Today's Prompt: The Air We Breathe
On the heels of Martin Luther King Day, my school developed a voluntary all-school writing prompt related to equality, asking what would it mean for everyone to be treated equally? I thought I wouldn’t write, with so much to do and the pressing temptation to do nothing and let it pass. But then I heard a song on the radio and suddenly I had to write. Suddenly, there was a lot to say.
The song was an old pop hit from the early 80s that I hadn’t heard since I was a little girl: Sheena Easton’s “Morning Train.” The song began and my chest filled with nostalgia as the lyrics came forward from the depths of my brain to my tongue unexpectedly, the way song lyrics so often can. And I remembered so fondly, singing along to the radio:
My baby takes the morning train,
He works from nine to five and then,
He takes another home again,
To find me waiting for him.
It was a catchy refrain, and as a little girl I learned the words and sang along unthinkingly.
And yet hearing it again, I was entirely appalled by the lyrics to that song. From the perspective of an adult woman listening carefully to the song, it was suddenly obvious that, at a very early age, I’d programed into my little brain the words to a song that describes a woman whose life is absolutely nothing without a man. Easton croons about how she gets up in the morning and her day seems to last forever, because she has nothing to do but wait for her baby to get home from work. But then, she tells us, “the moment that he’s with me, everything’s alright.” Essentially, she lives to be only with him. And the vision of little early-1980s me singing those words suddenly broke my heart.
And there I was in the car on a three hour drive, with the time to think about all of the ways those ideas about women’s roles are imbibed – digested – without even thinking about it. And I recalled the article I read recently about the fact that Landon Donovan is frequently cited as the all-time lead US soccer goal scorer and yet that’s actually not true; in fact it’s Abby Wambach. And yet she’s listed as the lead women’s goal scorer, as if that category needs the extra qualifier, as if her accomplishment is that much less. There’s the Women’s World Cup. The Women’s NBA. The Lady Wildcats. Without the qualifier, an athlete is default male. It’s simply assumed.
Or there’s the way my friend Amanda and I noticed one day how frequently we comment on little girls’ appearances when we first see them, telling them how cute they look, or noticing that they are growing their hair, or commenting on their clothes. Never once have I seen a friend’s son and complimented him on his t-shirt or evaluated his coiffure. And then I started to see it everywhere, in the way every single person interacted with my daughter. The hotel employees who addressed her as “Princess” at Disney World (vomit). The old ladies in the grocery store aisles, the friends of the family, my own mother and sister. Telling her over and over again that she has worth first and foremost because she’s physically beautiful.
And I go back to thinking about music and realize that little 1980s me unthinkingly singing sexist songs is fully mirrored and repeated in my daughter belting out her own version of “All About That Base,” which is probably the catchiest tune ever invented, and I have to admit it gets stuck in my head, too. And yet if you listen closely to the lyrics, it becomes obvious that it is a song clothed in the guise of feminism but is actually of a piece with Sheena Easton’s ode to female subservience. It’s lovely to be told that every inch of me is perfect from the bottom to the top, but I’m hardly going to rest easy in life simply because boys like a little more booty to hold at night. Aren’t there other criteria by which to judge my worth? And her dismissal of “skinny bitches” is just another instance of hatred of women by women for reasons of physical appearance. The song asks us to trade feeling worthless about our bodies for feeling full of worth just because of our curvy bodies’ abilities to attract boys. Is that a trade worth making? Does it actually change anything?
And then there’s the female student I recently overheard declaring that a boy she knew had a “man-gina.” To the uproarious laughter from peers, as though this was the perfect way to designate him as less than man enough. Endow him with female genitalia, according to this joke, and he becomes the epitome of weakness and ineffectiveness. It’s the opposite of declaring a woman has balls, as though testicles are the sole endower of gumption and courage.
Or the tired cliché spouted by dads of young daughters that there’s going to be trouble when their girls become teenagers if any boys come sniffing around. The message, of course, is that boys are driven solely by uncontrollable sexual urges and girls are weak, are the keepers of some innocent treasure called virginity, and need to be protected from male virility. The construct never considers the fact that girls and women might have healthy sexual urges of their own. It never focuses on helping daughters develop the confidence to find and cherish their sexuality and own it in a healthy way, or helping their sons respect girls and women enough to give them the space to do so.
The frequent response to the above comments is: oh, these are just small examples. You’re making a big deal out of small things. None of those instances are intentionally sexist. But here’s the insidious thing about sexism, and racism, and classism, and homophobia: the small examples are invisible, unconscious, and they add up. It’s not the really overt acts of exclusion and hatred that are the sum of those isms – it’s all that plus the enormous range of hidden and unintentional and assumed ideas and behaviors. Those hidden parts are like particles in the air we breathe – they come into our lungs without our thinking about it. They are molecules that become part of us. Each joke, a particle. Each song, a particle. Each qualification and judgment and assumption, a particle.
And the hardest part about it is that we breathe it in and then we produce it ourselves, exhaling it without knowing it. I am a feminist, but I’m also a sexist because I’ve inhaled too many jokes and songs and side comments. I may have withstood the siren song of Sheena Easton to stay home as a kept woman waiting for a man; yes, I went on with my life to pursue higher education and a career. But I still look in the mirror and hate my hips. I still judge the women around me by their appearance. I am an ardent supporter of equal treatment of people regardless of race and ethnicity, and yet I’m also a racist because I’ve absorbed television stereotypes of Peter Pan Indians and breathed in the idea that a black man on a dark city street might rob me. I’m passionate about gay rights and yet I’m a homophobic. I believe in economic equality and yet I hold assumptions about people who live in trailers. And I hate myself for having taken those breaths. And I spend every day trying to clear my lungs. I spend every day trying to interrogate the poisonous assumptions that surface. I try to climb above the layer of pollution that still exists, not so thick as when my mother was growing up and was told that her only choice was to be a teacher or a secretary or a mother. But it’s still there, and it clouds all our judgment.
Our challenge, I think, is to muster the courage to take a look at what we breathe in, and examine how it tinges what we personally breathe out. Our challenge is to take a good hard look at ourselves, and then make oxygen and clear the air.
