A very warm welcome to first-time guest poster, Lisa Sengelow!
I invited Lisa to write this post about the impact of Naomi Wolfâs book on her, expanding on a comment she made in a feminist motherâs Facebook group we are both part of. She wrote such a brilliant piece – this post right here! – that Iâm keen to extend it into a series of guest posts, loosely collected under the title âWhy I am a feminist.â They arenât exhaustive manifestos, just real life stories about why feminism is so important and potent and life-changing. Hereâs Lisaâs.Â
(And if you’d like to add your own, please email me at: sacraparental at gmail dot com.)
Iâm idly scrolling through my FB feed for some semi-mindless me-time after getting my children to bed, and I see this image.
A woman hunched under a table, naked, with her face bound up in bandages, holding an orange like itâs a holy relic, looking like sheâd never dare to eat it.
Itâs the cover of my copy of The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, which I owned sometime in the early 90s, and which disappeared sometime between then and now, lent to a friend or lost to an overenthusiastic cull. And the feeling I get is recognition, gratitude, a feeling of awe at the impact that book had on me, and a flashback to me at 21 â depressed, bulimic, obsessed with food and hunger and horribly weak physically. Trapped just like the woman in the picture.
I donât remember that time of my life all that clearly, but I remember devouring that book, chapter after chapter, and feeling like I had been jolted awake from a compelling but crazy dream.
I donât remember Wolfâs arguments in detail, but what I took from her was that the ideal I was striving so hard towards – harming my body and my mind in the process – was just one of many âidealâ body types that had changed dramatically over time, and that all they had in common was that they all signified male status and privilege â for example, you have to be very wealthy to afford a wife who is so constrained by her corset that she canât walk without help from a servant. I am sure the book was full of all sorts of nuanced examples, but thatâs the one that stuck. And if women and girls stopped giving a shit about looking perfect we could do so much more â have adventures, make discoveries, change the world for the better.
I remember thinking something like âwhy would anyone put themselves through all that just to shore up male privilege? Fuck that â Iâm not going to make myself vomit any moreâ. And I didnât.
I donât know if The Beauty Myth saved my life, but it got me out of a self-destructive pathway a lot sooner that would have happened otherwise. Back then I was not âtoo smart to go down any not so good streetâ (Oh, the Places Youâll Go! is another inspirational book for me! When I read it to my daughter I change the protagonist to a she. Itâs surprisingly easy).
Reading The Beauty Myth also made feminism real for me for the first time. Before then I had used half-digested feminist theory to do things like analyze power structures in A Midsummer Nightâs Dream. Which was enjoyable for me, but kind of distanced from my actual life.
Cut to now. Feminism is important to me because I donât donât donât want my daughter (who is now 5) to go through any of that same bullshit. Or anyone elseâs daughter either. I am a feminist because the issues that Naomi Wolf opened my eyes to 20+ years ago havenât gone away; theyâve gotten worse.
So I try to live and breathe enjoying being me, loving what my post-baby body with its bad back still does for me, not giving too much of a fuck what I look like (this is sometimes hard and I am still trying to fake it convincingly till I make it), using my brain for more important things, and playing with being plain or fancy as a choice I can make anytime. (My daughter loves being fancy, which is cool, and she says I am plain and sensible. I have dreams of one day reading Sarah, Plain and Tall to her, but sheâll probably say âMum, thatâs boringâ.)
But I know I canât control everything for her, and there is a whole world out there full of everyday sexism that sheâll have to navigate without me. Hopefully as a young woman she is too smart to go down any not so good street. But if she does, I hope she finds a wake-up idea at the right time, like I found The Beauty Myth. Now I want to read it again. And make sure itâs sitting on the bookshelf and or my kindle, waiting to be serendipitously discovered by someone else.
Lisa Sengelow is a practising public servant/Buddhist/mother/reader/Wellingtonian; and a lapsed librarian/Catholic/scuba diver/cable car driver/barista.
You can keep up with Sacraparental via Facebook for daily snippets, Twitter for general ranting and raving and Pinterest for all sorts, including a Gender Politics board.
You might also want to check out these posts on feminist subjects:
The Beauty Myth (an intro or refresher)
Women hold up half the sky (opening our eyes to women in the Bible)
Sexism in kids’ TV shows: what to look for and what to do about it
(Hopefully not) passing on rape culture