Tag: Self Acceptance

Being Frank About Female Insecurity

/ Alessia / Leave a comment

“If I had as many love affairs as you give me credit for, I would be speaking to you from a jar at the Harvard Medical School.”
~ Frank Sinatra ~

Ahh, Frank. Everybody loves the Frank. Or at least he was convinced of that.

Is anything as suave & steeped in romance as Frank crooning to you as you eat spaghetti? Maybe… But at least you like pasta, right? Or at least eating…? No? Well, you can’t please everybody.

So even if Mr. Sinatra had as many women as rumored, he wouldn’t have pleased all of them either. And he likely wouldn’t have cared.

But women care. We can please 4,566,782 people, and we worry about the one we didn’t please. Why is that?

Thinking about all that just makes me want some pasta. Or Frank, crooning in my ear as I swirl around a dance floor…

…I hope I dance well enough… that guy over there is looking at me funny…

See? Even in my fantasies, someone isn’t thrilled with me.

That’s why, I guess, we see women’s magazines & television talk shows pander to and exploit female insecurities. Even while they profess to be helping women get over their self-loathing, they sensationalize — ridiculing the person, mocking the appearance of the body part they already are insecure about. Sometimes they even make fun of the women who are proud of the way they or their body part appears. Just look at these casting calls from the past two days:

Can a Snuggie or long nails or body fat really be such a relationship problem? I argue that whoever thinks these things are (or can be) relationship problems is the one with a real problem. And I don’t say that glibly.

Whoever gives the status of the Snuggie so much importance that it not only becomes a “constant source of arguing in your home” but you’d be willing to go on television and argue it some more clearly has a carnival-fun-house-mirror view of reality.

If this is how you see yourself, you have a toxic relationship with yourself.

If this is how you see and treat your spouse, you have a toxic relationship with them.

And clearly the media that exploits these people for (they hope!) the money in our pockets has a toxic relationship with their guests and their audiences.

And if you can see just how distorted that is (and I pray that you do!), then you ought to be able to replace the word “Snuggie” with “hair,” “weight,” “fingernails,” or whatever silly appearance-obsessed insecurity-driven show topics show up in casting calls later this week.

I refuse to watch these shows, to prey on the insecurities of others as entertainment. And whenever someone in my fantasies starts to look at me funny, I give them the boot.

I may not be as full of myself as Sinatra was; but I sure as hell won’t be so insecure with myself (or my spouse, for that matter) that I’d consider myself freakish enough to participate in one of these shows — or be in a jar at the Harvard Medical School.

Hope For My Own Healing

/ Alessia / 4 Comments

The Hope For Healing blogathon was harder than I thought…

I thought I could, by dedicating a day to the subject of domestic violence, finally be personal about my own experiences, but that was not the case.

At first I thought it was because the world, my life, wouldn’t stop for me for 24 hours (despite scheduling the date, family came in from out of town and visiting to-dos could not be put off); it may have made it more challenging, but the real reason is that domestic violence is a very personal & emotional issue for me.

Every time I begin to tell/type my story (or parts of it), I hear the heckling from the jerks — you know the ones, the ones who belittle and devalue your statements because they are anecdotal, not statistical — and they belittle & devalue you right along with their “complaints” of non-data to support yourself.

I know these are the same people who call you a “fat ugly hag” because you dare to use facts to stand up for your rights, that these people just plain refuse to listen, let alone hear, and so I should easily dismiss their crude, hurtful statements as the weak defensive posturing (& refusal to become educated) that it is. As a feminist I’m used to these jerks. Most of the time I don’t mind them. But confessing painful truths while knowing how you’ll be attacked for it is far more difficult than intellectual debating or education dissemination.

Truth be told, it’s not easy to say the things I want to say anyway, but knowing what will be said…

I want to be braver than this. I hope I will one day.

I could view my inability to meet my own objective during those 24 blogathon hours as a failure — but I don’t.

What I’ve learned from this experience is vital to my own growth and healing.

No, I’m not fully healed from this — if one ever fully heals from domestic violence — and accepting that is part of the process.

Realizing yet another place I’m stuck at is disheartening, but one needs to see the problem for what it is in order to solve it. And so realizing just how held back I am from telling my story, using my voice, helps me see the issue for what it is — a fear of judgment, of victim blaming, of retaliation…

But if I want to move on, if I want to assist other victims, and prevent others from being victimized, I will need to address this all. And sooner is better than later.

13 Reasons To Stay Single

/ Alessia / 11 Comments

Don’t get me wrong; I love being married. But sometimes I miss the little things about being single…


Thirteen Reasons To Enjoy Being Single

1. Everything in your home is yours — and remains yours — until you die.

2. You can come home after a long hard day, strip off your clothes, leave them where they lay until you feel like putting them in the laundry pile, take a long uninterrupted soak in the tub, get up and walk around naked — all free of any complaints. Or being accused of “teasing” when you aren’t in the mood.

3. Your career is the only one that matters.

4. Breakfast can be the last slice of blueberry pie — ala mode, if you wish. Or left-over Chinese take-out. No one is there to take it — or judge you.

5. You dress for yourself — and you don’t need to justify your quantity of shoes, either.

6. Lunch can be a trip to the mall.

7. Dinner can be a bowl of cereal in milk — snarfed down the minute you walk in the door because you skipped eating lunch.

8. Your closet is yours & yours alone; the only need to squeeze things in is because of your last “lunch.”

9. No annoying in-laws or significant other family members &/or friends of your partner to put up with. (Just the annoying coworkers to deal with now — and see #2.)

10. You can sleep alone in the center of the bed, in one snoring, drooling pile, without being outed for it.

(Don’t worry, you can still have sex. Just kick him or her out; one person can easily avoid the dreaded wet spot. Better yet, have sex at their place and let them worry about avoiding the wet spot.)

11. In fact, you can sleep wherever (and whenever) you wish, including the couch, after another bowl of cereal, watching your favorite movie.

12. Things are where you left them — including the toilet seat in the down position.

13. You will always like & trust the person you live with. (You!)

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

Dates Are For Learning

/ Alessia / Leave a comment

My daddy, the one who calls ‘eunuchs’, ‘tunics’, always said that dating was equal parts learning about your date and learning about yourself.

Each & every date, each and every person you dated, was a field trip to learning. You might have thought you liked bowling but, as it turns out, you really only like drinking beer, spending time with your friends and wearing funny shoes. Go blowing with a guy you don’t like and bam! It becomes crystal clear: bowling is not fun, it’s the people you like. Then again, you might not like bowling, but you sure did enjoy spending time with that guy who took you bowling… It takes awhile to do the math, but eventually you figure it — and yourself — out. If you are wise, that is.

Too often, people spend time on dates just evaluating the other person as potential partner material, ignoring the self-evaluation. It’s important because maybe what you really really like about bowling is the flirtation with the guys in the other lane… So then it’s not the date that’s the problem (either going bowling or his seeming unlikelihood as a soul mate) but it’s that you aren’t really looking for a relationship.

I was reminded of this when I watched VH1’s Tough Love. It was the second episode but my first time watching the reality show — you might think that it would be ‘bad’ to miss the first show, but I found not knowing info about the eight women he’s trying to coach in the ‘boot camp’ far less distracting (like the whole “bitchy Taylor returns” thing — WTF?!) Anyway, professional matchmaker Steve Ward was trying to teach these girls some self-awareness. They must be pretty oblivious to themselves & their behaviors because Ward actually used a shocking device to zap the women whenever they broke dating rules — just like my uncle trained his hunting dog, or my sister’s invisible dog fence.

People reverting to old or bad habits, dating or otherwise, isn’t especially odd; new habits and behaviors take time. But the most amazing thing to me was Jody. This woman is completely unaware of the signals she sends. She comes off as a chick who doesn’t really want a relationship, but I think she’s got the same exact problem as Arian: neither one of them has the confidence in themselves to believe they’ll be loved that they’ve created tough-cookie exteriors to push (shove and kick) people away before there’s even a chance. Like those swaggering men with rotten cores I dated. It’s a neurosis as terribly isolating, self-destructive and painful as the clingy stalker chick, Jessa. And no fun for those dating them.

Stasha (who had to be zapped so often for bragging about being in Playboy that it went past comical into abrasive — I can only imagine what it would be like to sit across the table from her on a date. Ugh.) and Abiola also seem to be projecting a confidence they don’t feel… Or they could be so damn unrealistic about themselves and the realities of relationships that they’ll end up only accepting cartoon ones — superficial and, at best, two-dimensional.

(I didn’t see enough of Jacklyn, Natasha, and Taylor to get a read on them — yet)

Anyway, my point is that these ladies are all so busy looking at & evaluating men — immediately judging the men to be untrustworthy or otherwise unworthy so they can dump them and move on — that they require a third party to give them literal, physical shocks.

And even then they resist.

Along with not knowing how they behave (and how that behavior is interpreted), they don’t even seem to know themselves, their needs, or what motivates them.  It’s more than classic defense mechanisms that automatically go off; it’s ignorance about themselves.

If only these women had begun dating under my dad’s dating philosophy. It may not have spared them broken hearts & bad experiences, but at least they’d have walked away knowing something more about themselves. And then they wouldn’t have had to been zapped — on national television, yet.

Survey Indicates Single Women Aren’t Sleep-Around-Sluts

/ Alessia / Leave a comment

Continuing my look at the Maxim 2009 Ultimate Sex Survey, I’m struck by results which may indicate that there are less young 20-something so-called “third wave feminists” projecting an image of sexuality which moves past “available” to “equality means living up to male stereotypes” than I thought. I meet a lot of those young women… *sigh* But either they are fewer in number than I had calculated (feared) — or fewer participated in this survey. In any case, I am heartened to read most of the following survey results. (You can click the pic to see/read a larger image.)

maxim-march-2009-page-70

A whopping 67% prefer “rough and dirty” sex — which may sound promiscuous, but not only were the other two options (“over in time for The Hills“, 2% and “slow and gentle”, 31%) lame or limiting (where are the options to mix it up — some sort of combination answer?), but the replies to “How many one-night stands have you had?” were surprisingly low (38.8% said zero, 40.2% said 1-3). And 48% claim the number of sexual partners they’ve had is 1-5. When it comes to cheating, 50.8% say they’ve done it once. (Lived and quickly learned the hard way, I’m guessing.) And just over 61% deny having made any sex tapes.

Bottom Line: These girls aren’t the sleep-around-sluts Cosmo makes ’em out to be. (Or is it that Cosmo tries to make sleep-around-sluts?)

These women are realistic about penis size. The majority (49.5%) say their ideal size is 7-9 inches; runner-up is 4-6 inches with 48.9%.

However, 35.8% say they make their kitty-cats completely whisker-free — and only 3.2% admit to a full fluffy kitty. While nearly 81% prefer a man to trim his pubic hair (good luck with that dream, sister!), 10.2% (the second highest survey result) prefer men au natural — which means women are still more accepting of men as human animals then they are of themselves. (I hope future surveys see some more realistic self-acceptance.)

I Want To Change Your New Year’s Resolutions

/ Alessia / Leave a comment

So you’ve got this to-do list of things you’d like to change about yourself — but hold on there, miss! Before you start the scheming to match your dreaming, the first thing you need to do is know yourself. It sounds so simple that it seems ambiguous to some, but really this is where you start.

First, are these things realistic? Can you change these things?

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

Second, if you can change these things (and can set realistic goals for doing so), do you really want to change all those things on your list? If there’s just one thing written there, is that something you really want to change? Or are you making these changes for someone else…

Maybe you wrote it down, but your hand was directed by that head of yours which is filled with all those insidious messages you’ve received from critical family members, lovers (or those you wanted to be) who rejected you, so-called women’s magazines & other media which makes money off your insecurities — all these voices saying that you’re just not good enough.

Even if you’re convinced that your New Year’s Resolutions are in fact your own, take a good hard look at them any way. Do it because you’re patronizing me; I don’t care, as long as you take five minutes (eternally long if you set a timer) and reconsider the things-you-want-to-change-this-year.

Now I’m going to ask you to do one more thing. I’m going to ask you to put one thing at the top of the list. And that thing is to demand that people accept & respect you.

See, you’ve got these things (or maybe just one thing) that you want to change about yourself — and it may very well be that you should change to improve your life — but far too often I see women who are willing to change themselves but unwilling to demand that people accept them for who and what they are. This acquiescence bothers me. Bad things happen when you acquiesce so much in relationships.

So, get out another piece of paper, title it “Demand That People Accept Me”, and make a list of things that should not be changed about yourself.

They can be little or big things; vital ‘this is me’ things or ‘pet peeve’ things that really get under your skin. In fact, that should be one of the things you write down: No one has the right to tell me how important things are to me, or how I feel.

Sometimes it helps if you write it as a list intended to be read by a specific (though however imaginary) person. Like a written agreement. In the spirit of getting you started, here are some of my things:

* When you met me I smoked, I wore this dress size, I had a cat, this family, these friends, I swore, drank, and I required an hour a day to be left alone; none of these things should be expected to change — or are to be discussed as changes I ought to make.

* My work, no matter the pay, is as important as yours; and how I spend my days (weekly pottery class, shooting pool, my favorite TV shows) are as important as your softball league, TV habits and whatnot. It’s not an automatic ‘given’ that my plans should change to accommodate yours.

* While you may name your privates, you can neither make me address it by ‘name’ nor name mine.

* If I say something hurts, it hurts. So stop tickling me or whatever it is and just say you’re sorry.

* I’m a normal, healthy, menstruating woman; you are not allowed to make ‘ick’ faces, wince, cringe, or otherwise react stupidly to this biological fact. Similarly, you are not allowed to act embarrassed when tampons appear in the shopping cart, on the conveyor belt at WalMart, or in your bathroom (unused in the medicine cabinet, or neatly wrapped in toilet paper in the trash).

* On a related note, I get very randy before my period — sometimes during. Obviously it’s up to you to decide if you want to have sex at this (or any other) time; but do not make that fact which looks like you’ve just vomited in your mouth at my suggestion.

* The toilet seat is to be turned down after use. Period.

* No means no, means no, means no. No, I don’t want to see that movie; no, I don’t want order the clams; no, I don’t want to go on another date; no, I don’t want you to come in for a drink; no, I don’t want you to touch me. Yes, you may have come in last time; yes, you may have gotten laid before; but this time the answer is “No.”

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I do not want to change,
courage to demand that others to do the same,
and wisdom to rid myself of those who do not.

Pulling Relationship Weight

/ Alessia / Leave a comment

Leigh Peele, a published author and expert on weight loss, has an intriguing article at the Examiner on the courtship of obesity:

The process of mate selection for human beings is different from culture to culture and has evolved with the ages. Long ago the majority choose a mate purely on the ground of livelihood. If your mate could feed you or have children that was good enough. That isn’t to say there wasn’t always a rebel or two that caused a uproar in the normal flow of things. However, the majority of the time people chose mostly out of safety, and at best for love.

Flash forward to a time of internet dating, mail order brides, maxim magazine, and Flavor of Love. I think you will find that things are a little different. Self independence and prosperity is possible for both sexes. The ability to have children isn’t dependent on a penis and a vagina. Lastly, food is everywhere in advanced societies so the need to find a mate based solely on those past needs are getting cut more and more everyday. If those aren’t leading the ranks of why we pick a mate, what is?

I’ve written, elsewhere, on the subject of the biology of appearance in attraction, and while Peele clearly has a belief system (if not an agenda), she raises some good points:

How you look, the health you convey, and the body you have is now a extreme contributing factor. Studies and survey’s around the world are showing time and time again that the weight and appearance of a person plays a very large role in if they are found to be dating material or not. The question is, why?

If you say because “fat people are ugly” you would be wrong. Studies show that it isn’t the physical attraction to the person that is the issue, it is the underlying factors instead. For example, one study shows that on average medical costs are 36% higher for obese adults than their non-obese partners. Other studies also show that those who are largely overweight make a smaller percentage of pay vs those who have a healthier BMI. Obesity is also highly prevalent in low educated households, and the children of obese parents have a higher likely hood to drop out of high school.

When we combine all that above this means that through one scan of the eyes the average person when on approach for dating material can see someone who is obese as unhealthy, uneducated, and not financially secure. Obviously this is not true in all cases, but now if you find yourself in this position, not only do you have to worry about your own insecurities of being physically under par to yourself, you have to worry about your whole level of worth being judged from education to finance. Because of this overwhelming pressure, studies show that the mate you choose is going to be constantly less than your instinctual set standards because you feel that this is the best you can do. The cycle then starts of the problems in the relationship.

Peele then goes on to describe what she believes occurs in relationships where one person is ‘thin’ and the other ‘obese’:

Constantly those who are overweight will put “being fat” on the high list of problems in a relationship before they will put “living in self doubt.” Mixed couples fight more about cheating, have more short term separations, and will settle more in abusive relationships on average than couples who share in the same activities and physical physique. It is a lot more likely that one of you is nice and the other is a jerk.

…It isn’t about BMI, that is just a side effect. That is merely the scapegoat for the problem. The problem is self worth and self esteem. Usually those who were married pre-obesity have less problems than those who go into the courtship already overweight. With marriage there is a level of knowing what can be there again if desire or a deep understanding of the person in when they felt their best. Since the person saw the “real” you at a point, even if you are insecure now, there is still enough of you there in them that you are able to maintain a high level of happiness and trust.

I’ll admit, I’ve never quite looked at weight issues from this perspective. I’ve been ‘fat’ and I’ve been ‘thin,’ and while I’ve certainly noticed the times when my fat self was unattractive — not for the physical reasons but the insecurities & bad attitudes — I’ve never quite put things together as neatly as Peele has.

Not that being thinner delivers a magical life, but there is something I can attest to as far as attitude & acceptance. Speaking in generalities, if & when I happily accept ‘me’, I have better partners and better relationships; but when I am miserable, I make dumber decisions & accept far less than I really deserve.  Not to mention, I’m just a bitch (or killjoy) to be around.

There’s also been a difference between my relationships (with myself and with others), depending upon how I ‘took the weight off’.

The times I forced myself to diet — like an aggressive prison warden — I may have lost weight, but I felt the punitive actions, the self-loathing, and not only was miserable in the process and with others, but the weight came back quickly. However, once I rid myself of my emotional baggage, I naturally seemed to slim-down — as if that baggage was literally the saddlebags on my hips and thighs.

So while I’m not sure I agree that relationships between the skinny dating the fat are doomed to inequity, I do see (and often talk about) the great difficulties in relationships between those who are happily accepting of themselves and those who are riddled with insecurities and self-loathing. If your weight is an indication of the latter, the issues are certainly worth exploring for yourself.