Of Books and Bicycles

So on Tuesday I posted about my experiences with yoga and cycling and feelings of competitiveness, and I got some interesting comments about “mean girls” and women’s lack of confidence. Well, yesterday on my way to work I heard an NPR segment by sports commentator Frank Deford, called “Some women athletes follow a sordid path.” If you are interested, you can listen to it here. The story was about how some women college athletes are beginning to do some of the things some male college athletes are notorious for: nasty hazing and sexually explicit taunting, in particular, and then putting disturbing pictures of these things online. I don’t know if enough of this is going on to constitute a “trend,” although that’s the way Deford’s segment portrayed it.

This sort of thing is definitely a problem, and it shows how much we need models for how to be athletes and how to be competitive without being jerks — how much the sports culture needs changing. I think men and women both need this. Specifically for women, part of the trouble, it seems to me, comes from having the long, long tradition of women trained not to be competitive or athletic, so that when the opportunity arises to be those things, it’s hard to figure out how.

But what really bothered me about the Deford segment was the way he ended it. He closed with the grand statement, “Sports has won; womanhood has lost.” This statement puts me in a funny situation, because on the one hand, I don’t like it that women athletes are acting like jerks. But, on the other, I don’t like the implication that women exist on a higher moral plane than men and that “womanhood” as a whole is suffering when women act badly. Women are capable of acting just as badly as men, and to assume otherwise is to do a disservice to women.

In a strange way, to assert women’s equal ability to act badly becomes a kind of feminist statement. To assume that women when they enter the sports world (or any world, for that matter — this is true of politics as well) will raise the level of ideas and behavior is to hold women to a higher standard that can be just as limiting and unfair as holding them to a lower one. Now, I DO think it’s a good idea to have more women in the sports world and the political world and every other world out there, and I think women entering these places can change things, but not by improving everyone’s behavior. Their presence brings in new voices and new perspectives, and maybe simply the chance to change things further because change has begun to happen already with their presence. But please don’t start talking about “womanhood.” To me, this erases the individuality of women athletes by making who they are mostly about what gender category they belong to.

I suppose there’s something similar going on with the “mean girls” idea — we are particularly shocked when girls are nasty to each other because we have higher expectations of their behavior than we do for boys.

Instead of implying that these women-athletes-behaving-badly are betraying “womanhood,” Deford should have talked about how we need to change the sports culture itself, and how that culture can hurt both men and women. Of course when women enter a sports culture that’s messed up, they are going to respond in messed-up ways, particularly when we are talking about young college-age women. What else would you expect? Actually, I generally like Deford’s commentaries, and I know he DOES talk intelligently about how to change the sports culture. I think this particular commentary was an unfortunate slip-up, however.

Update: immediately after posting this, I came across this great post by Aunt B. on how feminism is not a moral position. Go check it out.

I know, I know, the concept of being “bad” at yoga is troubling, since I’m implying that “badness” in yoga means being inflexible. It means when I do a forward bend, I can’t touch my forehead to my knees. It means when I do triangle pose I can’t wrap my fingers around my big toe. And that’s a bad definition of what it means to be “good” at yoga. A much better definition of being “good” at yoga is more along the lines of doing each pose carefully and consciously, no matter where I am in it exactly.

But I’m in class last night, doing that forward bend where your feet are 4 or 5 feet apart, and you’re bending forward at the hips, trying to get your head toward the floor, and there’s this woman behind me who can do it perfectly. She looks beautiful, with perfectly straight legs, a perfectly straight back, head on the floor, arms parallel to each other. She could be on the cover of Yoga Journal, and I’m completely distracted by it. I start to feel like I want to be that good – I want to practice and practice until I’m that flexible.

And then, sigh, I realize I just can’t do it. I don’t have time to practice yoga that much, not if I want to be a competitive cyclist at the same time. And I’m not sure my body is cut out to look like those on the cover of Yoga Journal. I’m shortish and squattish, with a tendency to put on big muscles. People call me small, but I think that’s deceptive; if you look closely, you can see I’ve got leg muscles that bulge. They aren’t the long and supple muscles of people who “excel” at yoga.

So I’m forced back into the “good” definition of being “good” at yoga, and I think of all the yoga clichés I hear in class: I should come into my breath, be present in my body, get out of the mind and into the body, let breath lead me into the poses. Being “good” at yoga is a matter of being aware of what’s happening in the poses, not being super bendy.

Being competitive about yoga is all wrong – it’s such a western way of approaching an eastern spiritual tradition, although as I understand it, hatha yoga – the poses – isn’t really a part of contemporary Hinduism and that few people in India practice them. Yoga as I know it is an almost exclusively western manifestation, and the equation of yoga with poses is a very narrow understanding of what yoga really is.

On the other hand, though, I do enjoy a bit of competitiveness. I’m relatively new to my athleticism, having only been a semi-serious cyclist for the last, I don’t know, six years or so. And I love being strong on the bike. I love being stronger than other people, and it’s fun for me to play around with feelings of competitiveness and aggression, since so often I feel like they are off-limits for me as a woman. I’m guessing that other women might not feel so conflicted about competitiveness, having grown up with a stronger culture of female athleticism maybe, and maybe it’s also a personality thing – I can be a bit timid by nature, and so I have a complicated relationship with my aggressive side.

I’ve said things like “women’s races aren’t quite as dangerous as men’s races are because women are a bit more careful about their riding,” and other people have said something about men and testosterone in response, but I don’t know – I don’t have enough experience to know if women are less dangerously aggressive than men. That might not be true at all. I might be buying into a false idea of women as more level-headed and less dare-devilish than men.

All this makes me even more interested in finding writing about women and athleticism, as I wrote about a bit in yesterday’s post about Colette. I asked about women writer/athletes from earlier periods yesterday, but now I realize that I can’t even think of contemporary women who write about athleticism or women writers who are known for being athletic. This inspires me to look around a bit more. Does anyone know of good writing, from any time period, about women and athleticism? I don’t mean historical or sociological studies, I mean more literary explorations of it – whether fiction or nonfiction.

Anyway, being “bad” at yoga makes me think through my feelings of competitiveness, and to try to sort out where I should foster those feelings and where I shouldn’t.

So for now, my ambition for my yoga practice is to have no ambition. And my ambition for cycling is to kick your butt.

Advice for job interviews

1. It’s best not to risk being late for an interview because you are stuck in traffic on the highway. If you don’t know the traffic patterns, i.e. when there will be backup on the highway, leave VERY early. I made it to my interview fine, but I had some frantic moments along the way when I cursed myself for leaving home so late.
2. It’s best not to run into a colleague from your current job while you are walking down the hall on your way to an interview for a new job. Of course, this meeting may be unavoidable, but if you can, duck into a side hall or a bathroom to avoid seeing this person who may report back to your other colleagues that you are hoping to quit ASAP. I, unfortunately, did not have time to do this. I have no idea what this colleague was doing at this other place of employment. My first thought was that she was interviewing for the position too, but she was dressed in jeans. Either she interviews in jeans (in which case I may have a better chance!), or she works there in some other, unknown function.

3. Do your best not to splatter yourself with water when you are washing your hands in the bathroom just before the interview. Luckily I had my blazer unbuttoned when this happened, so I buttoned it to hide the water drops.

4. When you get to the place you think the interview will be held, and you look around for someone to help you find the place for certain, it’s best not to ask the previous candidate for the job who just got out from his own interview. I saw a person who looked very nicely dressed and immediately thought – this person will help me! Wrong choice.

5. When do you find the room for certain, don’t walk in when the hiring committee is in the middle of deliberations on the performance of that previous candidate. I did this, but only because the students I finally asked for help told me I could go right in. What did they know?

6. When you are finished with the interview, don’t get lost on your way home. I didn’t get lost, actually, but I did miss my exit and had to wind my way around complicated intersections and back roads to make it home. I almost invariably get lost coming home from interviews because I’m so busy thinking about all the brilliant things I didn’t say that I can’t pay attention to the road.
In general, do your best not to be an idiot.

A little while back, Stefanie from So Many Books wrote a post on Emerson that included a discussion on thought and action, knowing and doing, how they need each other and feed into each other. She wrote this in the comments to that post:

I like Emerson’s thought about knowing and doing too. I had a college professor tell me once when she saw I rode a bicycle to school that exercise and action were just as important as reading and thinking. Now I know where she got that from!

It sounds to me like this was a great professor. I can’t say the idea is something I heard much of when I was in school. I had a friend who said once that he wished he could be just a brain, without a body, and I’ve always thought that was sad. Actually, I bet this friend didn’t really, really mean it, that he was just playing around with the idea, or blurting out the feeling of a moment, but still he was expressing some genuine ambivalence about the value of bodily experience.

And it’s a kind of thinking I can be prone to, although I know better at the same time. The value of the body, of action and exercise, is easy to forget when I’m caught up in my mental, intellectual world.

But there are things I’ve learned through action and exercise that I couldn’t have learned in any other way. I’ll tell you one example. I was always terrified of having to do anything that involved going upside down: somersaults, cartwheels, getting lifted by my ankles as a really young kid. I don’t know where this came from, but I dreaded doing “tumbling” units in gym class. I would fake being sick, or pretend to practice my cartwheels when the teacher wasn’t looking. It was one of those phobias I didn’t understand and couldn’t shake. And boy would I dread those times in gym class – in the way of young people, I didn’t have a whole lot of perspective, and those classes were nightmares, inspiring a terror that would begin months before the classes themselves did. One of the best things about graduating from high school was that it meant no one could ever, ever make me go upside down in any way ever again. My head was staying firmly over my feet.

Well, a few years ago I began attending yoga classes, and one of the things we worked on now and then was inversions. Going upside down. These classes were purely optional, no one was making me do anything, and I could sit out the inversions part of the class if I wanted to. But I tried doing a shoulder stand, which didn’t seem all that hard, not really going upside down, and I learned how to do it. Then I got used to doing that pose where you’re lying on your back and you lift your feet up and over your head and rest them back on the floor behind you. That made me very nervous at first, but I got the hang of it.

Then I tried a headstand against the wall. I think it was the yoga class itself that made me willing to try these things – the feeling of openness and acceptance you can get in a good class, where you know that people aren’t judging you, the teacher isn’t judging you (and certainly isn’t grading you), and it felt like a safe space to try things. I learned how to do a headstand.

And then I spent a long time trying to do a handstand, again against the wall. This was the scariest of the all the inversions we tried because at least in a headstand you have your head and your forearms and your hands on the floor, but a handstand is just your hands. And it took me forever to learn. Sometimes my teacher would catch my feet and pull me up into the pose. Finally, I learned the trick of looking at my hands rather than watching my feet as they flew up, and I did it.

So after about 30 years of terror at kicking my feet up into the sky, I learned I could do it. And, of course, I learned things about my limits: that I can do things I’d always thought I couldn’t, that I can overcome fears I’ve had all my life, that, given the right conditions, I can change my habits of thinking and doing. And I couldn’t learn those things in any other way but by the physical practice. My body learned the lesson first, and then taught it to my mind. My mind can now articulate that lesson, but what really matters, I think is the way my body remembers it, and somehow I know it more deeply than I would any other way.

Today was graduation at my school, and I kind of had to attend even though I don’t really know anyone who is graduating. It’s one of those things I have to do for political reasons — to be seen is the point. And I knew it would be long, so I brought along some sudoku puzzles to keep me from going insane with boredom. I would have brought a book, but the puzzles I could hide away faster if I thought I needed to. A few other people were nodding off or grading papers, but most were paying attention, or looking like they were. So I sat there and did my puzzles and looked up now and then to pretend I was aware of what was going on.

I did tune into the graduation speech long enough to hear something cool, though. The speaker mentioned a Jewish teaching (he said it was from Maimonides, but I can’t seem to find anything that confirms it) that “In the world to come a man will have to face judgment for every legitimate pleasure which he denied himself.” I’m so used to thinking of people being responsible for keeping themselves from mistakes or “illegitimate” pleasures or “sin” that to reverse the thought is a bit disorienting. We have some kind of responsibility to seize pleasure when we can? I’m not a believer in any traditional God, so I’m not imagining some other world where I’ll be held accountable for denying myself enjoyment, but I still like the idea that we have some sort of cosmic duty to seize pleasures when we can.

For some reason yesterday I kept thinking about the line from a Flannery O’Connor story: “Shut up, Bobby Lee … It’s no real pleasure in life.” But today things are different.

Aunt B’s readers’ survey

Aunt B is asking her readers a few questions, and rather than answer them in the comments, I thought I’d answer them here.

1. What do you hope for? I hope to be a powerfully strong and fast cyclist. I’d like to hike the entire Appalachian Trail before I die, although I’m not stuck on this one. I hope to get a job I genuinely like. I’m not sure what that is though. I hope to always have plenty of time to read and I hope to get some wisdom from that reading. And to get some wisdom from life, period.

2. What makes a “good” person? Someone who can stay open to life and to other people. By “open” I mean someone who genuinely tries to understand other people and where they are coming from. With that kind of openness, can a person be a “bad” person? There’s nothing more depressing for me than seeing people disagree and then refuse to consider what the other person is saying — to be stuck in a rigid opinion.

3. Are you a good person? My answer depends on the day, or even the time of day you ask me. Right now, I’d say yes. I’ve had plenty of moments when I’d say no though. I do think I’m good at trying to understand other people, so according to my above definition, I’m a good person, but that definition is obviously incomplete and biased towards my own strengths. Mostly my feeling is that I’m such a changeable person — we all are so changeable actually — that pinning down if we’re good or not is impossible.

4. The Shill once told me (and it’s funny that Sarcastro should bring up something similar) that some people, when they meet someone, start that person out at zero and that other person has to earn their way into esteem, and other people, when they meet someone, start that person out at 100, and the person has to disappoint them into lower standing. If you had to say, which would you say that you are? To be perfectly honest, although this isn’t pretty, I’d have to say that I make a snap judgment of someone based on their appearance and way of dressing and whatever other clues I’ve got about them, and then I decide where they start, say between 20 and 80 based on what I know about them and then I revise as necessary. I just don’t see how we can start everyone at zero or at 100, since we’re bound to have some preconceptions that shape our reactions to them immediately. I guess the important thing is to be willing to make some major revisions to our initial estimation (it’s that openness thing again). The more I think about it, though, the more I think I’m a beginning at 100 person. Or maybe 80. I’m pretty likely to give people the benefit of the doubt, and I really don’t like being suspicious of people all the time. This means, I’m afraid, that I can be a dupe.

5. Do you hold yourself to that same standard? Hmmm. Again, this varies according to the day and mood. Sometimes I’m willing to start myself at 100 and work my way down if necessary. Others, the opposite, or somewhere in the middle. These days I think I’m more likely to be generous to myself. I criticize myself for plenty of things all the time, but I think I have a deep down loyalty to myself (sometimes very deep down) that keeps me sane.

6. Whatever your religious beliefs (or non-beliefs) was there one defining moment when you said, “Holy shit. This is how the universe works. This is why I believe what I believe.”? Or do you do whatever religious things you do out of habit or to appease loved ones? I don’t have a moment, but I have a year: the year I began graduate school, right after graduating from college. That was the year I “lost my faith,” although looking back it was clear what was coming. Lots of things in college prepared me for it. I finally recognized all those things that troubled my about my childhood Christianity, fully looked them in the face, and said to myself, it’s a choice between being true to my feelings here or being true to what my parents and the church have taught me. I chose my feelings. I’ve kept a vague sort of spirituality ever since but haven’t returned to regular religious practice. My mother asked for a while if I was attending church, but she’s stopped asking in the last few years. I think she’d prefer not to know. So I don’t do any religious things to appease others, but it’s easy for me because I live pretty far from my family — the only people who would be concerned at my apostasy. And they don’t pry.

7. Define “art.” This is the sort of question I might ask my students to write about, and then realize that if I had to write about it, I’d have no idea what to say. If I were a better person, I’d do all those assignments I ask my students to do myself. Anyway, ultimately, I think there is no real definition of art. Any definition is going to be flawed and incomplete. My students would say something about art being personal expression, and that’s what I think of first, and to a certain degree it’s true, but it’s so bourgeois! That definition privileges the artist, the “one who expresses” above all else. I want to mention beauty too, but some people set out to create art that is ugly or somehow aesthetically neutral. I guess art is something human-made, where the artist pays attention to how the thing is made.