body

Body Language proudly presents July’s guest writer, Laura Maffei. She is the author of the poetry collection Drops from Her Umbrella (Inkling Press 2006) and founder of the journal American Tanka. Her current project is a memoir called Girl with a Secret, or How I Tried to Hide Muscular Dystrophy with Tight Jeans and Makeup and she blogs about issues of appearance at lauramaffei.com.

When I was twelve years old, in 1980, I was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. There weren’t really any visible symptoms yet, but the disease was progressive and eventually there would be. During the car ride home, my mother turned to me in the back seat and said, pointedly, “We’ll only be telling Aunt Nancy and Uncle Joe.” These were our closest relatives. What she meant was, we would not be telling anyone else. She was telling me to keep it a secret.

My parents made this decision mostly out of protection. This was, after all, long before the Americans with Disabilities Act, and they didn’t want me unnecessarily labeled at school. But there was another side to it. My family cared deeply about appearances, my mother in particular. None of us, my father included, were allowed out of the house for any reason without being freshly washed and combed, wearing freshly ironed and color-coordinated outfits. We were also expected to look dignified and graceful at all times.

There was one other layer. I was a girl. I think a boy would have been told to keep it a secret too, for general appearances’ sake and to avoid discrimination, but a boy, you see, could win his mate with his earning power, if he worked diligently enough. Which he would be expected to do (both work hard and find a mate), since we were a traditional and conservative Italian-American family with one foot still in the 1950s. When I was born in 1967, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all placed bets on what age I would be when I got married. The bets ranged between 19 and 24, with one uncle betting “never” because I’d be a career woman. One could not be both, because then how could you cook or clean for your husband and children? And yet one was definitely expected to marry.

And marrying required being attractive. While I was encouraged to study hard and go to college, it was always made clear to me that being attractive was essential, and that “attractive” meant very specific things: A slim figure with a flat stomach. A face covered in foundation, blush, eye shadow, and mascara. (From the age of 13 I was encouraged to wear makeup every day.) Certainly not a disease that would cause my lower stomach to protrude from weakened abdominal muscles and cause me to walk with a labored gait that made people glance at me when I went by.

I had to hide it as best I could, and for a while I found various ways, like super-control-top hosiery and lying to the gym teacher about how many sit-ups I did. I refused to answer questions about it, especially from men I dated. Because yes, insanely, I kept trying to hide having muscular dystrophy well into adulthood, long after it became ludicrous to try to hide the obvious fact that I had a disability, that my body wasn’t the perfect one I thought I had to have in order to be acceptable.

Which is why, even though my story is specific and a little bizarre, I see it everywhere. It’s the same old story, really: girls and women trying to conform to what the culture tells them is physically acceptable, and feeling shame if they don’t. I see it when a friend won’t take her cover-up off at the beach in 95 degrees. I see it when the students I teach totter across the stage during an awards ceremony in stilettos that are hurting them (and, in one case, fall down the stairs). I see it when a woman in a mirror in a public bathroom experimentally pulls her skin back tight from her face.

What is the solution? For me, two things helped somewhat: learning how to draw, and hanging out with a group of smart, funny, earth-worshipping Wiccans while I was in my twenties. The Wiccans showed me that everyone, EVERYONE, was perfectly acceptable whatever their face or body type. Drawing, with its requirement of intently caressing with the eyes every shape and shadow of a person’s face and figure, showed me that everyone is beautiful.

Not that I don’t still cringe at times, when I see myself unexpectedly reflected in a store window and I don’t conform to the image I was brought up to believe was the only one that was acceptable. We all have to keep finding our way, slowly, out of the morass of arbitrary decrees that tell us what we’re supposed to look like, and what we’re supposed to hide.

I’m always highly attuned to language—its nuances, implications, and effects—so much so that my partner is ready (if not always eager) on at least a weekly basis to hear the latest term or phrase that I find problematic.  So here’s the latest:  I’m troubled by the metaphors of battles, wars, fighting that often get linked to people with diseases or disabilities.

Two nights ago I was watching Extreme Home Makeover.  As a side note, let me warn you never to watch this show unless you just want to sit in front of your tv weeping while simultaneously being vaguely embarrassed at yourself for doing exactly what the show’s makers want you to do.  That pretty much describes my evening.

There are many, many problems with this show that other bloggers should feel free to launch into, but one of the things that struck me was the battle metaphors.  The father of the family whose home was being remodeled has ALS, a progressive neurodegenrative disease.  He seems like a genuinely wonderful person, with a great attitude and a passion for his family and his career.  Everyone who helped with the project of rebuilding this family’s house seemed moved by this guy, and repeatedly throughout the episode folks recognized him and honored him for, among other things, his “battle against ALS.”

This is, of course, a pervasive way of framing people with diseases of all kinds.  The ALS Association’s big statement at the top of every page on their website is “Fighting on Every Front to Improve Living with ALS.”   There are a number of websites devoted to fighting cancer, fighting HIV, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, etc.  The fight metaphor is often how individuals with these diseases discuss their own lives and priorities.  And yet, it gives me a small, uncomfortable twinge.

I’d be politically troubled or offended if someone had referred to the little boy in the Extreme Home Makeover family as “battling” his life in a wheelchair, or if people suggested that my daughter was “struggling against” Down syndrome.  Down syndrome and paralysis aren’t war zones, they’re simply parts of the lives of some people.  And yet diseases seem to be different, certainly to many who are living with them.  While Down syndrome has been part of Maybelle’s life since the instant she was conceived, ALS comes along later in life, and the fighting metaphor seems empowering and functional for many people.

But I’m not one of those people.  I think that much of why this bothers me is personal.  It’s not that I’m opposed to fighting.  I’m an activist:  I welcome a fight.  I’m happy to aggressively challenge many things in this world that need to be shaken up.  And yet, as a person with a brain tumor, I don’t want my health condition framed in terms of a battle.  I am not someone who’s “battling” a brain tumor.  Some scholars have examined this concept and have identified several ways that the metaphor is problematic—not only because it’s “inherently masculine, power-based, paternalistic, and violent” but because it frames the patient as the one who has to fight fight fight in order to win the war, and if they don’t win, then they didn’t fight hard enough.

I have a brain tumor, and there are things I need to do to take care of myself, but no level of armored-up embattlement is going to make it go away.  I don’t love it, but it’s part of my body.  As the scholars note, “There are conceptual weaknesses in the metaphor. There are no actual enemy invaders; the enemy is self…and the battlefield is the patient’s very body.”  I feel that I’d like a rhetorical framing of my condition that allows me a little more coherence and peace.

Fortunately, I’m very happy with my house, so there will be no need for the Extreme Home Makeover folks to come over here and cheer for my fighting spirit in order to make themselves feel better.

Editor’s note:  I promise that my next Girl w/Pen post will be about something other than my brain tumor!  You all have been very supportive, but I think it’s time for some variety.

At the end of December I learned I had a brain tumor. In February I had surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible. In the time between those two events, and since, I’ve had an intellectual and emotional path to travel.

As I wrote about on Girl With Pen, one of the initial traumas of learning about the tumor was learning that it was located in the language center of my brain. The neurosurgeon was fairly certain that removing part of the tumor would affect my language skills. Numbers were tossed around: I could lose 10% of my language functions, or 20. I found myself agonizing over what those numbers meant, trying to connect them in some meaningful, concrete way to my own life. Could I write an academic article with 10% less language ability? Could I read the research written by my friends if I were 20% deficient? Would I be able to respond effectively to my students’ questions and comments in the classroom? One subtle undercurrent to this questioning was, Is it the right thing to do to have this surgery?

And then at some point in January, a plank I’d been standing on–let’s call it denial–dissolved beneath me, and I realized that the questions I’d been asking were important, but they were distracting me from the most important implication of this brain tumor: it’s fatal. If I didn’t have the surgery, I would die, and my daughter wouldn’t have a mother.

This realization quickly became all-encompassing. Maybelle is twenty months old–a baby, someone who still needs active parenting all day, every day. I started thinking ahead to other parts of her life: her first sentences, her discovery of what activities she loves, her best friends, her dating life. I want to be there. I can’t imagine not being there. But more importantly, she needs me there. The ambiguity disappeared. It became very clear to me that having the surgery was the right thing to do.

As I moved forward through this whole process, the intimate exposure to my own mortality made a number of things about parenthood clear to me. Before the diagnosis I might not have known this about myself, but I can’t tell you how grateful–powerfully, viscerally grateful–I was and am that I have the tumor and Maybelle doesn’t. Even pre-surgery, when all the fear was hanging over me, this realization was enough to add some buoyancy to my day.

I also discovered that I identify parenthood as a role–a commitment, a passion, a series of actions–and not as a biological category. It doesn’t matter that Maybelle is genetically related to Biffle and me; she’s our daughter because every day we are her parents. This was comforting, because I know that she is loved by many, many people, some of whom love her enough that they would step in to become her parents if she needed them to. It was a realization that also helped me to dedicate myself even more fully to my choice to be her parent. In the early post-surgery days, I could often only stay awake for a few hours, but I wanted those hours to be spent on the floor with Maybelle.

And yet recognizing my own mortality didn’t make my love for language disappear. In those early post-surgery days, if I had any awake time after Maybelle was asleep, I wanted to read and write, and I did: two days after the surgery I read my own blog, and two days after that I wrote a post. As it turns out, my language skills have emerged from the surgery almost just like they were before, and this is a great surprise and an unending source of joy for me.

So I’m not arguing that parenthood is the only thing that matters in my life. As I’ve told Maybelle many times before, and as I even told my neurosurgeon, I’m a much better mother when I’m working. I’m a better mother when I get to delve deeply into other life commitments and choices in addition to parenthood, and for me these are intimately connected to language. (The neurosurgeon responded, “My wife says the same thing.”)

I don’t have a neat summation here, an explanation of what I’ve learned and what this all means. My life has many points of connection to the planet, but whether I knew it or not, a few of them are more important than the rest.

Ads for menstrual products have been notoriously evasive, avoiding the dreaded ‘v word’ (vagina) and using blue liquid as a stand-in for the blood that is markedly absent in both linguistic and visual representation. Words conveying the reality of menstruation – blood, clots, cramping, etc – are absent, as are visual depictions of what actually happens during a period – or the fact that females bleed, often copiously, from that most dreaded “down there” (a euphemism that, as Feministing points out, “two out of three network censors still feel icky” about).

Yet, a more realistic (and humorous) representation of periods seems to be slowly seeping into popular culture. An example is the recent U by Kotex ad, the transcript of which is as follows:

How do I feel about my period? We’re like this [crosses fingers]. I love it. I want to hold really soft things, like my cat. It makes me feel really pure. Sometimes I just want to run on the beach. I like to twirl, maybe in slow motion. And I do it in my white Spandex. And usually, by the third day, I really just want to dance. The ads on TV are really helpful, because they use that blue liquid, and I’m like, Oh! That’s what’s supposed to happen!

(To see the video clip of the ad, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRf35wCmzWw)

Though this ad avoids the v word as well any specific reference to the product itself or why one should use Kotex (as pointed out here), it’s self-mocking tone pleasantly parodies the way menstruation has been characterized in the majority of ads. Periods, it reveals, are not a time one tends to want to dance joyously in a tight-fitting sheer dress or frolic along the beach in a white bikini. While the ad does play on the idea of menstruation as “the curse,” and thus perpetuates a negative rather than a positive (or neutral) view of this female biological process, it at least admits that periods often involve pain and inconvenience (not to mention no blue liquid whatsoever).

Though the NYTimes documents that three networks rejected the original ad, which did use the v word, even this de-vaginized version uses humor to mock our cultural shock and horror surrounding menstruation, moving away from ridiculous suggestions that bleeding, bloating, cramping, and/or menstrual headaches really make women want to dance, shop, or exercise (what else, after all, do women ever want to do?). And, though we have no specific references to female genitalia, at least there is an acknowledgment that periods for many (most?) are not all that fun.

Moreover, as reported in the NYTimes, “Visitors to the Web site, UbyKotex.com, designed by the New York office of Organic, part of the Omnicom Group, are urged to sign a ‘Declaration of Real Talk,’ vowing to defy societal pressures that discourage women from speaking out about their bodies and health. …For every signer, Kotex will donate $1 to Girls for a Change, a national nonprofit based in San Jose, Calif., that pairs urban middle school and high school girls with professional women to encourage social change.”

And, while the ad had to be “sanitized” for television (or, in other words no real mention of what a sanitary napkin or tampon is for, let alone a mention of where they go, was approved), the accompanying website is far more explicit in its anatomical and functional details, including a section entitled “challenging the norm” that aims to “start a new, healthier conversation about periods and vaginal care.” Thus, not only is Kotex partnering with a organization aimed at empowering girls and women, it is actually offering REAL information about menstruation and menstrual products – what a concept!

While the tv ad’s self mockery is certainly a fun and refreshing approach to a bloody subject, I wonder when/if the mainstream media will allow ads that admit – horror of horrors – that females have vaginas and this bodily reality is not disgusting, not a curse, not even a reason to boogey-down in celebration but rather nothing more or less than a bodily reality.

I am not saying that having a vagina is not cause for celebration (I personally rather like mine), but I feel whenever the body (or part of it) is showcased as something to uncritically celebrate, the flipside – where the body is denigrated and denied – is not far behind. Instead, I would like to see wider recognition and acceptance of the fact that menstruation happens, and does so often (for too often for my taste, in fact), that the body is not all pleasure and desire but also pain, inconvenience, and monotony.

As I am currently attending the National Popular Culture Association conference where I am presenting on a panel with three other women who are also menstruating, such concerns have been foremost in my mind. After seeing each other face to face for the first time after months of email organization and discovering are bloody synchronization, one of us joked “I know women are often in sync, but are we now so technologically advanced that we can sync via email?”

Our running joke was that we would announce our panel, a feminist analysis of Twilight, via sharing “You are about to hear an analysis of male, heteronormative, white privilege from four menstruating feminists.” In our banter, Robert Pattinson’s now rather infamous claim that he is “allergic to vagina” was a recurring point of reference as well. Though I feel Pattinson meant this as a joke and is likely not the misogynist some have suggested, I feel in contrast that US culture more broadly is allergic to vagina – to the word vagina – let alone to the fleshy, bloody, and yes, toothless, bodily reality.

Alas, as Gloria Steinem wrote in her 1978 piece, if males menstruated it would likely be a sort of bragging right, a competition over who could bleed the most. Yet, as it is female’s bodies that require the use of pads, tampons, and diva cups no such celebratory bragging rituals occur. Rather, even within the self-aware mockery of the way menstruation is rendered invisible and monstrous (such as in the above Kotex tv ad) it is still something that cannot be named, let alone visually represented. This, indeed, makes me blue.

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”;}

My daughter turned eleven this week. Though I agree with Allison Kimmich’s earlier post, which argued that it’s great to be a girl here in 2010, I can’t help but worry that growing up female in our culture still results in growing down.

Some examples to ponder:

When my daughter and I went to the mall to have her ears pierced last Saturday, we were deluged with anorexic size mannequins in thongs and barely-there bras.

Later, at the movies, we watched yet another film with a male protagonist (which included a male sidekick who ogled females throughout the entire movie).

For school, she worked on yet another dead white male report.

On television, she is still inundated by stories that focus on a girls looks and emphasize romance and/or beauty as the most important pursuits for a girl.

In music, there are undoubtedly many power-house female musicians, but this seems dampened by all the singing of ‘ho’s’ and ‘get-lows.’

Yet, there are positive aspects to each of these observations. At the mall, my daughter noticed the sexualization of the mannequins and complained about it, showing her awareness that our culture objectifies women in damaging ways (and revealing what I like to think is more feminist awareness in the culture generally). As for the film we watched, it did include one rockin’ strong girl character – only one, but one is better than none. As for books, we are able to find many feminist-friendly reads to fill her endless reading desires (and she subscribes to New Moon, a great feminist magazine for girls). Television may be the area most difficult to put a positive spin on, but at least there are more girl-driven shows. As for school, in general I think there is more emphasis on a diversified curriculum, one that offers more than the hetero white male view of the world.

However, I wish we had come further since I turned eleven back in 1982. The Equal Rights Amendment failed to pass that year, and has yet to be ratified. Laura Ingalls was still rocking the prairie feminism in “”Little House on the Prairie,” and my mom watched a show driven by the super-heroines “Cagney and Lacey.” Sure, Daisy wasn’t wearing much in “Dukes of Hazzard” and Suzanne Sommers was the stereotypical blonde ditz “Three’s Company,” but at least we had the strong mom and daughter trio of “One Day at a Time.” In music, female power abounded via the likes of the GoGos, Joan Jett, and Stevie Nicks. And ET, the top grossing film of the year, gave us one of my longtime favorite female actresses, Drew Barrymore. It was the year Women’s History Week was officially recognized, which has happily expanded to an entire month. (Ah, would that we could have inclusive history year round!)

In my hazy recollections of being eleven in 1982, I recall feeling I could be or do anything I set my sites on. I think here, in 2010, my daughter feels the same despite the fact popular culture still inundates her with the message she is only a sex object, only good for how she can please men, only important so long as she “plays by the rules” and shrinks to fit the mold of the “ideal female.”

As her world expands to include more ideas and experiences, her body is still expected to shrink to fit ever smaller and tighter fashions. As she grows up, the “queen be” culture at school seems to become ever meaner and more judgmental. As she is able to watch “more grown up” television and films, she is introduced incessant sexualization, dehumanization, and silencing of females. And, as her body starts to show the markers of womanhood, she will undoubtedly become more battered by the male gaze of a culture that is more pornified than ever.

Alas, growing up for girls in our culture in many ways still means growing down – but with feminist moms like ourselves guiding our daughters as they grow, I take heart in the fact that many girls are given the opportunity to expand their thinking, their horizons (and yes, even their bodies) without exhortations to “be quiet and diet.”

Last post I talked about the marathon boom, and how it’s being driven by women  http://girlwpen.com/?p=1821. Not coincidentally, I think, within the marathon community there has been a controversy about the boom, and whether or not the “slow” runners (those who take anywhere from four to seven hours to finish the race, thus running from a 10-minute to a sixteen-minute mile pace) really count as serious runners (a sixteen-minute pace is, after all, as slow as or slower than walking). See the New York Times article about the controversy: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/sports/23marathon.html?emc=eta1 Faster runners believe that running a marathon entails running a marathon–running the entire length at a fast pace, racing rather than merely participating.  Those in the slower group argue that participation is the point, and that speed is beside the point.  They run just to finish, and to have a good time.  As marathon numbers have swelled, primarily driven by the slower runners, the more competitive runners feel like their efforts are demeaned by those who participate but, for instance, stop to have lunch along the route, and that the marathon has become a social event rather than an athletic competition.  From the competitor’s perspective, the idea that “anyone can run a marathon” detracts from their distinctiveness as serious athletes.

An historical perspective that the debate has not incorporated suggests that these two conflicting attitudes, the competitive and the participatory, have a long cultural history that earlier split along gendered lines due to the gender role expectations of the early twentieth century.  According to historian Susan K. Cahn, in the U.S. in the 1920’s, women physical educators advocated an inclusive, participatory model of sport where the object was not to win, but enjoy oneself and better one’s health through participation.  This was a deliberate counter to the competitive sport model practiced by male athletic leaders, for whom winning was the bottom line http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Coming+on+Strong&x=11&y=18.  Of course there were women who were very competitive, and men who just wanted to participate, but the dominant attitude was that competition was for “real” athletes, while those who participated were wanna-be athletes at best.  This historical perspective raises interesting questions today:  what counts as athleticism?  Is participation enough?  Is sport a democratic, inclusive institution, or one based on the principles of competition, which necessarily involves exclusion?  Both?

I would argue that there is a third alternative we might consider as well.  While the competitive model of sport involves an internal focus while training, concentration on one’s breathing, pace, heart rate, etc., based around improving one’s performance, and the participatory model tends to involve an external focus, concentration on one’s surroundings or companions and enjoying the activity, there is an approach to sport than incorporates both of these ideas and that has links to the idea of sport as a form of spiritual practice.  I’ll call this the immersive model of sport–one in which sport is approached as a vehicle through which, as Professor Shirl James Hoffman puts it in the foreword to Sport and Spirituality http://www.amazon.com/Sport-Spirituality-Introduction-Ethics/dp/0415404827/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267635442&sr=1-1, we “shape our spirits and create alternative realities and states of consciousness” (xi).  Sport experienced as an immersive practice can involve competition–training hard to perform your best–but it can also involve the joy of sheer participation, an appreciation of the body in movement, a way to step out of the ordinary frenzy of our daily lives filled with the barrage of things to get done and instead experience pure absorption into the activity itself, and a suspension of all other distractions.  Known as a “flow” state, this mode of sports participation can incorporate the best of both the competitive and participatory models, and avoid some of their pitfalls.  I’ll elaborate on this model of sport participation in my next post.

This month BODY LANGUAGE welcomes Suzanne Kelly, writing her first guest post for Girl w/Pen!, as she takes to heart the literal matter of body language.

Suzanne teaches in the Women’s Studies Program at SUNY New Paltz.

A few weeks ago, scanning The New York Times for something weighty, I fell upon feminist science writer Natalie Angier’s thoughtful retelling of a new study in the burgeoning field of embodied cognition. The study revealed how our ability to process information is not a function of the brain alone, but of language’s perpetual play with and through our bodies as a whole. Angier explained how when study participants were asked to think of a past event, for example, they consistently “leaned slightly backward,” and when they were asked to envision what was to come, “they listed to the fore… ”subliminally act[ing] out metaphors in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.”

That “the body embodies abstractions the best way it knows how: physically,” as Angier put it, that it literally “takes language to heart,” comes as no surprise to me. When I’m writing and it seems as if the words won’t budge, I’m also often crumpled up at my desk – legs tucked under, torso rounded. If I stretch, realign, and maybe go for a run, the flow usually returns. When my ideas are at their stickiest so too, it seems, is my body.

That our thoughts, however intangible, are more than the sum of what goes on inside our skulls is also hardly a revelation to those of us who have long positioned the body’s knowledge at the heart of feminist theory and practice. Still, studies like this (and brilliant writers like Angier who are skilled at bringing their importance to light) always give me hope, especially when they’re given voice by the mainstream media. Might this be a sign of a new legitimacy of the body, one from which feminism could no doubt benefit?

I have written elsewhere about the value of “the sensuous classroom,” of education that takes seriously the presence of the body. If our “bodies embody abstractions…physically,” as this study suggests, what do we learn, not only from our own bodies, but from being in and around the bodies of others? In thinking about the transmission of ideas and the potential for changing consciousness, what is lost, for instance, in teaching Women’s Studies classes on-line, engaged in conversations about bodies, while removed from each other’s? How do we significantly combat unattainable body images, or think seriously about questions of disability, when our bodies are not part of the venue?

These same questions hold for our activism, as well. Would consciousness raising groups have proved as powerful had they happened on cell phones? What did those women’s bodies communicate to one another that gave them the courage to leave unhappy marriages, end the cycle of violence, and love other women? That enabled them to fight for legal abortion, childcare, and better wages?

Because body centered issues remain central, if not heightened, feminist concerns today – from the image of the female body, to eating disorders and the foods around which they revolve, to abortion and contraception, to health and its care, to intimate partner violence, rape and sexual assault, and, of course, to sex itself – it seems more vital now than ever for us to place our bodies front and center, to give them substance in our conversations as well as in our collective actions.

Of course, as we speed toward a near-virtual future and as our physical distance from each other exponentially grows, it becomes more of a challenge to find ways to speak, to share, to formulate conversation, to engage thought and transform it into action – in the flesh. But we can do better.

No doubt, our bodies know it.

I am truly, truly happy again for the first time in years. Back where I should be, where everything about my body feels right. Running, running, and running some more.

Apparently, I’m not alone in this, and in the United States (as well as worldwide), we are experiencing another running boom. The first was in the 1970s, when people took to the roads in large numbers for the first time, and they are running in much larger numbers today. In 2008, 425,000 people finished a marathon, and marathons have become big business—travel destinations, boons for the economies of the cities and towns that host them. Participation is up from 25,000 people who finished a marathon in 1976:

Year Estimated U.S. Marathon Finisher Total

1976 25,000
1980 143,000
1990 224,000
1995 293,000
2000 353,000
2004 386,000
2005 395,000
2006 410,000
2007 412,000
2008 425,000 (record total) http://www.runningusa.org/node/16414

And that’s just the marathon—half marathons, 10Ks and 5Ks attract hundreds of thousands of others. So why a running boom, why now? I’ve got some ideas about this I’ll explore in future posts, along with the debate about how slow is too slow for a marathon time and whether the marathon should be primarily a competitive or participatory event. For a recent article exploring this issue, see the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/sports/23marathon.html. This debate is part of a long history of such debates in the United States, whose sport governing bodies and sport educators have been divided on the question since the early twentieth century. Gender, and a claimed divide between male and female athletes, has been a major part of this debate—men are associated with the competitive model of sport, women with the participatory. This divide persists to some extent to this day, and I will be exploring the implications of this, along with the question of why certain sports are popular at certain times, and how this influences our body ideals. I’ll talk a bit about my own training, too, and its relation to my own ideas and feeling about bodies and gender.

My background: when I was younger, I was fast. I held the Arizona high school state record in the 1600 meters for 17 years http://az.milesplit.us/pages/Arizona_Track_and_Field_All_Time. I went to the University of Arizona on a track and cross-country scholarship, where I was competitive my freshman year, but so overtrained, injured, and burned out by my sophomore year I was ordered by my doctor to stop. I stopped competing, kept running on my own, but more slowly, and took up weight training, progressing over the years to competitive power lifting and specializing in the bench press, where I was ranked 11^th in the U.S. in my weight class for a lift of 235. My body, as you might imagine, was completely transformed, from a skinny, slightly muscular 120 pounds to a dense, extremely muscular 150 pounds.

I’ve written about this elsewhere, but what I haven’t written was how unnatural it felt to be like that, what a Frankenstein’s monster I experienced that body to be. At one point I was so stiff I couldn’t turn my head to the side, and it hurt so much to run and I had to do it so slowly that I stopped altogether. When I discovered that the closest I could come to touching my toes was to barely touch the tops of my knees, I knew I had to do something about this and took up ashtanga yoga—an intense, demanding form of practice that follows the same forms each time and takes anywhere from ninety minutes to two hours to complete: http://www.kpjayi.org/ Ashtanga changed my morphology again, and after six years I was down to 135 and the creaking cement that had been my chest and shoulders was finally starting to crack.

Then came the mid-life crisis moment, for me the occasion of my 45^th birthday last September. In July I decided that I was tired of worrying about aging and the wrinkles on my face, and I was going to do something about it. In the (il)logic of my world, this meant dropping back down to my college weight and body fat percentage (120 pounds and 12 percent), and I bought one of those diet and exercise journals where you record each calorie you ingest and each you burn, along with the relative percentage of carbohydrates to proteins and fats. That did it, and by my birthday I was down to 123 and 11.7 percent. So I’m giving myself a break on that last three pounds.

What I didn’t expect was that at this lighter weight, running felt good again. I started back slowly at first, running only once a week, a six miler on Sundays. By August I’d added some track work, and by November was up to a ten miler on Mondays, a six miler on Fridays, and at least four miles on each of two other days, meanwhile maintaining my ashtanga practice. By December, I’d gotten a Polar heart rate monitor, and was completely, utterly hooked, back in the that running world I’d lived in from 1979-1983, except with a lot more technology attached. With a HRM you can measure not only your heart rate, distance and calories, but your speed, cadence, altitude changes, and pretty much anything else you might like to know. By January, I’d signed up for a marathon in June, another in October that is 26.2 miles straight up hill the entire way and climbs 6,000 feet, and had started to look forward to my runs the way you look forward to whatever activity it is that you love the most, at home in my body in a way I’d never been.  Insane by most standards of sanity, clearly.

What are the implications of this changing body, changing activity slate, changing mind? For me, for you? How is the way we experience our bodies in physical activity a function of gender? What are your current physical training regimes, your backgrounds? I will explore these issues in future posts, and welcome your comments on any of these issues.

Over the holidays I had several seizures, which led to me being diagnosed with a brain tumor. It’s a low-grade glioma, which is the good news. It’s smack-dab in the middle of the language center of my brain, which is the bad news.

I tell you this in part to let you know why I might not be around for the next few months. I’ll be having brain surgery in February, and I expect at least six weeks of recovery, time in which I’ll be exhausted and may not be up for blogging. I hope to bring in some fabulous guest bloggers for those weeks.

The other reason I’m sharing this, though, is because having a brain tumor in the language center of my brain has raised a lot of hard questions for me, questions that relate to the theme of this column. I’m an academic, a scholar who writes books and teaches classes. I’m the mother of a young child who is doing great but who needs more help, intervention, and encouragement than a typical child. My Ph.D. is in English. I have been a ravenous reader and passionate writer since I was a little, little kid. Potential damage to the language center of my brain feels like something that threatens the heart of who I am. Who will I be if I don’t have the fluency or facility with language that I have right now? I’ve been poking around in the academic world of disability studies for the last several months, but this diagnosis brings disability even more intimately into my life. It’s not only someone I love who’s experiencing life with a disability (my daughter); it may well be me.

Indeed, no matter what the long-term effects are (and the prognosis actually looks quite good), I certainly will be living with disabilities for the weeks and months immediately following the surgery, as I’ll have brain swelling that will lead to some language difficulties and motor function challenges. I’ll have a kind of insider’s perspective on disability.

Who will I be? It’s an academic question as well as a deeply personal one. I can go around and around in my mind, wondering–imagining what it would be like not to be able to talk off the cuff about feminism with the same ease that I do now, or to hear a sentence and not to be able to understand it immediately.  These aren’t effects that the neurosurgeons have promised; in fact, one of the frustrations has been that they can’t tell me much.  We’re very much in a wait and see mode.  One friend pointed out that this may be a great opportunity for me to learn that who I am is not the same as what I do, but she was quick to add that this life lesson is no justification for a brain tumor.

It’s really weird for me to think about so many characteristics of my life—characteristics which in some way feel transcendent or inherent—as being tied to a physical organ. It gives body language a whole different meaning.

On this national day of gratitude, I find myself giving thanks for many things — including my family, my friends, and my health. I owe my sexual health to the now outdated norm of getting annual gynecological exams, with Pap smears, from the time I became sexually active. As a 20-year-old, in the mid-1990’s, I benefited from U.S. medical guidelines that supported my gynecologist in recommending cryosurgery (application of liquid nitrogen) to kill/remove the HPV-infected cells on my cervix. Early detection and early treatment afforded me a quick recovery from a potentially cancer-causing and highly contagious sexually transmitted infection. Following that treatment, I never had another abnormal Pap test result, got pregnant the first time I tried, and gave birth to a healthy baby. For all of those outcomes, I give thanks.

Today, many teen girls and women may not benefit from the level of medical care that I received. Last week, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) issued new guidelines for pap smear and cervical cancer screening, and this may prove to have unintended, negative consequences for sexually-active Americans.

Until 2008, ACOG had recommended annual screening for women under 30. This month, ACOG summed up their revised recommendations:

…women should have their first cancer screening at age 21 and can be rescreened less frequently than previously recommended. 

Media coverage of this latest revision has not done as good a job distinguishing that a Pap test is just one aspect of a pelvic/sexual health exam. How many girls and women will interpret the new guideline of “No need for an annual pap tes,” as, “No need to get an annual pelvic exam”?

ACOG admits that the Pap test has been the reason for falling rates of cervical cancer in the U.S.

Cervical cancer rates have fallen more than 50% in the past 30 years in the US due to the widespread use of the Pap test. The incidence of cervical cancer fell from 14.8 per 100,000 women in 1975 to 6.5 per 100,000 women in 2006. The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be 11,270 new cases of cervical cancer and 4,070 deaths from it in the US in 2009. The majority of deaths from cervical cancer in the US are among women who are screened infrequently or not at all.

So, why revise the guidelines such that we are likely to see an increase in the number of U.S. women “who are screened infrequently or not at all”?

And, it’s not just teen girls and young women that are the focus of these revisions. ACOG also recommends that older women stop being screened for cervical cancer:

It is reasonable to stop cervical cancer screening at age 65 or 70 among women who have three or more negative cytology results in a row and no abnormal test results in the past 10 years.

How much of this rationale depends upon women over 65 years old being sexually inactive or monogamous? This argument seems predicated upon ageist assumptions about older women’s sex drives and sexual behaviors (or lack thereof).

As the tryptophan from my Thanksgiving feast begins to dampen my ire, I’ll bring this post to a close. These are just a few of the problematic aspects of this new policy recommendation — stay tuned for “Part II” of this post in the near future.