Do you ever have those days where you think you might just explode if you have to endure one more wolf whistle, cat call, or “hey baby?” Do you feel your face fuming but instead just walk on by, head phones in ears, pretending you don’t hear?

While that is certainly the most common and least confrontational response, it doesn’t do anything to reverse the culture of impunity that allows street harassers to do what they do without even a hint of shame. The truth is, all forms of sexual harassment and disrespect towards women—whether it’s a simple inane comment or an act of violence—come from the same place: the idea that the female body is a publicly owned entity, there for all men to comment on and use as they please.

In honor of Sexual Assault Awareness Month and Anti Street Harassment Week (April 7-13), EcoSalon gives you a list of “Talk Back” ammunition. The truth is that we still live in a world where talking back can also be taking a risk. However, there are certainly instances when speaking up directly and confidently is a powerful tool to challenge the wide acceptance of this tired form of oppression. Riding a bus or walking through a public place or a busy street are good examples; a late night walk home perhaps isn’t.

Organizations like Stop Street Harassment and Hollaback provide resources and encourage both women and bystanders to confront, report, and record this kind of intimidation. Tips include speaking in a neutral, yet assertive voice; not losing your temper or swearing; and to decide when you’re done making your point to avoid a back and forth battle (for more very useful tips see here).

Despite what some men—and even some women—will tell you, street harassment is not a compliment. If it makes you feel uncomfortable or objectified or just plain irritated, it’s not okay. Remember that you have a right to talk back, whereas many other women in the world may not.

Go on and give some of these replies a try:

1.”You look like someone whose opinion is irrelevant.”

2.“I’m sorry, you must have me confused with someone whom you think you can speak to that way.”

3.”It’s funny you should say that, because I don’t recall asking for your opinion on my appearance.”

4.”Can you please think of a more imaginative way to assert your threatened masculinity.”

5.”You should save that for your girlfriend—oh wait, you probably don’t have one because you clearly don’t know how to respect women.”

6.”God, you are just so clever and original. I bet your friends just love you.”

7.”Do you disrespect all the women in your life, or just ones you’ve never met?”

8.”Sweetheart, please stop perpetuating the patriarchal dividend. It’s so over.”

9.”Honestly, it’s too early in the morning for misogyny and patriarchy.”

10.”Please evolve before you speak to me any further.”

12.”Has that ever really worked for you?”

13.”You must have a solid track record of saying stupid shit to women.”

14.”Have you really not evolved past the cat call/wolf whistle/hey baby?? Get with the times, bro.”

15.”Would you like your wife/sister/daughter to be treated the same way you are treating me right now?”

16.”You need a new line, man—and also a lesson on how to respect women.”

17.”Wow, you’re the first man to ever say that to me!”

18.”Look at me any harder and your pants might split.”

19.”If I was trying to track down a good time, I would have been a little more creative.”

20. And for the guys who want to speak up: “You’re making women hate men. Stop it.”

Image credit: TED Conference

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Pop culture has turned Marilyn Monroe into a two-faced mythological figure, both shallow sex symbol and confidence-boosting bearer of wisdom.

“I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.” This quote is one of dozens that make the rounds on the internet, typically written in script across a photo of Marilyn Monroe, sharing the wisdom of the tragic actress with a new generation. The problem – ironic given the nature of the quote – is that these words did not come from Marilyn. In fact, the many false quotes attributed to her are just a small part of the mythology of Marilyn, a movement that has placed her at the pinnacle of feminine charm and transformed her into something that both aggrandizes her and reduces her to the stereotypes she hated.

“A sex symbol becomes a thing. I hate being a thing.”

Now, those are Marilyn’s words. And like most of the “Marilynisms” that verifiably came from her, they paint a very different picture from the one that is now emblazoned across t-shirts and posters and tattooed on starlets’ bodies. To get the above quote tattooed is virtually a rite of passage for young women in show business and one that has turned Monroe into a sort of secular goddess to whom all sorts of wisdom is attributed. Why do women idolize Marilyn Monroe to this degree? Is it healthy? Does it really honor her?

“People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.”

It’s not hard to see why so many people continue to find Marilyn so charming, decades after her death. She was utterly captivating. Breathy and beautiful, Marilyn had a keen sense of comedic timing, and her overt sexuality made her both a magnetic and controversial figure. Today, most of us tend to see her as the ultimate representation of female sexiness: someone in control of her own body, someone who was able to gain the adoration of millions with a wiggle and a shake. She appeals to the desire of many women to transform themselves from Norma Jeane next door into a glamorous sex goddess.

In fact, Marilyn has become something of a meme. Pop culture has turned her into not just a sex symbol but a confident and carefree role model, with the help of fake quotes like “We are all stars and we all deserve to twinkle” (subverted, oddly enough, from a passage in one of her letters referencing a freedom ride for minority rights). Photos of her curvy figure are used to pit women of different body types against each other, ostensibly in support of the celebration of fuller figures, despite the fact that Marilyn averaged 117 pounds and had a 22-inch waist. She had the ideal shape of her era, now misinterpreted due to changes in sizing that make a vintage size 10 seem much larger than it really was. Such memes may be well-meaning, but they’re false.

“In Hollywood a girl’s virtue is much less important than her hairdo. You’re judged by how you look, not by what you are.”

Building Marilyn up into a mythological figure ignores the realities of who she was, and the circumstances that made her life so tragic. Marilyn had to change to fit an expectation of female beauty. She adapted to fit an existing ideal, and at this, she played her role perhaps a little too well: she became the ideal. But would Marilyn be happy to know that she is remembered primarily for her beauty and her sexuality? Probably not. Despite wanting nothing more than to succeed as an actress,  she was not only disrespected during her lifetime – treated as an object rather than a thinking and feeling person – but ridiculed.

“Some people have been unkind. If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don’t expect me to be serious about my work.”

Marilyn couldn’t seem to escape the restrictive boundaries that her physical appearance and her sense of alluring yet shallow feminine mystique placed on her life. When she proposed an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, envisioning herself in a role that was actually quite fitting for her persona, a reporter asked her, “Do you know how to spell Dostoevsky, Marilyn?”

A foster child with a family history of severe depression, Marilyn bounced from one unloving home to another before marrying at sixteen to escape the cycle. Her two subsequent marriages, to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, were a hallmark of what it was to be a woman in the socially restrictive 1950s: marrying what they wanted to be. In Marilyn’s case, that was first an American hero, and then someone serious, who commanded the respect of intelligent people. But the myth that had already begun to swirl around her then made her larger than life, even to her husbands. Marilyn oozed sex, but childhood abuse left her scarred to the degree that she didn’t experience an orgasm until she was well into her thirties.

“I am a failure as a woman. My men expect so much of me because of the image they have made of me and that I have made of myself, as a sex symbol. Men expect so much and I can’t live up to it. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy’s the same as any other woman’s. I can’t live up to it.”

None of this is to say that Marilyn Monroe is unworthy of being adored, nor that she should be viewed only as a cautionary tale – an example of the toll that objectification can take on a woman’s psyche. But perhaps part of what draws us, as a culture, to the legend of Marilyn is the fact that she represents an essential struggle within many women to this day. She has become, as Gloria Steinem put it, an exaggeration of femininity that struggles to fit into the expectations of an ideal, but conceals the truth of who she really is inside – “a kind of larger projection of the individual woman for a lot of us.”

Marilyn’s early death at age thirty-six – whether an intentional overdose or accident – has preserved her at the height of her beauty and sexual allure. She didn’t live long enough to push through all of those restrictions and participate in the feminist movement, as many believe she likely would have. She never got that serious starring role that would finally have given her the validation she craved as a thespian. She didn’t reach an age that would have allowed her to beat back many of the misconceptions that many have developed about her and her life. And so she has been commercialized for mass consumption, plasticized into a mannequin that can be manipulated to say anything we want.

In our mythical interpretation of her, we have washed away some of Marilyn’s humanity. Remembering Marilyn Monroe as a three-dimensional person rather than a flattened image of an hourglass figure and a pretty face – or even worse, a complete subversion of her reality – is a far more fitting tribute to the most iconic woman of the 20th century, and to ourselves.

Images: 1, 2, 3, 4; shameless mag

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Be pure. Be sexy. Be a nurturer. Don’t breastfeed in public. Messages to women are more conflicted than ever.

We live in an advanced era of cloud computing, virtual personal assistants and cars that can parallel park themselves. So why is it that women so often feel like we’re still living in the dark ages? The question of whether we should even have access to birth control is still a part of our everyday political discourse. Fathers are symbolically claiming their daughters’ virginity. We’re slammed with objectifying ads that tell us to be more sexy, then shamed for claiming our sexual identities. And perhaps the saddest part of all is that it isn’t just men who are forcing these forms of suppression and control onto women’s bodies; the pressure comes from other women, too.

Purity pledges

Young girls are such delicate, corruptible little flowers that their wise, protective fathers must not only rule their sexuality with an iron fist, but demand that their daughters pledge their virginity to them. So goes the rationale of the Purity Ball movement, engineered largely by Christian fathers as a means of control over their progeny’s blossoming bodies.

What makes this even more disturbing is the fact that these girls are not making this decision for themselves at puberty (and even then, they’re too young to realize just what their fathers are asking of them.) Girls are brought to their first Purity Ball at the age of five, where they prance around in white dresses, listen to sermons about living a “pure life” and pledge themselves to their fathers. Throughout childhood and adolescence, the girls are given ominous warnings of the “terrible consequences” of losing their virginity, and essentially told that they have no input on their own burgeoning sexual identities at all. Many girls receive lock charms on necklaces, the keys held by their fathers, who will pass them over to their husbands on their wedding day in a transfer of male power.

Of course, there’s no equivalent movement that attempts to force young men into pledging their virginity to their mothers. Because that would just be weird.

Virginity tests

Taking control over young women’s vaginas to a far greater extreme, virginity tests are the literal examination of a woman’s hymen to be sure that she hasn’t had sex before marriage. These tests are illegal in many countries, and Amnesty International classifies them as torture. That doesn’t stop them from happening all over the world, both in institutional and private settings. Some cultures require that brides-to-be undergo such a test before their wedding day. Last year in Egypt, female protesters were subjected to them by military authorities; an official explained “We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place.”

Because if they aren’t virgins, clearly they’re asking for it.

Think this practice is long gone in the west? The British government used virginity testing for young female immigrants until 1979, believing that if they were virgins, they were more likely to be telling the truth about moving to Britain for marriage.

Gender segregation

Women are told to sit at the back of the bus – in Brooklyn. In Israel’s Beit Shemesh, a growing sect of powerful ultra-Orthodox extremists are fighting to keep women separate from men in nearly all public settings, even preventing women from going to the podium to accept their rightfully earned prizes at an awards ceremony. In many other areas of the world, the segregation of men and women has been going on for so long, and is so deeply entrenched in local culture, that changing it seems like an impossible task. The problem is particularly troubling in Islamic cultures, where fundamentalists place strict limits on interaction between women and men who aren’t their relatives.

In many cases, the reasoning behind segregating women from men is preserving the “virtue” of women and the “honor” of men, the idea being that women are not only helpless against the temptation of jumping on any random men who cross their paths, but that the mere sight of women could corrupt and distract men who are supposed to be focusing on more important things. It also reinforces the idea of women as property, who must be governed by male overlords.

Reproductive rights

Our supposedly progressive president refused to relax restrictions on Plan B, preventing women of all ages from accessing the morning-after pill directly off drugstore and supermarket shelves. Our legislators threaten to cave to fringe groups that want to redefine life as beginning at the moment of fertilization, which would outlaw all contraceptives, including birth control pills. One of our Republican presidential nominees, Rick Santorum, not only believes that birth control damages society, but wants to make all abortions illegal, even in the case of rape or incest, saying women should “make the best of a bad situation.” A bill in Georgia proposed the persecution of women who couldn’t prove that they didn’t cause their own miscarriages.

In other nations around the world, women’s ability to make choices about their own bodies and lives are in even more desperate straits. Women are all too often seen as passive baby-making machines, essentially existing only to further the continuation of the species.

Breastfeeding brouhaha

Breasts are so sexy – except when you’re feeding your baby. Then, they’re just gross. So gross that people will go out of their way to yell at mothers trying to provide her infant with the best sustenance in the world, and shame them into hiding. The problem is, society at large only wants to think of breasts in a sexual context; we’re so far removed from the biological realities of our species that many people feel disturbed by the sight of a baby suckling. Some honestly believe that women only breastfeed in public because they’re exhibitionists or trying to make a statement, not because their babies are hungry. Some even view it as pornographic. It’s a sad state of affairs when a mother is told that a dirty public restroom is a more appropriate place to feed her baby than a table at a restaurant.

The great cover-up

In Saudi Arabia, women who are already shrouded from head to toe in impenetrable layers of cloth, even in the harsh heat of the desert, are being told to cover up their sexy eyes. If a man decides that a certain woman has eyes that are too “tempting,” he has the right to order her to cover them immediately lest she face fines or public lashings. In Israel, the same extremists segregating the sexes are spitting on little girls who are dressed “too provocatively” as they walk to school. There are even movements within America to return to some misguided Victorian celebration of modesty. Women have come a long way since the days when they could be institutionalized just for having a bad reputation, but they’re still treated as if their bodies are weapons with which they might accidentally (or intentionally) bring ruin upon themselves and the men who look their way.

Slut shaming and rape blaming

Well, if you don’t cover up, don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for you when you get raped. That’s the message that’s foisted upon us by modesty advocates and other groups who argue that showing virtually any skin equates to inviting violent sexual assault. And if you dare to claim your own identity as a sexual being, you should be ashamed of yourself. Slut-shaming has everything to do with patriarchal directives for women – how we should dress, how we should act, how we should conduct our sex lives. If we don’t conform, and especially if we dare to be aggressive about our sexuality, we’re ridiculed. Men, on the other hand, get a free pass – the more frequent and public their conquests, the more admiration and approval they gain.

Objectification

On the other side of the coin is the duality of expectations on female roles in society, specifically the wife versus the mistress, the modest and nurturing woman who is practically asexual versus the sex object that only exists for the pleasure of others. Both roles objectify women by removing their personalities and individuality. Sexual objectification is much more in-your-face, pushed on women every day by the mass media, treating women like commodities to be ogled and traded. For all of the pressure to be chaste there’s an equal opposing force pressuring women to be vapid, fleshly blow-up dolls. A prime example is a t-shirt offered by Abercrombie and Fitch (the same store hawking push-up bras for kids) emblazoned with the slogan, “With These, Who Needs Brains?”

Lesbian torture clinics

It’s no secret that homosexuality, another basic biological reality of our species, is seen by certain groups as something to be “cured.” But your jaw might just drop in horror when you learn that some of these “cure clinics” use physical torture and psychological abuse in an attempt to “straighten out” queer women. Ecuadorian activists are speaking out about 200 torture clinics operating under the guise of rehabilitation centers where both men and women are shackled, starved and sexually abused. Thankfully, a Change.org petition has brought about the beginning of the end to this practice in Ecuador, but we’re all too aware that there are still plenty of other groups across the globe that want to dictate who you can and can’t have sex with.

Female genital mutilation

Circumcision is a touchy issue, even here in America where it’s routinely performed on baby boys. Delve into the sticky cultural context of female circumcision as it’s practiced in Africa, and you’re opening a whole other can of worms. Some African feminists maintain that female genital mutilation is part of their cultural heritage, and one that “first world feminists” have no right to condemn – just as Jewish and Muslim traditions dictate that circumcision is a must for boys. But many woomen can’t help but feel that these practices were designed to control women by robbing them of sexual pleasure. Can you imagine a cut to your unanesthetized clitoris as anything other than torture? This is controlling other people’s bodies to the extreme, and truth be told, maybe we should leave everybody’s genitals alone and let them decide what they want to do with them once they reach adulthood.

Photos: progress ohio, tim & selena middleton, rutlo

The post 10 Ways the World Still Tries to Rule Women’s Bodies appeared first on EcoSalon.

Sexting and cyberbullying have harsher consequences for girls.

A recent instance of cyberbullying involved a slut list that was initially mass forwarded amongst students using Blackberry Messenger until one New York teen said he was tired of requests to forward it and decided to create a “smut list” Facebook group (the name was evidently changed to avoid flagging). Only a few months prior, a girl on the other side of the country took a full-frontal nude photo of herself and sent it to her new boyfriend. A series of events and bad decisions resulted in that photo going viral throughout her school, community and beyond. In both instances, girls were painted with the equivalent of a cyber scarlet letter.

Bad girl directory

The list contained over 100 girls’ first and last names (some as young as 14), ranked them according to their alleged sexual encounters and what they were willing to do, and included anonymous commentary. All boys’ names were omitted. The girls are from seven different high schools in the Westchester, New York and Greenwich, Connecticut areas. The group attracted more than 7,000 “likes” overnight.

The good news is that the schools and the authorities are taking it seriously, investigating, and discussing some severe punishment. The bad news is that, like all digital content, it most likely still exists somewhere. There is no way to unring this particular bell. In a time where college admissions personnel and job recruiters admit to Googling prospective applicants, inclusion on the list could have long-lasting consequences.

Clearly both boys and girls participated in creating, expanding, commenting on, and distributing this list, but it is no surprise that it only contains girls’ names. The underlying principle never changes – society perceives sexually active boys to be studs, and sexually active girls to be sluts. It’s such a tired double standard it would be laughable if it weren’t so damaging. In this case, the larger problem with this list is that it could be a complete fabrication. True or not, this list tars the reputations of all the girls who are even mentioned in association with it.

Take nude photo, send nude photo, lose control of nude photo, live with nude photo forever

The New York Times recently told the story of an eighth-grade girl in Washington state who took a nude photo of herself and sent it to her boyfriend. Her boyfriend soon became her ex-boyfriend and she had a falling out with a friend. Her ex-boyfriend forwarded the photo to her ex-friend, who forwarded it to her entire contact list. In just one day, it had spread to hundreds of students in her hometown. After that, there is no way to tell how many people have seen it, or where it went next. When she tried to change schools, she was recognized, pointed at and whispered about.

The ex-friend and ex-boyfriend faced criminal charges, but ultimately their punishment was to educate other students on the dangers of sexting. The girl who took the photo of herself faced no charges, but her lifelong punishment is clear. Despite the dangers, sexting has become popular with both teens and adults.

How common is sexting?

According to a 2008 study commissioned by The National Campaign to Prevent Teenage and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com, 20 percent of teens overall have electronically sent, or posted online, nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves (22 percent of teen girls, 18 percent of teen boys, and 11 percent of young girls 13-16). The numbers go up for young adults 20-26 (33 percent overall, 36 percent of women and 31 percent of men). When you count only suggestive messages (sans images), the numbers nearly double in both categories.

Sexting begins with one bad decision, but it could stop there if the recipient did not forward it on. Do teens and young adults just think it’s no big deal? Do they really think the messages and images they send will remain private? Especially once the relationship ends?

I believe dissemination requires malice. This generation of teens and young adults have grown up with the Internet and viral videos on YouTube. It’s hard to believe that they don’t understand the consequences of forwarding a nude photo or posting a slut list rooted in viciousness.

No matter what, girls are the most negatively affected. The NYT reports that a boy who sends pictures of himself might be considered an idiot or boastful, but girls are labeled sluts. “Photos of girls tend to go viral more often, because boys and girls will circulate girls’ photos in part to shame them.” However, when a boy sends a sexy photo to a girl, she usually does not forward it to the masses. Boys do not  forward photos of other boys, because they don’t want to admit to having photos like that. Not only is sexting a bad idea, but it’s an especially bad idea for girls.

Girls and Sex – Disrespect, Pressure, and Dehumanization

The reason that girls are more negatively affected when it comes to bullying related to sex is found in sexual attitudes toward girls and women that have not improved with the passing of time, and in fact, seem to have gotten worse.

A fraternity at Yale lines up and yells, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” and sends out its own version of a slut list, ranking incoming freshman girls by how many beers the authors thought it would take to have sex with them. At USC, a fraternity member sent out a disgustingly detailed email designed to identify “sorostitutes” willing to have sex, calling girls “targets” and saying that girls “are not actual people like us men…consequently, giving them a certain name or distinction is pointless.” It’s easy to see how treacherous the sexual climate surrounding girls these days really is.

Recent findings by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) suggests that sexual intercourse rates are down, but there is always a risk of teens lying on the questionnaire and questions not distinguishing between intercourse and oral sex. Conflicting reports have participation in oral sex from only 7 percent to over 50 percent of teens, but it’s possible that oral sex is on the rise as a hedge against unplanned pregnancy (the U.S. teen birth rate fell to a record low in 2009), and a way for girls to remain “technical virgins” longer.

Despite being bombarded with media messages, pressured to have sex younger and younger, and being the target of cyberbullying or objectifying attitudes – ultimately, it’s up to girls themselves to navigate this sexual minefield. No one else can make decisions for them about sending out sext messages of themselves or others, participating in creating a slut list of their peers, or deciding to when and how to have sex. We need to redouble our efforts to encourage girls to have respect for themselves and their bodies, resist peer pressure, and become educated on the consequences of all types of sex.

As for some boys’ and men’s attitudes about girls and women? Will they ever change? If not, these are the attitudes that the next generation of men will take to work with their female colleagues and bring home to their wives and daughters.

Photo Credit: modenadude

The post Sexting and the Slut List: The Double Standard Is Alive and Thriving appeared first on EcoSalon.

One of the 2011 shelter trends is the evolution of accessories and objectification of books. As technology takes over and electronic devices contain our libraries of words, there’s a growing nostalgia around the bound beauties we call books.

Bookshelves were an absolute obsession last year, and books will be objectified further in 2011 via wallpaper, classic novels with cleverly decorated covers, porcelain books, and even the classic decorative coffee table book.

Here are five items using the book motif to add to your space:

1. Stacked Paperback Wallpaper – Anthropologie, $198
2. Hardcover Classics – Penguin, $20
3. Distressed Books – My Sparrow, $12
4. Porcelain Book Set – Klein Reid, $198
5. Heart of Darkness – Spineless Classics, £24.99 (The entire book is printed on one page, image below).

Another bound inclination of the upcoming year is the coffee table book. Electronic readers may contain the latest bestselling fiction, but the tangible perusal and visual entertainment of coffee table books cannot be contained in a Kindle. Jump start your coffee table collection with this list of fifteen irresistible reads.

Speaking of irresistible, another of my favorite accessories trends is nature photography. Last year we saw over-sized horses and ostriches grace the pages of Lonny and Vogue. The love of ostriches will carry into this year, where you’ll also see plenty of elephants – prints, sculptures and ephemera.

If objectified books or photographic animal prints aren’t your passion, scroll through the rest of the 2011 shelter trends to find design inspiration and ideas.

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