I'm not sure when the transition happened, but at some point I fell out of the loop -- I feel like I have lost my job at Dartmouth. Like I've been transferred to the information processing department, where I sit and mull over the changes that are taking place and watch them happen without me. I feel too old, too jaded perhaps, to contribute.
I was asked to speak about advocacy for change at Dartmouth earlier this week. In preparing for the panel, I mulled over my years here, and the beginning of my active involvement in the community.
I was going to have to admit that I got involved by accident. I was naive and expectant, and I was let down by my interactions with other Dartmouth students my first year here. And I thought Spare Rib could fix that, the way I believe communication can fix most things. So I signed up.
I talked about the moderate stance I wanted the paper to have. I emphasized that the compromise was necessary because I wanted anyone as naive as I was when I got involved with the paper to be able to pick it up and learn something, and want to keep reading.
I said I didn't want the paper to be too "radical."
But I also cringed when I used that word. I myself was not "radical" when I took over that publication because I did not know enough to take a solid stance on feminist issues. My job was to encourage people to express themselves about gender issues and to present these articles to the community at large in as accessible a way as possible.
But the more you learn about any issue, the more "radical" you inevitably become. The presentation given by Ann Simonton titled "Sex, Power, and the Media" brought back the anger I thought I was immune to by now.
I admit I sometimes feel like I have seen it all. I succumb to the pressures to be non-threatening, to not speak out every time I see bias because people will stop taking me seriously if I complain too much. I like to believe that I can take a break from educating the people around me.
I think it can be called survival.
But I was also relieved that I felt outraged when shown these "common" media images. This is not a new revelation: there is a reason I do not buy magazines like Cosmopolitan and Vogue. But the extent of the violence caused by these advertisements and television shows and movies is astounding.
It made my flesh crawl. It made me almost ready to wear a dress made of white lunch meat to a beauty pageant (as Simonton has done). We should be responding to this sort of outrage with revulsion.
We should at the very least refuse to purchase products that are advertised with women who are frail or cowering or feigning to enjoy pain, with children as sex symbols, with violence portrayed as sexy. Glamorized victimization is not harmless.
But because this is the media, because this is common, we assume we are the only ones who would react that way. The question becomes not, "What is wrong with these pictures?" but, "What is wrong with me?"
The same is true with any cause. As soon as we lose our empathy for those who are less familiar with our issues -- racism, sexism, homophobia, what-have-you -- we have crossed that invisible line into "radicalism," and there is no going back. Being informed, and knowing the extent of the damage these things can do, makes it difficult to relate to the student who -- even if only through his or her ignorance -- perpetrates the problem.
So we tend to stay away from the "mainstream" and hang around people who do understand. We lose our interest in trying to educate anybody, because so many people are apathetic, or worse yet, defensive. We cannot share information if we do not pet egos along the way, and part of the problem we are fighting is that those egos have been petted too much already. We've reached an impasse.
Issues like selective censorship in the images we see, sex roles, violence and racism affect all of us. Why then don't we see as much or more representation from white men as we do from, say, African American women in addressing them? Why are there so many women willing to take a stand and so many men avoiding the issues? I realize this a gross overgeneralization. But why are most of us afraid to speak up?
We don't, of course, want to show ourselves to be too different from our peers, or be labelled as "too serious" because we give actual thought to what is going on around us.
And we don't want the problem on our own backs. After all, we have a societal emphasis on being happy and unencumbered. That's what the media shows us, too. No wonder those of us who are trying not to be radical and trying to educate end up getting frustrated, because no one wants to hear.
If we believe everything we see, the anorexic woman in that picture wanted to be punched so she could show us how great her jumpsuit looks "in action."
Is that a smile we see? She looks ... happy.
