Maid To Order

         I found a few connections in Maid to Order, some from previous classroom observations, some from other materials.  I’ve found that all across the globe, when women want to have some of the power that men have traditionally had, they do so by taking on male attributes (Power recreates itself in its own image).  Part of the tradition of masculinity is domination over women.  Women who want power seem to find it much easier to dominate other women than to really challenge the status quo and dominate men.  That seems to be too radical to risk.  I think a lot of that ties into the phenomona of hiring ‘cleaning ladies’ to perform tasks that were traditionally assigned to women of the family.  First, a woman asking a man to perform housework is a radical reassignment of traditional gender roles and risks provoking feelings of resentment.  The much safer choice is to hire another woman to do the job.  Peace and calm is preserved, but no moves toward gender equality have been made.  Also, a working woman probably faces monumental discrimination and has to work twice as hard to advance to the level of her male coworkers can come home, observe the cleaning lady and remark to herself ‘At least that isn’t me’. Even hiring household help, which seems like a straightforward, utilitarian need, has taken on symbolic significance in that maids scrub ‘the old fashioned way’, taking a submissive, degrading position that really does nothing to make the task more efficient, but does reinforce feelings of superiority.
I don’t neccessarily think that hiring domestic help is in itself evil, we are a capitalist society and specialization of professions is part of what makes us prosper. But attitudes toward the hiring of maids have got to change, or every step forward that the feminist movement has made will be so saturated in classism and hypocrisy that it may cripple us.

Riverbedblog

The most dramatic difference I noticed between the Iraqi family and the American family was the solidarity.  Aside from my parents and my father’s mother, I had little to no contact with my family at all.  The tribe also seems to act as a sort of an enormous, extended family, which amazes me.  On one hand, the pressure to conform to the wishes of so many people must be a great deal heavier than the pressure to conform to the wishes of two parents,  but on the other hand I feel myself longing for that sense of being part of a greater whole that is willing to take action for you and takes an interest in you simply because you are a member.  There is great freedom in our culture, but great anonymity and isolation.  Any difficulties I may have faced in my life pale in compasion to hers, and I am in awe of her for coming through it all.

             I have to admit, I had had an optimistic outlook on the war, and thought that the United States was making significant contributions to the country and its welfare.  But after reading the accounts of a young woman actually living in Iraq, I feel shaken and somewhat ashamed of the actions of this country and its attitudes toward the Iraqis.  I have read many historical accounts of how war seems to justify acts of brutality, but I had hoped that humanity had advanced past that.  It seems not, and that infuriates me.

Women of Color and Their Struggle for Reproductive Rights.

      I’ve always thought that the oppression of women through reproductive rights manifested itself though denial of contraceptives and abortions, but never did it occur to me that the opposite would be true.  I know that eugenics was practiced in India and Nazi Germany, but the notion that it occurred in this country as recently as the seventies is nauseating.  It seems that in the early years of the United States black slaves were politically powerless and treated as commodities, so whites didn’t worry about their population, and in fact they encouraged/forced childbirth the way one would fertilize a crop.  In later years, non whites have won a great deal of social and political power, so much so that they have become a threat to the white majority, some of whom now seem to want to neutralize the threat they pose by diminishing their numbers.  I remember one account in the case of Brown vs. The Board of Education when black student were brought into a previously all white school for the first time, one white woman was reported to be screaming ‘Got your birth control pills?’ at the black students.  I think this all sheds light on what it truly means to be racist, or not to be a racist.  It is easy enough for a white person who lives in an all white community and never has to compete with black people to say they bear no animosity towards black people.  It is only when a person does come in contact with people of other races and does have to compete with them, and possibly lose a job or a promotion to a person of another race that their character is truly tested. 

              White women are pressured to bear children, non white children are pressured not to.  Both groups are subject to a template of an ideal America forced upon them by a small, but powerful sector of the population that seems to want white women forced back into a more traditional domestic role and seems to want the absence of black people as a whole, now that they no longer serve as commodities.  This conflict threatens to pit white women against black and Hispanic women in the fight for reproductive rights as both may resent the position the other holds in the struggle and may feel that the other group is taking their position for granted.  The goal of course is not unchecked childbirth or complete sterility, but for individual choice, something that men have far too long believed that women are incapable of making for themselves.  The whole situation is nauseating and enlightening, and gives me a great deal of sympathy and understanding for black women in America. 

         Amanda Wright

Designer vaginas

       This is an extremely shaming thing for me to admit, being a member of a Womens Study course, but a few years ago, I actually did have a labiaplasty.  I had existed most of my life without any feelings that there was something ‘wrong’ my body parts, and I had had fulfilling sexual relationships.  No partner of mine had ever made disparaging comments.  The insecurities came when I really started to encounter pornography.  The doctors in the essay claim that with a labiaplasy, the woman is the designer.  This is not so.  With a labiaplasty, Playboy is the designer.  Before I encountered pornography, the only vaginas I had ever seen had been my own and those displayed in medical textbooks.  This was my only basis of comparison, and so I felt just find with myself.  Pornography, however, gave me image after image of the idealized, perfect vagina, a clean slit, something I didn’t have.  This perfect, airbrushed being on the page was so different from me, and I began to feel insecure and ugly and ashamed of said body part.  When my boyfriend at the time broke up with me, I had, by then, managed to convince myself that he wasn’t satisfied with the relationship because I had weird labia.  I had a labiaplasty done, and it gave me a true, visceral appreciation for the life I lead in a country where female genital mutilation isn’t done.  When the anesthesia wore off for me, the pain was excruciating to the point it made me nauseous, and I blanch to think of what it must be like for a twelve year old gurl who undergoes such a thing with rusty tools and no painkillers at all.  Later on, when I had enough insight into the situation to wish I hadn’t had the surgery performed, I realized that plastic surgery, cosmetics, shoes, jewelry, yachts, nearly all of commercial America is built on the foundation of people being unhappy.  When people are happy, they want for nothing, therefore they purchase nothing, and the more frivolous industries suffer.  No wonder, I realized, we are all bombarded constantly with these images of mythical people in media and commercials who are so different from us and so impossible to attain.  As long as the industries can keep us hungry for their products, we will continue to feed them.  I look at advertisements (not pornography) with a different eye now, seeing it for what it is, a desperate corporations attampt to cash in on my insecurities.  I definitely agreed that attitudes by women about women are just as dangerous as attitudes by men about women, and I know that women can make far more cutting and hurtful remarks than men ever dare to in this society. 

          Amanda Wright