Permission Slip

As I stated in last week’s post about the documentary Miss Representation:

Society places an inordinate amount of pressure on women about the way they look, their age, where and who they should be in life and just about everything else. We are also often given very conflicting messages about these very same issues.

I feel like the pressure also comes from other women with their own agendas too. Like society, some feminist minded women like to box women in to a limited set of parameters and choices that measure up to their equally narrow vision of womanhood. It’s almost as if women today have less freedom to self define themselves. We are pulled in many different directions and it can be confusing and frustrating. Hard to hear your voice amongst all the noise.

Repeat after me:

• There is nothing wrong with wanting to be married.
• There is nothing wrong with wanting (or even needing) someone special in your life, as long as it is, hopefully, a healthy want or need.
• There is nothing wrong with wanting a man who brings something to the relationship table.
• There is absolutely nothing wrong with having standards.
• There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a mother, after all it is one of the most important jobs in the world. And if you are at a certain time in your life it’s normal to have an urgency about it.
• There is nothing wrong with wanting to look pretty.
• There is nothing wrong with wanting to appear feminine and using it to your advantage.

This does not make you pathetic, less than, brainwashed, or a sell out. You are doing something with your life- it just might not be someone else’s definition. You define your own ambition. Once you can be honest about your needs and wants, free from other people’s opinions or objections, you can really do the work needed to achieve the life that you want.

You are your own woman; therefore, you don’t really need my permission...but you have it anyway :-)

P.S.

Happy Halloween!

Miss Representation

Society places an inordinate amount of pressure on women about the way they look, their age, where and who they should be in life and just about everything else. We are also often given very conflicting messages about these very same issues.


I don’t remember exactly where I first heard about the documentary Miss Representation but I remember hearing about it several times and seeing the trailer below a few times before I had a chance to watch it this past week.

I really enjoyed watching this film. There were somethings that I liked, somethings that I didn't like. Somethings I agreed with and didn't agree with. It made me question many of my own perceptions and beliefs about my fellow womankind like: why are we so competitive with each other? Why don't we trust each other? Why are we so judgmental of each other? To what degree have we been conditioned?

It frames the issues surrounding women, men, and the media as a post feminism backlash - because women have made so much progress there is now this patriarchal push back to put women back in their place so to speak. Women are now more empowered so some men now feel dis-empowered and are unsure of how they fit into society. As I've said before women have changed A LOT over the past few decades while men have pretty much stayed the same; therefore, many men don't know how, or aren't taught how, to look at women in ways other than they did 60 years ago. In a way a disservice has been done to men too.

We are in the midst of a social (and economic) transition and it sucks being caught in the middle!

As a Christian, capitalist, conservative (the big 3Cs) I didn’t like the documentary’s insinuation that conservative and capitalist principles were to blame for the current situation. I don’t agree with this because: 1.) we don’t live in a capitalist system we live in a capitalist-socialist-hybrid 2.) true capitalism gives people the most freedom of choice and opportunity possible. I also think that there is a lot of value in many conservative principles that have been lost over the past few years. In some ways women have confused empowerment and sexual liberation with self-exploitation. We’ve gone from one extreme to the other.


Though the producers claim that the representation is evenly split I still would have liked to have seen more stories from women of color in the film- black women in particular, for obvious reasons- as our experiences in the culture will be wildly different from those of WW. I do feel that there was an even distribution of commentators within in the film but not necessarily an even distribution of stories and experiences. But the solution to that is for more women of color to write and produce their own stories.


Needless to say I have a lot of mixed feelings about Miss Representation. It is thought provoking documentary and I am speaking about it here because I think its important for both women and men to see and discuss. I encourage those reading to find a way to see this documentary and follow the discussion. It is currently running on OWN:

- #missrep on Twitter
- @RepresentPledge
- http://missrepresentation.org/
- https://www.facebook.com/MissRepresentationCampaign


More next week.

Book Review: Is Marriage For White People by Dr. Ralph Richard Banks

(By someone who actually read the book!)

I was able to attend a book signing with Dr. Banks’ this past Thursday and he signed my copy :-) Dr. Banks strikes me as very eloquent and level headed. What I’ve seen and heard from him, I like so far. However I think he’s presenting a message most BW are not ready to hear- this was made painfully apparent at said book signing.

Before I got hold of my copy of Dr. Banks' book I perused the reviews from various sources to see what people were saying. Now that I've read the book, I can tell that many of these so called reviewers and analysts never even so much as picked up the book. The biases and hidden agendas are becoming quite apparent.

This book is not what people are making it out to be. Is Marriage For White People? sets out to answer the questions: Why are African Americans now the most unmarried people in the country? Why do we marry less and divorce more? What are the consequences? Organized much like a research paper it: presents a problem, reviews the framework of the problem, analyzes relevant data, and then makes a recommendation for policy reform. He even goes into detail about how his research was conducted. Banks only offers up IR dating and marriage as a solution on the very last page of the text.

Banks echoes much of what most of the BWE bloggers have made apparent about the "black community": colorism, man sharing, gender imbalance, marrying down, etc. Dr. Banks provides an effective and eye opening analysis of statistics relating to how the marriage decline is intertwined with other various and important issues which are seemingly magnified within the "black community": abortion, OOW births, divorce, the spread of STDs, infertility, middle class income instability, the wealth gap, and much more. He also does an excellent job of deducing the statistics surrounding BW’s desirability as it relates to online dating in particular. His analysis is thought-provoking and shows how these numbers can be very misleading and that there is in fact a market for BW.

Banks also assess why it is that BW are so loyal to BM, how these mindsets are shaped, and why BW cling to them. In all honesty, reading through those three chapters in particular was mentally exhausting for me. I just couldn’t relate (maybe others can) to all of the mental gymnastics and blockers BW put up in order to rationalize not pursuing an IR relationship.

“If fears of interracial intimacy keep people separate now, it is because those fears embody the echo of the past.” page 169

Dr. Banks is sympathetic to black women and he is willing to address the bad behavior of some (okay, many) black men and the pathologies of the black community that reinforce those behaviors. After reading though I still was not clear on what it was Banks was trying to do with his book. He does answer his questions but he doesn’t necessarily make a very compelling case for interracial marriage for black women. He does present it as an option but if I was not already an IR inclined BW, this book wouldn’t make me take any more of an interest in IR dating as an option. Therefore, I don’t see what people are so riled up about.

This book reads very quickly, almost too quickly. I felt that the book only scratched the surface and that it could have gone into much greater detail. In many respects I felt like I was reading a summary of a much larger report.

Much like Sophia Nelson's Black Woman Re-Defined, I found that this book lends itself very well to group and sociological discussion. Regardless of your position on IR dating or what you believe about marriage rates in the black community I recommend that you read Is Marriage For White People? with an open mind.