness in order for women to see their personal problems as part of a larger pattern. Pygmalion’s Chisel supplies this need for today. In Greek myth, Galatea was the woman whom Pygmalion attempted to chisel down to size and immobilize in a statue. Using this myth and her own experience in a partnership in which she was made to feel “never good enough,” Hallstead analyzes the underlying misogyny that posits women as essentially flawed. In the process she concisely synthesizes a wide range of feminist thought. She revisits first-wave feminism to recover voices from the past who resisted the silencing and diminishment of women. From the second wave she takes not only her method, but classic insights, such as Beauvoir’s concept of woman as Other. And in good third-wave fashion, she quotes Vogue and Rolling Stone as well as Naomi Wolf, demonstrating how the battle has recently been fought. The rawness and specificity of her contemporary examples—such as Internet bashing and the pejorative media portrayals of powerful women—pack a punch. Hallstead understands how the daily warfare against the psyches of women in contemporary American culture, from the home to the workplace to popular media, makes it tempting to internalize these misogynist messages, especially when psychological binds are reinforced by economic and social realities. What I like best about this book is its balance between clear-eyed understanding of the backlash against the gains of women and a realistic

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awareness of the possibilities of resistance. Calling for a “responsive feminism” that finds “pockets of instability” within the system to push for transformation, Hallstead weaves practical suggestions into her analysis and provides institutional resources for change. Beautifully organized and accessibly written in a first-person voice, this book is bound to change the consciousness of readers. (Middletown, Connecticut 1/20/2013) Joan D. Hedrick is Charles A. Dana Professor of History, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. Her biography, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (Oxford, 1994), won a Pulitzer Prize.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Milla Riggio, whose rigor and warmth inspired me to aim for demanding research that nonetheless connected to readers. I am likewise indebted to Beverly Wall for her substantial understanding of the potency of rhetoric. And I thank David Rosen, whose keen insights into George Orwell cultivated my fascination with how a power over others model works. In addition, Allan G. Johnson, author of The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, deserves considerable acknowledgment for his bold naming of patriarchy’s damages. He has done much to discredit the ubiquitous “Oh, this again!” response to feminism that keeps women apologizing for renewing the conversation. I also recognize Adam Katz for his theoretical sophistication, which helped a hopeful tone emerge in the final draft. Additionally, Paul Pasquaretta and the Quinnipiac University Writing Across the Curriculum program deserve acknowledgment for establishing peer review opportunities and quiet venues for drafting and revision. I am profoundly grateful to Irene Papoulis. Mindful of my shyness yet believing in the importance of this work for others, she sensed vital ideas in the air and coaxed them back to the page where they belonged. Heather Grace Shubert deserves thanks for her compelling poem, “She is the Soft Whisper,” which gives voice to the woman who feels she is never good enough. And I am deeply indebted to Joan Hedrick not only for wise words, but for healing love. I also thank the many women, past and present, who fill these pages with stories and fighting words that have challenged Pygmalion in their lives. I respect them for their continued struggle, especially against misogyny turned inward. To my husband, Christopher, and my daughters, Elise and Eva, thank you for bearing with me as I cursed my rebellious computer or left the house for yet one more trip to the library. And many, many thanks for doing your part with the household work that—as I’ve noted in this book—keeps us alive. It is the hope for a better world for you, Elise and Eva, which drives me to write.

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Acknowledgments

Please Note: In order to protect the anonymity of those who appear in the personal stories, names and settings have been changed. Several of the conversations represent composite encounters with the same individual.

INTRODUCTION

In the relatively new millennium, we may be lulled into thinking that we live in a post-feminist era. Because first-wave feminists from the midnineteenth century to the early twentieth century pioneered voting rights for women and because second-wave feminists in the 1970s built successfully on their legacy, we may believe that the old wounds of gender discrimination have surely healed. Today, we often hear an “Oh, this again!” response to feminism, as if the whole distasteful subject of women’s inequality, along with racism and homophobia, has been resolved. Worse, we hear young women assert that they are not feminists, as if feminism connotes personal ugliness and male disapproval, while the right to vote, own property, feel safe in one’s home, and work alongside men—the premiums for which feminists sacrificed lives and reputations— are taken for granted. I wrote this book because I have sensed an enduring critical presence in the culture that scrutinizes, critiques, and sizes women down in their daily lives, despite rights gained through the centuries. I named that presence “Pygmalion,” after the ancient mythical sculptor who believed all women were essentially flawed and who therefore endeavored to chisel a statue of a woman he called “Galatea” to perfection. My research confirms that our popular culture, a Pygmalion in its own right, chisels women down to this day. Our culture also tells men that they should improve, but not in a way that diminishes them or reduces their power, as in weight loss campaigns disproportionately aimed at women or a cultural double standard that punishes women for the aggrandizing qualities it rewards in men, such as assertiveness or outspokenness. My book consists of five chapters and an appendix. The first chapter provides background on the Pygmalion and Galatea myth—including my own personal Pygmalion and Galatea story—and explains how the myth reflects the story of modern women’s lives. Chapter Two argues for the existence of a patriarchy that still surrounds us and lives within us, making its onerous demands of women in the new millennium. In the remaining chapters, I explore three key ways in which modern woman experiences patriarchy’s “chisel” carving her life down into something much smaller than it should be. First, as in Pygmalion’s Galatea, patriarchy still requires modern woman to be silent relative to

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men and to keep her opinions to herself, a theme I cover in Chapter Three. Next, patriarchy mandates that women remain relatively immobile economically, and so I explore women’s stunted economic status and the devaluation of women’s work both in public and in the home in Chapter Four. Finally, patriarchy requires that women be physically small, and so I examine the means by which Pygmalion’s chisel—our patriarchal culture—carves down our bodies in Chapter Five. My appendix offers a concise summary of resources for women seeking further aid in resisting Pygmalion’s chisel. I also thread an examination of rhetoric throughout this book. Rhetoric is much more than the empty or inflated language with which it is associated. In fact, Aristotle defined rhetoric as “discovering the best available means of persuasion.” Our culture effectively persuades women of what they should and should not be through images (as in advertising photos, Internet offerings, film, and video), books, magazines, and speech, among other “best available means.” All of these rhetorical “texts,” if you will, are part of a conversation about women in modern Western culture. Examined together, they confirm that something is very wrong in that conversation: Pygmalion has eroded the ways women define and talk about themselves. Throughout this book, I often refer to the Victorian era’s treacherous rhetoric that mired women’s lives in a sort of ideological quicklime. I do this because the woman-hating of the nineteenth century is reflected in patterns of woman-hating in the relatively new millennium. Though misogyny dates back to the earliest civilizations, Victorian misogyny is similar to the misogyny of our day because both use women’s literacy against them. The rhetoric in both a nineteenth-century lady’s gift book and a twenty-first-century fashion magazine can effectively keep a woman in her place by promoting disempowering behaviors, such as silence before one’s husband or excessive weight loss, respectively. This parallel between then and now does not mean that women have made no social progress since the nineteenth century. Rather, our path has moved forward through enlightening periods, as in the second-wave feminism of the 1970s, with loop-de-loops that spin us painfully backward from time to time, as we have experienced in the early decades of the 2000s. Patriarchy has never really left us since the Victorian age; it merely sleeps during our progressive times till we spiral backward on a retrograde loop again. And interestingly, the arguments against women’s empowerment in the 2000s echo the old Victorian cadences about woman’s essentially flawed nature. For this reason, my discussion flows back and forth

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between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, as I explore parallel themes in both. In providing for women a way out of the Galatea predicament that has fettered us for centuries, I analyze the arguments of nineteenth-century women who, in their speeches and writings concerning slavery and women’s rights, faced down the patriarchal lie that the female of the species is inherently flawed. Though it may seem odd to juxtapose Victorian women’s lives with our own, nineteenth-century female speechmakers and writers—such as Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Maria Stewart, Harriet Martineau, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—offer enlightening lessons that women believe we have learned or resolved, but in reality have not. Virginia Woolf’s obedient specter, the Angel in the House, still demands perfection and self-sacrifice of women, who, for the most part, feel overwhelmed in their daily lives and work, especially if they have children. The historical thinking women are strangely forgotten by most modern women, yet their voices beckon us to follow them on a clear path outside Pygmalion’s chamber door. I also weave in several private experiences of women in patriarchy along with my own, in order to illustrate Pygmalion’s potent grip on the female psyche. A man who seemed to draw ready-made arguments about “female flaw” from the air nearly broke my spirit. The memory of that destructive relationship inspired me to question the Pygmalion and Galatea myth that haunted me. I hope that my recollections of living the myth form a compelling backdrop for its exploration. As powerful as Pygmalion’s voice is, however, women can choose not to believe him. The dynamic can change as we adopt new consciousness of how our culture carves us down. We can then insist on alternative messages by training ourselves to no longer “buy in to” the unhealthy ones. There are pitfalls within a purely “victimary” point of view, in which the victimizer/victim mentality is impossible to escape. According to anthropologist Eric Gans (1997), the oppressor/oppressed binary that has marked academic writing in recent decades leaves no room for other types of interaction; for instance, role reversals in which the oppressed may, temporarily or not, wield more power. The result is a sort of “rhetoric of resentment” that detects oppression everywhere—even behind neutral ideas—but does not seek to change it: The imposition of this radically dichotomous model obliterates the historical nuances of social differentiation and interaction, reducing all social roles to those of persecutor and victim. It sacrifices to the power of

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Introduction its resentful rhetoric the means to understand the very movement toward social equality that it is promoting (165).

Oddly, a “rhetoric of resentment” needs the oppression to continue in order for the theory to resonate, and so such theories can potentially exploit marginalized people, when they should instead uncover chinks in oppressive systems so that we can destabilize them. There is little hope for women’s lives if we see patriarchy as an inevitable state from which there is no escape. I see patriarchy, rather, as a byproduct of entrenched behaviors that can nevertheless change through an informal education that uncovers where women have agency. The patriarchal atmosphere may be oppressive, but it is no Holocaust. Consistent with Gans’s view, there are “nuances of social differentiation” in which Western women do wield more power than men; for instance, women hold more buying power in certain consumer markets. And thankfully, many of our laws have tackled gender discrimination, affording women more opportunities for education and thus economic power. Yet our popular culture, for the most part, has lagged behind the progression and still disempowers women. Our problem is that men and women alike have allowed Pygmalion to speak unchallenged in popular culture for too long. Above all, therefore, this discussion invites women to empower themselves by seeing patriarchy for what it is—a system we don’t necessarily have to buy in to—and to dismantle its powerful lies about what women should be. I believe many women are hurting simply because they locate fault in themselves when they are actually dealing with the enormous burden of what their patriarchal culture requires of them: to be the silent, immobilized, chiseled-down Galatea, who is patriarchy’s perfect woman. We forget that she, devoid of life and a purpose of her own, was created from a wellspring of contempt. We can choose whether to follow our culture’s cues and become Galatea, but the stakes are high. Becoming her could destroy us.

CHAPTER ONE WHO ARE PYGMALION AND GALATEA TO US?

Pygmalion and Galatea Retold I see Galatea, recumbent, exquisitely silent, impeccably still. Pygmalion has rewarded his perfect beauty with a soft couch and with gem bracelets, pearl strands, and a laurel crown. What more could she want? She has his attention, too—the chisel she greets daily. Pygmalion finds live women contemptible—loudmouthed, blind to their own flaws and stupidly resistant to the perfecting touch. But Galatea is hollowed where hollowing is needed, rounded where rounding is needed, glassened by the sculptor’s loving rasp. What could be more generous? These improvements are his daily graces freely bestowed upon her. Satisfied with his finishing touches, Pygmalion leaves his beloved statue for the city. A breeze stirring in his courtyard goes unnoticed. Enamored by his creation, he will return in time. A breath flows through the window, rustling the silk veil from the statue’s face. This breeze, Venus’s will, is not the sculptor’s love. A deep nerve— within the softening ivory—twitches new muscle and skin. Galatea raises a warming arm. She can lift herself and walk! She moves forward through the door (he thought he could leave it open) and up the hillside, feeling not cold chisel, but sun on new flesh. Thigh muscle senses heft but pushes her up just the same. From atop the hill, she descends into the city where Pygmalion, King of Cyprus, rules. How can she hide from the king and still move through his world? *** After Galatea wreaks insufferable mischief in the city, Zeus, on the king’s behalf, extracts an apology from her before returning her to Pygmalion in her original state. Venus, as Zeus’s daughter, is forced to comply and to keep her distance. The god of gods decrees that on the first day of spring

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each year, Pygmalion is to prop Galatea in the marketplace as an example to all women who love to roam about on their own, rather than staying put and yielding to improvements. For generations hence, each woman is granted an honorary chisel which she must carry on her person as a reminder of the price she must pay for love.

Background The ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea has often haunted me. In the conventional myth that has passed down to us through the generations, Pygmalion, who despises human women, copes with his hatred of the sex by creating Galatea, a female form made of ivory. Caught in a cycle of artistic scrutiny and admiration for his work, Pygmalion can hardly keep himself from his statue. So daily he chisels every tiny, unwanted mark, every slight imperfection, with his skillful hands as she grows more beautiful before his eyes. The sculptor falls in love with his lifeless statue and treats it as a doll, decorating it with baubles and silks. Languishing with desire for his own creation, Pygmalion prays for Venus’s help from his well of lust and self-love. And the goddess of love rewards Pygmalion by warming the statue to life. Galatea, a virgin (how could she be otherwise?) blushes and kisses him in return and he is thrilled and fulfilled. The two marry at once. Pygmalion rules over both Cyprus and the perfect wife he has created in serene harmony (Hamilton 1969, 108-111; Bulfinch 1979, 62-64). Romantic poet Friedrich Schiller (1795-1796), the champion of heroic freedom in other works about the American Revolution, sings a paean to Pygmalion’s artistic, amorous triumph: And then, in all my ardor sharing, The silent form expression found; Returned my kiss of youthful daring, And understood my heart’s quick sound. Then lived for me the bright creation, The silver rill with song was rife; The trees, the roses shared sensation, An echo of my boundless life (trans. S.G.B. in Bulfinch 64).

In Schiller’s poem, Galatea (whom we remember Pygmalion has created according to his own specifications) “lives for” and through Pygmalion, her obedient heart keeping pace with his. She has no purpose or spirit of her own but is merely a reflection of him, an object created by him and for

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his glory, not a subject with individual will. No one seems to have a problem with this. All of nature’s minions—the trees, even—cant hymns of praise to Pygmalion, who is positioned at the center of the universe, drinking it all in. All is well for him. And so unfair to her. I never liked this myth. It takes too much for granted: Why should a man go unchallenged for believing all human women are worthy of contempt? And why should Galatea, his grandiose tribute both to his scorn for real women and to his own ego, be his everlasting reward? I looked for other versions of the story and came up with precious little variation, until I found the following sentence tucked away within the glossary of my worn Bulfinch’s Mythology: Galatea. … [A] statue made by Pygmalion, which became animated, caused much mischief, and [was] returned to her original state (907).

This may likely be an earlier version of the better-known story. But I wondered why the idea of a wandering, mischief-making Galatea was missing from the traditional tale. If Galatea had a will of her own even for a moment, I thought, the outcome would have been far different. Perhaps, awakening slowly by the divine will of Venus rather than spontaneously and miraculously to fulfill Pygmalion’s desires, she would have resented the chisel that daily gouged away at her being. Perhaps she would have left Pygmalion and the couch he made for her. And he (backed by Almighty Zeus, who represents masculinity personified) would have retaliated for sure. This seemed more realistic to me, so I began my discussion here with my recast myth based on the version in Bulfinch’s glossary. My story adds the tension that is the natural outgrowth of a Galatea with a small, though significant, will of her own. Though my ancient Cyprus is still a man’s world, where men make and enforce the rules, I have included there the possibility that Venus breathed a life force into the girl that is not necessarily the personal property and exclusive domain of Pygmalion. Then I saw my recast tale for what it has been: the story of women’s lives. Throughout history, women, like Galatea, have been most beautiful to Pygmalion— men with privilege and the institutions they dominate— when they are silent and still under his scrutinizing gaze. In order to perfect his woman, Pygmalion chisels her to size her down and polishes her flaws to make her worthy of his love while she quietly yields to him. But I believe Galatea is never perfect according to Pygmalion’s standards, because to maintain his power over her, he must forever remain her critic

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and sculptor, filing flaws away until there is little left of the original material from which she is made. And her “flaws” are the painfully familiar bugbears that women still strive to avoid in order to be more pleasing in a patriarchal, male-centered world: If a woman is too vocal, too ambitious, too physically or psychically large, she must fix herself—or else face male rejection and perhaps even public ridicule, including the disapproval of other women who have internalized and propagated the culture’s misogyny. Though my Galatea has a modicum of will, getting up from her couch and leaving the sculptor’s chisel behind her is profoundly threatening to patriarchy. This is why, perhaps, Bulfinch’s glossary entry (and thus my recast myth based on it) mention a Galatea “returned to her original state.” Once she returns to her form as a lifeless statue after asserting her will, then Pygmalion can maintain his power over her, filing flaws away until there is little left of the bone from which she is made. This is certainly the case for women in Western society who have flouted the standards of feminine perfection embodied in the statue Galatea: silence, immobility, and slenderness. As to silence, once the conservative media successfully spread its caricatures of the 1970s second-wave feminists as ugly man-haters, trivial bra-burners, and “femiNazis,” then women, stung by male disapproval, chose to muffle their voices and disown feminism. “I’m no feminist, but…” we hear young women say in the young millennium, prefacing pleas for simple respect. Yet feminism was the only force in Western culture that gained women’s right to vote as well as the laws protecting us from rape, which was once a husband’s proprietary right. I believe that young women hold their futures lightly when they simultaneously exploit these rights and reject the boldness of the historical women who illuminated patriarchy’s onerous expectations for the female life. Concerning their professional immobility relative to men, no sooner did women become comfortable with their mobilization in the public square, where they had helped with the World War II effort, than ladies’ magazines, run by all-male editorial boards, disseminated the message that women would pay for a career outside the home with a “cold dimension of loneliness” (Friedan 1963, 270). In regard to slenderness, no sooner did women gain access to the convenient, inexpensive birth control pill in 1965 than Twiggy, a British teenager, appeared on the cover of Vogue magazine to reassert a beauty standard of “weakness, asexuality, and hunger” (Wolf 1991, 184). The ubiquitous image of Twiggy, “the face of 1966,” appearing in print media and television could successfully contain women’s growing power over

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their own bodies. It asserted a patriarchal standard of beauty that was, at 32-23-32 (Twiggy’s measurements) physically incapable of reproduction and too plagued by starvation and weakness to have all that much personal power (Wolf 1991, 184). And that emaciated standard of beauty remains with women to this age. The consumer lens through which we are encouraged to see the world distorts our irregular bodies so that we regard ourselves as flawed and ugly. Now, in the young millennium, despite the political and social strides made through two waves of feminism, centuries-old oppression against women is still profoundly alive. We need look no further than current statistics concerning violence against women, economically disadvantaged women, or eating-disordered women for confirmation. Men are simply not required to pare down their lives in such disempowering ways. Saddest of all, Western women have internalized Pygmalion’s misogynist messages and chiseled themselves according to the patriarchal standard. It has always been safest for them to do so, because presenting a silent, relatively immobilized, smaller version of the female self in patriarchy—the malecentered and male-identified world we still occupy—has traditionally guaranteed women the culture’s second-place prize: the love of a man and any labile economic security that comes with it (Johnson 2005, 6-10). The culture’s first-place prize, power—with the status, prestige and earned income it generates—is disproportionately reserved for men, who have been encouraged to move and to express themselves freely in the public square.1 Fortunately, Western men have sometimes been taken to task for the Pygmalionlike view that women are inherently flawed and need fixing. Respected male literary figures have criticized the principle of a presumptuous man improving his woman to his specifications and for his glory. In a wonderful 1843 story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark,” a brilliant scientist wastes his life away in his laboratory, where he plumbs the secrets of “man’s ultimate control over nature” (300). Aylmer’s highest aspiration—perfecting nature with science—applies to his beautiful wife, Georgiana. On her cheek is a tiny flaw, a birthmark in the shape of a human hand that he tolerates early in the marriage, but that grows into an obsession bordering on a nightmare later on: “[D]earest Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from the hand of Nature…that this slightest possible defect—which we hesitate to term a defect or a beauty—shocks me, as being the visible mark of earthly imperfection.” “Shocks you! My husband!” cried Georgiana, deeply hurt; at first reddening with momentary anger, but then bursting into tears. “Then why

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Chapter One did you take me from my mother’s side! You cannot love what shocks you!” (301).

Georgiana is right. Aylmer cannot love what shocks him, and neither can she. Georgiana comes to loathe her birthmark and thus herself, having internalized Aylmer’s deadly conclusion that her flaw makes her unbearable as a wife. In reality, the “visible mark of earthly imperfection” is simply a physical reminder of the flawed, mortal state that all human beings, including Aylmer, share. Refusing to acknowledge his own faulty nature, however, Aylmer must displace it from himself by excising its sign from his wife. In the end, he does remove the birthmark with a potent elixir he has invented, but once unblemished, Georgiana dies from the procedure, as no mortal on earth can live in a state of perfection, body and soul. The story explores the overweening hubris with which man judges a fellow human being, obsessing over a superficial flaw in her while ignoring defects much deeper and more loathsome in himself: egotism and cold-hearted judgment. However, a large part of the story’s tragedy lies in Georgiana’s willingness to buy Aylmer’s reasoning that she not he, is intolerably flawed. In a more lighthearted work, the 1914 play Pygmalion, playwright George Bernard Shaw also illuminates the dynamic of an egotist perfecting a so-called flawed female for his glory. Henry Higgins, a linguistics professor, undertakes the ultimate improvement project: He will make a crude cockney flower girl into a lady. After taking Eliza Doolittle from the London streets and dusting her off in a Wimpole Street Studio, Higgins and his assistant, Colonel Pickering, use linguistics exercises and a phonograph to transform her grating mother tongue into the stately Standard East Midlands English of the British upper middle class. By the end of the play, Liza is so perfectly metamorphosed into an elegant lady that Higgins can hardly take his eyes off her. The whole process is thrilling to him, as is evident in this interchange with his mother, who sees through the men’s Pygmalionlike arrogance concerning Liza, their “Galatea”: MRS. HIGGINS: You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll. HIGGINS: Playing! The hardest job I ever tackled: make no mistake about that, mother. But you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. It’s filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul (63-64).

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Naturally, Higgins refuses to acknowledge the depth of pain that he has caused Liza in the process. He has effectively separated her from her East End family and friends, making her unfit to return to them while the gulf between herself and the English upper middle class is still firmly fixed. Before leaving the professor to seek her admirer, Freddy, a commoner, she gives Higgins a piece of her mind: LIZA (desperate): Oh, you are a cruel tyrant. I can’t talk to you; you turn everything against me: I’m always in the wrong. But you know very well all the time that you’re nothing but a bully. You know I can’t go back to the gutter, as you call it, and that I have no real friends in the world but you and the Colonel. You know well I couldn’t bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it’s wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could. You think I must go back to Wimpole Street because I have nowhere else to go but father’s. But don’t you be too sure that you have me under your feet to be trampled to and talked down. I’ll marry Freddy, I will, as soon as I’m able to support him (102).

In Liza, Shaw portrays a realistic Galatea with more than a modicum of will. In this way, she differs from Hawthorne’s Georgiana, who internalizes her husband’s disdain for her birthmark and quietly submits to her perfecting process. After Liza’s linguistic “flaws” are polished according to Higgins’s standard, she becomes furious when she realizes that the whole improvement project has benefited Higgins at her expense. In this sense, because Liza questions her creator long enough to walk away from him, George Bernard Shaw’s play resembles the alternate, lesser known version of the myth that I found tucked away in Bulfinch’s glossary and that I used to compose my recast version of the story. Shaw’s play is a fair portrayal of how a real-life Galatea might feel about her “sculptor,” so to speak. However, when Shaw’s play was adapted by W.P. Lipscomb and Cecil Lewis into their script for the 1938 film version of Pygmalion, starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, the tacked-on happy ending resembled the traditional Pygmalion tale, where the creation falls in love with its lovelorn creator. Eliza dumps Freddy for Higgins. Shaw was furious after seeing the film. He railed against Hollywood’s “‘ready-made, happy endings to misfit all stories’” (Dennison and Shaw in Shaw, 107). When asked by a Hollywood reporter why he allowed this new ending, Shaw retorted, I did not. I cannot conceive a less happy ending to the story of “Pygmalion,” than a love affair between the middle-aged, middle-class professor, a confirmed old bachelor with a mother-fixation, and a flower

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Chapter One girl of 18. Nothing of the kind was emphasized in my scenario, where I emphasized the escape of Eliza from the tyranny of Higgins by a quite natural love affair with Freddy (108).

Nevertheless, the alternate ending that Shaw loathed remained intact for both musical adaptations, called My Fair Lady, produced for the stage in 1956 and made into a film in 1964.2 Rewritten by lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and set to music by Frederick Loewe, the revised script, like the 1938 film, ends after Eliza decides that the commoner Freddy is not for her, since she is now a lady, not an East End flower girl. Eliza therefore returns to the lovesick Higgins: ELIZA (gently): I washed my face and hands before I come, I did. (HIGGINS straightens up. If he could but let himself, his face would radiate unmistakable relief and joy. If he could but let himself, he would run to her. Instead, he leans back with a contented sigh, pushing his hat forward till it almost covers his face.) HIGGINS (softly): Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers? (There are tears in ELIZA’S eyes. She understands.) The curtain falls slowly (Lerner 1964, 219).

In this gooey revision of Shaw’s original script, patriarchy’s status quo reasserts itself—as it often does in Hollywood productions. A much more docile Eliza falls into the gentle “understanding” that is the key to propping up Higgins’s ego. She must return his love out of gratitude for his improving, even creating her. Her life must serve as a tribute to his artistry and genius. In this so-called “happy” ending, we can almost hear echoes of Schiller, who, referring to the traditional version of the tale in his poem, wrote that when the statue Galatea came to life to return Pygmalion’s love, she “Returned my kiss of youthful daring, /And understood my heart’s quick sound” (emphasis mine, see p. 2). It’s as if Eliza cried, “Yes, my darling, you did it, and I love you for it!” on the sidelines while Higgins gleefully crooned, “By George! I really did it! I did it! I said I’d make a woman/And indeed I did!” at the end of the film (214). One may as well imagine Georgiana, free of her birthmark at last, thanks to her husband, embracing him in joy and everlasting gratitude, leaving his toxic ego intact. There is no Galatea “wreaking havoc” in this script. Unlike Shaw’s refreshingly mutinous Eliza, this recreated doll has no will or purpose of her own. She serves to prop up her male creator. My

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Fair Lady’s ending, to which Hollywood producers thoughtlessly defaulted because its comfortable familiarity would sell more tickets, is the dangerous, stifling script women have been handed through the ages. And we should fight it for all we’re worth. In the young millennium, we women still live by Henry Higgins’s (or Pygmalion’s) objective to improve us, though we are not necessarily conscious of its scope or disempowering effects. If women feel that we are never good enough as is, we may not realize that it is because we are targets of a patriarchal culture that makes us feel flawed, needing improvements that we should embrace and for which we should be grateful. These messages are omnipresent, appearing in advertisements for cosmetics or weight control products, parenting or housekeeping manuals, Internet advice blogs, television “makeovers,” and self-help books. At every turn, our culture tells women that we need to look better by making ourselves up and driving our weight down; that we must parent and keep house better; that we must revise traits that surely make us unpleasing to others. Our culture also tells men that they should improve, but not in a way that assumes a priori flaw, a belief consistent with the Pygmalion and Galatea myth. A serious look at the myriad ads for anti-aging creams or for weight loss products tells us that they are disproportionately aimed at women, who are assumed to exist in a defective state, needing desperately to be more acceptable to others. Interestingly, as in the birthmark removal program imposed on Georgiana by Aylmer, such improvement campaigns usually benefit men, not women, since the corporations and advertising firms that market these products are, for the most part, run by male executives who profit from the insecurities they can insidiously sow in women. In the most extreme cases, the beauty treatments—especially surgical procedures—may even harm or kill women, as Aylmer’s birthmark-removal elixir killed Georgiana.

Pygmalion At Home Yet Pygmalion’s message that women are inherently flawed is not found solely in the public forum, outside the private realm. In their homes, too many women are cruelly barraged by the message that they are never good enough as to reveal the “private” crisis of domestic abuse for what it really is: an American institution. Cultures are comprised of individuals, who carry their private attitudes into the public sphere, where they can combine with political power then flow back into the home again. I have

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come to see the division we have made between the “private” and “public” realms as highly contrived and artificial. The questionable division between a public sphere that has status and importance and a private sphere in the home that has far less significance and regard is a socially constructed paradigm. This ideology trivializes and discredits women’s experiences based on what it sees as the low-status environment, the home, where women live much of that experience (Young 1999, et al). Feminist theorists have long noted that the “personal is political” (Hanisch 2006). By this, they mean that experiences that seem highly personal because they are not in public view—verbal and physical abuse, rape, sexual harassment, lack of money, unremitting and uncompensated work in the home— are often the result of skewed, unjust systems in society. Furthermore, private experiences tend to be discredited as that which does not comprise real or trustworthy knowledge, since we look for experts out in the world to tell us what is true. Though social media could easily render our private experiences “viral,” abused women who live with eroded self-regard as well as the threat of retaliation will often blame themselves for such problems, doubting what their own experiences tell them is really happening in their lives. But if we listen carefully to the stories of women around us, we hear a collective experience, regardless of its venue in private places. Nevertheless, breaking silence about this collective experience can seem inappropriate, audacious, and even dangerous. We are afraid of accusations of “male bashing.” We are afraid of sounding “shrill,” as patriarchy tends to describe female voices that are not docile, compliant, or self-doubting, like Galatea. For these reasons I have chosen to break my own silence regarding how I arrived at this study of a myth so resonant and yet so painfully archetypal in the lives of women. The Pygmalion and Galatea myth haunted me, in large part, because I was a “Galatea” too. In an earlier part of my life, my then-partner assumed a certain masculine prerogative to perfect and fix me, and I have no doubt that his attitude in the home was inspired by the Pygmalionlike contempt for women in our culture at large. When I was younger, I would have kept the story to myself, fearful that it would have eroded my credibility or made me look as though I had, in Virginia Woolf’s words, an “axe to grind” (A Room of One’s Own preface). But because the personal is political, and because women’s stories heal one another, I have included it here with new faith in its importance for other women.

Who are Pygmalion and Galatea To Us?

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My Pygmalion and Galatea Story In private, Carl, my former partner, used language with a potent rhetorical effect of its own. His objective was often to convince me that there really was something wrong with me. In the spring of 1990, we were driving to our apartment in Central Connecticut after a dinner at his divinity school in New York, where he was preparing for ordination in a mainline protestant church. I had irritated him—certainly not for the first time. It had become a pattern in our relationship for me to sit docilely during these lectures about my flaws, because if I did not, Carl’s’ criticisms would “explode like torpedoes” inside him and I’d eventually have a much bigger price to pay than a tongue-lashing. That price almost came at the end of our relationship—more about that later. In this particular instance, according to Carl, it was time for me to work on my awkward language, which contrasted too starkly with the discourse he used with his ivy-league colleagues. I peppered my sentences with juvenile, effusive words like “so” and “just,” he said. This deeply embarrassed him. “‘I just learn soooo much about theology and church history now that he’s in this program!’” he mocked, in lilting, hyperfeminine tones that reminded me of Marilyn Monroe. “Are all high school English teachers soooo inarticulate?” he jeered. In the midst of my struggle teaching high school students full time in a challenging school system, this barb hurt. Though Carl had once told me that my teaching job perfectly suited my abilities and though it paid our bills while he attended graduate school, he had no respect for the “lowstatus” work. His disdain for my language was bad enough, but his contempt for my job wounded me, though I knew better than to resist him. When I had last fought back during another harangue in the car, he had come within four feet of hitting a dingy gray dog stumbling across the road. At that point, the act seemed like a statement. This time, Carl was driving again, and if I provoked him and we crashed, I knew he would find a way to convince me it was my fault. I would lose any battle with him just the same. He was that good at discrediting me. Still, a question burned in me. Summoning the deference required for him to bear it was excruciating: “Why do you devalue me?” I asked. From his rolling eyes, I knew I had made another incompetent word choice and felt instant regret. “Devalue?” he landed on it. “How can you say devalue? It’s a stupid word. I cannot devalue you when you come to a graduate dinner with an inherent lack of intellectual zest in the first place. Don’t say I devalue you when you have little of value to offer a theological conversation to begin

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with. Instead, acknowledge that when you lack the mental rigor and gravitas that you find at a seminary, you embarrass yourself unless you keep quiet. When we’re there, smile more and talk less. It’s more attractive and mysterious.” I cannot remember much more about that car ride. When I look back on the failed relationship (thankful that there were no children for him to destroy with his contempt), I simply recall a sensation of being eroded by him, of being whittled down and muffled, perpetually flawed in the presence of his accusing voice. The price I paid for harmony was my obedience to his agenda for my improvement. Perhaps to many, Carl’s assessment of me sounds outrageous and unreasonable, easily dismissed; and perhaps I sound hopelessly weak, naïve and foolish for believing him. But he had trained me well. The partnership had started off glorious and strong. Everyone we knew respected Carl for his keen intellect, spirituality, and “compassion.” Carl began our life at home as the model of respect and consideration. But through the years he became gradually more irritable and demanding, leading me to believe that if I simply changed to please him, all would be well. By the time I reached my late twenties, after several years of living within the ever more stifling den of his reality, I had lost sight of who I was outside his dim view. And his view of me was remarkably sophisticated. Through his rigorous studies of Freud, Jung, transactional analysis, and various New Age schemata that left me dizzy as he explained them, he had me all figured out. I was inherently flawed, and as my natural physical, intellectual and spiritual superior, he was entitled to fix me. In Carl’s thinking, two things had empowered him to do so: First, his divinity studies at an ivy-league seminary gave him incisive vision into my spiritual and mental shortcomings. Second, he was a man, and a certain masculine prerogative empowered him to dismiss my ideas as irrational, emotional female arguments with everlastingly trivial concerns (our relationship; the messes he left in the apartment and refused to pick up; my “low-status” high school teaching career, which contrasted sharply with his brilliant future as an ordained theologian and professor of religion). Like Galatea, I needed Carl’s chiseling touch to perfect me and make me acceptable. Perhaps many would fault me for staying with Carl as long as I did, but his profound rejection of me when I rebelled from his “corrections” was painful enough to send me, begging for renewed approval, back to him. Even worse, his detailed descriptions of my flaws had the ring of truth to them, as if there must be something deeply wrong, something profoundly

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unacceptable about me. And the soothing, albeit dubious gratification I felt whenever I confessed my defects and repented to please him hooked me for years. After eight of those years, his approval became hollow and even repulsive, and when he knew this and ultimately threatened me with his fists, I left him. The labyrinth of threats and recriminations that I groped through before reaching a clearer reality is too unwieldy to describe here. I suppose one could see my experience as utterly unique—that of an isolated woman in a strange sort of emotional thralldom with a twisted man. There must be numerous relationships with milder forms of the Pygmalion-Galatea dynamic that do not involve emotional abuse, and surely many “Pygmalions” are women who set about to improve their male partners. But there are far more women than men on the receiving end of insidious contempt. Contempt, after all, is Pygmalion’s default stance toward all women. It was as though Carl could pull ready-made anti-female arguments from the air. His comments about women’s irrationality, the triviality of women’s concerns, and the problematic nature of women’s bodies seemed fully-formed, as if he drew from a misogyny that existed long before our particular struggle began and that justified his superiority. In the healing years since that relationship, I have wished to explore the contempt that not only once held me spellbound with an (ostensibly) powerful man, but whose influence runs through our patriarchal society at large, where it silences women and chisels them down to size, though perhaps in more subtle ways than I experienced. I believe my own memories as a “Galatea” reflect the lives of many women who have been taught to blame themselves for their individual “defects” instead of understanding the context—the patriarchal culture—within which they have been so shamed, muffled, and whittled to become smaller than they should be. And though it’s true that too many women in contemporary America have been “messed over” by a world that values what is male more than what is female, men should nevertheless be invited to join such a discussion (Hanisch 2006). Feminist thinkers have often been wrongly labeled “man-haters.” In contrast, rather than hating men, feminists should recognize that too many men have been, in Malcolm X’s words, “hoodwinked” and “bamboozled” to regard women in unhealthy ways. Through its incessant media violence against women and its dehumanizing pornography, our culture teaches men that a life of control over women is acceptable. But relationships based on control are warped and toxic, and in the long run, such a belief system corrupts and harms men too.

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Control is an efficient isolator, and the one who dominates over another is perpetually separated from her. When men value this domination of women, failing to recognize exactly what the culture’s misogyny has cost men and their important relationships, anti-woman beliefs coalesce and become normalized. This normalization results in the cultural atmosphere we know as patriarchy.

CHAPTER TWO THE REALITY OF PATRIARCHY

Patriarchy and its contempt for women is not a “personality flaw” in individual men, but a matrix of feelings, beliefs and behaviors toward women that exists all around us and that affects us in our daily interactions, while it keeps women in their place as second-class citizens. In The Gender Knot, sociologist Allan G. Johnson (2005) argues that patriarchy flows all around and through us, a sea where we, like fish, “can’t breathe without passing it through our gills” (64). According to Johnson, patriarchy is a system in which we men and women adopt a set of default behaviors inherited from the generations before us and pass them down to our children. I would argue that if patriarchy is a sea, then it takes the form of swells, or waves, that frequently flood and engulf women, obscure our view of the air, and drive us underwater as we struggle to maintain purchase on solid ground. We speak of feminism itself in terms of waves, as in “first wave” and “second wave,” meaning a rising up of women who ride on collective social power. I believe patriarchy still answers that progression with its own smaller but more frequent “waves,” which most women may face daily, depending upon their circumstances, but that are formed from default behaviors which create a cultural atmosphere that continues to disempower women. Called “paths of least resistance” by Johnson, these default behaviors are our daily complicities—our nods, smiles, and silences—toward incidents of gender oppression. An example of a path of least resistance could be a self-protective refusal to protest a sexist joke or other language or media that demeans women. Another example could be a habit, such as men routinely enjoying their leisure while women gravitate to the kitchen to prepare food for and clean up after the men. Men fall into a path of least resistance when they habitually take over the lead in public arenas, such as business or political meetings and classrooms, where males tend to dominate the conversation and thus reserve the highest positions and highest salaries for themselves (James and Drakich 2005 in Holmes, 1-2). And we fall into a path of least resistance when we assume that women,

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not men, should be the default caregivers of children and elderly parents, roles that are, for the most part, sacrificial, uncompensated, and timeconsuming, effectively keeping women in their place socio-economically. Certainly we see exceptions to these patterns, as in the case of the full-time stay-at-home male caregiver. But rarely does he take on such an untraditional role without resistance from others. Daily he negotiates interactions with people who feel uncomfortable with his position.

Pygmalion Within: “Psychological Patriarchy” and Contempt for Women The contempt for the feminine in patriarchal culture exists in patriarchy’s problematic, artificial division between favorable “masculine” qualities— strength, dominance, rationality, independence—and inferior, even disagreeable “feminine” qualities: weakness, submissiveness, emotion, sensitivity, and dependency (Real 2002, 78). In How Can I Get Through to You?: Reconnecting Men and Women, psychologist Terrence Real has pioneered the idea of “psychological patriarchy,” in which the cultural preference for masculine traits and its devaluation of the feminine plays out in the individual male psyche, wreaking havoc in relationships. From their earliest years, boys are taught to “man up” against the world and to disown feminine vulnerabilities. In the home and in the schoolyard, the devaluation of femininity in boys is brutal and incessant. Real recounts a grown “sensitive child,” Michael, whose father had forcibly separated him from his mother during a cuddling session on the couch when the boy was just eight (108). Michael’s father linked the maternal embraces to sexual indiscretion in a way that confused and traumatized the boy: “‘Time to stop petting that boy, Laurie’” (108). In obedience to her husband, Laurie pulled away from her son, knowing the price she would pay in accusations, arguments, and threats if she resisted. The episode is one of the many “masculinization” scenarios Real provides, in which boys learn that it is shameful to be emotional or dependent (in this case, on one’s mother). I lived in the midst of that masculine contempt for vulnerable emotions. I have painful memories of my own inability to connect with Carl, who perpetually needed to be the strong, dominant party in the relationship. One time, when Carl was quite ill with the flu, I thoughtlessly stroked his feverish forehead. “I know what you’re doing, and you need to stop,” he said. His bitterness stunned me—what could be so sinister about comforting him when he was sick?

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“What do you mean, you know what I’m doing?” My questions always sounded so banal and trite. Routinely, I regretted my words. “You know this is a one-up, one-down game for you,” he said. “You’re ‘one-up,’ because you’re well. And I’m ‘one-down,’ because I’m sick. As if you’re not enjoying this.” Here was a marvel: a gesture of tenderness as a manipulative, sinister act. But Carl was balking more at the fact that sickness could place him in a “one-down” position where he would be dependent, vulnerable, and weak, and his manhood could not abide such evidence of femininity. It is a wonder that so many men feel they can organize their lives this way—in everlasting control of others, despite sickness, human fallibility, heartbreak, aging, and death. But I was the last person Carl would consult for a more rounded world view. Scholarly research into schoolyard bullying patterns in boys, like Real’s claims and my own experiences with Carl, affirms that feminine traits are severely devalued in patriarchal culture. Norwegian psychology professor and the founding father of bully/victim research, Dan Olweus (1993), has noted that lack of muscle strength, physical vulnerability, high voices, and emotional sensitivity (feminine qualities) in boys make them targets of playground bullies, who are, more often than not, alpha males, “physically stronger than their classmates and their victims in particular [and] physically effective in play activities, sports, and fights” (59). Furthermore, bullying the effeminate boys brings a “benefit component” with it, in that bullies enjoy status and prestige among schoolchildren, as well as the perks they extort from their victims: candy, food, cigarettes, and homework completion (35). This punishment-reward system—tormenting those who are effeminate and rewarding those who are aggressive, dominant, and masculine with status and prestige—makes patriarchy into what Real calls a “psychic landscape” in the mind of the individual man. He comes not only to disown femininity, but to despise it (79). In that psychic landscape appears an imaginary page with a line drawn down the center: “On the ‘masculine’ side lie such qualities as strength, logic, aggression, antidependence, goal orientation, and insensitivity. On the ‘feminine’ side lie such qualities as weakness, emotion, yielding, dependence, process orientation, and oversensitivity” (73). Neither of the two sides is healthy, asserts Real, echoing the views of several experts who maintain that secure gender identity reflects the ability to embrace both masculine and feminine traits in the self, with the skill to discern which type of trait is appropriate for the situation at hand (74). However, because most young boys are raised primarily by their mothers, they must “piece together”

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masculine identity from remote sources, and thus masculinity becomes an abstract concept, more related to what one is not than to what one is: “[D]on’t act feminine, and don’t be gay” are the two fundamental codes of masculinity our culture imposes on males (Guarino quoted in Dunne 2012, G2-G3). To be manly in our culture means not being like a woman. This means that a man must often deny —even despise—feminine traits in himself. His feminine qualities are instead projected onto his female partner in what Terrence Real calls a “dance of contempt” (84). Though vulnerability, neediness, and weakness are common to us all, many men disown these traits in themselves and project them onto women, whom they shame for them, all the while embracing a heady grandiosity and the sense of being one up over women. This dynamic creates a “power over” model of relationship based on control, in which men must protect their dominance over women by controlling them lest men be “one-downed”—and Carl had used this very phrase with me (Miller in Real, 81). Because many men must access a disowned and often frightening set of emotions in order to be with rather than stand over a woman, the one-upmanship over her remains, and she, bewildered as to how to reach her partner, is at a disadvantage. In my case, it was impossible to be with Carl as his equal. Even my molecule of power—a token gesture of comfort when he was sick—destabilized and threatened him. I had to stop or face the consequences. In patriarchal society, control is an organizing principle of men’s lives. It is essential to men’s sense of “self, well-being, worth, and safety” (Johnson 14). In Pygmalion’s case, the sculptor controls everything about Galatea. He is her creator, so she exists merely as a reflection of his creative genius, not as a person with gifts or abilities in her own right. He is also her owner-captor, with absolute power over her, and this power is very gratifying to him. Pygmalion is perpetually “one-up” over Galatea. And because Galatea is archetypically the closest thing to man’s perfect woman, we come to see her “one-down” status as nearly inescapable; it is a way of life for her that preserves harmony with Pygmalion at a profound expense to herself.

Patriarchy and Abuse The facts concerning women and men in abusive relationships support the power over model of men’s behavior toward women as a common modus operandi in relationships. Though both women and men can be verbally abusive, experts agree that women are much more likely than men

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to be targets of demeaning, degrading, emotionally abusive behavior. According to a Canadian study, 81 percent of college men reported that they had psychologically abused their female partners in dating relationships (NDVH 2007). A 2010 National Institute of Justice report states that over 90 percent of “systematic, persistent and injurious” violence in the home is perpetrated by men (nij.gov). Women are five to eight times more likely to be victimized either verbally or physically by men than are men by women (NDVH 2007). Approximately one in four women in the United States has been emotionally or physically abused by a husband or boyfriend during her lifetime (DVRC 2012). Virtually all research on domestic abuse defines the abuse as a means to maintain power and control over a partner, who statistically, is more often than not a woman abused by a man (DVRC 2012). It is not surprising, then, given Terrence Real’s theories of psychological patriarchy and its contempt for all things feminine, that abusive men often express Pygmalionlike disgust for their “flawed” or “defective” women. A 2006 study published in the psychology journal Violence and Victims found that a common theme in men’s name-calling of women centered on denigrating their worth and intelligence, questioning their value as human beings (Goetz and Shackelford). We may recall that in the myth, Pygmalion found all human women worthy of contempt. It is no surprise either that the psychologists also found that the men who questioned their partners’ inherent worth and mental capacity were the most likely to resort to controlling behaviors and violence in their relationships (Goetz and Shackelford). In one particularly painful memory of my own, without telling me beforehand, Carl had bought an exorbitant plane ticket to fly a relative overseas to America so he could visit us. I was to accept this move without question, despite the fact that we were already in debt and I was paying for the ticket, since we were living off my teaching salary while Carl finished graduate school. To compound the insult, Carl assumed I would “naturally” wish to honor his guest by preparing meals and cleaning up the apartment. Of course I was furious at the disrespect, not to mention the crushing blow to our finances (eventually, a credit card company threatened us with litigation over this very bill). He pounded his verbal gavel at me to close this argument for good: “You’re nothing but a dizzy little bitch.” For years, comments like this ate away at my thoughts; why did my partner think I was so stupid and contemptible? Why did he assume a right to such cruelty? I had always seen the circumstances as our peculiar problem, as if Carl and I had individual, isolated hang-ups.

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However, from the findings on the nature and prevalence of abuse, we may conclude that men’s devaluation of women is widespread in society, rather than an individual experience in the life of each separate woman. In his extensive study of the dynamics of patriarchy, Allan G. Johnson (2005) discusses how patriarchal oppression—the domination, discrediting and trivializing of women—runs like a “seamless field” from society at large into private life, where conflict is often mistaken for “personal problems caused by faulty personalities, bad childhoods, or some bit of bad luck that could happen to anyone” (The Gender Knot 163). Though in Western culture we have come to conceptualize a false barrier between public and private life, the force of patriarchy runs undetected through both “realms,” which are not separate at all: “What is harder to see is how systems of patriarchy promote individual troubles and connect them to one another” (163). When a man discredits his female partner’s viewpoints or priorities at home, telling her in private that she is “hysterical,” “talking crazy,” “sexually frustrated,” or “it must be that time of the month,” he actually reflects the collective devaluation of women in our patriarchal system at large and exercises over her the dominant position society has afforded him as a male. We are used to discussing sexism as “out there” in the public sphere, but many women experience sexism in the privacy of their homes. It is this private venue for the workings of patriarchy that makes its force invisible to men, who accept their power over model of relations with women as the status quo. “If it ain’t broke for me, why fix it?” many men reason, because a comfortable status quo makes them unaware of how patriarchy privileges them in their daily lives at the expense of women. In response, women must develop the awareness that their experience is a collective one, widespread in a society where patriarchy’s power is, as Allan G. Johnson describes throughout The Gender Knot, maintained by its invisibility. “I’m not having a problem. It must be your problem,” Carl would say to me. “In my opinion, this is an A-plus union, but you think it deserves a D minus. Maybe you have a distorted view of reality.” In Carl’s view, if all was going well for him in the relationship, he was not at fault; my perceptions and emotions were. An invisible, seamless field of patriarchal assumptions about women flowing around and within Carl had enabled him to see our lives this way. Compounding our denial of the damaging forces of patriarchy is an economic legacy we have had since the Industrial Age. Industrial capitalism encouraged middle class white men to create wealth in public venues outside the home, such as the factory, the railroad yard, or the

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bank. Women, whose primary roles were reproductive and domestic, were kept from the public sphere, which was associated with masculine status, creativity, industry, and prestige. (Even now, substantial barriers keep women, for the most part, on the margins of our wealthiest institutions.) Not surprisingly, the domestic realm (with the women in it) was relegated much lower status and associated with the “softer,” sacrificial “non-work” of child and home care, which, of course, are mostly unpaid or underpaid, in the case of domestic workers. Because patriarchy has never taken the domestic realm quite as seriously as it has the public sphere, women’s experiences are seen as less valuable than those of men and are easily trivialized or discredited, despite the fact that women’s “support” work at home makes men’s status in the public realm possible. Above all, the most cruel endowment patriarchy has given women is the self-doubt we often feel as a result of internalizing misogynist messages from male partners and from the culture at large. For instance, when an abused woman feels so isolated—despite the fact that we are legion—there is a brainwashing effect to her male partner’s degrading messages about her. Women come to believe their partners’ messages that their personal defects are to blame for the abuse. This was certainly true in my experience, in which the abuse was primarily psychological throughout most of the relationship. In her book No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women, Estelle Freedman (2002) notes that many abused women—particularly homemakers with no independent means of financial support—come to internalize the blame for their husbands’ abuse (294). In my own case, though I had a job, I was still convinced that an improved version of myself would stop the torrent of criticism. I recall Carl’s mother, whose legacy of abuse I had inherited, saying long after her divorce from Carl’s father, “I felt that if I could have only pleased him more, he would have respected me.” Harmony and love were the carrots that Carl continuously held before me, while I held out hope that fixing one more peccadillo—modifying one more annoying behavior—would finally secure his love. Carl wasn’t the only one who, like Pygmalion, “chipped away” at me. I did it to myself. And when a flaw of mine annoyed or displeased him, I felt enormously guilty. His misogyny had transferred to me a sort of self-hatred, which is very convenient for men in their perpetuation of patriarchy. Because I was willing to blame myself as the “flawed” partner, Carl had no responsibility to change, and his control over me went unchallenged for years. Women’s guilt is a related explanation as to why Galatea has not left the building. In The Myth of Women’s Masochism, clinical and research

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psychologist Paula J. Caplan (1993) discusses the potent grip of guilt in the minds of wives who have internalized as young girls the culture’s message that they must suffer unhappiness in order to preserve their men’s feelings, for which they are somehow morally responsible (94). Nearly twenty years after the publication of Caplan’s book, social analysts in the young millennium still detect a wide guilt gap between men and women, especially concerning responsibility over the well-being of others that women routinely bear (Daly 2006). It’s as if the man’s feelings, being disassociated from him, are the special province of the woman in his life, who must read his mind and guarantee his comfort and happiness. If he’s unhappy it’s her fault—and her problem to fix. Educational psychologist Carol Gilligan (1992) reinforces this idea of the vice-grip guilt has over women in her studies of adolescent girls, whom she maintains all but lose their voices by age thirteen, by which time they have learned that being likeable, docile, nice and good is preferable to making waves and thereby losing relationships with others.3 This tendency in girls and women to muffle their opinions and instead adopt the “play nice” stance that the culture has taught them puts them at a marked disadvantage when they have conflicts with men.

It’s Not About Women After All Compounding women’s relative lack of resistance to men is the way men often posture themselves against women in order to gain status and respect among fellow men. In his book The End of Manhood: Parables on Sex and Selfhood, feminist writer John Stoltenberg (2000) observes the masculine codes of behavior that guarantee “Manhood” status when a man fears the humiliation of other men who might judge him as a “wimp” or “pussy” for capitulating to the needs of his wife or girlfriend. One sure way to bolster one’s own masculinity is to show his female partner “who’s boss” so as not to lose rank with other men (40). Another way is to sell women out—that is, to publicly degrade women to other men. Indeed, according to Stoltenberg, a sort of “secret social truce” among heterosexual men in groups inspires them to demean what is unmanly— women and gay men—in order to keep the shaming eye from themselves (xxxiv). This social behavior implies that patriarchy may have even more to do with men’s fear of other men than it does with men’s pure contempt for the feminine. Allan G. Johnson (2005) supports Stoltenberg’s observations as he discusses how men’s competition for status, control, and respect charges male relationships with fear of judgment and humiliation. If a man

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does not pass muster with other men because he is less rich, powerful, or in control of himself and others than they are, he can still feel a sense of compensation with women, over whom he can assert male privilege, since our culture has guaranteed his “better than” status relative to females (The Gender Knot 62-63). Thus the oppression he feels from other men (such as men at work, where he cannot voice his opinions without the risk of being demoted or dismissed) is relieved by his dominance of women, including his own female partner, in many cases (63). For her part, she must anticipate his needs, despite his inability to own them. Her job is to absorb the discomfort and vulnerability he feels, so that he need not himself acknowledge these emotions. Johnson articulates the role expected of her when she becomes the unwitting target of the humiliation and fear the man so desperately must disassociate from himself: On a deeper level, she is supposed to make him feel whole again, to restore what he loses through his disconnected pursuit of control, to calm his fears—all, of course, without requiring him to face the very things about himself and patriarchy that produce the damage in the first place. When women fail to “make it better”—and they are bound to fail eventually—they are also supposed to be there to accept the blame and receive men’s disappointment, fear, and rage. Men who feel unloved, incomplete, disconnected, battered, humiliated, frightened and anxious routinely blame women for not supporting or loving them enough. It’s a responsibility women are encouraged to accept, which is one reason so many victims of domestic violence stay with the men who abuse them (63).

The cultural expectations for men (that they are in control of women) and for women (that they not complain to men or fight back) can create an extreme power discrepancy between the two. In abusive relationships, men end up harnessing most of the power, especially since women’s priorities (feelings, relationships, connection rather than control over others) are routinely thwarted and devalued. If a woman does not fight back or resist a domineering male partner who blames her for his fear and disappointment, as Gilligan has observed that she generally does not, then how does she cope with such a severe imbalance of power in the relationship? Stoltenberg maintains that she has few options with the partner who must aggressively affirm his “Manhood” against her need to be heard. Many of her options are either passive: “make a wish” that it will get better or “put on a happy face” despite it all. Or they involve her, like Galatea, being eroded, diminished, and chiseled down. Such options include “making room”: “Make yourself smaller so he can be big,” and

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“making over”: “Change your life so he will find you more interesting and less repellant. Change your appearance” by losing weight, no doubt—by filing the female body down (175). Like docile Galatea, in order to make their men happy again, women can submit to one improvement campaign after another until there is little of the original self left standing. Even if a woman were to resist Pygmalion’s chisel, for the most part, she would face a bleak economic reality if her man left her. Real sums up the reason why: Some husbands, faced with a partner they experience as too angry, or too demanding, or just “too much” in a thousand small ways, will, just as women worry, simply back out, finding someone younger, prettier, and more compliant. And when husbands do leave, research indicates, their standard of living tends to rise slightly, while that of the woman and children can drop as much as an average of 60 percent. There is a stark political reality to women’s silence (50)

A woman made single in this way often faces the devastating responsibility of caring for her children with far less parental and economic support than she would have had if she had stayed with her male partner. Modifying herself to please him so that he will not leave her for someone else is not masochistic, then, as some have charged, but an economic and social necessity. Finally, even if Galatea did “leave the building,” so to speak, she might risk being destroyed or seriously harmed. If a male partner is abusive—as is often the case, since one-third of American women have been emotionally or physically abused by men—his wife or girlfriend risks sexual attack, beating, or death when she chooses to leave (Freedman 2002, 283). Experts agree that the most dangerous time for a woman in an emotionally or physically abusive relationship is when she attempts to leave. Rape or the threat of death cast a pall of fear over women planning their exit strategies. Abused women are much more likely to be murdered after they leave their abusers (White and White 2005). In my own case, one day during a heated argument at the end of the relationship, Carl—all six feet, five inches and 240 pounds of him—held his fist to my face. He knew I was leaving, but I simply couldn’t muster the abject sense of loss he thought I should feel, and this enraged him. He cornered me in the bedroom and though I felt very small, drained of strength and absorbed by his domineering energy, by some miracle the right words came to me. I told him, “You’re strong enough and tall enough to do whatever you want to me—even kill me…But afterwards, you’ll have to live the rest of your life with the hypocrite who did so.”

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At these words he dropped his fist, likely because they reminded him that he would soon meet with the committee of church lay leaders who would determine his candidacy for ordination in the ministry. (Eventually, with no input from me, the church’s governing body did not accept him as a ministerial candidate after all. His self-congratulatory remarks about his divorce connecting him with divorced parishioners rang hollow to them. They preferred a more honest sense of brokenness in a priest.) My words possibly saved my life, but too many women have paid a lethal price for their defiance. As compelling as our current stories are, recounting contemporary abusive, patriarchal personal relationships like mine where the man wields most of the power is only part of the picture. The silent and whittled image of the ideal female to which patriarchy has demanded women conform has not been created in a vacuum; she has instead survived intact in our culture from our history. And despite the tremendous strides made by two waves of feminism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, our culture still punishes women who evade the patriarchal ideal—even according to the values of a much earlier time.

CHAPTER THREE GALATEA’S SILENCE

Pygmalion Without, Then and Now If we travel back through our history, we can hear the voice of the Pygmalion of old and compare it to the patriarchal messages women receive in our homes and in our culture today. We should constantly rethink that artificial division between private and public life in order to understand that our experiences are collective—shared by many, if not most women—and that they have cultural and historical contexts. Pygmalion’s old rhetoric still pervades our culture, convincing women that they are inherently flawed and that they need silencing and improvement in order to be accepted and loved. Pygmalion’s first requirement of Galatea is her silence, which ensures his status over her and which keeps him firmly in charge, calling the shots. A realistic look at our major corporations or governing bodies in which males far outnumber females in leadership roles tells us that women still take a back seat, keeping their silence in relation to men. The relative silence that we still maintain (or at least, a quiet compliance that hesitates to challenge men) has been imposed on American women for centuries. As we will see, the expectation that we keep our silence has not really changed all that much since Victorian times, when women’s education and popular literature stifled and limited them. Therefore, we need to listen carefully to our great grandmothers who made their way to the public platform when the deluge of patriarchal contempt threatened to drown out their voices. They have precious lessons to teach modern women, both in their brilliant rhetorical techniques and in their courage when standing against anti-woman sentiment that ranged from affectionate condescension to misogynist hatred.

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It’s Not What You Say But What You Are: Having No Right to Speak When poet Emily Dickinson wrote that Victorian wives lived behind a “soft Eclipse,” shielding themselves from “freckled Human Nature,” she was probing the denial of women who pleased patriarchy with their demure compliance to its standards but who lost themselves in the process. Poems such as “I’m ‘wife’—I’ve finished that” and “What Soft—Cherubic Creatures—” recall how a stifling Victorian education and the saccharine rhetoric in popular women’s magazines, gift books and sermons, like Pygmalion himself, chiseled women’s minds down to feminine perfection. Most of these forms of rhetoric used ad hominem reasoning. Unfortunately, there is no standardized feminine equivalent for this term that means, translated from Latin, “to the man.” Therefore language, itself male-centered, cheats women of proper nomenclature, since the term ad feminem sounds trivial and contrived. But I use the term ad hominem just the same, since it is the standard term for arguments that focus on the personal flaws of the speaker in order to devalue his or her ideas, much as my ex-partner’s statements concerning my “essential” shortcomings did. In classic debate as well as in writing instruction, ad hominem reasoning is discouraged, because it forces the listener into irrational territory where an argument, no matter how reasonable, is discredited or ignored not because of its content but because of the person who delivered it (Hacker 2002, 515). Ad hominem reasoning is therefore not logical, rational, or credible. It is considered weak, faulty argumentation. In citing an example, it is fallacious, ad hominem reasoning to say—as Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell said in the nineteenth century—that “The man who does not know sick women does not know women” (Ehrenreich and English 1979, 97). Weir Mitchell reasoned that all women were, by definition, sick, because female reproductive organs, which caused the “crises” of menstruation and menopause, were inherently flawed. Because the defective ovaries were thought to govern her entire being, a woman’s ideas were not to be trusted or taken seriously. Weir Mitchell therefore would not even abide a woman’s own view of her ailments. He dismissed a disclosure of symptoms in one of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s detailed letters to him about the legitimate depression that she suffered. His treatment, which Gilman described as “intent with sadistic ignorance on destroying me body and soul,” focused not on Gilman’s symptoms, but on her flawed female nature, which he attempted to “cure” by forbidding intellectual stimulation and imposing a strict regimen of housework and childcare. Then as well as now, the danger for many women, who tend to

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internalize blame for their flaws, is that they “buy” the ad hominem argument of patriarchy and thus keep their silence. (Fortunately, as we will see later, Gilman was not one of these.) Compounding the Victorian ad hominem reasoning that women were “naturally” inferior to men was the traditional exclusion of women from political and public life. Historically, women’s educational opportunities were severely limited and limiting, resulting in grown women with stunted intellects and skills. Eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote extensively of woman’s place in society, espoused the theory that human life took place in two realms: a public realm where men gained money, status, and respect; and a private, domestic realm where women served men’s interests. Because woman lived in the domestic sphere for man, who was her protector and provider, she needed not concern herself with serious education, public expression or reform. Indeed, a learned woman whose education drew her away from household duties was unfeminine and unlovable: I appeal to my readers to give me an honest answer; when you enter a woman’s room what makes you think more highly of her, what makes you address her with more respect--to see her busy with feminine occupations […] or to find her writing verses at her toilet table surrounded by pamphlets of every kind and with notes on tinted paper? If there were none but wise men on earth such a woman would die an old maid (Emile 1762, 248).

Though woman was allowed enough education to train her sons for future citizenship, her education was to benefit her family, never herself. According to Rousseau, such pursuits subjected her to scathing criticism (248). But the potency of Rousseau’s rhetoric lay in the price he and men of his age set for woman’s advancement. If she gained knowledge, she would forfeit love. This price was too dear, considering the fact that woman’s only hope of economic or social survival was marriage. Furthermore, woman could not pursue marriage for herself; she must wait to be chosen. Her only power was personal attractiveness and charm, which she could only hope suitors would recognize in her as she patiently waited for their attentions. God pity the woman who was passed by. Victorians continued to hold these theories dear in their own age and thereby exerted strict social control over women. By the mid-nineteenth century, what education women in Britain and America had was restricted to preparation for marriage, childrearing, and domesticity, although Bible-reading was encouraged, as long as it kept

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women in their proper domestic sphere. In 1851 John Stuart Mill, husband of feminist Harriet Taylor Mill, lamented the sparse mental diet offered women. Women were educated not “for themselves and for the world, [but their] sex for the other” (in Bizzell 2001, 986). Superstitions and the fear of premature death in Victorian America steered girls away from intellectual accomplishments, since “precocity” was believed to undermine a girl’s health. A popular notion of the time was that intense intellectual endeavor caused consumption in young females (Welter 1976, 11). One Victorian physician, Edward Clarke, wrote that young women who studied too intensely during their monthly periods risked being “unsexed.” His theory stated that strenuous brain activity diverted blood away from a girl’s reproductive organs, causing them to atrophy: “The stream of vital and constructive force evolved within her was turned steadily to the brain and away from the ovaries and their accessories” (12). The ad hominem argument was that since woman was defined by her sexual, reproductive capacities, she must not cultivate any other aspects of herself but those feminine pursuits (needlework, the arts, domestic management) which enhanced her attractiveness to men. From 1820-60, women’s magazines, gift books, and religious literature reflected Rousseau’s and Clarke’s theories by espousing a rhetoric of “True Womanhood” that was based on virtue and quiet submission to men. Historian Barbara Welter (1976) notes that the phrase “True Womanhood” was used so often without definition that its Victorian audience was assumed to automatically know what it meant (204). In her book Dimity Convictions, whose title is taken from A Dickinson poem about a limiting Victorian wifehood, Welter names the four cardinal virtues of what she terms the nineteenth century Cult of True Womanhood. They are piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity: “Without them, no matter whether there was fame, achievement or wealth, all was ashes. With them she was promised happiness and power” (21). But the “power” women gained from these Victorian virtues was a restricting one. It merely enabled a woman to attract and keep a man by presenting a chiseled-down female self. With complete economic control over his wife, the husband still thought all of the important thoughts and made all of the important decisions. Women’s magazines and gift books promised that women were most attractive to their husbands, and therefore marriage was happiest, when women kept their opinions to themselves. In 1830 The Young Lady’s Book encouraged in woman “from her cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind” (28). Caroline Gilman’s 1834 advice book for young brides, Recollections of a Southern

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Matron, enjoined women to “‘repress a harsh answer, to confess a fault, and to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self defense’”(in Welter 29). The gift book Lady’s Token directed, “‘[D]o not give your advice until [your husband] asks for it, [have] no arms other than gentleness…if he is abusive, do not retort’” (30). In 1851, the publication The Ladies Wreath ran an essay contest offering a fifty-dollar prize to the woman who could most effectively answer, “How May an American Woman Best Show Her Patriotism?” Elizabeth Wetherell’s winning essay declared that American women can find the best method to express their patriotism by asking their husbands’ opinions on the matter. The husband in the essay gushed that his wife’s “‘blessed advantage of a quiet life at home’” and her “‘natural refinement and closeness to God’” placed her in a position to influence him and his sons to act for the country’s good (in Welter 1976, 39). Like the women’s magazines and gift books, religious rhetoric also plied women with promises of lasting happiness and virtuous reputations if they would simply remain quietly in their places at home. In 1847, the minister of the Amity Street Baptist Church in New York addressed the church’s Maternal Association on “The Social Position and Culture Due Women.” He observed that woman was in a privileged position to cultivate her piety because of the “‘seclusion of the scenes in which her lot has been cast’” (in Welter 1976, 72). If home was a prison, it was only so to the woman whose flawed “‘vaulting and ambitious’” spirit had deemed it so (73). Inquiry into deep theological principles was considered dangerous for women. Eve, after all, brought sin into the world when she ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (73).

Galatea Wreaks Havoc in the Public Square: Fearless Maria Stewart How enormous, then, was the opposition against perhaps the first woman in America of any race to speak publicly to mixed (or “promiscuous”) audiences of men and women: Maria Stewart, an AfricanAmerican who made speeches in Boston’s black churches and anti-slavery houses (Bizzell 2001, 1033). Though there is no existing biography of Stewart, a former domestic servant who had no heirs and who left no known letters or diaries, Marilyn Richardson (1987) has collected and commented extensively on her speeches, deeming her a “significant historical figure hidden in plain sight” (xv). From the limited evidence available, Richardson has provided a brief account of this extraordinary orator’s life in the introduction to her book, Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer.

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Born of free parents in Hartford, Connecticut in 1803, Maria Miller cobbled most of her education together from Sabbath classes and from the books belonging to the white Protestant clergyman for whom she labored as an indentured servant after her parents, free Northern blacks, died. At twenty-three she married James W. Stewart, a prosperous shipping agent who outfitted whaling and fishing vessels in Boston. Members of the black middle class to whom James Stewart belonged inspired Maria with their fiery abolitionist publications and speeches. David Walker, a successful clothing merchant and staunch abolitionist, railed against the bigoted sentiments of Thomas Jefferson and other so-called Founding Fathers who justified slavery by deeming blacks inferior beings to whites, the cursed “‘sons of Africa or of Ham’”(Jefferson qtd. in Richardson 6). The powerful sermons of African Baptist Church’s Reverend Paul, who spoke out against racist oppression, also moved Maria Stewart, who gave her earliest speeches at the African Meeting House at Beacon Hill, where Paul’s congregation was located (3). In speeches that uphold women’s rights and denounce slavery, especially the back-breaking domestic labor that “deadens the energies of the soul” of the black woman, Stewart continually dismantles the ad hominem notions that as men’s natural inferiors, women have nothing of value to offer men intellectually or spiritually (47). To convince her black mixed-gender audiences, Stewart employs a religious rhetoric called the jeremiad, named after the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the Old Testament (16). She relies heavily on Biblical verses, stories, and apostrophes invoking God’s authority in order to simply justify her credibility as a full human being. In “Mrs. Stewart’s Farewell Address to Her Friends in the City of Boston,” a speech she made in September of 1833 before leaving Boston because of its hostile opposition to her, Stewart separates the Pauline doctrine that it is a “shame for a woman to speak in public” from Old and New Testament instances in which women’s speeches spiritually free the oppressed and unenlightened: What if I am a woman; is not the God of ancient times the God of these modern days? Did he not raise up Deborah, to be a mother, and a judge in Israel [Judges 4:4]? Did not Queen Esther save the lives of the Jews? And Mary Magdalene first declare the resurrection of Christ from the dead? Come, said the woman of Samaria, and see a man that hath told me all the things I ever did, is not this the Christ? St. Paul declared that it was a shame for a woman to speak in public, yet our great High Priest and Advocate did not condemn the woman for a more notorious offence than this; neither will he condemn this worthless worm (68).

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The holy women Stewart invokes are far different from Galatea, the quiet, submissive, creation of man and the “true woman” in Victorian rhetoric. As creations of God, the female judges, monarchs, and evangelists who are Stewart’s role models have an alternative purpose: to speak liberty to the captives, a hope that would have died had they chosen to please men with their silence. Furthermore, by calling herself a lowly “worm,” a vile if humble creature, Stewart distances herself from Victorian notions that she is on the platform merely to flaunt her sexuality (according to Richardson, Maria Stewart was physically beautiful). In the Victorian mindset, women were inherently reproductive beings. This meant that their sexuality was at the heart of every social moré they violated, especially if they appeared on the public platform to speak, an “indecent” act for women (Bizzell 2001, 1046). Susan Zaeske, a speech communication scholar, has illustrated that women were traditionally viewed as irrational and therefore incapable of persuading men intellectually. As men’s intellectual inferiors, Zaeske maintains, they were thought to move men to action only through the seductive power of their sexuality (1048). Perhaps Stewart’s awareness of this notion is inherent in her tribute to a powerful 13th-century female orator and jurist (unnamed in Stewart’s text), for whom “such was the power of her eloquence, that her beauty was only admired when her tongue was silent” (in Richardson 1987, 70). Here, Stewart unravels the Victorian assumption that women have no power to persuade other than their sexuality by noting how the orator’s beauty was forgotten as listeners became more and more captivated by her speech. The concept of a young woman noticed more for her ideas than her looks would have been remarkable for a Victorian audience, though perhaps many in the black audiences to whom Stewart spoke had experienced the corrosive power of ad-hominem reasoning, since simply having African features marked one as inferior. A Southern doctor once argued that God had intended servitude for the African male body, a naturally “submissive knee-bender” for whom “‘in the anatomical conformation of his knees, we see genu-flexit written in his physical structure, being more flexed or bent than any other kind of man’” (qtd. in Sanchez-Eppler 1993, 3). However outdated and ridiculous this idea of black males’ knees naturally assuming positions of servitude seems to us now, women of all races have carried the burden of such ad hominem definitions to this day. (Consider the argument that women are “naturally” disposed to housekeeping, an idea I’ve seen recently in my college students’ papers!) To her disappointment, the black men who opposed Stewart— themselves victims of the prejudice borne of warped, ad hominem logic—

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could not consolidate their cause with hers. Perhaps they needed her to be their inferior in order to feel a measure of personal power. Stewart’s farewell speech nevertheless courageously resists the ad hominem notions that she, being a woman, has no right to speak. She names the ridicule of females, a common practice of her time, as a “strong current of prejudice” (Richardson 1987, 69). As such, it is “counted for sin” against God (69). Stewart’s reasoning is that God, not man, has the right to proclaim the value of a woman. Stewart acknowledges that women are physically weaker than men, but their ultimate purpose belongs to God, a higher authority than man: “God makes use of feeble means, sometimes, to bring about his most exalted purposes” (69). In all, the sum of a woman is not her sexuality but a divine core, a “principle formed in the soul” (70). Man does not have the authority to define her. These were bold arguments indeed, given that popular Victorian rhetoric—even from the pulpit—had defined women as men’s natural inferiors. Animosity mounted against Stewart with every speech. Black historian William Nell wrote in a letter to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, “In the perilous years of ’33-’35, a colored woman—Mrs. Maria W. Stewart— fired with a holy zeal to speak her sentiments on the improvements of colored Americans, encountered an opposition even from her Boston circle of friends, that would have dampened the ardor of most women” (27). In 1834, after she spoke her Farewell Address in a colored school on Belknap Street, Stewart left Boston because of the heckling and threats perpetrated by her own people. Though the speech itself looks resolutely forward to paradise in the life to come, Stewart mentions “enemies,” “those who have hated me,” and “those who have despitefully used and persecuted me” (74). In perhaps the most poignant passage of this farewell speech to enemies among friends, Stewart laments, “Thus far has my life been almost a life of complete disappointment. God has tried me as by fire. Well was I aware that if I contended boldly for his cause, I must suffer” (73). Though Stewart limited her public speaking, likely as a result of painful recollections of ridicule and hostility in Boston, she did take up social justice causes once again in New York. There she also published a volume of her collected speeches (27). Stewart is emblematic of the fact that throughout history, women who have dared speak out against patriarchal abuse—as Stewart denounced the enslavement of black women—could expect hostile ridicule as a result. The key to an enduring message has always been a woman’s willingness to reject the Pygmalionlike view that as a flawed and unworthy being, incapable of feats of intellect, she deserves dismissal, even contempt. A

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defiant statement within Stewart’s Farewell Speech reveals a faith in her purpose that patriarchy could not refute: “A something said within my breast, ‘Press forward, I will be with thee.’ And my heart made this reply, ‘Lord, if thou wilt be with me, then I will speak for thee as long as I live’” (67). Though at times miserable in patriarchal culture, Stewart’s Herculean resistance to patriarchy’s messages forged a path for women as they timidly left the confinement of their homes and made their way to the podium in the public square (27).

Continued Havoc: The Grimké Sisters From 1835 to 1838, two such women, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, spoke out against slavery as did Maria Stewart. But unlike Maria Stewart, a black middle-class resident of New England, the Grimké sisters were upper-class white Southerners whose firsthand witness of slavery had spurred them to protest against its sexual exploitation of black women. After Angelina Grimké, a gifted orator, published the pamphlet An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States, numerous speaking engagements for Northern abolitionist organizations followed, despite Victorian distaste for women who spoke in public. When Angelina Grimké addressed the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in Massachusetts in 1837, men joined the audience just to hear her powerful speeches (Bizzell 2001, 1046). As the gatherings attracted more male listeners, opposition mounted. The Grimkés’ high social position worked against them; many people were enraged that these genteel Southern ladies had abandoned the feminine, domestic realm in which they belonged (1046). Catharine Beecher, an educational theorist of the era who advocated a sort of spiritually empowering domesticity for women, severely censured the Grimké sisters for abandoning their proper sphere at home. In keeping with the Victorian ad hominem reasoning, Beecher argued that by taking the speaker’s platform, which naturally belonged to men, the Grimkés had “unsexed” themselves, becoming “unwomanly” (1046). Male hecklers joined the audience, and their insults escalated to violent threats. Ministers in the General Association of Congregational Churches in Massachusetts vehemently denounced the Grimkés’ subject matter: black women’s sexual thralldom in slavery. The ministers declared that the Grimkés’ mere mention of such a delicate subject invited doubts about their own chastity. One minister noted that he would not be surprised if the Grimkés themselves should appear nude upon the platform (1046-1047).

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Such a statement is a blatant illustration of the grip of ad hominem assumptions on the general public: a woman had no right to speak simply because she was a woman. Furthermore, a protest against cruel sexual exploitation on the part of slaveholders somehow meant the speaker herself was promiscuous. Pygmalion’s old practice of focusing on women as perpetually defective and unworthy played out once more. In her July 7, 1837 letter “On the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women,” Sarah Grimké questions the rationality of men who have historically punished women for being women. She invokes the example of irrational Salem judges who “have sat on the trials of witches, and solemnly condemned nineteen persons and one dog to death for witchcraft” (Grimké in Rossi 306). She also opposes the male practice of redefining women, whom she asserts are God’s spiritual creations, as playthings and instruments of men’s self-gratification (like Pygmalion’s sculpture-doll). According to Grimké, by assigning women to a life of intellectual famine and childlike dependency on their husbands, men force women to be hypocrites, who “pretend to submit, but gain [their] point” by resorting to manipulation as the only available means of power (in Rossi 1973, 308). Grimké argues further that men who deem women “trivial,” all the while robbing them of meaningful education, have distorted God’s spiritual definition of women to suit their own selfish ends: I am willing to let [men] have all the honor they desire; but if they mean to intimate, that mental or moral weakness belongs to woman, more than to man, I utterly disclaim the charge. Our powers of mind have been crushed, as far as man could do it, our sense of morality has been impaired by his interpretation of our duties; but no where does God say that he made any distinction between us, as moral, intelligent beings (309).

Like Maria Stewart some years earlier, Sarah Grimké also combats the notion that men have the final authority to define women. Women do not belong to men; they belong to God. Certainly Christianity is infused with patriarchal values. (It has a male God at the helm of creation, a male Messiah, the “faith of our fathers” and women who are to “keep silence and learn in all submissiveness,” after all.) Yet Sarah Grimké distinguishes between a political interpretation of the Bible that privileges men and a theological interpretation that honors women in unexpected ways. In Grimké’s reasoning, the view that God has created a stronger masculine being and an inferior feminine being is a treacherous, self-serving male argument that relegates women to silence in the shadows, when they should be lights of the world. Throughout her letters, Grimké points out that despite what men want to believe, the New Testament especially does

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not generally characterize women as morally or spiritually less capable or valuable than men. Nor does it enjoin women to keep silent in every context. The resurrected Christ’s first apostle was Mary Magdalene, after all (Grimké in Rossi 1973, 316). And despite his problematic injunctions for women’s silence and submission in First Timothy and Ephesians, even the apostle Paul attempts to break down barriers between men and women when it comes to God’s grace: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28. See Angelina Grimké’s Letter XII to Catharine Beecher in Rossi 1973, 322). Grimké enjoins women not to fall for the spurious rhetoric that privileges men at women’s expense: “More souls have probably been lost by going down to Egypt for help, and by trusting in man in the early stages of religious experience, than by any other error” (310). Men, she maintains, will habitually emphasize Biblical themes concerning women’s subjection in order to exploit female bodies and labor and to maintain power over them. In keeping with the Protestant tradition, Grimké urges women to seek God directly for spiritual guidance. The cost for such defiance to male authority was enormous in the 1830s. No matter how egregious were slavery’s crimes, no matter how pious were the arguments against it, women who spoke out against slavery threatened to topple the American social order. Such power was fearsome enough in a man; in a woman it was intolerable. In 1838, after an angry mob burned down Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia following Angelina Grimké’s anti-slavery address there, abolitionist Theodore Weld (whom Angelina had married) convinced the sisters to stop speaking in public because they were hurting the abolitionist cause (Bizzell 2001, 1047). The sisters moved with Weld to rural New Jersey, where for the next five years they raised Angelina and Theodore’s three children (1048). Though Angelina lectured somewhat in the 1860s and the two women were active in demonstrations later in life, Sarah had retired from the speaker’s platform (1047). After wreaking havoc in the public square by speaking, Galatea was safely returned to her male guardian at home, in accordance with the traditional Pygmalion tale. Although the Grimkés had left a lasting impression, so did the patriarchs who, by publicly humiliating them, taught women the price of protest.

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Confronting Shame: Our Grandmothers’ Lessons for Modern-Day Galateas We may assume that patriarchal backlashes such as Stewart and the Grimkés endured are isolated within history and are really no big deal today. After all, slavery and women’s disenfranchisement ceased being pressing issues as the twentieth century unfolded. In our own day we often assume that women should remain content with the abundant power they have gained since the years of Stewart, the Grimkés, and their suffragist daughters. In the young millennium, for the first time in history, a woman contended for the pinnacle of American leadership—the presidency—and thus had a radically new and refreshing relationship to the vote. Why open an old wound? I would argue that we examine the wounds of the past because they have scabbed over somewhat, but still sting, unhealed. To this day, Galatea has neither left Pygmalion nor triumphed over patriarchy. To illustrate, there is one disturbing passage in the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, that seems unresolved. This sentence, modeled after the grievances against tyrannical rule in a much earlier Declaration of Independence, has an eerily modern ring to it: [Man] has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

I place beside it the words written in 2007 by Terrence Real, who as we saw earlier has traced modern cultural patriarchy to its toxic form in the psyche of individual males, where it corrupts men and injures women in their daily interactions: Psychological patriarchy is based on the contempt by the masculine forces in our culture for the feminine…“Masculine” qualities are exalted. “Feminine” qualities are devalued. This inequality perpetuates the dynamic of “better than/less than”—between grandiosity and shame (“What is Psychological Patriarchy?”).

The two passages, though 159 years apart, both point to the core of patriarchy’s lasting power: a shame that men have imposed on women for centuries in order to maintain control of them. Stanton’s observation that men throughout America have “lessened [women’s] self-respect” is connected to Real’s idea of the “contempt by the masculine forces in our

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culture for the feminine.” Shame is not based on what women do. It is based on what women are, something we cannot escape. And when what we are is used as a justification to devalue us, then we see that the ad hominem argument still lives, chiseling us down to size. The idea of being a woman—“feminine”—and somehow diminished (as one sees a boy with feminine qualities as diminished)—is a sexist, ad hominem assumption that privileges men as “better than” and shames women as “less than” the other sex (Freedman 2002, 287).

Be a Man and Be In Control Indeed, forming a masculine identity depends on the “Other” to serve as a foil for what one is not. Thus heterosexual men often use women— and others who are different from the heterosexual male norm—as projection screens, so to speak. A woman (or an alternative “Other,” for that matter) can carry the “shadow,” which Carl Jung (1959) identified as the unconscious weaknesses, fears and disowned feelings that reside in all of us (20-21). By gaining control over the Other—whether by dominating a woman, degrading a homosexual, or participating in racist acts or speech—a man can assert his masculinity by proving to himself and to others his ascendancy over the disowned, vulnerable, or threateningly chaotic self. Therefore, the shaming of women runs more deeply than a generalized contempt for feminine qualities. Though it would be unfair and misinformed to say that all men are “essentially” patriarchal, or worse, misogynistic, control is so highly prized in our male-centered, hierarchical society that it takes a rare breed of fearlessness for a man to resist the socially constructed rewards associated with it. And while all men are certainly not cruel, power-hungry tyrants, their collective control over women is manifest in subtler forms, such as women’s lower pay in society at large, or the culture’s tendency to reward assertiveness in men and punish it in women. To be identified with the masculine ideal, men must separate the world into “self” and “other,” “us” and “them” in order to justify their control over others. Men’s separation from in order to gain power over is consistent with the Oedipal phenomenon that Freud named and that other theorists have built upon.6 Though Freud was particularly unfair to women, whom he considered imperfect, underdeveloped, or “castrated” versions of men, his Oedipal dynamic is nonetheless compelling. It brings to light the excruciating confusion between a boy’s needing Mother to meet his physical and emotional needs and his compulsion to separate from her

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because of the pressure he feels to form a masculine identity. Though his emotional need for Mother never wanes, the boy must still somehow find a way to make her “the Other”—something apart from him. He does so by devaluing what she has to offer (“feminine” nurturing) and projecting his need for it (the weakness and vulnerability of a little boy who needs his mother) onto her and all females (Gilmore 2001, 154). And in order to control this frightening need in himself, he instead seeks to control women; or at least, to put them in their place. Interestingly, because of ongoing conflict with their own weakness and frightening emotions, many men will shame women—chiseling them mentally, so to speak—just for being women. This dynamic works subtly in unchecked behaviors, rather than exclusively in overt gestures. For example, note the female-themed language men use to degrade both men and women, as illustrated in Allan G. Johnson’s Gender Knot (2005): Not to be overlooked is the insulting of males with names that link them to females—sissy (sister), girl, son of a bitch, mama’s boy. Notice, however, that the worst way to insult a woman isn’t to call her a man or a “daddy’s girl.” It’s to still call her a woman but by names that highlight or malign femaleness itself—bitch, whore, pussy, cunt (64, emphasis in original).

By far, patriarchy’s cruelest legacy to women is the shame we have internalized from men, blaming ourselves and embracing their contempt for us (64). This dynamic serves patriarchy well: Men blame women and women blame themselves for their conflicts with men.7 However, in order to cope with men’s abuses, women must remember that the degradation of femaleness is the collective, society-sanctioned method men have appropriated for dealing with their own vulnerability and emotional need. The scapegoat must shed the burden of men’s suffering from her back; she does not deserve it. We need to keep the resistance of Maria Stewart and the Grimké sisters alive. Though they knew nothing of Freud or of modern psychological theory, they had the wherewithal to defy the old shaming, ad hominem assessment: You’re just a female—irrational, weak, trivial and domestic, mostly sexual in nature, flawed. By a miracle of faith, by knowledge of an inviolate inner core or both, Stewart and the Grimké sisters risked public humiliation by shedding light on why the irrational, ad hominem arguments existed: White men condemned women and slaves in order to justify profiting from domestic and slave labor. Even more important, Stewart and the Grimkés affirmed that neither the woman nor the black slave rightfully belonged to the white man, and thus his convenient, exploitative definitions could be cast away. The Grimké sisters put their

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fingers on something women in the young millennium are still struggling to overcome, but still seldom choose to name. Women today need to keep alive the fighting words spoken by their grandmothers, because despite women’s rights gained since the nineteenth century, the ad hominem lie has not changed. As we will see in the following example, it has survived with us through time and into our relatively new millennium.

Pygmalion Now: A Silencing Force on the Internet In recent years, an incident involving the Internet proves that the bitter nineteenth-century misogynistic assumptions about women still live, effecting their intended damage. In 2007, Kathy Sierra, a software programming expert and author of the Head First computer book series, ran an Internet blog called Creating Passionate Users, which explored the interrelationships among neuroscience, psychology, and computers. In post after post, male bloggers insulted Sierra in words that “ranged from banal putdowns to crude sexual garbage,” though Sierra had difficulty locating the controversial content to which these bloggers were responding, since her website focused on technology, not some hotbed issue such as politics or religion (Harris 2007). Many of the more disturbing posts contained rape or murder fantasies. One message read, “fuck off you boring slut…I hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob,” while another showed a photo of a noose next to Sierra’s head (Harris 2007). Sierra brought these posts to the police and commented on them in her blog. A “sort of backlash” resulted, according to Salon.com editor Joan Walsh, who wrote about Kathy Sierra in her impassioned response, “Men Who Hate Women on the Web.” When someone published Sierra’s home address after another user wrote “the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size,” Sierra shut down her blog and cancelled a major speaking engagement at a technology conference in San Diego (Harris 2007). In her final post, she wrote: I have cancelled all speaking engagements. I am afraid to leave my yard. I will never feel the same. I will never be the same (Walsh 2007).

The host of the blog with the vilest comments (“Rageboy” online), insisted that Sierra had fabricated the threats. He also believed that her supporters—such as PodTech.net’s Robert Scoble ( who wrote “It’s this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop”)—had undermined bloggers’ free speech rights. One argument was that Sierra

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should have known better than to take web threats so seriously. Cowardly Internet bloggers who hide behind the anonymity of the computer screen sound much more menacing than they can ever be in real life, said “Rageboy’s” supporters, and according to them, Sierra had overreacted (“Read Comments” in Harris 2007). Other posts personally attacked the women who had defended Sierra online: “‘Trying [sic] verifying rather than just opening your fat piehole and spewing bile,’ and later, ‘Now I know you are a fattie and single’” (in Harris 2007). Professional bloggers and online editors noted a pattern of sexual insult and threat that was disproportionately aimed at women (unless a male writer was gay, such as Andrew Sullivan, whose hate mail at Salon.com was also “heavy on sexual imagery and insult, sometimes bordering on violence”) (Walsh 2007). Robert Scoble wrote, “‘Whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn’t happen if the interviewee were a man’” (quoted in Walsh 2007). In “Men Who Hate Women on the Web,” Salon.com editor Joan Walsh (2007) remarked: I couldn’t deny the pattern: Women came in for the cruelest and most graphic criticism and taunting. Gary Kamiya summed it up well in a piece on overall online feedback, noting ‘an ugly misogynistic aspect’ to the reaction to women writers. One thing I noticed early on. We all got nicknames. I’m “Joanie,” Rebecca Traister is “Becky,” Debra Dickerson is “Debbie” and on and on. There are lots of comments about our looks and sexuality or…likeability, to avoid using the f-word, a theme you almost never see in angry, nasty threads about male writers. Most common is a sneering undercurrent of certainty that a woman in question is just plain stupid; it’s hard to believe we have jobs at all.

Perhaps some would argue that the online assailants were deviants— except for the sheer volume of their posts, numbering in the hundreds and representing a multitude of individual writers. A more reasonable argument might charge online publishing entities such as Salon.com with blocking or at least screening posts with inappropriate or violent content. The online magazine has pledged that it will be more careful publishing posts in the future (Walsh 2007). But there is always someone who blames the victim by crying “free speech violation!” as did one of Rageboy’s supporters, who wrote, “The bloggers are behaving like a lynch mob… looking for someone to string up…Sierra is upset, traumatized, even; but it’s [Rageboy’s] reputation which will be, possibly unfairly, soiled by her accusation” (Denton in Walsh 2007). How ironic it is that when the tidal wash of free speech turns toward Rageboy and his supporters, whose

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vitriol demanded that Sierra shut up, they cry “character assassination” (Sharp in Walsh 2007). Most notable in the case of Kathy Sierra is the thematic similarity between the heckling the nineteenth-century female dissidents experienced and the insults pitched at Kathy Sierra and the other female writers Walsh discusses. Misogynistic comments about women’s looks and sexual viability are consistent with the Victorian ad hominem notions that a woman is merely the sum of her reproductive parts and nothing more. The charge that vocal women are “stupid” echoes the Victorian certainty that a woman is man’s natural intellectual inferior; she has nothing of value to offer him but her sexual and domestic services. Furthermore, the nineteenth-century conception that a woman speaking in a public forum somehow “desexes” herself still lives, couched in the wording of the men’s posts. Walsh wrote that many men’s responses to her Salon.com interview with best-selling writer and former Salon.com columnist Anne Lamott focused on Walsh’s and Lamott’s supposed lack of sexual viability: “we’re wrinkly old hags…mostly we’re just bad women. Bad, bad women. And did I mention ugly and wrinkly?” (Walsh 2007). Most lamentable by far is the silencing effect the threatening blogs can have on women like Sierra, who shut down her blog and cancelled speaking engagements out of fear for her life. Bloggers called her reactions “over the top” and told her to develop a thick skin and “cowboy up” (Harris 2007). They felt she should have known better than to take all that adolescent vitriol seriously. Isn’t a blog like a gill net dredged up from the ocean floor—full of much we can use, intermixed with refuse and rotten matter? But these (mostly male) responses overlooked a key issue: Vulnerability to sexual assault is a daily reality in the consciousness of women, who have historically borne responsibility for somehow inciting rape in men (Freedman 2002, 282). To be fair, we must acknowledge that false accusations against men, such as the 2006 charges against the Duke lacrosse players, create enormous pain and damage in the lives of innocent men. However, it is far more likely that a woman will be raped than that she will level a false accusation against a man. In America, one in six women (compared to one in 33 men) will be raped in her lifetime (RAINN 2009). And this is likely a very conservative estimate, given the prevalence of unreported rape in our culture. Fifty-four percent of all rapes in this country go unreported, mostly because of the personal shame the woman feels, the social stigma still attached to rape, and the ensuing trauma a woman can endure all over again when she is interrogated in the courts (RAINN 2009, Freedman 2002, 287).

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Feminist scholars have insisted that rape and its threat are powerful weapons in patriarchal society. The culture-wide force of sexual intimidation has “sustained female subordination in economic, political, and personal life” (Freedman 2002, 282). In her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, Susan Brownmiller writes, “From prehistoric times to the present, rape has been nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (15). Brownmiller’s generalization about “all men” may seem “over the top” to many, but her point reinforces the fact that the threat of rape is so real for women that it would be unwise for a woman not to take it seriously. The statement also implies that men who have no intention to rape a woman can rely on the threats of other men to humiliate her and keep her in her place. These threats are compounded by the dynamics of web communication itself. A nasty thread posting Sierra’s address just to scare her, though the blogger “didn’t mean it seriously,” could enable a deranged person who intends real harm (Walsh 2007). Adding to the nightmare, an online rape culture normalizes and even excuses rape, encouraging social media users to blame and harass victims (Bigelow 2013, A4). It is therefore unrealistic to blame Kathy Sierra for her reaction to the threats. Sadly, Pygmalion’s conviction that woman must be kept silent at home, diminished in stature by his chisel, is upheld when women cease speaking in male-dominated, high-status professions such as computer technology and instead stay within locked doors out of fear. Dreading men’s contempt, we mute ourselves at such times. As women, we struggle with being hated in a world where we’ve learned our whole lives to please others. It must be me, many of us think, twisting the ad hominem reasoning self-ward. I’m ugly, mouthy, wrinkly, fat, old, dirty. We measure ourselves against the nubile, chiseled and silent Galatea, whose beauty we have internalized as our standard. But Galatea represents a model of perfection created by Pygmalion, who hates women. Galatea acts (or does not act, because she is an object) according to what misogyny demands of her. Silent, still, and small, she is virtually dead, existing only to make Pygmalion, her creator, look good. When we thwart patriarchy, as did Kathy Sierra by giving technical advice to men, the reprisal of shaming ad hominem epithets hurts deeply. After reading the stunning blog posts, Joan Walsh commented, “I’ll give Anne Lamott the last word. She advised me to look at the nasty letter threads as a ‘workshop, a workshop on your own self-doubt.’” The ‘self-doubt’ is the doubt of the scapegoat who believes in a shadowy, subterranean place in her being that she somehow deserves the ad hominem insults along with the psychological burdens patriarchy has heaved upon her. .

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Perhaps she should listen instead to a deeper voice that would beckon her to frame the facts a different way. If women’s liberating messages— such as those of Stewart and the Grimkés, who opposed slavery and the degradation of women—had not some kind of inherent power to buck the status quo, would they be so maligned? As Allan G. Johnson (2005) maintains, The public response to feminism has been ferociously defensive precisely because feminism touches such a deep nerve of truth and the denial that keeps us from it. If feminism were truly ridiculous, it would be ignored. But it isn’t ridiculous, and so provokes a vigorous backlash (The Gender Knot, 22).

The “deep nerve of truth” to which Johnson refers provokes the tendency—seen by psychologists more often in men than in women—to “turn against an object,” or project the qualities one loathes in the self onto another.7 Phebe Cramer (2006), Professor Emerita of Psychology at Williams College, provides the following insight into projection as a selfprotective mechanism: In the broadest sense projection protects the [self] from disruptive anxiety by attributing unacceptable feelings, wishes, and impulses to someone else; the disturbing thoughts are placed outside the self—“ejected” into the external world and attached to some other object (70, 184).

Indeed, the construction of a masculine identity depends on this displacement; thus heterosexual men define themselves in terms of what they are not: feminine, weak, vulnerable, womanly. In building a masculine self, a man can lay his inevitable weakness and vulnerability, along with a host of other undesirable qualities he keeps in the shadows, on a woman. If she feels his disturbing thoughts are her fault, as psychologists tell us she tends to do, then he has outmaneuvered his agitation and successfully scapegoated her as its source. When such projection consolidates with the projections of other men, women find themselves in a deluge of insult, as we saw online, in Kathy Sierra’s case. And her story is but one example of online woman-hating among thousands—indeed, millions. Yet the scapegoat needs to recognize—once and for all—that the tide of insult is not her fault.

CHAPTER FOUR GALATEA’S IMMOBILITY IN WOMAN’S ROLE AND WOMAN’S WORK

The purpose of any scapegoat is to absorb blame for her own oppression, as well as to take on blame for the perceived oppression of those around her. As psychologist Paula Caplan (1993) argues in The Myth of Women’s Masochism, our culture’s blaming women for men’s unhappiness “forces women to spend a lot of energy defending themselves against charges that they are hurting other people” (11). The power-over-others model that organizes so many men’s lives certainly hurts men, but the villain is not women taking power from men, but the pressure too many men feel to both separate themselves from and dominate others in order to thrive. Men in patriarchal society rarely implicate themselves for their own unhealthy masculine codes of behavior. Allan G. Johnson (2005) maintains, “Men’s misery does deserve sympathy, but not if it means we ignore how men contribute to that misery, where it comes from, and what men get in exchange for it” (173). Men who adhere to patriarchal values will habitually blame women for their frustration and rage, despite the fact that such men’s insecurity, fear, and emotional disconnection results from maintaining the masculine front that men, not women, impose upon one another. Women are easy targets for the type of scapegoating that ensures that they maintain second-class citizenship, because men can gain status among other men by putting vocal women in their place. In doing so, patriarchy often employs a rhetoric of male victimization, which argues that empowered women, by their very existence, oppress men. Citing the disproportionate number of male suicide victims, prisoners, and college dropouts as evidence that men, not women, needed a boost in status, Fox News pundit Marc Rudov opined in 2008 what the Women’s Movement over time had cost modern American men: “That’s all I have heard my entire adult life: What’s good for women. I have not heard one public figure talk about what’s good for men” (Steinem 2008). Rudov saw Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as proof that women as a whole

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had jostled their passive men out of the limelight, forcing men to languish in the cold, lonely shadows of society: “Men are depressed and it’s their own fault, because men are allowing women to take over the world,” he lamented (Steinem 2008). This rhetoric, prevalent in patriarchy, keeps women’s power in the public sphere in check. Research confirms that even women in positions of authority will, for the most part, intentionally yield the floor to their male colleagues because they are aware of unfavorable perceptions if they speak too much. Yale Assistant Professor of Management Victoria Brescoll discussed her findings, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, for the April 2012 issue of Washington Post: “When men talk a lot and they have power, people are like ‘oh, that’s fantastic, I’d vote for him.’ But when women do it, they are seen as being too domineering, too presumptuous. Women perceive this, and that’s why they temper how much they talk” (Brescoll qtd. in McGregor 2012).

Because patriarchy brands the vocal woman who is not properly deferential to men as unfeminine and sexually unappealing, women will pay a huge price in male rejection for political power. In contrast, Galatea, patriarchy’s perfect woman, is male-centered and male-determined. As a feminine other, she serves as a foil to Pygmalion’s dominant masculinity. To retain Pygmalion’s approval in the myth, Galatea must magnify Pygmalion by encouraging his one-upmanship both over her and over other men (he is king of Cyprus in the tale). She does this by remaining relatively immobilized, away from the public eye, supporting Pygmalion in traditionally feminine roles. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (1929) describes woman’s role in patriarchy as a mirror that must not call attention to itself, but must rather reflect man as an entity considerably larger than he really is. This magnification of men on the part of women enables men so they can confidently and resolutely conquer the world: Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size…Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge…[I]f she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgment, speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is? (35-36).

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Women’s silence in group settings may create the unintended impression that we support a lens on the world that skews male, as silence is often mistaken for consent. Our routine dynamic of yielding the floor to vocal men is nothing more than our daily path of least resistance to codes of masculinity that may cause more harm than we acknowledge. Women’s silence in mixed groups may maintain the illusion that men are “superior to half the people here” (Woolf 36). It is the illusion of superiority that entitles the most aggressive men to define a world view—to shape our reality. Best known for his vision of Big Brother’s totalitarian power in the book Nineteen Eighty-Four, British writer George Orwell also explored hypermasculine dominance in a lesser-known essay, his 1947 “Such, Such Were the Joys…..” This reminiscence of Orwell’s miserable childhood at St. Cyprian’s School for Boys portrays the development of the young male who comes to see himself “at twice [his] natural size.” Orwell himself had reason to be resentful of such bullies, for he exemplified a sort of effeminate cowardice that the bullies prosecuted daily: “I was weak, I was ugly, I was unpopular, I had a chronic cough, I was cowardly, I smelt” (37). In the following passage, we see the corrupting, unbridled cruelty that takes hold of the bullies who win the coveted brand of masculinity by tormenting their effeminate schoolmates: That was the pattern of school life—a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak. Virtue consisted in winning; it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people—in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly (36).

Might makes right in this incubator of patriarchs. Winning over others is so vital to thriving that no one exists outside the simple categories of strong, who always win, and weak, who lose—“everlastingly.” Since winning in itself gains boys moral legitimacy, winners cannot be reasoned with or questioned: “Virtue consisted in winning…Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right.” In other words, the winner’s sheer dominance means that his view of reality—no matter how unreasonable or unethical—rules. We may believe that now, in the twenty-first century, Western culture has surely evolved from such primitive thinking. Our daily lives, after all, are most likely not characterized by brutality. However, consider the

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“winners-versus-losers” structure that in recent years drove the American economy and American politics. As 2008 came to a close, we heard of unreflective Wall Street investors, almost exclusively men, scrambling to maintain their wealth and lifestyle after hurling our economy into ruin with the toxic investments that infected, like a contagion, the finances of the working and middle classes. Crain’s New York Business reported that these “titans” flocked to Manhattan Motorcars to grab up Lamborghinis and Porsches while their $68-million salaries still held (Elstein 2008, 7). Rather than showing remorse for driving hundreds of thousands of Americans out of their jobs and homes, they were like soldiers gobbling up the spoils of battle before the next mêlée. The riches, power, and ruthlessness in these men at the pinnacle of the American upper class reflected Orwell’s bullies, for whom winning trumps ethics. In another example of schoolboy “winners versus losers” mentality, 2008 presidential candidate John McCain sang a flippant “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of an old Beachboys’ song at a VFW gathering after being asked how he would deal with this leg of the “axis of evil.” We may be lulled by the rhetorical effect of such a rallying cry: A good guy stands up valiantly to the dark, exotic heathen, like a cowboy braving Indians. And America has a right to defend herself from the “bad guys,” doesn’t she? The threat of Iran’s nuclear program would rattle the patience of any American diplomat. At the time of this writing, Hillary Clinton herself has had to take a hard line with this nation, pressuring superpowers to reconsider their dependence on Iranian oil. However, it is the patriarchal might-makes-right mentality that is our worst enemy. A minute of honest reflection may help us understand the cavalry trumpet of the American hero for what it is. The drive to answer hate with more hate—to “one-up” the offender by bombing it prematurely, before an imminent strike on its part is substantiated—does nothing but drag the innocent into a never-ending vortex of attack and counter-attack. Nevertheless, in such a power struggle, the appeal of the final blow—the allure of the last word that shows the “bad guy” who’s boss once and for all—rumbles within the molten core of the patriarchal mindset, where it threatens to shatter the earth. Fortunately, McCain did not win the 2008 election and, though Iran still poses a significant threat to our national security, the administration at the time of this writing has chosen to impose severe economic sanctions rather than intensive military threat. Yet it is sobering to realize that all it takes for global instability to erupt is a President not firmly aware of his limitations. Conversely, we could argue that unhealthy codes of masculinity also inspire the victims of severe bullying to equalize their power in violent,

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devastating ways. For instance, the Columbine shooters, young white men tormented by bullies, appropriated instant masculinity by wielding assault weapons with which they murdered thirteen people (Campbell 2013, A3). Exploring a possible connection between Columbine and the searing 2013 murder of 20 elementary school children and six of their educators in Newtown, Connecticut, Sut Jhally, founder of the Media Education Foundation, notes: “You can go back to Columbine […] and the perpetrators are not the big, tough jocks, the aggressive bullies. Put a gun in their hand, and for these guys, the moment they felt the most normal was when they had people cowering in front of them. Guns allowed them the guise of masculinity” (in Campbell 2013, A3).

Masculinity means power over others. It also means power to define reality, as “might makes right.” For Galatea, questioning the patriarch Pygmalion’s rule in Cyprus or over her is strictly forbidden. His reality— with him in charge as a winner—must control, and she must support it behind the scenes, in relative silence. I like to think of the Galatea who, in the entry tucked away in Bulfinch’s glossary, briefly “became animated, caused much mischief, and [was] returned to her original state” (Bulfinch 1979, 907, emphasis mine). Quite likely such “mischief” involved simply questioning Pygmalion’s assumptions—that he was superior to her; that she as the feminine Other was defective; that his might in all cases meant right; that he was virtuous and not somehow deeply corrupted by evervaulting power. Such questions would invite Pygmalion to face his limitations and weaknesses, and this stance is unbearable to him. Men with patriarchal views of the female role may call this questioning on the part of women “ball-busting” or “castrating,” but it is only because their identities depend on the illusion that men are better than women. Therefore, men with patriarchal values find the quiet, unobtrusive woman who works primarily to support male dominance attractive. Snow White, who cooks and cleans house all day in a shadowy cottage deep in the forest, is a beautiful princess. But women who “make mischief”—vocal women who protest patriarchal values—are seen as ugly and unappealing, like wicked witches with threatening power. For example, despite historical fact, patriarchal rhetoric has etched into cultural memory an ugly, witchlike caricature of the feminists who protested the demeaning Miss America pageant in 1968. We automatically recall those protesters as shrill, repulsive malcontents who shouted manhating epithets while throwing their bras and curlers into a bonfire. In reality, no such fire ever existed. The women threw what they perceived

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as the uncomfortable accoutrements of femininity into trash cans. The actual “burning” of the period involved not bras, but men’s draft cards in separate protests against the Vietnam War (Poulton 1997, 26-27). Nevertheless, many young women disown feminism simply because these false memories have associated feminism with ugliness and with male disapproval. Journalist Margot Magowan (2001) reminds young women not to fall for these false cultural memories that still grip women and encourage their silence. Instead, she urges women to value the precious rights that the historical feminists gained for them: Young women ought to feel pride and gratitude for the women who came before us—Susan B. Anthony and the right to vote; Margaret Sanger and birth control; Gloria Steinem and more equality in the institution of marriage. But the Ugly Feminist eclipses our real history. Her spooky image sends a warning: Women seeking equality are inherently unattractive. This message is haunting. One of the few ways young women are allowed to experience power or be celebrated in our culture is through their beauty and sexuality. To warn women they risk losing attractiveness if they vie for some other kind of power is yet another way, and an effective one, to keep women in their place (A27).

Female sexual appeal is so highly prized in patriarchy that young women are taught to value it over political agency. The rhetoric of the Ugly Feminist still convinces women that they can have either feminine beauty (and the man that inevitably follows) or social power—not both. Why should a young woman forego the ultimate prize, a man’s love, by being a political threat to him? Young women come to believe that the price for political equality, men’s rejection, is too high to pay. The threat of this intolerable rejection helps to keep Galatea politically immobilized.

Pygmalion’s Female Mouthpieces One may argue that men with traditional, patriarchal values have graciously invited women to be very vocal within their camp on the political right. Contemporary American examples such as Ann Coulter, an outspoken conservative polemicist; or former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the first female vice presidential candidate in American history to appear on a Republican ticket, come to mind. However, the rhetoric of these women and others like them staunchly defends patriarchy’s status quo and thus poses no threat.

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Ann Coulter is a widely televised political polemicist and best-selling author. Coulter’s public attacks on feminists, Democrats, gays, and people of color might urge us to believe that she is the very opposite of patriarchy’s docile, perfect woman. However, Coulter’s raison d’être, an ongoing, contemptuous one-upmanship of liberal Americans through ad hominem insults, serves the beat-em-down and keep-em-in-their-place attitude Orwell observed in the schoolyard bullies groomed for patriarchy in “Such, Such Were the Joys...”  If Coulter has power in the public square, then it is power gained on men’s terms for men’s benefit. With the long blonde hair and svelte figure that are sanctioned in a man’s world, Coulter is a conspicuous apologist for the male-dominated view women have endured for centuries. Sarah Palin is a second example of a seemingly powerful woman who, in reality, maintains patriarchy’s status quo. With five children ranging in age from pre-schooler to adult, Palin exudes the breezy confidence of the mythical American Supermom, who juggles family and career responsibilities with no hassles and with a smile on her face. In 2008, the Republican Party capitalized on the rhetorical effect of this image. It reassured female voters that they could have it all: children, political power, and attractiveness, as Palin was a former beauty pageant contestant. However, upon close scrutiny, one could see that Palin’s political record did anything but empower women. As mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin cut funding for a transitional home for teenage mothers (Valenti 2008). Instead of curbing the problem of teen pregnancy through comprehensive sex education, Palin promoted “abstinence-only” programs in schools, despite the fact that these programs do nothing to prevent teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases in adolescents (Steinem 2008). For women facing unwanted pregnancy, Palin has staunchly opposed the right to choose an abortion, even in the case of sexual assault or incest (Valenti, Steinem). In Wasilla, Palin’s administration imposed upon rape victims a fee for their own rape kits, which cost up to $1200 per kit (Valenti). At the time of this writing, Palin has continually refused to answer questions concerning this municipal policy that was eventually outlawed in 2000 by the Alaska State Legislature. Then-Governor Tony Knowles argued, “We would never bill the victim of a burglary for fingerprinting and photographing the crime scene, or for the cost of gathering other evidence. Nor should we bill rape victims just because the crime scene happens to be their bodies” (Samuels 2008). Because Palin has not spoken directly on the issue, speculation abounds as to why she would support such an outrageous mandate. One of the most credible theories is that, as a fierce opponent of abortion rights, even in the case of

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rape, Palin’s policy of charging victims for their own rape kits would discourage women from reporting rape. Hospitals offer rape victims an emergency contraception pill, which many hard-line conservatives wrongly view as abortion (Samuels 2008). Given these policies, Palin’s breezy supermom image is a deception. Only the best-resourced, financially secure woman can juggle motherhood and politics as easily as she does. But her policies leave poor single mothers—even those whose children were conceived in rape—in the dust. Despite the attention they garner for themselves in the public square, women such as Coulter and Palin do not cause “mischief” as patriarchy defines it and as the alternate version of the myth states it: “Galatea [is] a statue made by Pygmalion which became animated, caused much mischief, and [was] returned to her original state” (Bulfinch 1979, 907, emphasis mine). Rather, these women function as the mirrors that Woolf describes and of which patriarchy approves, reflecting man “at twice [his] natural size.” By opposing policies that empower women in the workplace, that support young mothers or that protect victims of rape, incest, or sexual harassment, women like Coulter and Palin reaffirm men’s political power at women’s expense—“all for a patriarchal pat on the head” (Valenti 2008). Unfortunately, their vocal presence in the public square conveys the illusion that women can be every bit as powerful as men with no misogynist backlash. Conversely, when Galatea harnesses for herself genuine power that threatens to shake the status quo, she risks insult, humiliation, and sometimes even physical harm. Gloria Steinem (2008), founder of the Women’s Media Center, puts the idea succinctly: “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke…she will need her sisterhood” (in “Sexism Sells—But We’re Not Buying It”).

“Dirty Jokes” We can invoke Hillary Clinton as an example of the “dirty joke” that is told about women who gain too much power in the public sphere. In 2008 Presidential Candidate Clinton, an imposing and vocal woman, threatened the status quo of women’s place in patriarchy by advocating strongly for women’s issues such as education, healthcare and labor reform. As a result, mockery flooded the marketplace and the media in retaliation that, at the time of this writing, has gone far beyond the “sexism in the media” charged by Sarah Palin.

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Sarah Palin did suffer some thoughtless comments on CNN about juggling motherhood with the vice presidency, as well as a smattering of nasty, rumor-ridden Internet jokes and You Tube postings. Degrading references to Palin appeared in tee-shirt slogans. One said, “Yet another Bush we can’t trust.” Another referred to her famous comment characterizing herself as a hockey mom: “A Pitbull in Lipstick is Still a Bitch.” However, thus far, this sexism—crude and unacceptable as it is— has been concentrated on the periphery of mainstream media. The major television networks indeed aired complaints about Palin’s $150,000 campaign wardrobe, but any actual sexism in these references lay mostly in the patriarchal assumption that a woman’s looks and fashion sense trumps the content of her character—an assumption of the Republican Party officials who purchased the designer clothing. There was also the Tina Fey “pageant walk” on NBC’s Saturday Night Live mocking Palin’s beauty contestant experience. But the skit was fairly innocuous and goodnatured, and Palin herself participated in the broadcast. Because of Palin’s relative youth at the time, sexist references to her were free of the sense of ugliness aimed at sixty-year-old Clinton. Sexism directed at a younger, attractive woman is certainly disempowering. But it lacks the ad hominem charge that an aging woman cannot be a legitimate political presence in America. Furthermore, because mainstream media took up these ad hominem insults of Clinton, cruel putdowns and downright vicious attacks gained a rhetorical legitimacy that they did not deserve. Conservative pundits mocked Clinton for having the bad taste to show her age in public. A.M. radio personality Rush Limbaugh recoiled in disgust at being forced to watch a woman grow old before the cameras. Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin vilified what she described as Clinton’s frightening resemblance to a “ninety-two year old woman” during one media event where Clinton had apparently not primped enough for the camera to meet Malkin’s standards (Steinem 2008). Like Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton was also mocked in campaign paraphernalia such as tee-shirts, bumper stickers, posters, and gag gifts. One bumper sticker read, “The good, the bad, and the ugly,” referring respectively to the Republican elephant symbol, the Democratic donkey symbol, and a caricature of Clinton (“the ugly”). A poster showed Clinton’s mouth open, with an inscription beside it, “Insert here.” Another said “The bitch is back” beside a crude drawing of Clinton’s angry face. Yet another showed Hillary Clinton standing in a kitchen beside the inscription, “Where she really belongs” (Steinem 2008). There was the Hillary nutcracker, legs outspread, ready to castrate the first male who

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defied her. However, in contrast to the anti-Palin gear, which has not to date been presented on network or cable television, the anti-Clinton paraphernalia gained new rhetorical force when mainstream television personalities praised it: “That is so perfect!” Tucker Carlson, a young MSNBC commentator said regarding the Hillary Nutcracker. “When she comes on TV, I involuntarily cross my legs!” (Steinem 2008). And mainstream media referred to female sexuality to put Clinton in her place. MSNBC showed a split screen, comparing Clinton’s cleavage to that of Jackie Smith, a fellow female legislator. When asked during the Clinton campaign to name the biggest downside of having a woman in the Oval Office, Fox News Channel’s Marc Rudov quipped, “You mean, beside the PMS and the mood swings, right?” (Steinem 2008). Again, the default method for whittling a threatening woman down to size in our culture—as in the Victorian age—is still simply to belittle her identity as a woman, and thus fall back on the assumption that because she is female, she is inherently flawed and has little of value to offer. How vehemently we see the ad hominem reasoning hurled at those particular women who threaten patriarchy’s social order, as in the case of Hillary Clinton. We can see that the price for a Galatea who seeks agency in the public sphere is enormous. If we consider that price—public humiliation— alongside the imperious desire to please within so many women, then it makes sense that after Galatea hedges her bets, she decides that staying out of the limelight is much safer than wreaking mischief in the public square. After all, an obedient Galatea is rewarded with the prize patriarchy reserves for its second-class, female citizens: the love of a man. Says one marriage manual published during the feminist movement in the seventies as a stern reality check to women with growing agency: “It is only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him, and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him” (Andelin in Caplan 1993, 103). Galatea’s personal power may diminish as her sexual appeal grows; nevertheless, women in patriarchy are taught that the second attribution far outweighs the first.

Women Need Not Apply One key marker of personal power and social status in our culture is the type of work one does outside the home. Many of us believe that women are equal to men in the realm of work. For the most part, however, access to employment that supplies power and wealth still eludes women. According to Catalyst (2011), an independent nonprofit organization that recently testified before the U.S. Joint Economic Committee, only 3.6

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percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, or 18 total, are women. As they compared the current figures to their prior research, noting that 92.5 percent of the top earners in Fortune 500 companies are still men, the organization concluded, “[W]omen have made no significant gains in the last year and are no further along the corporate ladder than they were six years ago.” Despite a handful of token high-profile female political leaders such as Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, or Nancy Pelosi, the United States still ranks 69th in the world for representation of female leaders in the national legislature (Catalyst 2012, “Women in Government”). At the time of this writing, in the 112th United States Congress, only seventeen out of 100 senators are women, while only 73 out of 435 members of the House of Representatives are women (CAWP 2012). Though most Americans admit in public that the country is ready for a female president, forty percent of those who expressed their views in an anonymous 2008 Gallup poll acknowledged that the idea of a female president still made them uncomfortable (Haddock 2007). Our economic system conspires to keep Galatea relatively immobilized, since she can only with great difficulty expect to move up the pay scale in Pygmalion’s world. On the whole, women make considerably less pay than men. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research tells us that in the relatively new millennium, a woman with a full-time job still earns, in average annual salary, 77 cents to every dollar a man makes (Ariane Hegewisch, Claudia Williams, and Amber Henderson 2011). After a life spent in the full-time workforce, a female high school graduate can expect to earn $700,000 less than her male classmate. By the end of her life, a female college graduate with a business, medicine, or law degree can hope to earn $2,000,000 less in wages than a male graduate (DeLauro 2008). A salary analysis of Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty found that female radiologists are paid, on average, 10.4 percent less than their male counterparts, while female anesthesiologists make 14 percent less than their male colleagues (Bloomberg School of Public Health 2005). Given the persistence of the gender wage gap through the young millennium, the 1999 findings of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor must still hold true: After time lost due to motherhood was factored back into the calculations, 43 percent of the wage gap between men and women was still unaccounted for, the only possible explanation being prejudice against women workers (Barko 2000). In most colleges and universities, though women comprise close to sixty percent of the student body, female faculty members fare worse than men. Female faculty are more concentrated in the less prestigious colleges.

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And part-time, non-tenured faculty with low pay and minimal benefits tend to be female. In 2007, only 4.4 to 12.3 percent of full professors at the top 100 universities were women, and only 16-27% of assistant professors were women (Williams and Ceci 2012). A 2011 American Association of University Professors report states that women make up only 42 percent of full-time faculty in US universities and colleges. Women become even rarer in the more advanced positions. Only 28 percent of full professors are female (Curtis 2011). Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci (2012) of American Scientist report that while most institutions have left blatant forms of anti-female discrimination behind, more subtle forms may remain, since female scientists who choose parenthood face a “grim and unfair reality that men simply do not face.” The more children a father has, the more money he is likely to make, yet the opposite is true for mothers in scientific fields. It is likely that one of the “subtle forms” of discrimination the female scientists face is the cultural expectation that mothers should stay at home while fathers work. This assumption likely underlies the “regrets [that] plague women in the academy at a far greater rate than men” (Williams and Ceci 2012). Our laws have not adequately protected female workers from gender discrimination. In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Goodyear Tire Corporation, who, for nineteen years in their Gadsden, Alabama plant, paid field supervisor Lilly Ledbetter 25 percent less than her male counterparts who had the same job, though in every way, her performance was the same or better than that of the men. Though the District Court ruled in her favor, the Supreme Court overturned that ruling, basing their decision on an existing law mandating that employees file claims within 180 days of acts of discrimination. Driven by conservative judges John Roberts and Samuel Alito, the Court argued that since the act of discrimination occurred in 1979 with Ledbetter’s first paycheck, she should have filed her claim then. The statute of limitations for making such a claim had expired. Yet the company had strictly forbidden employees from disclosing their salaries. Any employee who did so lost his or her job. It was not until sixteen years into her position that Ledbetter received an anonymous note about the unequal salaries, at which point she realized the huge sum she had lost in pay and retirement savings relative to her male colleagues. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court ruled against Ledbetter in a 5-4 vote, saving Goodyear Corporation and others like it millions in back pay and settlement costs. The sole dissenting judge, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, argued that because Goodyear had cheated Ledbetter out of equal compensation in every

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paycheck since 1979, the pattern of discrimination was ongoing and the statute of limitations should not apply. Regarding the 5-4 vote, Ginsberg concluded, “This Court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination” (Barnes 2007). In January of 2009, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which expanded the statute of limitations to 180 days after each unfair paycheck received (Stolberg 2009). However, in June of 2012, the Paycheck Fairness Act failed to secure the 60 required votes in the Senate when every seated Republican voted against it (Bendery 2012). Their arguments centered on the frivolous lawsuits that would burden small businesses as a result of the bill’s passing. One material difference in this new bill was that it would have prevented companies from retaliating when employees shared salary information with their co-workers, which is why the statute of limitations expired in Ledbetter’s case and why “Goodyear will never have to pay me what it cheated me out of,” in Ledbetter’s words (Bendery 2012, Stolberg 2009). In the 2011 gender discrimination suit against Walmart, attorneys representing millions of women who claimed that the company bars women from upper-level managerial roles found that women held only one- third of the management positions in the company (Rushe 2011). The higher the management position was at Walmart, the scarcer the female population became: In 2001 women outnumbered men by nearly 4-1 among hourly supervisors but comprised only 45.1% of the "support managers," the highest-level hourly supervisory position. In salaried positions, Seligman argues, women comprised 37.6% of assistant managers, 21.9% of co-managers, and 15.5% of store managers. Figures from 2001 show that it took women an average 4.38 years from the date they were hired to be promoted to an assistant manager position compared with 2.86 years for men (Rushe 2011).

Yet the Court found in favor of Walmart, remarkably because the plaintiffs could not prove that Walmart abided by an existing written policy of gender discrimination (Rushe 2011, emphasis mine). This is a fatuous argument. What company would be foolish enough to fly in the face of EEOC laws and create a written policy promoting gender prejudice? No written policy is required to create widespread discrimination against women workers in a company. Thousands of male managers simply fall into their paths of least resistance: If promoting women makes them uncomfortable, they refuse to do so—no policy needed.

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In the same way, however, customers who are uncomfortable with Walmart’s treatment of female employees can create a “path of resistance”: They can demonstrate a discomfort with Walmart products— by not buying them. We forget that our “power of the purse” can speak just as loudly as the courts. We certainly should consider that many lowincome families feel they have no viable alternatives but to shop at Walmart, which, in many neighborhoods, has edged out the competition when it comes to discount stores. Yet those of us who have alternative discount venues need to vocalize our choices to shop at stores that are Walmart’s competitors, particularly if their hiring practices are more equitable. In companies with more egalitarian hiring practices, serious barriers still exist for women who wish to advance their careers. In “Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership” (Harvard Business Review, September 2007), researchers Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli debunk the metaphor of the “glass ceiling” that has for years described the obstacle for women who could clearly see a career goal at a high level in an organization but could not reach it because of gender discrimination. Because women encounter a series of impediments to their goals rather than an absolute, single obstacle, Eagly and Carli argue that a more appropriate metaphor for women in the workplace is a labyrinth, a path with a series of twists, turns, and barricades, any one of which can slow or derail a woman’s career. The barriers to women’s advancement are multiple and huge. They include “vestiges of prejudice” against women that cause male workers to resent and socially penalize female authority with name-calling and hostility (Eagly and Carli 2007). This reaction recalls what Virginia Woolf called men’s “infantile fixation” throughout her book Three Guineas. The infantile fixation describes a gut—not a reasoned—response in men when they ridicule female workers, or, more mildly, when they simply block women from lucrative positions. Male supervisors, such as those at the Walmart stores, may not know why they bar women; they only know that they feel more comfortable when they do. Additionally, men often say that they are more at ease working with women who demonstrate communal qualities, such as affection, friendliness, sympathy, and gentleness. But the qualities men find satisfying in a woman rarely win respect in salary negotiations, and highly communal women tend to steer clear of such negotiations in the first place. The qualities that earn men the highest salaries—dominance, aggressiveness, ambition, self-confidence, and individualism— are frowned upon in women, so that women face a double bind that causes higher salaries to

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elude them in performance evaluations: “‘If they act dominant or ambitious, they may be criticized for not being sensitive enough; if they act warm and considerate, they may be criticized for not being tough enough’” (Eagly and Carli 2007). If they are too physically appealing, men will not necessarily take them seriously. In fact, argues linguist Robin Lakoff (1976), the more attractive a woman is, the less likely she will be taken seriously in the workplace or elsewhere (40). Finally, the demands of family life in our culture still impose upon women the expectation that they—not men—will be the ones to interrupt careers, take time off work, or work part time in order to care for children or elderly relatives (Eagly and Carli 2007). To compound these burdens, women are often blamed for failing to advance their careers, as if workplace policies, unhelpful spouses, and a corporate culture that privileges cutthroat competition over cooperation played no part in the problem (Basu 2013, B3). Fortunately for women, a handful of businesses are responding to the challenges that valuable female employees face. American Institute of Architects Fellow Rena M. Klein (2008) has proposed that architecture firms adopt Eagly and Carli’s suggestions, including changing the norm of long hours that pre-empts time spent with family; reducing anti-female bias in performance evaluations; ensuring a “critical mass of women” at every level of the field; mentoring women and showing interest in their careers; assigning women demanding jobs commensurate with their abilities; and welcoming women back from family leave. Still, however, such progressive practices are the exception to the rule. In fact, a sobering 2008 study by organizational psychologists Beth Livingston and Timothy Judge found that the more egalitarian a man’s values were concerning women in the workplace, the less money he tended to make, leading us to conclude that sexism is very profitable to the men who perpetrate it (Vedantam 2008). Those who are the most likely to demonstrate dominance and aggression over women gain the highest paid positions, consistent with the patriarchal “The-strong-must-win-and-theweak-must-lose, everlastingly” philosophy that Orwell portrayed in Such, Such were the Joys. Yet we should consider how more egalitarian attitudes about women’s pay would benefit society in general. As journalist Naomi Barko (2000) argues in “The Other Gender Gap: Why Women Still Fail to Receive Comparable Wages for Comparable Work,” “If men and women were paid equally, more than 50 percent of lowincome households across the country—dual earner as well as single mother—would rise above the poverty line” (61).

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The Pink-Collar Dilemma Perhaps Galatea can avoid competing with men altogether by choosing to fill a traditional female role such as teacher, childcare worker, nurse, health care aide, social worker, or secretary. These are the some of the “pink-collar” service jobs that are sanctioned for women. Unfortunately, they pay, on average, almost twenty percent less than do the maledominated professions. Yet many “women’s jobs” such as teaching or nursing have educational requirements comparable to traditional men’s work, such as engineering. In 2000, Naomi Barko noted in “The Other Gender Gap…”that there was discrimination not just “against individual women but rather discrimination against women’s occupations,” despite the schooling and licensing requirements of many pink-collar jobs: “As the percentage of women in an occupation rises, wages tend to fall.” Barko recounted the story of Milt Tedrow, a licensed practical nurse at Eastern State Hospital in Spokane, Washington. Becoming a nurse required two years of schooling, four years of experience, and a licensing exam. But this lowpaying “woman’s job” would not fund Tedrow’s approaching retirement, so he became a carpenter at the same hospital. Though the carpentry position required no schooling and little experience, it paid substantially more than nursing. Tedrow made clear that the state objected to “‘paying people decently who are taking care of people’s bodies, when they’d pay a lot for someone fixing cars or plumbing.’” (Barko 2000). At the time of this writing in 2012, the wage discrepancy still holds. Our monetary system continues to pay rich rewards to men, who tend to work with objects—as engineers, chemists, builders, computer technicians—and scant rewards to women, who tend to care for people— childcare workers, teachers, nurses, social service providers—despite the education and training needed in any of these jobs. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy research, the higher the concentration of women in an occupation, the lower [the] median earnings for weekly fulltime work (Hayes 2010). This system of monetary rewards for men and monetary penalties for women threatens to convince Galatea that she is worth a fraction of a man, a dynamic that effectively chisels her down to size in Pygmalion’s patriarchal world. Many argue that the current recession will continue to improve this dynamic for women, since more men than ever are seeking service sector jobs after experiencing layoffs from jobs in manufacturing and industry. Yet a 2011 Pew study found that, regardless of ethnicity, men have recovered much better than women in our anemic economy. In the past

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year, men have gained 768,000 jobs, whereas women have lost 218,000 of them (Lee 2011).There are two reasons for this trend. First, men are better received than women when they seek nontraditional jobs. Hospitals are more willing to admit men into nursing or medical technician positions than industry and finance sectors are willing to receive women into their fields (Younger in Dankosky 2011). Theresa C. Younger, Executive Director of the Permanent Economic Status of Women, recommends that traditional, male-dominated professions implement more family-friendly hiring and scheduling practices, yet the charge to do so will likely disadvantage female applicants even more. Younger notes that the financial squeeze on women evidences the already entrenched wage gap, since men can tolerate a greater range of salary reductions—from 5 to 15%—when they accept new positions, whereas for women who most likely start from a lower place, such salary reductions are untenable, especially for single mothers (in Dankosky 2011). Furthermore, even when men do enter female-dominated jobs, they tend to rise above women to senior management positions on what is termed the “glass escalator”: “While women climb the ladder in femaledominated positions, men glide past them on an invisible escalator, shooting straight to the top,” where they receive more promotions and higher salaries, despite having less experience than their female counterparts (Goudreau 2012). According to American University’s Assistant Professor of Management Caren Goldberg, entrenched gender discrimination still matches the typical manager with the typical male, meaning that female candidates, though outnumbering male contenders, are simply bypassed for the highest paying roles (Goudreau 2012). In all, however, gender segregation still holds fast in our culture, so that fewer than five percent of all nurses are males, most likely because the culture sees such a role as demeaning for men (Goudreau 2012). Meanwhile, though occasionally a woman can defy the stereotype and rise to a prestigious position in a male-dominated field, she is often perceived as a poor fit (Goudreau 2012). Though for the most part gender discrimination is manifest in unspoken, even irrational “gut reactions” that cause employers to bypass women for prestigious positions, on occasion, such discrimination is more explicit.

Summers, Pinker, and the Feminine Brain Consider the insidious delivery of the rhetoric that women don’t belong in the male-dominated occupations of science and engineering during Harvard president Lawrence Summers’ 2005 address at a

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conference on women and minorities in those fields. At this private, invitation-only event in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Summers gave three reasons why women were not attaining high-level positions in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The first, he said, could be that women refused to adjust to the mandatory 80-hour workweeks associated with these fields. The second was that high school girls do not score as well as boys on mathematics or science exams. The third was that genetic factors unaffected by socialization made women inherently less capable than men in science and mathematics (Bombardieri 2005). Stating that he was merely consolidating the research he had learned from the organizers of the conference, Summers repeated several times, “I’m going to provoke you.” To illustrate his point about the feminine brain being “innately” nurturing and not scientific, he recounted that he had tried to practice gender-neutral parenting with his daughter by giving her trucks as toys. But the toddler insisted on treating the trucks like dolls, naming one “Daddy Truck” and the other “Baby Truck” (Bombardieri 2005). Some female participants walked out. Knowing that only four out of 32 tenured faculty jobs were offered to women under Summers’ watch, Nancy Hopkins, a Harvard graduate and an eminent biologist at MIT who pioneered studies documenting gender bias at that institution, said, “‘It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women [at Harvard] are being led by a man who views them this way.’” Other women who found Summers’ remarks offensive argued that when women have the same opportunities and encouragement as men, they excel in mathematics and science (Bombardieri 2005). In patriarchy, however, men tend to encourage and reward their own kind. Conference organizer and Harvard economist Richard B. Freeman described the offended women as those “‘whose sensibilities might be at odds with intellectual debate’” (Bombardieri 2005). Consistent with Pygmalion’s ad hominem view, Summers and Freeman relied on the idea of women’s inherent shortcomings: Not only were women relatively incapable in mathematics or science; even the most brilliant among them reasoned with wounded feelings (“sensibilities”) rather than intellect. Freeman and Summers perpetuated a public rhetoric about where women really belong in society: nurturing and caring for others behind the scenes, far away from the masculine hard sciences whose challenging principles elude female understanding. Summers and Freeman are not alone in their essentialist view that women are innately lacking when it comes to ability in mathematics and science. In his popular 2002 book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of

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Human Nature, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker acknowledges the unfair glass ceiling and gender gap in pay that disadvantages women, but he then provides a lengthy argument as to why women shy away from the highest paid professions in the land: Nature has steered them away. With sly rhetorical strokes that justify women’s low status relative to men, including quoted support by numerous female researchers, Pinker reminds us that “‘On average, women are more interested in dealing with people and men with things’” (Gottfredson in Pinker 2002, 353). Pinker paints the researchers who argue for innate cognitive differences between women and men as “lonely voices” who bravely challenge widely held but misguided gender-feminist theories of systemic barriers and cultural bias against women workers (353). Quoting social scientist Patti Hausman, Pinker hails the problematic theory that women, for the most part, just don’t like science: “The question of why more women don’t choose careers in engineering has a rather obvious answer: Because they don’t want to. Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks. Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works” (Hausman in Pinker 2002, 352).

Consistent with Summers’ view, Pinker essentializes women as caring nurturers who play with dolls as children and later apply their maternal instincts to the low-status social sciences and humanitarian professions. The chapter on gender is peppered with references to women’s biologically driven strengths and weaknesses, dictated, as Victorians would agree, by their ovaries: “When estrogen levels are high, women get even better at tasks on which they typically do better than men, such as verbal fluency. When the levels are low, women get better at tasks on which men typically do better, such as mental rotation” (348). Having provided data related to women’s proclivity for communication and caretaking, Pinker reasons as if his priceless cognitive theory is the secret golden key that unlocks the mystery of women’s low pay: The possibility that men and women may differ from each other in ways that affect what jobs they hold or how much they get paid may never be mentioned in public, because it will set back the cause of equity in the workplace and harm the interests of women (353).

Even if nature plays a role in the way women choose their vocations, Pinker’s conclusion that his findings are likely to “set back the cause of

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equity in the workplace and harm the interests of women” is hugely problematic. His rhetoric frames women’s low status and low pay as their biological destiny. Women’s “inherent” skills, verbal fluency, childcare, and artistic ability, pay far less than traditional male skills such as mathematical understanding, ability in the hard sciences, and financial acumen. But Pinker simply avoids the fact that pay scales have nothing to do with biology and everything to do with a social value system that prizes men’s work and devalues women’s work (so that the average public school teacher makes $54,819 per year, while the average engineer, with the same level of schooling, makes $77,880 (National Center for Education Statistics 2010; Thomasian 2011). According to Pinker, since Nature, not Nurture, dictates the work women do, the notion of culture as a system that rewards traditional male roles and penalizes traditional female roles is absurd. To define culture as a force in its own right is to believe in a mythical bogeyman, a “superorganism that teaches, issues commands, and doles out rewards and punishments” (309). Not surprisingly, the idea of patriarchal culture economically or socially disadvantaging women is a ho-hum, tired ideology to Pinker: “[The] wording—‘men are socialized in a patriarchal culture’—reproduces a numbingly familiar slogan” (360). In this way, he sweeps the pesky nightmares of the gender feminists neatly aside to emphasize science’s answers concerning women’s abilities (or lack thereof). Seeking to balance his anti-feminist rhetoric with tepid reassurances about the valuable contributions of underpaid teachers and journalists (they are not “less worthy human beings, less valuable to our civilization” after all!), Pinker ends the chapter with a lukewarm pat on the head for all of the little ladies who are biologically destined to serve others and remain under-compensated behind the scenes (359). Summers and Pinker may regard their essentialist views of women as innovative and refreshing, but their shared position that science justifies women’s second-class citizenship is nothing new. Virginia Woolf, who critiqued the Victorian theories about women’s inherently dull brains that were perpetuated in her lifetime, wrote in 1938: Nature was called in; Nature it was claimed who is not only omniscient but unchanging, had made the brain of woman of the wrong shape or size. “Anyone,” writes Bertrand Russell, “who desires amusement may be advised to look upon the tergiversations of eminent craniologists in their attempts to prove from brain measurements that women are stupider than men.” Science, it would seem, is not sexless; she is a man, a father, and infected too (Three Guineas 139).

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Because science is still being employed in the young millennium to privilege men and to devalue women, we’d do best to remember that even the field of science is, in its largest part, manmade.

Devalued Work and the Devalued Self Women in pink-collar professions do get the message that they are less worthy human beings than men, whether they should or not. With thirty graduate credits beyond the master’s degree, Nicole, a kindergarten teacher whose colleagues are exclusively women, once lamented to me concerning all that was expected of public elementary school teachers under No Child Left Behind education policies: “Now we have to submit written lesson plans to the administration, which takes ten extra hours a week that they don’t pay us for. And there are vacations that they expect us to skip in order to get training or to raise students’ test scores.” We laughed together over how much money she would make in billable hours if she could charge for work done outside the office as do attorneys, who have roughly the same years in education. “There’s just no respect for elementary school teachers,” she said. Stanford University Professor Andrea Lunsford (2002) echoes Nicole’s view: “If we shouldn’t send such messages [that women are worth less than men], then let’s pay teachers as much as other professionals” (Editor’s Note, Presence of Others 754). Perhaps as in the medical field, more men will begin to populate the teaching profession in our ailing economy. As Barko has indicated, however, more men in the teaching profession would likely elevate the status of the job, but it would not mean the same opportunities were extended to women. Galatea may feel that her sanctioned “feminine” work really doesn’t matter too much in Pygmalion’s world. Traditionally, our system of measuring America’s economy in terms of the goods it produces has not taken the caring, pink-collar service sector into account. In her book The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, feminist economist Nancy Folbre (2001) rightly questions measuring economic success on any given day in America by the average performance of thirty or so industrial stocks (the “Dow Jones Industrial Average”). Relying on figures like these means that most women and their work are irrelevant to the American economy. Folbre proposes an economic index called the “Dolly Jones,” which accounts for women’s service work and even women’s unpaid domestic work. Women’s work benefits the American economy as a whole because it meets workers’ basic needs. Indeed, women’s work makes life-or-death differences to those it serves (64-65). In our current

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recession, as more men edge out the traditionally female demographic that has filled these jobs, it will be interesting to see how this dynamic plays out. An interesting contrast to American disregard for service work is Finland, which at the time of this writing ranks at the top of international measurements examining economic, political, and social success (Oppenheimer 2008, A17). In Transparency International’s Index of Least Corrupt Nations, Finland ranks Number One. (The United States is Number 20.) Finland ranks first in Freedom House’s list of the most democratic countries (the United States is 15th), and it ranks first in the world for high school students’ standardized test scores in science (the United States ranks 29th) (Oppenheimer 2008, A17). When asked why Finland tops other countries in these measurements of success, President Tarja Halonen said, “‘I can sum it up in three words: education, education, and education’” (in Oppenheimer 2008, A17). According to Halonen, the high expectations, high pay, and great social respect for Finland’s elementary school teachers deserve credit for the country’s overall economic health. Small classes and tutoring programs have helped Finland to shift from timber-based industry to a technological center containing the largest cell phone company in the world, Nokia (Oppenheimer 2008, A17). We may argue that comparing a socially homogenous country of 5.3 million people to the enormous, economically and socially diverse United States is unfair. However, consider the lifeblood that a well-trained, wellrespected, and well-compensated force of educators could pump into any impoverished school district in our country. At the time of this writing, teachers willing to sacrifice their lives for their students in isolated incidents of school violence such as the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut shootings have proven their merit beyond the pale. Yet we undercompensate those who choose teaching as a profession—and most of these workers are women. The rhetorical effect of such policies is that women’s work is still only partially as valuable as that of men. Not only may Galatea feel that her work is unworthy, she may feel a tangible threat to her lifetime economic security. Because of real economic hardship on an institutionalized scale, women “feel a much more palpable sense of economic anxiety than men do, both for their current circumstances and looking into the future” (Lovell, Hartmann and Williams 2008). In our patriarchal society that privileges white males, women of color face the greatest risk when it comes to financial hardship. Their salaries are, on the whole, less than that of white women, with Latina and Native American women faring the worst, making roughly 54

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percent of what white men earn (Hegewisch, Williams and Henderson 2011).

Galatea’s Guilt Since Galatea knows it is of prime importance that she not be powerful or rich in Pygmalion’s world, there must be something that motivates her immobility in society—some alternate currency that she finds worth working for, behind the scenes, away from the most powerful sectors of society where ample money is made. Victorian rhetoric from the pulpit and in popular ladies’ manuals often argued that because they were the moral center of the household, women worked primarily for love; filthy lucre was the man’s reward. Almost a century has passed since the last of the Victorians died away, but their rhetoric still echoes in women’s ears; otherwise, modern women would not continue to organize their lives around the moral imperative to be good, nurturing caretakers for love, not money. This reasoning has its merits. Imagine a world minus its unpaid, female labor. Though there are exceptions, most men would not willingly care for infants and children or for elderly persons on a full-time basis for no reward but love. The reasoning that women must work for love alone has onerous implications. Because our culture teaches women that any shortfall in unpaid caretaking work makes them unworthy and unloving, women are susceptible to a guilt that far outweighs any guilt men feel concerning the way they organize their lives. A stronger and more primary currency than money, avoidance of guilt is too often the reason why Galatea labors in the household, away from the public square. Cultural rhetoric mercilessly heaps guilt upon female caretakers, especially mothers. In The Myth of Women’s Masochism, psychologist Paula Caplan (1993) uses a variety of sources, including advertising and mental health experts, to examine the blaming of mothers in Western culture. “Mothers have nearly all the work and receive all the blame” when something goes wrong with children (or even adults). Caplan writes of her 1983 study on the work of psychiatrists and psychotherapists: In the 125 articles that we read and classified, mothers were blamed for an astounding array of problems in their children—72 different kinds of problems in all. These included anorexia nervosa, arson, chronic vomiting, bedwetting, poor bowel control, inability to deal with color-blindness, male children’s fear of penile shrinkage and death, minimal brain damage, a need to be anally penetrated, poor language development, schizophrenia,

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Caplan notes that whether a father is absent or engaged in a child’s life, mental health professionals rarely implicate him for a child’s maladjustment. It is as if these professionals assume a guilty mother lurks in the shadows. Caplan’s findings are consistent with patriarchal culture, in which all women, and therefore all mothers, are to blame for something. We may argue that things have changed since 1983 when Caplan did her study, and today more mental health professionals are willing to consider fathers’ roles in children’s overall well-being. But there is a lingering sense in our culture that since mothers, not fathers, carry the lion’s share of responsibility for children’s welfare, then mothers are to blame when something goes wrong. Australian social analyst Dr. Susan Maushart has noted that despite the Women’s Movement, women in the young millennium are still “expected to, or [choose] to take on enormous levels of responsibility” (Daly 2006). While fathers enjoy more leisure time, mothers’ time is circumscribed by duty and obligation. Even making time is a creative struggle for them: “‘Men take time out, whereas women have to make time…it’s as if time is something you can bake, like a batch of brownies’” (Maushart in Daly 2006). And patriarchal culture piles guilt on modern mothers whether they stay at home or work full time. A 2008 Australian market research project found that stay-at-home mothers felt “ashamed, inadequate, lazy, and embarrassed” for not contributing to society. One participant, a full-time mom, said, “‘I feel guilty that I’m not working and that I’m seen by society as not doing a lot with my life on a professional level.’” But working mothers fared no better emotionally, feeling “ashamed…because they worried about the lack of time they spent with their children” (Connolly 2008). In the Observer, British journalist Stephanie Merritt (2006) describes the rhetoric of guilt that psychologists and the media target at working mothers: “Every week a new report seems to emerge telling us that day care is an automatic route to academic failure, [social maladjustment], and depression.” At a 2008 meeting with working mothers in Ohio, Michelle Obama described the nearly universal inner struggle of employed moms, who miss first steps, first words, school functions, soccer games, and other childhood events because of the demands of full-time work: “Everywhere I go, no matter what, the women in the audience, their first question for me is, ‘How are you managing it? How are you keeping it together?’ It’s a constant sense of guilt. It’s guilt. Feeling guilty all the time” (qtd. in York 2008).

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Recent studies do tell us that, in the current recession, fathers suffer more from family/work stressors than they did in decades past. Yet their conflicts have more to do with the job insecurity that results from asking employers for more flexible scheduling than from the guilt associated with parenting (Galinsky in Dankosky 2011). As a result of economic pressures, fathers in the recession are actually putting in three hours more per week at their jobs than are men who do not have children (Galinsky in Dankosky 2011). There is still little evidence that fathers feel huge amounts of guilt for not being the über-parents that mothers feel they should be. In The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, a study of the “intensive mothering” our contemporary culture requires of women with children, sociologist Sharon Hays (1996) observes a marked “guilt gap” between mothers and fathers in their attitudes toward parenting: This guilt gap is described with elegant simplicity, I think, by yet another mother: ‘I never feel free of my kids, where[as] I think that’s very different from how the dad thinks of it. ‘Cause when he goes, he’s gone. And when he comes home, he’s home.’ Fathers, in other words, can go to the movies and not worry about what they’re leaving behind, because they know that mothers are in charge of the worrying. They simply go and enjoy the movie. Mothers, on the other hand, worry about who will care for the children while they’re at the movies, and frequently they worry about how well the kids are being cared for as they watch the movie (104).

In the widely accepted ideology of intensive mothering, dads do help out, but they enter and exit the parenting role with ease, shedding their worries and responsibilities for their children once Mom takes over. However, Mom is always responsible for her children, whether she is absent or present. “‘You never get away from the responsibility,’” says an Ann Arbor, Michigan mother in Betty Rollin’s essay, “Motherhood: Who Needs It?” (2000). “‘Even when you leave the children with a sitter, you are not out from under the pressure of the responsibility’” (207). It’s as if women in patriarchy shield men from the grunt work (and worry) of the parenting role. Certainly there are exceptions, as current studies tell us that men are parenting and doing more housework than they ever did. But an average married mother employed full time is still likely to perform over two-thirds of the chore and childcare load (Davis et al 2007). In contrast, men continue to enjoy more hours of uninterrupted work than do women, whether at the office or at home. Critic Marya Mannes puts the idea succinctly: “‘A man at his desk in a room with a closed door is a man at work. A woman at a desk in any room is available’” (qtd. in Rollin 2000, 208). A 2011 poll of 1,200 women taken

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by Forbes Woman and bump.com found that 89 percent of stay-at-home mothers and 92 percent of working mothers felt overworked and overwhelmed by responsibility. And 68 percent of stay-at-home mothers and 70 percent of working mothers resented their partners because of the unrelenting workload. Yet these mothers desired to fit the pattern of the supermoms they saw in the media and refused to ask their spouses for help: “She feels it’s damaging her sense of motherhood to ask for help. And it’s causing resentment” (Meghan Casserly in Chang 2011). Popular culture intensifies this ubiquitous pressure on women to maintain the supermom identity. In the ABC sitcom, Last Man Standing, Mike Baxter, a marketing director and self-proclaimed “man’s man” (played by Tim Allen), must shift his attentions homeward when his wife’s promotion makes her the primary breadwinner in the economic recession. The domestic role erodes Baxter’s masculinity and fuels the burning question he explores in his video log, “What happened to men?” It’s as if masculinity fades away with every mini-van run or household chore. This patriarchal assumption implicitly blames working mothers for harming male identity when they press for a fairer division of labor. Mothers buy the rhetoric of intensive parenting without question, and the results are exhausting. I came up with my own list of responsibilities where we mothers rush in and fathers need not tread: There are teacher meetings to attend; pediatrician and dentist appointments to keep; medicine to administer; fevers to gauge; school supplies and clothing to shop for; scrapes, scratches, and other wounds to clean; tears (and other things) to wipe; sibling fights to break up; whining to manage; omnipresent kid clutter to sort through, throw out, or put away; grandparent and relative visits to orchestrate; school buses to wait in the rain for and bus schedules to straighten out; dance or karate or music (or whatever) lessons to drive to; holidays to decorate, plan, shop, and cook for; costumes to make or buy; thank you notes to write; hurt feelings to soothe; demands of “Play with me, Mommy!” to attend to; vacations or outings to plan and pack for; crafts to supervise; beds to make; toilets and many other things to clean; meals to shop for and prepare; homework to oversee; clothes to wash, dry and fold—again and again and again; lunches to pack; school forms to sign; skills such as reading, math, and bike-riding to teach; swings to push; toddlers to head off at the pass before they tumble down the stairs or fall off the kitchen counter; Internet use and television to monitor; play-dates to arrange, host, and supervise; birthday parties to schedule and furnish with presents, cake, and favors; and I have not even begun to exhaust the list. If a mother has a full-time job or cares

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for an elderly parent without substantial assistance from others, the burdens of caretaking can be nigh to intolerable. It’s not that fathers don’t help with these duties—they do. But the word “help” implies aid or assistance adjunct to the parenting that is primarily the responsibility of the mother. “Help” is an activity that can be curtailed to suit one’s convenience and schedule. Most mothers do not “help” care for their children; their parenting is ongoing and incessant. As my late grandmother would say, “Man works from sun to sun, but woman’s work is never done.” Therefore fathers, in large part, seem immune to the guilt pangs mothers feel when they neglect almost any one of the items on the list. And though we are conscious that the standards for good mothers are ridiculously high, a subterranean conviction that we mothers are still to blame for not reaching them accuses us when we don’t get it right. If our children misbehave or are hurt or ill or have not put on warm enough clothes, an internalized Pygmalion, the patriarch, hisses accusations at us. And we often locate the blame in ourselves, neglecting to look seriously at our patriarchal culture as the actual source of blame. Without realizing it, psychologists and self-help authors may use damaging rhetoric that reflects the patriarchal attitudes about women in the culture at large. These authorities can be especially unhelpful in guiding women toward healthy ways to manage guilt. Too many times, the “experts” locate blame within the individual woman (who must have “issues”) and completely neglect the role of patriarchy in shaping her feelings about herself. Consider, for example, how popular self-help author and psychologist Anne Wilson Schaef (1990, 2004) frames women’s anxieties in her book, Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much: Pain is inevitable in life. As we begin to recover, we can see that much of the suffering that we experience is directly related to our stubbornness and illusion of control […] Contrary to much religious belief, suffering is not noble. It is often just plain stupid and comes out of our stubbornness and need to control. When we are attached to our suffering, we often miss those “flowers that grow out of dark moments.” My suffering teaches me about my disease. My pain teaches me about my life (no page).

Taking her cues from Twelve-Step programs for addicts and alcoholics, Schaef’s rhetoric locates women’s suffering in their individual addictions to pain and control. If a woman does too much, it is because she

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is pathologically hooked on busy-ness and responsibility. Certainly a working mother’s daily mountain of duties has a mind-numbing effect, like a drug. But we rarely implicate the culture that imposes this relentless labor by holding women to ridiculously high standards of parenting and home management. The idea that each woman individually chooses a lifestyle of never-ending tasks for herself because she is diseased only adds to the sense of blame that women already feel. And it perfectly mirrors patriarchal culture’s assumptions that women are, in all, essentially flawed. We mothers will do just about anything to keep the accusing Pygmalion off our backs. It does not matter that when we opt out of the full-time workforce to mother our children—as writer Leslie Bennetts amply proves in The Feminine Mistake—we court economic disaster should a male breadwinner get sick, leave us or die. We will pay a huge economic price, so as to avoid a more devastating emotional one: the guilt Pygmalion imposes upon us for never being good enough mothers. And guilt cuts to the heart of mothers so intensely that it keeps us in political check as well. After all, a guilty mother cannot harness political power or change public policy unless she critically scrutinizes where that guilt comes from and what its implications are. In this way, guilt, an emotion that women experience personally, holds us back politically: The personal is indeed political (Hanisch 2006). Often, women will hold on to a fuzzy sense of “it’s all worth it in the long run” to justify sacrificing the time, earned income, and self-esteem that patriarchy requires of mothers in exchange for its expiation from guilt. A mother will say to herself that because she loves her child, all of her thankless, trivial grunt work was worth the beautiful adult that emerged from it. This, to me, is a lie. I do not believe that presenting motherhood as a guilt-inducing role that whittles one’s social status and esteem down to nothing; that requires not only timeshed but spiritshed, as Virginia Woolf called women’s work—can create beautiful human beings (Three Guineas 1938, 64). It is precisely because I am a mother that I must choose not to model motherhood for my girls as a series of compulsive tasks done to avoid guilt and judgment. Rather, I must parent consciously—not because I have to, but because I want to freely give of myself. And I require that my girls and their father give of themselves as well—to keep our household running smoothly. Each task I do, no matter how trivial patriarchy tries to make it, is to promote life and wisdom for my daughters, not to absolve me of blame. And because I am a mother of girls, I choose to expose the patriarchal lie for what it is: Mothers should not be guilted into shielding

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fathers from their own parenting responsibilities. But patriarchy has convinced mothers that they, not fathers, are to blame if something goes wrong. Guilt-ridden mothers run the risk of passing that lie on to their daughters, or to men who will eventually become women’s domestic partners. Couldn’t it be true that the enormity of the parenting role is the very reason that patriarchy has laid it almost exclusively at mothers’ feet, then used guilt to turn mothers against themselves? We do our daughters a much bigger favor by insisting that their fathers also actively parent their children—not just “help” care for them.

“Women Nag” My ex-partner, Carl, found women’s work so shameful that my every request for help around the house became a monumental power struggle. He’d quip, “My father always said, ‘Women nag. That’s what they do.’” In addition to the word “nag,” patriarchy’s arsenal had supplied him with many other choice animal epithets for problematic women. And because he could slip into an abusive mode so easily, his reality ruled, despite the facts. “Have you ever considered that it’s your obsession with the trivial that’s the real problem?” he once said over a sink of aging dirty dishes. I needed his contribution to the work, but he was able to convince me that my fussy obsession with “trivial” things like dishes and toilets made me a nag. I hated seeing myself as a nag. So I acted the mule. I said nothing and did everything: dishes, groceries, cooking, toilet-cleaning, you name it, though I had a full-time job and a full-time grad school load. But I grew more and more resentful, naturally. Why was this “servant work,” as Carl called it, appropriate for me, but beneath him? Besides, his refusal was getting ridiculous. “I’ll help you in my time—not yours” meant that the plastic bags of accumulated garbage got so heavy that in order to get them to the dumpster across our apartment parking lot, I had to drive there with them on the hood of my car. “Make sure you do that at night after dark. I don’t need the neighbors’ seeing me as a selfish jerk,” he said. At one point these power struggles (making the work much more demeaning than necessary) became so onerous that I hired cleaning help, which at the time we could barely afford. Carl was furious that I’d spend our money on something so unimportant. When our budget ran out, we returned to the same cycle. That was the beginning of the end of us. Carl may seem over the top compared to most male partners, who are more “helpful”—problematic as that word is—to their wives and girlfriends. But a patriarchal delusion that once chiseled me down to size

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is common to other women who devalue themselves. We are thus reminded once more that for women, the personal is political, since our most intimate relationships can be microcosms of our social power. I felt that I had to please Carl no matter what. The world seemed rocked off balance if I annoyed him (with my “nagging,” or whatever). So I was willing to contort my mind into believing that he was right: Housework was trivial, shaming, and unnecessary; I was unreasonable to ask for his help; I’d better shut up about it and do it myself so as to please him more. If he was uncooperative or boorish about housework, it must be my fault, and therefore, I was responsible for changing my outlook. Poet Kay Ryan called it a “last chemise we can’t escape—a hope more intimate than paint” (in Say Uncle, 2000). Virginia Woolf called it the “Angel in the House,” who keeps us from telling the truth about patriarchy, and instead soothingly urges us to charm and flatter men, because, after all, they have the power to hurt, reject, and possibly impoverish us (“Professions for Women” 1931, 1254). It is the desire to please etched so deeply into a woman’s psyche that she rarely questions it or invites it into the light. I say that in the long run, it does men no favors, since our compunction to please denigrates the male character by enabling men’s control and economic disempowerment of us. I also say that the drive to please can whittle a woman down to half the size she should be, like the statue Galatea.

Questioning the System: Harriet Martineau If anyone’s faded message to women living to please deserves revival in the present day, it is that of Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), the first female sociologist. Born in Britain the sixth of eight children to Elizabeth and Thomas Martineau, a textile manufacturer whose fortunes tended to wax and wane, Harriet received an intensive education early in life. Deeply self-aware, she came to realize in young adulthood that marriage was not for her, as Victorian wifehood required a loss of self (Rossi 1973, 122). When her father’s business collapsed in 1825, Martineau was forced to make a living by her pen. She wrote prodigiously, publishing pamphlets on politics and the economy, several children’s stories, a translation of Comte’s Positive Philosophy, a volume on child care, and a methodology of social research that she drafted on board a ship to the States. Her detailed journal recording several months’ travel through America was the basis for her 1837 multi-volume work, Society in America (Rossi 1973, 120). As an advocate for women’s rights as well as a relative outsider to American culture, Martineau was especially keen in

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detecting American hypocrisy concerning freedom promised to all but withheld from half the human race: “how is the restricted and dependent state of women to be reconciled with the proclamation that ‘all are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?’” (Society in America 1837, 143). Martineau was understandably critical of the limited lives reserved for American women. “Nothing is thus left for women but marriage,” she wrote, upon noting the intolerable existence of women who tried to make their living in the grossly underpaid “female” positions, such as those of textile workers or governesses, who were subject to abuse in the private homes of their employers: “Let philanthropists inquire into the proportion of governesses among the inmates of lunatic asylums,” she wrote (142). Martineau emphasized the tension between each thinking woman’s burning conscience over the slavery issue and society’s expectations of her quiet obedience. Martineau was sympathetic to the few female abolitionists she observed who were willing to speak out against slavery, only to become “dirty jokes,” as Gloria Steinem much later said we could predict of women who rocked the status quo. Martineau saw pamphlets, flyers, and newspapers teeming with “disgusting reproaches and insinuations” leveraged at female—never male—abolitionists. The result, in most cases, was that women, wishing desperately to please men by remaining attractive and marriageable, simply shut their mouths. They fell into the “anticipated, weak, ignorant, and subservient” roles expected of them, “exchang[ing] self-reliance for reliance on anything out of themselves” (129). Discouraged from using or speaking their own minds, American women, to Martineau, had traded learning and thinking for superficial banter: “Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare,” she remarked (140). American women’s religion lacked substance. Despite what Martineau saw as the egalitarian teachings of Christ, she noted that women were expected to abide by a “separate gospel” from that of men, since directly expressing one’s moral sense was unfeminine: “fidelity to conscience is inconsistent with retiring modesty” (128). Martineau maintained that this female gospel of silence and docility actually deadened the moral sense and was consequently unhealthy: [Women’s] charity is overflowing, if it were but more enlightened; and it may be supposed that they could not exist without religion. It appears to superabound; but it is not usually of a healthy character. It may seem harsh to say this; but is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless

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Women were allowed the superficial show of religion (their “superabounding” charity). But they could not publicly express any actual conviction, particularly concerning slavery, without sinning against Victorian modesty. American women’s religion would have been much healthier, according to Martineau, if charity were an outgrowth of moral awareness. But patriarchy required that women disassociate from their moral, spiritual, and intellectual selves—not only so that the patriarchal practice of slavery could continue unchallenged, but so that women could be nonthreatening to men and therefore more marriageable. Embracing an intellectual life characterized by critical inquiry, Martineau herself refused to give in to the demands of True Womanhood and instead spoke her mind. Naturally, a backlash resulted. In the tradition of Maria Stewart and the Grimké sisters, Martineau also suffered threats because of her anti-slavery beliefs. A public lynching plot caused her to cancel plans to travel to the Western states. Martineau knew of mobs as far north as Michigan that had planned to ambush her carriage and attack her. She recounted the experience years later: “The woods of Michigan were very beautiful; but danger was about us there, as everywhere during those three months of travel. It was out of such glades as those of Michigan that mobs had elsewhere issued to stop the coach, and demand the victim, and inflict the punishment earned by compassion for the negro, and assertion of true republican liberty. I believe there was scarcely a morning during those three months when it was not my first thought on waking whether I should be alive at night” (Chapman in Rossi 1973, 119).

Men were willing to kill Martineau simply for telling the truth about the degradation of slavery. Despite overwhelming pressure to protect herself and withhold her views from the public (as did American women all around her), Martineau nevertheless published her observations in 1837. As a result of her book, she lost numerous friends and made many enemies (Rossi 1973, 124). But she successfully traced the path between patriarchy’s oppressive assumptions about women and the whittled-down half-beings that nineteenth-century American women had become. Whenever we women are tempted to carve our authentic selves down to size in order to be pleasing, we need to remember Martineau’s courage in illuminating hypocrisy in the slave-owning Land of the Free. Martineau courageously questioned the American patriarchal system that exploited

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both slaves and women, who were still the property of husbands in 1837. In this way, she broke through the onerous Victorian cultural expectation that women disown their intellectual selves. Martineau’s writings, full of astute observations and critical inquiry, helped to reclaim an intellectual life for women. Though women’s rights have vastly improved in America since 1837, America’s economic system still keeps women relatively immobilized as second-class citizens. Not only are we economically disadvantaged relative to men (we make 77 cents to every man’s dollar, after all), but our culture also holds us in check with guilt. If we work solely as homemakers and mothers, then we feel ashamed for not contributing to society. Yet if we work outside the home, then we can expect a barrage of guilt for being negligent mothers. Martineau’s courage can inspire modern women to stop pointing the finger of blame at themselves, as patriarchy with its damaging rhetoric has expected of us. Rather, like Martineau, we can embrace our right to face flawed social systems and their spurious arguments with hard, honest questions. Facing our culture as thinkers, rather than mere readers of cultural phenomena, we can grow to understand all of the implications of the false guilt patriarchy has dealt us: the dependent, immature spouses and children that result when women take on the lion’s share of the work; the hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost wages women can expect over the years when they opt out of the workforce to raise children full time. Let’s change this script. By periodically questioning nineteenth-century women’s roles in her journals, Martineau was able to interrupt a feminine “script,” so to speak. Her writings imply intellectual possibilities for women —possibilities she made real in her own vocation as a pioneer sociologist. In the same way, we can interrupt the flow of guilt in the old script by writing our roles differently. In journals, in letters, in blogs we share—we can tackle this guilt with all the irony we can muster and reclaim our thinking selves. Zora Neale Hurston once said, “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” We need to tell our own stories, then, not as guiltridden, “never-good-enough” women, but as thinkers now ready to tear this script apart and begin anew. I think of the wisdom of Hannah Arendt: Though we die, we “are not born to die but in order to begin” (Human Condition 1964, 246). Each of us has a sphere of influence to reach, whether it be our families, our neighbors, our friends, or our online village (Tatum 1997, 275). It is time to begin an alternative conversation in those venues instead of obeying a culture that diminishes our voices, that trivializes and discredits our work, that guilts us into submission, and, as

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we shall see next, that chisels our bodies down into something much smaller and weaker than we should be.

CHAPTER FIVE PYGMALION’S CHISEL ON OUR BODIES

The sculptor Pygmalion has a scrutinizing eye for female flaw, and his message as to what women’s bodies should be and what they should not be is narrow and virtually impossible to achieve. The media is a potent rhetorical force that offers Western women but one acceptable body type: a frame slender almost to emaciation, with torso and arms preadolescent, the only allowable fat visible in the rounded breasts. This type has seeped into our thinking and inspired the internal voice of criticism so many women know. First and foremost, Galatea’s beauty is inversely proportional to her overall size. A perfect woman cannot be big, so Pygmalion—our contemporary patriarchal culture—sizes Galatea down incessantly, and against all odds, too many women struggle to be just like her. Any casual leafing through a current women’s fashion magazine exposes us to cultural rhetoric urging us to attain a perfect body through the “carving” of diet and exercise. The ideal female form presented to women is remarkably slender, as it has been since the arrival in 1966 of the emaciated British model, Lesley Hornby (Twiggy), who set the late twentieth-century standard of beauty at measurements of 32-23-33 (IMDB 2008). Current top models, with a rare exception or two, do not stray much from that standard. Supermodel Kate Moss, whose Calvin Klein ads in the 1990s prompted frightened protests about the beauty trend Bill Clinton called “heroin chic,” at 5 feet six and one-half inches weighs 105 pounds and measures 33-23-34. Moss has still reigned strong in recent years, since she was British Fashion Awards 2006 Model of the Year and appeared on Vogue’s August 2008 cover. Today’s face of the ever-racy Calvin Klein campaign is Russian supermodel Natalia Vodianova, who, though taller than Moss at five feet nine inches, weighs only 110 pounds and measures 35.5-24.5-35. When Vogue triumphantly proclaimed the “Return of the Curve” in 1999, the magazine offered up top-earning model Gisele Bündchen (who currently grosses $33 million a year) on its cover. Bündchen, whom Rolling Stone Magazine called “the most beautiful girl in the world,” weighs a whopping 128 pounds. At five feet, eleven inches,

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she is also tall, but with measurements of 35-28-35 and a dress size of four, she is still far slimmer than the average-sized American woman: five feet, four inches tall, 145 pounds, measuring 37-31-42 and wearing a size 12 (FMD 2008, ANRED 2011). Popular film actresses must be chiseled down, too. In the 2006 Oscarnominated film The Devil Wears Prada, Andy Sachs, played by reed-thin actress Anne Hathaway, must drop from a size six to a size four to be considered worthy of retaining her position as personal assistant to fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestley. Miranda (played by Meryl Streep) takes in Andy’s “excess fat” with looks of disgust, though in every other way, college-educated journalist Andrea is overqualified for the job. The film gives the appearance of poking fun at the ridiculous beauty standards in the fashion industry. In the magazine offices’ cafeteria, Andy asks fashion stylist Nigel (played by Stanley Tucci), “So none of the girls here eat anything?” Wrinkling his nose at Andy’s corn chowder, Nigel informs her, “Not since [size] two became the new four and zero, the new two.” As to Andy’s size six, it’s the “new fourteen,” Nigel quips before he throws Andy’s uneaten lunch into the trash. However, in true Hollywood fashion, while parading as a critique of unrealistic weight standards for women, the film rigorously maintains the status quo. Hathaway’s Andy triumphantly sheds her size six pounds and becomes the ideal two in time for the happy ending. Fans barely questioned the “one-Triscuit-a-day” diet Hathaway endured, or the “onthe-edge-of-sickness” thinness producers imposed on petite co-star Emily Blunt, who bitterly joked that the next time she spoke to producers, it would be from the hospital emergency room (Doonan 2008, 111). These expectations seem in no way remarkable for the female stars, despite the fact that Hollywood rarely (if ever) requires emaciation of already slender male actors who seek major roles. Though a small handful of female celebrities such as Queen Latifah, Wynonna Judd, and Oprah Winfrey have larger bodies, Hollywood sends the message that their weights are unacceptable despite their star power. All three have marketed popular diets with the reasoning, “I’m good, but a thinner me will be so much better.” Oprah recently reinforced this sentiment herself when she lamented her failure to control her own body, an achievement worth more to her than her billions. Similarly, popular culture mercilessly criticizes those former waifs who have gained weight and have thus adopted a more natural profile. Nasty blog comments, scathing television commentary, and a mean-spirited 2009 New York Post cartoon vilified singer Jessica Simpson for adding enough pounds to go from a size 2 to a size 8.

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Waiflike Galatea, perfectly carved down in commercial images, is much more likely than a larger woman to greet us at every corner of our lives: on film, television, and computer screens; on billboards, bus panels, kiosks, or packages; and in catalogue, magazine, and newspaper pages; in store fronts and in the toy chests of children. At six feet tall, the average store mannequin measures 34-23-34 and wears a size six. The iconic Barbie doll, of which every girl in America owns eight on average, would have an absurd profile if she were blown up to life size. At six feet tall, she would weigh 101 pounds, wear a size four, and have measurements of 3919-33! (ANRED 2005). Beyond the Galatea-like images, the rhetoric of carving in popular women’s magazines invites women to chisel away at themselves. We hear how women are to internalize the sculptor Pygmalion’s artistic scrutiny in an article in Fit magazine, “‘You visualize what you want to look like…and then create the form,’” “Create your own masterpiece. Sculpt your body contours into a work of art,” “It’s up to you to do the chiseling; you become the master sculptress’” (in Bordo 1993). There is also the rhetoric that urges us to visually fracture ourselves into our component body parts. Thus we have In Style’s imperative, “Get Sleek Sexy Arms!” (July 2008 cover). Or Mademoiselle’s order to ‘Stamp out cellulite!’ And “‘Arms too chubby? Butt too big? No problem! Just focus on the best and minimize the rest!’” (in Bartky 2003, 28; Steinem, 2000). Our futile pursuit of the Galatea patriarchy has ensconced in our minds is an enactment of the conclusions of philosopher Michel Foucault, who theorized that oppressive systems will create “docile bodies” that discipline and oppress themselves. In popular culture, edicts to get “fit” or “in shape” are often juxtaposed with images of slender models or actresses. However, the ideal body of most models and actresses, who are, on average, 19 percent below normal body weight, is not fitness, physical or mental. Most women would have to develop the disordered eating patterns found in anorexia or bulimia to maintain this ideal. Not surprisingly, the long-term physical effects of these illnesses are the same as those found in starvation victims: infertility; dehydration; ruptured stomach; torn esophagus; tooth and gum disease; severe heart, kidney, and liver damage; and death (ANAD 2010). The fatality rate for anorexia is higher than any other cause of death for girls and women ages 15-24 (NIMH in ANAD 2010). And the mortality rate for the disease increases by five percent for each decade a patient has the illness, reaching 20 percent for those who have had the illness for twenty years (NIMH in ANAD 2010).

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Caloric restriction disorders the mind as well. In 1950, thirty-six healthy subjects from the University of Minnesota underwent a restricted diet (half their normal food intake) for six months in the war rations experiments of biological researcher Ancel Keyes. As the experiment progressed, the students became obsessive about food and eating, talking about the subject incessantly or stealing and hoarding food-related objects, such as menus or cookbooks. Unable to concentrate on anything but the idea of food, they could not function socially or in their work, and their relentless hunger did not ease even after they ate large meals in the refeeding stage. Many were caught up in cycles of binging, feeling stinging remorse, then vomiting their stomach contents (Wolf 1991,194; Garner 1997, 145-177). When Western women demonstrate these unhealthy preoccupations with food and eating, they are often seen as proof positive of the irrational female mind, tossed about by hormones and menstrual difficulties. But when we realize that these subjects were all college-aged men, we recognize that the problem is not raging hormones, but the painful mental residue created by the starvation state (Wolf 1991, 194-195; Garner 1997, 145). Food deprivation is psychically toxic and accounts for binging, hoarding, and obsessing about food. Furthermore, the hollowedout Galatea that anorectics and bulimics harbor in their minds as a standard of female beauty—an image irrelevant to the college men in the starvation experiment—only tightens the grip the disorders have on girls and women. Still, as feminists have pointed out, because they are seen primarily as “women’s issues,” eating disorders and the need for their treatment are not taken seriously enough in a culture that exacerbates them. Conservative estimates state that in the United States, between 5-10 percent of girls and women after puberty (five to ten million American females) have eating disorders (Dittrich 2008). However, as prevalent as anorexia is, its treatment is limited and extremely expensive, costing up to $30,000 per month for inpatient treatment, according to The Center for Counseling and Health Resources Inc. And there are precious few college counseling centers focused on eating disorders, as opposed to substance abuse centers found commonly on campuses. Parents would do well to advocate for eating disorder programs at the colleges and universities that will potentially receive their tuition checks. Though victims of eating disorders are legion, they often describe an extremely isolating, tormenting cycle of self-accusation and reward, depending upon whether pounds are gained or lost. Forty-one-year-old Stephanie, who has struggled with eating disorders for over 25 years (but

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who has made remarkable strides in recovery), wrote in a recent e-mail to me, Anorexia was an addiction for me. I was addicted to losing weight. As much as I knew I shouldn’t lose any more, it was like a drug. There was a sick satisfaction in seeing the scale creep lower still, even though I knew it was inching toward death. The anorexia began as a quest for perfection. I was a competitive equestrian and was surrounded by tall young women who had a completely different body type than I. They were lean and lanky, with long, slender waists. By contrast, I have a short, compressed frame, with a very broad ribcage that sits directly on top of my pelvic girdle/hip bones. If you were to stand up a gecko (think Geico commercial) and then stand up a frog next to the lizard, I would be the frog. What happens when a frog starves itself? It does not magically transform into a gecko. It becomes a skinnier frog… I think we have been conditioned by the media to accept only one female body type. Tall, long, lean, with tiny, elongated waists. The ideal man, on the other hand, can be tall and lean, like an endurance athlete, or big and muscular, like a bodybuilder. Different body types seem to be much more acceptable in men.

Stephanie makes clear that her eating disorders went far beyond her desire to look like the fashionable ideal. They were, in reality, based upon an addiction to control over the body: “It’s like crack. ‘Just this once’ you tell yourself. Then again and again and again until you can’t wait to get home from work so you can start eating and throwing up again…The only thing that keeps you going is this thought of eating and throwing up as soon as you get home.” This is tyranny turned self-ward. If a woman in this state of mind cannot control anything else in her life, she can at least prove her control over her body. There is an imperious moral component to what the anorectic tells herself. We hear the moral imperative couched in Stephanie’s language of “shoulds,” “shouldn’ts,” and “oughts.” “I ought not to have eaten that. I should look like the skinny, elongated gecko. I shouldn’t be the bulky, stocky frog whose frame is just plain wrong. The fact that there is one right body type for women and all others are “wrong” (whereas men do not have this constraint, as Stephanie says), tells me that a Galatea, incessantly whittled (by herself, in the anorectic’s case), is beyond moral reproach. As in the ancient Catholic ascetics, her starvation punishes her body for its “flaws” and simultaneously redeems it by canceling its wayward flesh. Unlike men, who have many more “acceptable” body types, she assumes that the attribution of flaw—in a natural body type that

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Stephanie calls a “frog”—is legitimate and that she can find moral rectitude in an active campaign to stamp it out, which destroys her in the process: “the scale…was inching toward death.” Such a woman has internalized the patriarch Pygmalion and made his accusing voice her own. She turns his chisel against her own body and carves herself. In a haunting poem, Heather, a former high school student of mine who also struggled with anorexia, called her inner, moralistic voice the “Soft Whisper”: She thrives on perfection Body and mind; Achieve a flawless score, And you’ll succeed. She hisses in my ear If what I do defies her. Too many mistakes, And I hang my head. She whispers hauntingly To do better next time… Disappointment Is worse than failure.

Simultaneously encouraging and accusing, the inner voice, a cooing demon, promises the control over the body and the ensuing moral rectitude that ensnares the anorectic. Heather trusted this voice and slavishly obeyed it, as if it spoke the truth. Heather, like Stephanie, assumed that losing weight by obeying the despotic “Soft Whisper” was a morally correct position: “too many mistakes and I hang my head.” It’s as though Pygmalion, hissing his contempt for female flaw, lived in their minds. From the earliest civilizations, men have assumed that being a woman means being flawed. Aristotle thought that “we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness” (in De Beauvoir 1973, 675). Men have not carried this burden; their gender does not mark them with any peculiarity as femaleness marks women as “Other”: “A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong” (675). When a woman feels her body to be all wrong and thus gouges away at her natural form out of shame and moral repugnance, she reflects the Pygmalionlike contempt for what is female that still lives in our culture. Some would argue that eating disorders serve an alternative purpose for women; that they are a way of harnessing power—a sort of “hunger strike” that mocks the extreme beauty standards of the culture (Katz 2010).

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Or, instead of an assertion of patriarchal control over the female body, anorexia and bulimia are defined as protests against the meaninglessness of consumerism, as Maggie Helwig (2000) argues in her essay “Hunger.” Because women have traditionally borne society’s nightmares, Helwig claims, they also carry a physical hunger that signifies spiritual hunger, the logical conclusion of uncontrolled material consumption in a commercial society: To be skeletally, horribly thin makes a strong statement. It says, I am hungry. What I have been given is not sufficient, not real, not true, not acceptable. I am starving. To reject food, whether by refusing it or by vomiting it back, says simply, I will not consume. I will not participate. This is not real […]. We have too much; and it is poison (196).

In relating her own eight-year struggle with anorexia, Helwig makes clear that she was not simply trying too hard to be fashionable. Neither did treatments targeting her individual psychological idiosyncrasies reach her. Her problem, rather, was spiritual: “In fact, the first person I was able to go to for help was a charismatic Catholic, who at least understood that I was speaking in symbols of spiritual hunger […]. I did not hate or look down on my body—I spoke through it and with it” (197). Helwig’s essay renders a human complexity that reaches beyond sheer victimization in patriarchy. Her body served as a voice, shouting its statement against the emptiness of material consumption in a way that parodied the very standards of beauty mandated by consumer culture. Many anorectics similarly reject the suggestion that their disorder is obedience to fashion gone too far. In fact, in her research, psychologist Ruth Striegel-Moore has found that bulimics, not anorectics, tend to aim steadily for the thin ideal in mass advertising, whereas anorectics may aim for beauty and fashionableness early on, but continue to drop pounds long after excessive weight loss has compromised appearance (Dankosky 2011). As Stephanie asserted, their control over the body (rather than reaching the fashionable ideal) “hooks” the anorectic, like a drug. Interestingly, eating disorders can become demonstrations of power and control, particularly control over the body. But these complex means of seizing agency do not ultimately free the women who exemplify them. A weak, suffering female body has limited energy and, therefore, agency, despite the demonstrations of power or control, which are as unhealthy and problematic as the power or control that any addict wields over friends or family members. And this accounting for an ambivalent form of female

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power does not negate the culture’s culpability in “feeding” the disorders, especially in its emaciated standard of beauty.

The Debate is Over: Eating Disorders Are Culturally Driven Advertisements do not directly compel women or girls to become emaciated. Yet the media affects our self-concepts incrementally, through constant replay of its redundant themes over time. Depending on one’s locality, each American sees, on average, 5,000 advertising messages throughout the course of a day (Alfreiter, Elzinga and Gordon in NEDA 2012). One out of every 3.8 television commercials encourages us to improve our physical attractiveness (NEDA 2012). And women’s magazines have 10.5 times the number of ads devoted to weight loss than do men’s magazines (NEDA 2012). The media contributes to disordered eating because it creates an atmosphere in which female worth is based on appearance: Media messages screaming “thin is in” may not directly cause eating disorders, but they help to create the context within which people learn to place a value on the size and shape of their body, to the extent that media messages like advertising and celebrity spotlights help our culture define what is beautiful and what is “good.” The media’s power over our development of self-esteem and body image can be incredibly strong (NEDA 2012).

Because only thin women—with little variation—find love and success in the media, we may feel defeated to the extent that our bodies deviate from the norm. Susan Bordo articulates the criterion for self worth that almost all Westernized women have internalized: “No female can achieve the status of romantic or sexual ideal without the appropriate body” (1993, 154). According to a 2007 Cornell University study, women, on average, are “much more dissatisfied with their bodies” than are men, who, if unhappy with their bodies, more often express the desire to gain weight (Lang 2007). In a large-scale survey of 3,452 female respondents, 89 percent said they wanted to lose weight (Garner in Dittrich 2008). Essence magazine, the largest black women’s publication, reported in 1994 after studying 2000 respondents that on the whole, African-American women also struggle with the white, thin, cultural ideal (Galatea is thin and ivory after all). Analysis of the data showed that black women are currently at risk for eating disorders at rates equal to those of white women (Dittrich 2008).

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This body dissatisfaction begins in girlhood, a time when females are especially susceptible to the culture’s expectations. In a recent study, forty percent of 2,379 nine and ten-year-old girls, of which approximately half were black and half were white, were dieting to lose weight, a gateway practice that puts them at high risk for anorexia and bulimia. These girls reported that their primary sources of information on body image were magazines. The body image (more positive) and sources of information on image (parents) were markedly different for boys (Dittrich 2008). Harvard’s Graham Professor of Gender Studies Carol Gilligan points out that because adolescent girls learn to “modulate their voices” in order to accommodate the expectations of the culture around them, they are particularly vulnerable to the powerful and incessant messages that they must be thin to be acceptable. Girls at this age are often so afraid of becoming fat as they grow older that thinness takes over other aspirations for the future, such as education, career, or healthy family life. Because they actually feel better about themselves when they are dieting, the girls are at great risk for developing eating disorders. It is certainly not surprising that ninety percent of those suffering from eating disorders are girls and women (ANRED 2011). In the 2000 documentary film The Strength to Resist: The Impact of Media Images on Girls and Women, Clinical Consulting Psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair comments on a sociological study in Fiji that supports the conclusion that eating disorders are culturally driven. Anorexia and bulimia were nonexistent during the many years the islands lacked electricity. After the introduction of electricity and an ensuing five years of exposure to American video and television, girls and women in Fiji exhibited disordered eating while trying to attain the American ideal. Steiner-Adair concludes, “There’s no question that eating disorders are culturally mediated disorders. The scientific debate is over. We know that cultural messages feed eating disorders.” Banal and omnipresent, the messages seem to reach us in a semiconscious state, creating what Susan Bordo (2003) terms the “hegemony of the fat-free body.” Even if we know that every digitally enhanced ad serves not us but an amoral market interest, Bordo argues, we are still thoughtless towards the body dissatisfaction the market has instilled in us. Yet isn’t this thoughtlessness—a falling into our own paths of least resistance—a choice? Perhaps what may inspire us to “wake up” to the messages is the utter conviction that, by obeying them, we act irresponsibly, not just toward ourselves but toward girls and other women who, following our lead, also obey the thinness rhetoric to their detriment.

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The process, therefore, by our own failure to act, is “circular and selfperpetuating” (Orlie 1995, 340). Drawing on her admiration for political philosopher Hannah Arendt, feminist writer Melissa Orlie examines how our conformity to social pressure reinforces it: We become incrementally disinclined to act or we become incapable of acting spontaneously […]. Flowing with (but not also against) social norms leaves us without any sense of our effects upon others. We are rendered, and proceed as if we are, thoughtless (341).

I do not intend to add this charge of “thoughtlessness” to the false guilt patriarchy has heaped upon women. Such guilt reinforces the all-toofamiliar ad hominem accusations of our never being good enough. Instead, to help ourselves and other women, we must recognize our agency and act on our growing conviction that the ads need to change, not simply lament that they never do. Many women attest to the fact that it is relatively easy for us to negotiate the ads and other beauty images intellectually: we know that the beauty standards are ridiculous. Yet we feel helpless when it comes to overturning their emotional impact: “I’m too [fat, old, or misshapen] to be a worthwhile female. The million-million images I’ve seen since childhood tell me so.” Recognizing this harmful emotional impact in others—especially if we have daughters—may inspire us to act. Defamiliarizing the familiar is the first action we can take in building immunity to the thin-is-forever-in rhetoric. To “defamiliarize” messages is to look at the everyday ads and products of our culture in new and critical ways that examine their methods as well as their implications. Such an education need not be formal (informal reading and discussions would do), but it should direct a spotlight at the most disempowering entities: the sense of sin food advertisements inspire in women for simply nourishing themselves; the double-dealing of a diet industry that profits when their diets fail; and the misogyny behind the fashion and beauty industry as a whole. Deconstructing these familiar, albeit onerous institutions through selfeducation is the first step in breaking their hold over our consciousness, where the unnatural Galatea ideal has seeped in and made so many of us devalue ourselves. But we should deepen this education by tracing misogyny to its source: not women themselves, but something too many men fear that is associated with femaleness. Such knowledge can heal us from the self-deprecation that is women’s legacy in patriarchy. All the while, as consumers and informal educators of other women and girls, we must act in ways that refresh the cultural atmosphere, primarily by

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demanding that advertisers and companies form a new, healthier conversation about female identity.

Eating: A Morally Charged Act for Women Our first project in “defamiliarizing the familiar” is to critically examine the ads that frame women’s eating in problematic ways. These ads shame women for feeding themselves. Consistent with the ad hominem reasoning that assumes females are “all wrong,” food ads aimed at women frame feeding the female body as a morally questionable act. The ads link women’s physical hunger with their sexual appetites. For instance, a magazine ad for Post Shredded Wheat with Strawberries shows a thin young woman in a negligee sitting on a bed beside her sleeping lover. She holds a small bowl of cereal and a spoon. “What satisfies a hungry woman?” the ad reads (Better Homes and Gardens June 2008, 180). “Experts say foods rich in fiber can help keep you satisfied… Outrageous satisfaction!” The ad implies that when a lover is not enough, “outrageous satisfaction” comes from a tiny bowl of cereal. Because women’s sexual appetites are already highly problematic in patriarchy, equating their bodies’ requirement for food with their desire for sex is a “virtual blueprint for disordered relations to food and hunger” (Bordo 1993, 130). Susan Bordo sees little difference between advertising messages in contemporary popular culture and the Victorian conduct manuals that imposed stringent warnings against lewdness in women, whose modesty could be confirmed by taking only small portions of food at public gatherings (130). Food ads grant a sort of qualified permission for women to eat. “‘Indulge a little,’” says an ad for Andes Candies (in Bordo 1993, 129).The fact that the candies are so tiny “contains” and controls female appetite while spontaneously promising to satisfy it: “‘Each bite-size piece packs a wallop of milk chocolate crunch’” (129). “Every diet needs a little wiggle room” says an ad for Jello Singles Puddings in Better Homes and Gardens (July 2008, emphasis mine). Aside from its implication that dieting is a normative state for women, the ad reassures them by granting permission to cheat a little. A woman marvels that she is actually allowed to eat key lime pie in a television commercial for tiny artificially sweetened yogurt cups that pathologically fill her entire refrigerator while her husband looks for the real “pie” in despair. She is given permission to indulge—but only in tiny amounts, chemically sweetened. Her husband has no such restrictions.

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The rhetoric of measured permission helps to account for the countless women who hide their eating from the public and therefore binge behind closed doors. Susan Bordo discusses female students who found it tortuous to eat ice cream in the cafeteria where male classmates could see them (130). Just as telling was the series of apologies my daughter’s teacher delivered when my children and I “caught” her in a line at Dairy Queen: “You really didn’t see me here,” she said sheepishly, adding, “Will you believe that I’m actually buying vegetables?” Similarly, I have never seen Stephanie (the woman who described her “frog” body type on page 85) consume anything but black coffee in front of others, though in her writings, she has recounted in detail the agonies of her nighttime binges. Another woman in her forties, a graduate student and recovering bulimic, had a term for her secret midnight binges that left her miserable and ashamed on the kitchen floor: “oral sex.” These women had absorbed the patriarchal charge that female appetite is somehow shameful. In patriarchy, female sexual desire is often framed as an act of eating, whereby a woman consumes a man, “body and soul,” destroying him or at least threatening his potency (117). Thus female appetite, whether physical or sexual, is suspect. Eating is thus a highly charged moral issue for women in our culture. In contrast, men suffer few moral misgivings for unrestrained hunger. And our culture allows them to freely satisfy big appetites with abundant portions. The shame associated with women’s eating no doubts fuels women’s obesity rate as well, since many are caught in a cycle of despair and overeating to cope with that despair.

A Diet Industry that Primes Us for Failure If we approach these messages uncritically, believing that we are allowed only tiny amounts of food, that we are good only when we deprive ourselves, then we may be tempted to turn to the diet industry for help with our problematic eating. Yet this institution, so familiar and so insistent, also deserves “defamiliarizing.” The diet industry makes $40 to $100 billion annually by exploiting female culturally-driven insecurity about the body and profiting from female failure to achieve the ideal. Fully 95-98 percent of those on popular commercial diets will fail, precisely because the body and mind remember the state of caloric deprivation and vigorously fight it. This is why during and especially after weight loss—as we saw in Keyes’ starvation experiment with young men—the appetite rages out of control while metabolism has already slowed down, leading to binging and inevitable weight gain (Poulton 1997, 70, 76). This failure rate, combined with an impossibly thin ideal body and the peddling of

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fattening foods in a land of plenty, is a recipe for unhealthy body image and likely fosters America’s current obesity epidemic. Defying logic and natural law, the ubiquitous diet ads nevertheless promise that we can attain the thin ideal. But the diet industry would fail financially if we succeeded at weight loss: “No industry actually benefits from us actually eating healthily for a sustained period of time” (Cummings 2003). Therefore, the same companies that promise to deliver results, such as Weight Watchers foods, also supply deceptively highsugar, high-calorie foods branded as “low fat” (Cummings 2003). At the time of this writing, Weight Watchers packaged foods are owned and marketed by Heinz Corporation, and according to Heinz.com, it has other high-calorie food holdings such as Ore Ida, Bagel Bites, and T.G.I. Friday’s restaurant chains. Similarly, International Pizza, which has had holdings in the Domino Pizza chain, ventured a nationwide chain of weight-loss centers in the last decade (Cummings 2003). Companies will promise weight loss while simultaneously endeavoring to maintain consumers’ extra pounds. This revolving door marketing ploy involves alternating weight loss ads and tempting ads for high calorie foods in print media and onscreen. In No Fat Chicks: How Big Businesses Profit by Making Women Hate Their Bodies-And How to Fight Back, journalist Terry Poulton calls this strategy a “double-dealing formula for capturing consumers coming and going” (243). In this polemical book about the weight loss industry and its advertising rhetoric, Poulton analyzes the Orwellian techniques of what she calls the diet industry’s “billion dollar brainwash.” She also examines society’s complicity in punishing overweight women, who are cruelly mocked in the media, exploited by doctors and plastic surgeons, discriminated against in schools and in the workplace, and often mistreated in their homes. However, despite an apparent billion-dollar behemoth that we just cannot shake, we still have a choice: to sleep through the messages, or to act consciously. If we have secretly cherished the Galatea look without knowing why, we can now acknowledge how the diet and beauty industries have fed Galatea to us—thousands of times a day, obscuring her hungry, self-denying mindset while encouraging us to absorb it. We can consciously recall the implications of the diet the “atypical” woman on the screen has undertaken, especially the fact that she has imprinted a deprivation state upon her body and mind that nearly eliminates her chance of keeping the weight off over time. In shaking off the scripted and unhealthy Galatea role, we must research which diets are the offenders and resolutely refuse to buy their

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products. And we must disseminate our findings and our decisions to other women. Legal action has already been proposed against some companies for profiting from and simultaneously creating body shame (Cummings 2003). As consumers, we can now intensify this pressure using the social media tools at our disposal until the industry stops promoting obesity and unhealthy weight loss methods.

Misogyny: A Coiled Spring of Emotion that Ads Release The multi-billion-dollar diet industry is just one leg of an advertising industry that exploits women. Sarah Woodruff, who worked as a copywriter in the advertisement industry for over 25 years before assuming a public relations role at an insurance company, points out that the advertising industry effectively forms collective opinions about women, but its rhetoric also parrots what buyers presently think and desire. If advertising rhetoric perpetuates misogyny, it is because such an ideology already sells products so well: Claiming “market share” depends on the stopping power of an ad. Everything is deployed to this end: sexual cues as well as scented coupons. Ads have become pheromones and advertisers have become more and more dependent on primitive signals. I think this is at the root of what we’re seeing now—misogynistic symbols like a woman bound at the ankles or gagged communicate very quickly and grab attention. In the end, that’s what advertisers want. Perhaps because the industry is dominated by men, the implications and destructive effects of such images on women and girls are simply ignored (29 July 2008 e-mail to the author).

In Woodruff’s depictions of the advertisement industry and its antifemale rhetoric, we see executives who exploit a misogyny that is already deeply embedded in the potential buyer’s psyche, whether male or female. It is one of the human emotions Sarah portrays elsewhere as “a coiled spring that advertisers must reach.” Misogyny is the gut feeling—the “infantile fixation,” as Virginia Woolf termed it—that keeps buyers purchasing the products that subtly promise to perpetuate it. It is therefore not enough to stop at multi-billion dollar corporate profits as the only answer to the universality of women’s disordered relationships with food. As powerful as the gravitational pull of the media’s thin ideal has become in our collective psyche, the advertising industry seems to draw from a whole galaxy of misogyny whirling around the smaller, more understandable system of consumerism, profits, corporations, and their marketing techniques.

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Liberal feminists tend to dismiss the systemic concepts of “misogyny” and “patriarchy” and instead charge separate individuals with the responsibility to act in egalitarian ways. Yet the ready-made assumption that women are flawed and must keep on improving themselves is so ubiquitous that we can virtually pull it from the air. It’s difficult to dismiss the systemic view that misogyny and patriarchy are real when women on such a wide scale feel emotionally and existentially weighed down by their flawed bodies. At the same time, radical feminism, which to its credit acknowledges patriarchy and misogyny as systems, tends to see the intervention of the State as the only viable solution; yet government intervention can create more harm than it intends to solve (McElroy 2011, 135-141). However, there needs to be a reasonable middle ground: a feminism that acknowledges systemic misogyny yet acts on the instability in that system. We could call that feminism responsive feminism. Responsive feminists would neither underestimate their own power nor overestimate the power of a misogynistic atmosphere that, though onerous, has pockets of instability that make change for the better possible. In 2011, we heard reports of the Arab Spring, in which citizens in several countries across North Africa and the Middle East staged uprisings against their oppressive governments and, in some cases, effected the breakdown of tyrannical yet unstable regimes. Social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, have advanced these revolutions to exponential proportions. How much more can we, who are not imprisoned and beaten like our Third-World Sisters who live in these regimes, use the social media sites and other resources at our disposal to spread the word that we need neither the misogyny nor the products it promotes?

Patriarchal Backlashes Some would argue that women can expect a backlash if our responsive feminism aims to revise the status quo message that we are perpetually flawed. “Backlashes” are cases of patriarchal retaliation to women’s political power that have mounted periodically throughout history like tidal waves to wash away freedoms gained. Yet stealthy men do not conspire in boardrooms to create a totality of oppression that will inevitably overtake women. What we call a “backlash” is instead a resurgence of patriarchal attitudes towards women that can consolidate, especially when individual men in power feel discomfort with women’s growing political or economic agency. Misogyny then disseminates through “a million million separate individual reflexes…that coalesce into

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a national mood weighing women down” (Wolf 1991, 4). In an example of how the periodic backlash against women in America works, Naomi Wolf recalls a January 1985 New York Times Sunday Magazine that profiled Karen Valenstein, one of the first female traders on Wall Street. Out of the many flattering pictures the editors had collected of this young, slim, blond woman, they recognized that the most unattractive photograph would simply sell more copies because it “sooth[ed] men’s fears” (4). According to Wolf, a beautiful woman who has made it in a maledominated career has enough power to make the patriarchs cringe. The fact that New York Times Sunday Magazine editors simply chose the unattractive photograph that threatened men less reinforces the theory of “paths of least resistance”: comfortable, familiar behaviors—similar to what Woodruff called “buying impulses”—that maintain a patriarchal status quo in our lives. In 1992 Wolf called the “beauty backlash” a “source of suffocation…so diffuse as to be almost invisible” (4). In America, we have seen the “backlash” continually incarnated in popular culture’s beauty rhetoric that, while promising women a sort of breezy freedom in attitude and lifestyle, actually undermines women in body and mind. For instance, the women’s vote in 1920 was soon followed by the flapper image on advertising posters and on the printed page. This svelte, boyish model of the liberated woman, cigarette holder posed jauntily in her hand, pressured women to bind their breasts, smoke, and lose weight, effectively desexualizing themselves and risking their health to reassure patriarchy that women were not all that powerful. Terry Poulton (1997) describes a sweeping pattern of culture-wide disempowerment that has appeared through the years as a sort of misogynist “cosmic trick”: The fact is, only after they won the vote [in 1920] was there any real pressure for women to eschew the physical abundance that had been favored since the beginning of time, and shrink down to the diminutive dimensions of powerless adolescents. Yet, the significance of this virtual checkmate had been anticipated by visionary suffragist Lucy Stone way back in 1855: “It is very little to me to have the right to vote, to my own property, etcetera, if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right” (34).

The year of women’s legalized right to vote, 1920, also marked the introduction of the annual Miss America beauty pageant, in which young women competed (and still do) for a crown based primarily on their sexual viability in the eyes of men. To quell criticism of the pageant and its political implications for women, the second-wave feminists who protested it in 1969 were summarily dismissed by the media as “‘a bunch

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of…ugly women screaming at each other on television’” and “‘just so unattractive’” (Esquire and The New York Times qtd. in Wolf 68). That vision of the feminist as the ugly, carping harpy with no sexual appeal of her own remains with us to this day and is the reason so many younger women disown feminism, though without acknowledging it, they enjoy the hard-won rights feminists have gained for them. Similarly, as Naomi Wolf argues in The Beauty Myth, Twiggy, at 3223-32 and looking like an emaciated survivor of the London Blitz, could reassert an ideal of feminine frailty just as the introduction of the birth control pill in 1965 was affording women economic and social power (184-185). Since 1966 and continuing through the second wave of feminism in the 1970s and beyond, anorexia and bulimia have gained ground among America’s females. Today, with five to ten percent of all girls and women from puberty on suffering from eating disorders, the third most common medical problem among adolescent girls in the United States, anorexia and bulimia are “normative” for young women (Dittrich 2008). Wolf asserts that a cultural focus on women’s slenderness is not about “female beauty but an obsession with female obedience…a quietly mad population is a tractable one” (187). I would argue that the “backlash” that began in the nineteenth century, banal and omnipresent as a fashion page, has stayed with us unchallenged all this time. Western women have not had much reprieve from Pygmalion’s sculpting knife on their bodies. We see chiseled women like signposts along a misogynist path through time: the corseted Victorian “hysteric” making way for the 1920s boyish, breast-bound flapper, who preceded the late-twentieth-century anorectics and the millennial bulimics. Apart from the token “plus-sized model” in an ad or two or the lone company, such as Dove, that celebrates women of varying body types, why has so little changed by the second decade of the millennium? Why do we act out the parts that patriarchy has scripted for us? I believe women have acted out the Galatea role simply because we have been conditioned to value our culture’s top prize for acquiescent females —men’s approval—more than we have valued ourselves. In popular culture, the female body can rarely be approved, “lovable,” or “sexy” without paying in hunger and deprivation. The ads have fooled us into thinking that men do not value healthy, robust women. Yet surely enough men with enough mothers, sisters, and daughters are acquainted with the pain popular culture has imposed on their women. These are the men we need to find. But we will not be done there. We must ourselves promise to live according to who we are, rather than obey society’s script concerning what we should appear to be. In this way, we respond—not

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numbly acquiesce—to oppressive social control and thus refresh the cultural atmosphere. In responding to the ads, we would simply communicate to the advertisers that we were now ready to explore other interests beyond our weight and that we would no longer allow our creativity, energy, and life goals to be driven by preoccupations with food and weight control. We would nourish our bodies when they were hungry and stop when they were full, no longer identifying our own natural hunger as an enemy that wishes to thwart our success (Bordo 1993, 143). We would feel comfortable in our own skins, rejecting a discourse that locates shame and punishment in our bodies, a dynamic consistent with Pygmalion’s ad hominem reasoning. These goals may seem farfetched, but they are not so at all when we consider how powerfully and quickly social media can aid us in spreading a healthier conversation about the female body and female identity, especially when millions of women have uneasy relationships with food and eating. In spreading the word about what we would no longer tolerate from the advertisement industry, we could instead stress what we would accept from them: an unproblematized baseline of health that no longer equated fitness with underweight, but which used well-established parameters of medical science in presenting healthier, more varied, and more realistic role models. And, in addition to social media, we would reinforce this change not with government regulation, which can create more harm than it intends to redress, but as many individuals, using a collective “power of the purse” by simply cancelling buyer loyalty to the companies that hurt us the most.

Why Misogyny? These moves would constitute a beginning as we set about to disrupt the misogyny that has burdened us. Yet we need to go deeper. An education in why misogyny exists can help us to finally accept that it is more about what men fear in themselves than about who women actually are. In patriarchy, women’s bodies have traditionally been associated with sin, sexuality, corruption, and mortality, as if the female of the species alone experienced bodily urges and decay. To illustrate the idea that men project bodily existence onto women, psychologist Kim Chernin invokes the Adam of a little-known ancient Jewish myth in which God created the first Eve with all of her viscera exposed, an act that disgusted this Adam, who begged God to take her away and begin again (The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness 1981, 115-116). Chernin sees

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little difference in attitude between Adam’s repugnance and the disgust of a modern Dear Abby writer who says of his wife who cannot shed 15 extra pounds no matter how often she diets and how much he cajoles her: “‘I cannot accept her as she is no matter how hard I try…This problem is continually on my mind, and I am afraid that a permanent separation will eventually be the result’” (111-112). Chernin concludes that Adam and the Dear Abby writer are both projecting onto their women a fear of their own bodies, which are chaotic, vulnerable, subject to frustrating sexual urges (for which women are blamed), disease, pain, aging, and death. I imagine that some of the most virulently sexist of men would strongly disagree, claiming that they love women. But I would counter that they, like Chernin’s mythical Adam, the Dear Abby writer, and Hawthorne’s Aylmer, love women only a certain way: slender, young, polished of flaw or decay, docile, silent, like Galatea. Such a man likes a woman who poses no threat, though she risks her emotional and physical health to please him. Some would argue that women also target men whose bodies displease them, or that men have as much social pressure to conform to a physical ideal. However, one session in front of the television screen or one careful look at the magazines in the grocery store checkout aisle would tell us that there is a conversation in the media that continually scrutinizes women, not men, for falling short of the physical ideal. If men are also criticized— and sometimes they are—it’s for being too thin or too small, states that do not require deprivation to correct. And for men, critiques of physical flaws do not commonly extend to facial features, a myriad of body parts, or age. I would argue that residual, unchallenged misogyny in our culture inspires this finding of fault in women. And modern misogyny is widespread. In Misogyny: The Male Malady, anthropologist David Gilmore (2001) sees woman-hating as a universal phenomenon, consistent in cultures and economic systems as diverse as Blackfoot Indians, Muslim Bedouin Arabs, Chinese Buddhists, and English gentlemen (219-220). For Gilmore, misogyny goes beyond economic systems in which men reap material and social rewards for the “important” work of society while women wait in the shadows for the leftovers. And it goes beyond man’s fear of his own sexual urges, since woman is “much more than a sexual object to man. He has many other needs that only she can fulfill” (223). Gilmore locates misogyny in men’s memory of their simultaneous need and terror of the all-powerful mother, since she alone can feed infants with her body and thus in her body holds the keys to life and death (223). Masculine jealousy over the female ability to bear and nourish children with their bodies may very well create the cross-cultural misogynistic

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attitudes and reach women as sexual shame (Chernin 1981, 151). Indeed, many anorectics and bulimics fear female maturity and voluptuousness. Not only are these traits associated with fertility, but they are also connected to the shamefulness of sex. The anorectic can evade sexual harassment or atone for past sexual abuses—both shaming experiences— by canceling the parts of her body men deem sexually enticing: “Having no fat means having no breasts, thighs, hips, or ass, which for once means not having asked for it” (Wolf 1991, 199). In patriarchal culture, women are the particular provenance of shame. Most heterosexual males cringe at the idea of being “marked” with femininity. Donning pink, feminine clothing or lipstick would most likely shame a heterosexual man in ways that blue, rugged clothing or handling power tools would not shame a woman. We need to understand that this dynamic has everything to do with men’s projections onto women and nothing to do with femininity being inherently shameful. Since in patriarchy men have learned to project need, vulnerability, and weakness onto woman, they have also placed upon her their fear of annihilation. Why else would mythology’s imagery of death—the whirling Charybdis that destroys men’s ships, the vagina dentata inherent in a Medusa that kills with one look, the “chthonic gateway to hell,” itself a pit of fire—all be associated with what is female? (Gilmore 2001, 220). In Powers of Horror, psychologist and philosopher Julia Kristeva (1982) studies the potency of what she terms the abject, those bodily defilements that serve as reminders of our ineluctable mortality and decay: “corporeal waste, menstrual blood and excrement” (70). While excrement symbolizes defilement that occurs from without the body, such as food that enters the body from outside and becomes waste, menstrual blood defiles the body from within, threatening sexual identity, or, “through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference” (71). Though Kristeva does not make clear how menses (apart from sexual contact) violates men in an existential sense, we can imagine that it is through the shadowy memory of how the uterine lining, including the passage of blood from the placenta to the fetus, protected and nourished the male fetus before its separation at birth. As to men’s need to tear themselves from women in order to disrupt an earlier dependency, Kristeva notes that in societies where rituals attempt to control the supreme threat of defilement, there is the utmost concern for separating men and women, and the latter are seen as “passive objects… [with] wily powers, ‘baleful schemers’ from whom rightful beneficiaries must protect themselves” (70). Thus to control women and their “defiling” powers, patriarchal societies use ritual and/or language (73). Obligatory ritual

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cleansing at the end of the menstrual period, as in the Jewish Mikvah, effectively neutralizes the threat of menstruation. However, in contemporary America, myriad animal names for women still neutralize our power. There is simply no parallel linguistic trope for men, who are not “defiled” by their own semen. Yet in all their attempts to control women, men can never completely shed the abject from the self. By definition, what is “abject” constantly beckons and threatens men in the liminal parts of consciousness: It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us (4).

Thus, to protect himself, a man must set up thick boundaries between himself and woman, driving the feminine Other away like a “jettisoned object” (2). The alternative, clinging to her, is to risk intimate connection with a weakness and need that presages death, though it is man’s unacknowledged weakness and need projected onto her (2). In my own case, though Carl did not condemn me for my physique, he found it intolerable that I should be sick in his presence. On one occasion when we visited his family out of state, I came down with food poisoning that embarrassed him. He told me to stop being the “weak wife” in his family’s presence. He swore I was “faking it” (that was not possible, according to the doctor who took my temperature). To prove his point, he declared I was ready to drink fluids and compelled me to drink a half liter of soda in his presence. I kept it down---for about half a minute. I recovered from the fever only after his relatives insisted on driving me to the hospital. If a man can separate himself from that which he fears, naming it an inferior “Other” (meaning a woman—something he is not), then he can seek to control it while she bears his nightmares, since the logical end of what is supremely “feminine”—weakness, fear, pain, and vulnerability—is death. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” Aylmer found his wife’s birthmark deeply troubling because it stood as a visible sign of his own mortality—that “fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps on all of her productions” (Hawthorne 1843, 302, emphasis mine). But to him, it stood for “his wife’s liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death” (302, emphasis mine). Aylmer chose to project his nightmare of death upon his wife, after which he obsessed over how to symbolically remove it from view by excising the birthmark. Because woman—however unconsciously for man—carries his vulnerability and mortality, man sees her as the “defective” one. A Galatea completely

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within a man’s power, being carved to perfection, a creation of his own, can reassure him that he, not she, has a measure of control over the body’s imperfections, as well as its mysterious forces of life and death. In her 2006 book Undoing Gender, Judith Butler examines violence against the “Other,” whether gay or transgendered (or, because of the prevalence of violence against women, I would insert female), as a disavowal of one’s common human condition, one’s vulnerability and mortality held in common with the Other. Butler suggests that violent heterosexual men choose ignorance of the Other rather than knowledge of the vulnerability they most certainly share: The violent response is the one that does not ask, and does not seek to know. It wants to shore up what it knows, to expunge what threatens it with not-knowing, what forces it to reconsider the presuppositions of its world, their contingency, their malleability (35).

To know the Other, to allow it to abide as an equal, is to identify with it—to see oneself mirrored in it. Because masculine identity is so dependent on not being vulnerable, the feminine (or effeminate) foil that threatens it must be expunged from the self. Furthermore, the Violent One replaces all that threatens him with an impenetrable state of “notknowing.” His violence reinforces a world view steeped in ignorance, a spurious vision of himself as omnipotent and invulnerable. Butler’s essay argues mainly for revised legal, psychological, and literary theories that recognize the legitimacy of gay, lesbian, intersexed, and transgendered voices. Yet her compelling focus on grief as a political or social “glue” applies to all of us. Violence attempts to cancel grief by attacking vulnerabilities in the “Other.” Grief, however, acknowledges those vulnerabilities in the self, and this recognition allows the self to connect with the Other: Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, remaining exposed to its apparent tolerability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? Is there something to be gained in the political domain by maintaining grief as part of the framework by which we think our international ties? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? (23).

Grief binds us to others when we recognize that we are all mortal and thus vulnerable, with “precarious lives” that, in the end, masculinity will not preserve (23). Men need to process their grief, the emotion associated

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with loss, by mourning their losses and limitations. Mourning entails a full course of letting go that we cannot curtail or short circuit. In mourning, we say goodbye—one at a time—to the things we held dear but cannot ultimately seize: the power over loved ones that eludes us; the sense that one is better than a weaker Other; the faded certainty that we will always have our status or our possessions. Certainly women have these inclinations too, but we do not define femininity in the same way that we define masculinity, to the detriment of relationships and of culture. Through mourning, men would lose a way that they have imagined themselves to be. And it would be difficult. Psychologists have characterized mourning as “extraordinarily painful,” a prolonged series of rips and tears from all of the piecemeal things one holds dear but cannot ultimately own ((Fiorini and Lewkowicz 2009, 244-245). However, mourning, though painful, would engender a healthier vision. It would loosen the grip of fear on the male psyche. If masculine control is an illusion, then the fear of losing it must be too. And mourning carries us from the ineluctable reality of loss through to the surprise of restoration. Though we cannot restore the temporal things that we lose, mourning, through time, strangely ignites glints of joy in everyday encounters we once slept through. Mourning restores us when we agree to be agents of restoration for others who have known loss. Such awareness of the vitality of mourning will need to grow incrementally, in classrooms perhaps, or in homes, but as part of daily interaction, and quite incidentally and informally. A gradual education in the value of mourning will be necessary for men, because the masculine predisposition to separate from and control the “Other” will still fight a redemptive connection to humanity.

The Dynamics of Pornography and Its Pull on Our Consciousness We see the male predisposition to separate from and control the female Other most starkly in the pornography whose audience is primarily heterosexual men. As with the advertisement industry, an education in the dynamics of pornography can thwart its debasing definitions of women. Pornographic rhetoric is the antithesis of mourning, because it allows and encourages men to lay their nightmares upon women. Pornography fractures and brutalizes femaleness. Femaleness broken into separate reproductive parts and served to men in pornography has lost its compelling power. Instead, femaleness becomes controllable and dehumanized (so that men’s guilt is kept at bay), primed for consumption.

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Because pornography disintegrates women’s mysterious essence associated with life (and death, through her feminine vulnerabilities), it reassures men that it is acceptable to consume and deride that which unbalances them. If we think that pornographic ideology is hidden from mainstream view and therefore, the consciousness of most women, we should think again. Visual pornographic rhetoric, with its inevitable fantasies of violence against women, filters down into mainstream media, where it finds its way into the recesses of our consciousness. In film and television, we see countless women murdered and raped, as in popular crime shows where young female victims routinely outnumber men. The pornographic images leak into the fashion world, too, and thus tighten their grip on the female psyche. Hundreds of mainstream ads simulating attacks on women include three honorable mentions for a “gallery of shame” (About-Face.org 2008). One ad for Marc Jacobs fashions shows a woman’s apparently dismembered legs, feet in stylish shoes, sticking out of a shopping bag. A fashion spread in Details magazine depicts a woman in a red evening dress lying dead on the sidewalk, a pool of blood spilling from her head (AboutFace.org). A third ad for Dolce and Gabbana clothing—eventually pulled from circulation because of its controversy— shows a woman in revealing eveningwear being “gang raped” by four men who wait their turn for her as she arches her back toward one, presumably showing that she is “asking for it.” And so violence against women is seen as “sexy,” “fashionable,” desirable, and cool (Dines, lecture in The Strength to Resist 2000). If such rhetorical images centered on race, rather than on the more trivialized issue of women’s identity, then countless viewers would feel justified moral outrage. When a Penthouse photograph depicted an Asian woman hanging from a tree—“lynched,” as it were, for being a voluptuous female, the public barely winked (Dines 2000). Imagine the public outcry at a similar image of a naked black man, “lynched” in the same way. This is not to minimize the searingly painful issue of racial injustice in our country. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hate-mongers lynched black men because they feared a mythical black hypersexuality might target Southern white women. And black slave women bore the brunt of white men’s cruel projections by being branded with “deviant sexuality,” assessed on the auction block for their “salable parts,” and mercilessly raped, the children of these rapes sold far from them (hooks 2003, 123). In the millennium, we are just beginning to acknowledge the lasting scars of racial injustice in America. However, pornography still maintains unchallenged its brutal open season on women of all races. So normalized is the juxtaposition of violence and women that we are numb

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to its implications: Every day in this country, more than three women on average and representing varied ethnic backgrounds are murdered by husbands or boyfriends (DVRC 2012). Yet rather than respond by turning against the industry, we women turn this contempt inward upon ourselves. We buy the wrong, fragmented, ad hominem definition of woman that has reached us from the earliest civilizations. We accept patriarchy’s view of mature womanhood: “the body of woman is a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it” (De Beauvoir 1973, 675). We hate our bodies with the vehemence of the cruelest patriarchs, and we therefore piece them apart, pornographically, blind to the whole woman and seeing only separate signs of ugliness: rounded hips, buttocks, stomach, thighs—which merely represent mature womanhood. Or, obeying patriarchy to become slender, lifeless Galatea, we starve our bodies, sometimes courting death. We mistake what protects us and therefore belongs on our bodies—the melanin that shields us from burning sun, the natural layer of fat that keeps the fetus from cold and shock—for stain and filth. How long will we embrace these wrong definitions and deny our bodies the nourishment and regard that would keep us fully alive? To be healthy, we must know once and for all that the source of our shame has everything to do with masculine identity and nothing to do with ourselves. We must illuminate how male identity itself can be healed by mourning its vulnerabilities appropriately and thoroughly. Finally, we need a new barometer—health, not weight—in determining what we women should be. If a woman needs to adjust her weight, then it should be for her overall health and nothing less. Medical science—especially thoughtful medical professionals willing to look beyond cultural expectations—can speak to our health, when the beauty, fashion, diet, and pornography industries try to carve us down into something unhealthy and self-deprecating.

The Resistance of Charlotte Perkins Gilman This healthy standard sounds so simple—and yet our Pygmalionlike culture, bent on “improving” us till there’s not much left—makes it extraordinarily difficult to be happy with who we are because it continues to “speak for us,” insisting we are flawed. We must take our cues from past women who, like Maria Stewart and the Grimké sisters, have successfully fought the familiar ad hominem reasoning that has always implicated women for being women. Because hatred of the female body remains with us in the relatively new millennium, their stories are

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intimately connected with ours. Stewart and the Grimkés perhaps experienced extreme versions of what modern culture tells women, but because these historical women recognized false, damaging definitions of the female body whereas we modern women do not, their stories can inspire us to identify exactly where our body shame comes from and to begin dismantling it. I turn therefore to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who also countered Victorian misogyny; in her case, by means of her creative energy as a writer. In the Victorian era, as first-wave feminists gathered their forces to abolish slavery and gain the vote, the patriarchal medical establishment theorized the origins of a new women’s disorder they called “hysteria,” a disease said to have been caused by the mysterious fluctuations of the womb (“hysteria” comes from the Greek word for uterus). Physicians observed many middle- and upper-class women succumbing to fits of rage or to near catatonia. Every female malady, from tuberculosis to postpartum depression, was diagnosed as hysteria (Ehrenreich and English 1979, 9495). Doctors, who were almost always men, saw the “crisis” of monthly periods –in addition to menopause—as proof of women’s innately sick uterus (Ehrenreich and English 1979, 94). These physicians had already accepted the theory that woman’s every physical and psychological characteristic was governed by her ovaries, “powerful agents in all the commotions of her system” and themselves inherently diseased (Dr. W.W. Bliss in Ehrenreich and English 1979, 99). Because woman thought not with her mind, but with her flawed glands, she was summarily trivialized and dismissed (De Beauvoir 1973, 675). The male Victorian physicians proclaimed that women’s education and political participation were out of the question, since, they said, all of a woman’s energy had to be channeled to her defective reproductive system, which—conveniently for men—regenerated itself during “feminine” domestic duties such as housework, cooking and childcare and atrophied with masculine pursuits such as study, political involvement, and sexual activity (Wood 1992, 112). It took decades for psychologists to finally implicate the isolation, drudgery, and emotional as well as intellectual sterility of Victorian domestic life for “hysterical” outbursts. Until the fog lifted, the medical establishment, true to the Pygmalionlike views of patriarchy, blamed woman’s flawed nature for woman’s maladies. Some vocal women saw through the doctors’ theories to the profit motive, ego, and brutality behind them. Mary Livermore, a suffrage advocate, protested the “‘monstrous assumption that a woman is a natural

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invalid’ and denounced the ‘unclean army of gynecologists who seem desirous to convince women that they possess but one set of organs—and that these are always diseased’” (in Ehrenreich and English 1979, 97). Livermore knew that unsuspecting women would inevitably blame themselves for their inherently “diseased” natures. Then as now, Pygmalion’s power lay primarily in his ability to insinuate his accusing self into the minds of individual women. In 1887, when twenty-six-year-old Charlotte Perkins Gilman of Rhode Island exhibited symptoms of what most medical practitioners today would call postpartum depression, a renowned physician, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia, imposed upon her his well-known “rest cure” (Gilman 1935, 96). This series of quintessentially “feminine” behaviors was intended to restore her to her “full female nature,” since her “hysteria” was said to be caused by defective female organs: “Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time.” (Be it remarked that if I did but dress the baby it left me shaking and crying—certainly far from a healthy companionship for her, to say nothing of the effect on me.) “Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live” (qtd. in Gilman 1935, 96).

The intellectual and creative deprivation of this imposed domesticity drove Gilman to near madness, until she took her baby and left her failed marriage. She recovered once she divorced her husband in New England and wrote to support herself in her new home in California (97). Though the effects of a depression she called “nerve bankruptcy” would haunt her throughout her life, she remained a prolific writer, a respected lecturer on women’s rights, and a feminist economist who advocated women’s profiting from their gifts and talents, rather than languishing as they did in the uncompensated drudgery of Victorian housework (Lane 1963, Introduction to Living, xxi). In 1890, Gilman wrote an autobiographical short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” to protest the Victorian, misogynistic cures for hysteria. In this tale, written in the gothic horror style of Poe, a young husband, John, brings his wife to a country house for the summer to help her recover from nervous anxiety (Gilman 1892, 24). (As in Gilman’s own case, we read “postpartum depression,” for the young mother’s dark, hopeless thoughts are connected to a baby she cannot bear to be near.) Nothing is as it seems. The ancestral summer home, with its “hedges and walls and gates that lock” is actually an abandoned mansion that once housed the insane in an upper room. Effectively treating his wife like a

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child, John, a physician, calls this room a “nursery” and insists that she occupy it. The clues as to the room’s real purpose—the barred windows, stationary bedstead, “rings and things in the walls” (where the afflicted were likely secured with ties), and “gate at the head of the stairs”—puzzle the narrator (25-26, 28). With a sinister irony concerning John’s “care,” which is actually a patronizing control that refuses to take her seriously, Gilman writes, “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction” (26). John is based upon Silas Weir Mitchell, for the young doctor’s “rest” cure, like Mitchell’s, bars the narrator from reading, painting, or writing a word (which she does in secret). Consistent with the “hysterical” women of Gilman’s day and Gilman herself, the narrator has no say in her own treatment: Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do? (25).

Fettered as it is, the narrator’s creative energy is drawn to the hideous yellow wallpaper in the room, which becomes an obsession. A riot of ugly swirls and patterns colored like “foul, bad yellow things,” the wallpaper in her mind’s eye oscillates as she begins to imagine a woman trapped behind the pattern and struggling to escape (37). Of course, no one will believe her, and John ratchets up his confinements—she is now to visit no one and to keep to the room, which he has locked. In the end, the narrator’s madness overtakes her, and she works to free the woman in the wallpaper (who represents herself, really) by creeping along the walls on the floor, tearing the wallpaper to shreds. Overcome with shock at seeing her this way, John faints, and the narrator creeps triumphantly over his prone body to finish her work destroying the wallpaper, which liberates the woman behind it at last. Some irritable male readers just “didn’t get it,” so to speak. H.E. Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly , sent the story back to Gilman with this comment: “I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!” (in Gilman 1935, 119). And though she never received the promised forty dollars payment from her agent, Henry Austin, Gilman achieved her rhetorical purpose for “The Yellow Wallpaper.” (She had said once that “it is a pretty poor thing to write, to talk, without a purpose.”) In fan mail letters praising “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman learned of another female patient who had suffered from a similar malady, right down to hallucinations about her wallpaper. After the woman’s relatives read the story, they were so

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frightened by it that they abandoned her doctor’s rest cure and changed the wallpaper. And the woman recovered completely. “This was triumph indeed,” Gilman wrote in her autobiography (Gilman 1935, 121). But Gilman’s greatest reward was the knowledge she received through an acquaintance that upon reading “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell recognized the error of his ways and abandoned the rest cure for his patients. She had sent him the story herself, and though he had never summoned up the courage to respond to her directly, the secondhand news satisfied her just the same: “If that is a fact, I have not lived in vain,” she said (Gilman 1935, 121). The story is now widely anthologized as part of the nineteenth-century canon of literature, its “privileged status” acknowledged by literary critics (Golden 1992, 2). Gilman never foresaw this reception. Her purpose was mainly to reach Mitchell with the story, which she said in her autobiography “was meant to be dreadful and succeeded” (Gilman 1935, 119). Though the story slept unrecognized for over half a century, it is hailed now for giving voice to an otherwise invisible, silent class of human beings: who could not attend college although their brothers could; women expected to devote themselves, their lives, to aging and ailing parents; women treated as toys or as children and experiencing who is to say how much loss of self-confidence as a result; [w]omen…bred for marriage [who] cannot actively pursue it but must sit passively and wait to be chosen (Hedges 1992, 132-133).

Gilman’s story can also liberate contemporary women. We, left with the residual misogyny of our Victorian forebears, have internalized a patriarchal assumption that our bodies are all wrong and that this very preoccupation is trivial, not worth much recognition or relief. “The Yellow Wallpaper” teaches us about a female narrator’s “I,” her subjectivity, breaking through the false reality patriarchy has imposed on her. Through writing her story, she recognizes John’s peremptory dismissal of her selfknowledge as an insidious form of oppression in which his reality trumps hers. In her deepest self, the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” knows her thoughts and feelings are not nearly as flawed as John’s tyrannical control of her. But she also conveys the dangers of even partially “buying” the patriarchal lie that men know a woman’s flawed self better than she. In the same way, we modern women need to employ our self-regard to fight the oppressive patriarchal conclusion that our bodies and thoughts are flawed. After all, the cruelest exercise of power occurs when one forces a distorted, toxic reality on another (Nafisi 2005). Effective resistance

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begins when a woman rejects patriarchal lies by protecting her inner core of reason, where her own beliefs are held inviolate. Joan Hedrick, Pulitzer-prize-winning biographer and Professor of History at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, has studied and taught Gilman extensively. She believes that “The Yellow Wallpaper” successfully conveys the dangers of accepting patriarchal “realities.” For this reason, she sees the story as a powerful resistance piece: The woman in the story acts out a script that is partly hers, but is severely constrained by the repression she has internalized. I see Gilman’s work as challenging the authenticity of the patriarchal authorities and claiming her own culture, reality, identity, feelings, subjectivity. Her feminist novel, Herland, turns the tables on men by having them enter an all-female world where their assumptions are met with (a more compassionate form of) the disbelief with which “John” greets every request his wife makes. So the message women can take from Gilman’s work, is, in a nutshell, not to let men define their reality but to trust their own responses (23 Jul 2008 e-mail to the author).

Advancing a Responsive Feminism Because patriarchy has defined women’s reality for too long, women have been damaged and undermined. Eight out of ten of us hate our bodies; one in three of us lives in poverty if a single mother; one in three of us has also known a man’s emotional or physical abuse; and one in six of us has been raped or sexually molested by a man (Lang 2007; Sourcebook, University of Albany 2001; Stevens 2008). The numbers are simply not comparable for men, who suffer these abuses, but with far less frequency in a society that privileges them at every turn. Even though some fortunate individual women have enough self-esteem to immunize themselves from patriarchy’s injuries, they would be in serious denial if they claimed that women and men shared human rights equally in our world. Yet women seem to sleep during youth, quite convinced that all of the women’s issues have been fully resolved and that there will never be a need to revisit feminist struggles. However, as women mature, patriarchy’s expectations may become so onerous that they are led to think, Friedanlike, “What gives? Who co-opted my dreams and handed me these burdens?” Though the facts seem to paint a bleak outlook for women, we must also recognize that oppressive cultural systems like patriarchy are inherently unstable (Johnson 2005, 226). When a cultural system violates human dignity on a large scale, a resistant collective eventually builds and

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gains resonance, despite rhetoric that pushes for more oppression. Though we cannot dismantle patriarchy and its gender oppression overnight, we can take comfort in the fact that the young millennium has seen more educated women than ever in America. As individual women with access to social media, we can effect our own cultural change, especially in the marketplace where we currently see the chiseled-down Galatea everywhere we turn. Yet women must make new, more conscious choices, awaking, as it were, from the culturally-sanctioned dream that the only prize worth living for is sexual viability and attractiveness in the eyes of men. The woman who has pinned all her hopes on such a goal forgets that her future may be a long one, with rich opportunities that extend long past her nubile years, depending on her choices. An example from the works of Hannah Arendt can help illustrate my point. In Responsibility and Judgment (2003), Arendt grappled with the tension between the need for individual Germans to take responsibility for their complicity in allowing the horror of the Holocaust to happen on the one hand, and the irrefutable guilt of the Nazi “system” on the other. Germans often claimed that they were innocent because of their ignorance of just how bad things were getting. Or (as in the case of Adolf Eichmann, a principal exterminator of Jewish people), they claimed innocence on the grounds that they were just obeying superiors’ orders as “cogs in the wheel,” so to speak. However, as Arendt asserts, even “cogs” have choices: For to the answer: “Not I but the system did it in which I was a cog,” the court immediately raises the next question: “And why, if you please, did you become a cog or continue to be a cog in such circumstances?” (31)

Though women’s current experiences in patriarchy cannot be equated with the organized, profligate horror of the Holocaust, we should still be wary of the same “cog in the wheel” logic that many German citizens used to exonerate themselves. We do not have to be cogs in the wheel of the beauty, fashion, or diet industries. Our notion that ads will always feature malnourished women as standards of beauty and “there’s nothing we can do about it” needs revision. Ads did not always feature such women. Until Twiggy appeared in 1966, women were afforded more abundant flesh. We must choose not to obey the “thin-is-in” edicts and we must own that choice by not buying the products the ads advertise. Instead, we should employ a buycott strategy. “Buycotting” products that promote a healthier, more realistic and more inclusive definition of feminine beauty rewards the companies that genuinely support our self esteem and, by

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default, lets the companies with the most destructive messages wither on the vine of consumer choice. This strategy is consistent with a responsive—rather than reactionary—feminism. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1964) offers an ethic of responsiveness in the midst of oppression that can serve as a model for women. As other nations—“cogs in the wheel” of the Nazi machine—turned over their Jews to Third Reich forces, Denmark protected its Jewish citizens in unique ways: Italy and Bulgaria proved to be nearly immune to anti-Semitism, but of the three that were in the German sphere of influence, only the Danes dared speak out on the subject to their German masters. When the Germans approached them rather cautiously about introducing the yellow badge, they were simply told that the King would be the first to wear it, and the Danish government officials were careful to point out that anti-Jewish measures of any sort would cause their own immediate resignation (171).

The Third Reich’s unique dependency upon Danish officials who simply refused to follow their orders turned the whole plan upside down. Danish people readily received Jews into hiding, as did Sweden, Denmark’s neighbor (174). Even the small number of old or sick Jews sent to the concentration camp Theresienstadt were well treated because Danish institutions supported them (174). The scenario is striking compared to the cog-in-the-wheel behavior of Italy and Bulgaria who, though not particularly known for anti-Semitism, never spoke out to their German masters and allowed their Jews to be summarily deported and exterminated (171). Though our lives are not Holocausts, Western women can still take valuable lessons from the king of Denmark’s yellow star, which he embraced to protect his Jewish citizens. What if all conscious women chose to “wear a yellow star” by refusing to obey our patriarchal culture’s orders, and thus protected the dignity of other women? By speaking out and refusing to buy in, a thinking woman has the wherewithal to begin dismantling, if only by bits, the top-heavy colossus that is Pygmalion. And when other women do the dismantling together, he crumbles more until his voice no longer resonates. We can achieve this end by claiming our subjectivity and speaking the truth about our lives—whether in the public forum or on the printed page—whenever patriarchy tries to speak for us. Together, we can reject the notions that muffling our thoughts in order to please men is worth the spiritshed that results; that our passionate, lifesustaining work is never good enough and is too trivial for compensation or male assistance; that our bodies are too large, too out of proportion, too

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old, too whatever; that we matter little in relation to the men we must reflect or magnify.30 I have spoken at length about the need for women to resist cultural voices that seek to chisel them down into something much smaller than they should be. But what voices are safe to follow? To gauge the messages that tell us who to be in our culture, whether they come from screen, print, or broadcast media, women must critically parse those messages to determine if they are destructive or healthy, though sometimes admittedly they will fall in a murky spot in between. The most destructive voices will offer an unhealthy, even irrational reality that speaks to women in terms of shoulds and shouldn’ts: What we should and shouldn’t eat, look like or be, according to cruel and impossible standards. Most women are familiar with fault-finding inner voices they have internalized, the “Itty Bitty Shitty Committee” that lives in our heads and carps at our every flaw. These voices would not have nearly so rich and insulting a vocabulary if popular culture did not feed them. Furthermore, the “Itty Bitty Shitty Committee” tends to generate hostility toward other women, whom we unfairly judge by the same vicious standards we have turned against ourselves (Taylor 2006, 138). The healthiest voices, however, empower us not to hide or silence our full selves. They rarely originate in the media, because unlike media, they do not profit from our insecurities, self-doubt, and self-loathing. Where do we find these healthy voices? Often, they speak through our closest friends, or through a trusted therapist, if we are fortunate enough to afford one, or through a religious counselor, relatives or gifted teachers. As one mentor once told me when I was in a particularly tough spot, “You need to listen only to the people who love you.” One thing is certain, however. It takes discipline to find and cultivate the empowering voices and shut out the critical voice of Pygmalion, the faultfinder: “I was adamantly opposed to reactivating old painful emotional circuits,” remarked neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor (2006) when a massive stroke had the unlikely result of illuminating how little she had protected herself from self-criticism before the event (121). In the same way, women need to be adamantly opposed to a culture bent on convincing them that they are never good enough, and on a daily basis, they need to fortify themselves with the empowering voices in their lives. More than anything, since encouraging, healing messages aimed at women are lacking in our omnipresent media, women must themselves be willing to become agents of healing. If you choose to educate and empower another woman suffering from self-doubt and body dissatisfaction, then her reality, once fogged by cultural expectations, may

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acquire a clear spot that did not exist before. If hundreds of women, even thousands, choose to reach out to their sisters with a clearer, cleaner reality, then Pygmalion’s toxic expectations for women dissolve in earnest, especially when women would no longer be motivated to reinforce industries that undermine their self-regard and would instead reward those companies that promote healthier, more realistic female images. These actions would render the unhealthy conversation less profitable and thus obsolete. When Galatea chooses to speak her own reality, her voice sounds a healing message. Maria Stewart, the Grimké sisters, Harriet Martineau, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman first sounded their voices with a truth that women must continue to spread in the young millennium in order to dismantle patriarchy: What we have come to know as an inherently flawed, irrational, trivial nature that deserves society’s leftovers is simply patriarchy’s ruse. Women have a value for connection with others that, if employed creatively in our institutions, could make the self-serving, controlling, power-over model of patriarchy look ridiculous. Once we know this and share it, we will more powerfully resist Pygmalion’s absurd agenda to silence, immobilize, and diminish us. Perhaps we will even choose to see ourselves not as objects of contempt, but as daughters of a force of love. Warmed and animated with this knowledge, we can then speak with one another in the public square, “wreaking havoc” by simply proclaiming our truths for each other to hear. Then patriarchy’s oppressive illusion will crack and fall away from us, like a fractured knife of stone. And we will not just speak, but sing.

APPENDIX RESOURCES FOR RESEARCH AND RESISTANCE

Below is a concise list of organizations with websites that provide valuable information for resisting patriarchy and its damaging forces in women’s lives. They are organized according to the themes I cover in Chapters Three through Five.

Resisting Women’s Silence Family Violence Prevention Fund, www.endabuse.org National Domestic Violence Hotline www.ndvh.org Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network www.rainn.org Rape on Campus: If You Are Raped on Campus www.rapeis.org/activism/campus/campus.html Women’s Media Center, Director Gloria Steinem (Confronts Sexism in the Media) www.womensmediacenter.com. Women Watch (United Nations Gateway) www.un.org/womenwatch/

Resisting the Devaluation of Women’s Roles and Women’s Work American Association of University Women www.aauw.org

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Center for American Women and Politics www.cawp.rutgers.edu/ Institute for Women’s Policy Research www.iwpr.org National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education www.ncwge.org/ National Council for Research on Women www.ncrw.org National Organization for Women www.now.org Religion and Women www.womenshistory.about.com/od/religion/Religion_and_Women.htm

Resisting Pygmalion’s Chisel on Women’s Bodies About-Face (Resisting Harmful Media Images) www.about-face.org/ National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders www.anad.org/ National Eating Disorders Association www.nationaleatingdisorders.org National Women’s Health Alliance www.nwhalliance.org/ Society for Women’s Health Research www.womenshealthresearch.org/ The Strength to Resist: The Media’s Impact on Women and Girls (videocassette). Cambridge Documentary Films, 2000. Women’s Health Initiative www.nhlbi.nih.gov/whi

NOTES

1

I speak primarily of heterosexual white men, who have not experienced the discrimination and harassment with which so many men of color as well as gay men are familiar in patriarchal culture. (See my point about writer Andrew Sullivan, page 42).

2

At the time of this writing, a remake of the film, starring Carey Mulligan, is slated for production. It remains to be seen whether this new version ends with the patriarchy-sanctioned Galatea’s falling in love with Pygmalion, an intolerable outcome for Shaw.

3

Carol Gilligan’s discussion of “The Tyranny of Nice and Kind” is included in Chapter 3 of her book, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development, co-authored with Lyn Mikel Brown.



In Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller (1979) took Sigmund Freud to task for his insistence that “masochism in women is the preferred state” (315). In 1993, Paula Caplan extended the challenge throughout her book, The Myth of Women’s Masochism. In the relatively new millennium, the myth remains very much alive.



See Ehrenreich and English, “The ‘Sick’ Women of the Upper Classes.”



Conversely, as Carol Gilligan has maintained in her studies of girls’ moral development, women, with some exceptions, learn to maintain connection, not necessarily status, over others. It is interesting to note that “girl bullying” most often is about disrupting the victim’s connection with other girls, whereas male bullying (discussed in Chapters 2 and 4) is primarily about winning dominance over others.

7

Psychological studies have revealed that women, unlike men, tend to turn their anger inward onto themselves, a process that often leads to depression (Cramer 2006, 184).

8

Some gems illustrating Coulter’s mean-spiritedness include the following: “…it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I…can’t really talk about Edwards” (on 2008 presidential candidate John Edwards); and “That was the theme of the Million Mom March. I don’t need a brain-I’ve got a womb” (on the 2000 Million Mom March on the National Mall that called for restrictions on gun ownership). For more Coulter quotations, see http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/quotations.cgi.

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9

In a promotional video entitled “Sexism in the Media: Sarah Palin,” Pat Benatar’s song, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” accompanies a montage of images showing Sarah Palin with adoring fans. Despite the unflattering shots of Barack Obama frowning in the background alongside the caption, “Surviving Barack Obama,” the video contains no concrete evidence of sexism against Palin in the media (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =1FEnO8-JMhQ).

10

Hillary Clinton’s appointment as Secretary of State under President Barack Obama has not neutralized the sexism leveled at her. In one 2009 instance, a Congolese student apparently asked Clinton what her husband thought of a policy decision (though he, mistranslated, meant Barack Obama). Clinton, annoyed but by no means enraged, replied, “My husband is not secretary of state, I am.” Media outlets reacted by framing her answer as “rage,” “snapping,” “loss of temper,” “jealousy of Bill,” among other unflattering overreactions (in http://www. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205738/Hillary-Clinton-Bill-secretary-state--Iam.html ). 

I must insert a word here about my own Episcopal priest, Margaret Minnick, who pursued ordination in the 1970s. In interview after interview, male priests rejected her simply because she was a woman. Their arguments were rarely theological. Rather, they were based on gut discomfort: “That’s just not the way we do things around here,” she’d hear. Finally, exasperated, she told one male authority that if Jesus were so interested in keeping gays and women out of the Church, he would have surely said so in the gospels. 

As traditionally male occupations become populated by women, pay scales tend to go down. It will be interesting to note what happens to the pay of rank-and file medical workers as the industry hires more men. 

Lawrence Summers resigned from his Harvard post in 2006 as the result of a breakdown in relations with Harvard faculty. In recent years he served as President Barack Obama’s Chief Economic Advisor.



In fact, Pinker believes that the most egregious manifestation of woman-hating, rape, is more efficiently prosecuted in what he would likely believe is now a postfeminist America: “[I]n the early 1970s…[m]arital rape was not a crime, date rape was not a concept, and rape during wartime was left out of the history books. These affronts to humanity are gone or on the wane in Western democracies, and feminism deserves credit for this moral advance” (361).  True enough, my middle-class concerns do not reflect the economic anxieties of those mothers who struggle to put food on the table and keep a roof over their children’s heads. For such mothers, the day is almost never done.

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Martineau wrote a methodology for observing the manners and customs of society before the term “sociology” was coined by Auguste Comte in 1838 (Rossi 1973, 118). 

The three have promoted Jenny Craig, Alli, and Bestlife weight loss campaigns, respectively.  See Sandra Lee Bartky’s 2003 essay, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power” (in The Politics of Women’s Bodies, ed. Rose Weitz).  In a current Weight Watcher’s ad, Jennifer Hudson, at size 0, sings a gospel tune and testifies how “powerful” she now feels after losing weight. As a friend who aimed for size zero as a life goal once commented, “It’s remarkable how the thing I wanted most in the world was to be nothing.” 

These would include thousands of incidental messages, such as those found in stickers, posters, packaging labels, billboards, slogans on clothing and vehicles, emails, and pop-ups. 

Susan Bordo provides rich examples of this deconstruction of ads in her writings. 

A good place to begin is US News and World Report’s “Weighing the Evidence” at http://health.usnews.com/health-news/diet-fitness/diet/articles/2010/03/19/ weighing-the-evidence-on-6-popular-diet-programs?PageNr=2. Consumer Reports also offers periodic updates on the best (and worst) diets, though this is a paid service. Virtually all of the reports note that major lifestyle changes are necessary for the weight to stay off, and if one cannot restrict unhealthy food choices in the long run, the diet will not work.



See www.about-face.org for a “gallery of offenders” that shows some of the most misogynistic ads currently circulating. The website also includes detailed links to resources focusing on the media and body image, as well as contact information for offending companies so that they can be pressured to reconsider their methods. 

Sociologist Allan G. Johnson deserves credit for the phrase.



The terms “who we are” and “what we appear to be” are explored by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. 

Beaver, Bitch, bunny, chick, cougar, fox, vixen, hen, kitten, minx, nag, pussycat, shrew, tiger mom, and the mythological dragon lady and harpy come easily to mind. Most are disempowering. For men, we have dog, jackass, silver fox, snake, and wolf and the mythological chimera. Only one of these, “jackass,” is

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disempowering. The remaining four are actually complimentary in most contexts. The term “son of a bitch” is female-themed. 27

Butler also references violence against “gay women who read as ‘masculine’” (34). I would argue that such women likewise threaten patriarchy by not defining or magnifying male identity as feminine foils. I believe that woman-hating and hatred toward gays are intimately linked; as a gay friend once noted, “All homophobia is misogyny.” 

I am not arguing for the censorship of all pornography, whether visual or textual. I am, however, arguing for a critical understanding of how pornography works rhetorically, persuading and often convincing men that turning a female human subject into a dehumanized, consumable object is funny, sexually exciting, and altogether harmless.



An excellent discussion of this issue is found in Cornel West’s Race Matters.

0 The Appendix (pp. 115-116) offers a concise list of organizations with websites that provide valuable information for resisting patriarchy and its harmful forces in women’s lives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANAD (National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Eating Disorders). 2010. “General Information.” http://www.anad.org/getinformation/about-eating-disorders/general-information. ANRED (Anorexia Nervosa and Related Eating Disorders, Inc.). 2011.“Statistics: How Many People Have Eating Disorders?” http://www.anred.com/.stats.html. Arendt, Hannah. 1964. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking Press. —. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 2003. Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Press. Barko, Naomi. 30 Nov. 2000. “The Other Gender Gap: Why Women Still Fail to Receive Comparable Wages for Comparable Work.” The American Prospect. 11.15: 61. http://prospect.org/article/other-gendergap Barnes, Robert. 30 May 2007. “Over Ginsburg’s Dissent, Court Limits Bias Suits.” Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com /wpdyn/content/article/2007/05/29 /AR2007052900740.html. Bartky, Sandra Lee. 2003. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In The Politics of Women’s Bodies. Edited by Rose Weitz, 25-45. New York: Oxford University Press. Basu, Rekha. “Lean In Doesn’t Lean Enough on Cultural Change.” 17 March 2013. New Haven Register. (Middletown, CT). B3. Bendery, Jennifer. 5 June 2012. “Paycheck Fairness Act Fails Senate Vote.” Huffington Post.