Moving Maine Forward

53% of Mainers chose to repeal a law allowing gay marriage in yesterday's historic election. The election results left me and many others feeling deflated, hopeless, bitter, and angry. How could people vote to deny U.S. citizens their civil rights? The idea of voting not to allow a group of people to pursue happiness is extremely difficult for me to understand. Which is why now, thinking back on it, I realize how naive I had been to think that the majority might vote No on 1. In my community, the majority did. I am surrounded by people who planned to vote No, and although the media propaganda of the opposition worried me, I was not willing to entertain the thought that ignorance might actually prevail. U.S. citizens voted for Obama. An overwhelming majority of Maine voters chose to allow further usage and distribution of marijuana for medical purposes. So why not this?

Reading Andy Thayer's article made it clear to me: while many Mainers did work hard to get the vote out for No on 1, some of us were far too complacent. I did not have a sign in my front yard; I did not campaign; I did not even discuss the issue frequently. What was there to discuss? No on 1 was the obvious answer...but to many others, clearly, it wasn't. Although I'm proud of 47% of the state for supporting the cause (which is a larger percentage than we would see in most states currently), I have to acknowledge that I underestimated Maine's rural areas and conservative views.

The last time I saw an organized political march in my town was never. It's unheard of. Although I live in a fairly liberal area of Maine, we're still New Englanders, and speaking up or speaking out politically is generally considered impolite at best. We don't like to offend; we keep our mouths closed and believe what we will in private. But it's not enough - it wasn't enough this time and it won't be next time either. Andy Thayer is right, No on 1's media-based campaign was tepid. I never even saw an ad that was directly in conversation with an ad from Yes on 1, whether it would have debunked the propaganda about teaching gay marriage in public schools or simply called out the opposition for bigotry. The No on 1 ads all played the same angle: to insist that Maine values dictate that we don't exclude others from their rights. Which is true, and it's fine, except that it wasn't enough to change people's minds.

And regardless of which commercials we could have played, choosing a media-based campaign at all is lukewarm. Commercials are just not enough to sway an undecided vote. Next time more of us need to be on the streets; we need to be having discussions and fundraisers in the communities that voted Yes yesterday. I know of some fundraisers that took place, but unfortunately they still didn't cut it. My conviction is that when people change their minds, it happens on a personal level. To change racist views, one has to become personally acquainted with other people of different races and recognize their similarities. The same is true for changing people's minds about homosexuality. People are afraid of what they don't know. If someone they know and respect is campaigning, if they can match a face to an issue, then slowly the wheels start to turn. With the figures being what they were in this election, I would guess that most people know at least one person who voted Yes. We have to get over our fear of controversy and talk to those people.

Next time, by the way, is now. I've moved past disappointment to anger, past anger to hope, and all of that energy is fuel for the next step. I've seen a lot of facebook activism, and sure, speaking your mind on facebook is part of it, but it can't stop there. This discussion needs to start now and continue until the next vote. Now, I plan to campaign. Now, I plan to speak. Now, I will be louder. In the history of civil rights movements there have always been losses; this is only one loss on the path to equality. We must move forward. So what are we going to do here in Maine now?

Holy Water

When the baby was several months old, they baptized him in Holy Water. He didn't know then that Holy Water was just water with a blessing, scented with rose by a wistful nun. The priest dipped his fingers in the Holy Water (blessed, scented with rose) and smeared it on the boy's forehead with an incantation singular to priests. The rest of the Holy Water, unbeknownst to the parents or the baby, remained in the bowl until the nun, sensing nobody nearby, brought it to her chamber and washed herself in Holy Water, even drinking a little, imagining she smelled the scent of a baby in the droplets which she tasted.

Word Geek

I learned a new word and now I have to share!

Kyriarchy: "a neologism coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and derived from the Greek words for "lord" or "master" (kyrios) and "to rule or dominate" (archein) which seeks to redefine the analytic category of patriarchy in terms of multiplicative intersecting structures of domination....Kyriarchy is best theorized as a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, of ruling and oppression."

The Embodiment of Oppression

I haven't been able to let go of this idea of the ties between patriarchy and eating disorders, however overstated. Or understated, because I haven't yet read anyone who is trying to say what I am trying to say, which is that eating disorders in our society have been flattened, and the real discussion - the discussion of the truth - is not happening because of it. Though it must be happening somewhere and if you know of something I (and others) could read, you should leave a comment.

Aren't we all tired of talking about eating disorders? Eating disorders are so tiresome, so cliche. We all know what causes them - images in the media; too-high expectations from society and family members; a culture obsessed with beauty and thinness. Because of this we don't write stories about it; we don't write poems about it. Such a poem would be a cliche; there is no mystery, only the too-loud repetition of the same.

But I don't think we name what ails us. Too often I hear people make jokes about bulimia/anorexia or refer with disdain to women who suffer from these illnesses as shallow, stupid girls who should know better. The reference being that it is their fault for obsessing over beauty and thinness; that they fell for a trick in a magazine; that they fell. The age old story of the Fallen Woman. Why doesn't power come up more often in such conversations? What about control? For surely one thing we have learned is that the anorexic woman feels that she has control over the situation; this is what she holds on to even in the face of death. And in my view control, much more than food or thinness, is the crux of the issue.

Certainly there is an argument to be made that the entire U.S.A., if not the industrialized Western world, has an eating disorder. What do we know about what is healthy? From obesity to anorexia, corporate-government marriage in the USDA, processed food to greenwashed product, Atkin's Diet to raw foods, we don't have a clue what "healthy" is for men or women. Similarly, some men do suffer from eating disorders in the silence of an as yet unborn dialogue. But I'm not talking about them, because women with eating disorders - anorexia, bulimia, and the range in between - are suffering in greater numbers for different reasons. Reasons that go beyond the gross wealth and beauty obsessions of industrialized nations.

The issue is power; the issue is control. For women with eating disorders typically have neither. Let us say, for the purposes of this essay, that the standard woman with an eating disorder is young. She is still under the power of her parents. She is under the power of the state, which mandates that she go to school, that she not drink until she is 21, etc. She is under the power of a patriarchal society which claims her independence, demanding that she depend upon men for attention, for acceptance, and for identity. Her body is to be used for these purposes; her sex and sexuality only existing in direct proportion to the number of men who notice and validate it. In this relationship she relies on men and thus lacks power even where her own body is concerned. If she is not white, she is at the mercy of a racialized society that conflates her body and her sexuality with her race. Her identity is not yet formed; her ideas of her future are ambiguous. That she chooses to control, of all things, her food and her body is not an accident.

It is also important for us to also note the archetypal links between women and food that precede and envelope this young woman: the woman in the kitchen, women as gatherers, women as keepers of the home, women as property and metaphorically as land, women as the symbols for nations. Take, for example, these lines from Carol Guess's poem "Watercolor: Leda":

Returning

from the front, a man lays his head

between his lover's breasts, listening

for the heart nestled among orchards of skin and bone.

The man has been at war - out, in the world; the woman is compared to the orchards of his home and nation. Orchards being the bearers of food; women being the bearers of fruit. The woman in this poem is not powerful. She is his lover, nothing more, existing only in relation to him and to the nation and its orchards. In a metaphorical sense, the woman is food - something to be owned, something to be consumed. That women and women's bodies are in such a way associated with food means that any woman who disrupts the cycle is a direct threat to patriarchy.

Seeking power through the rejection of food is one radical way to disrupt the cycle. And the young women who suffer from eating disorders are seeking power over their own lives. For bulimic women, perhaps, the disorder is a direct reflection of their lack of control or power. Just when they feel they have control, they have lost it; they go to extremes to gain it back. For anorexic women, perhaps, the disorder is a direct reflection of their lack of control over anything else. Our consistent portrait of an anorexic woman is one who has a distorted perception of her beauty; one who thinks thinner = more beautiful. This theory exists in harmony with the patriarchal idea that an anorexic woman is trying to be beautiful, that she is trying to please others and live up an ideal of beauty in the 'male gaze'. But what if she isn't? What if even she is painfully aware of how emaciated she looks and still refuses to eat because eating would mean losing control over the body she has created for herself? At least she has been able to control something; this desperate act for power over self is what leads so many young women to near starvation. The saddest part, of course, is their ultimate powerlessness: as women with eating disorders they have not gained any power, their bodies having been sacrificed even in an attempted act of control.

I'm not saying it isn't sick, or that it's all a conscious form of protest. Women with eating disorders are sick; they need other healthier ways to control their own lives. What I'm saying is that the common explanations for eating disorders are too easy. Even as eating disorder activists attempt to deconstruct the culture of beauty and image, they construct theories within the patriarchal ideology, making it seem that eating disorders are about beauty. On many levels these disorders are about bodies and beauty and sexuality. But on a deeper level they are only a symptom of the profound oppression a woman with an eating disorder experiences; the oppression she embodies.