That Takes Ovaries! (27 page)

8:00 A.M. We’re postering the city tonight and it’s raining buckets. The forecast says seventy-mile-per-hour winds and “one hundred percent chance of rain in all areas all day.” Great.

I have long been frustrated with the way women are depicted in our culture—the emphasis is always on looks over brains or talent. My frustration heightened in 1995 when I overheard a mother offering her preteen daughter a cookie. The girl took it, saying, “Sure; I can start my diet
tomorrow.”
I was surprised. “It’s starting so young,” I thought, making the link between the depiction of females in the media and the stories I’d read about girls’ self-esteem plummeting around age twelve. Images of women in popular culture (led by advertising, entertainment, and “beauty” industries) affect girls’ perceptions of themselves and encourage eating disorders. Every year billions of dollars are spent on advertising; every day we see hundreds of glossy
images. This barrage is effective. It is virtually impossible to keep from internalizing these industries’ beauty standards, and difficult to offer criticism or alternative images that can have a real impact—unless you have the money to buy your own billboards. Or an inclination to become an Urban Guerilla.

Not long after the cookie incident, I became obsessed with Obsession. Calvin Klein’s perfume ads had been around for years, but an especially annoying new one sent me over the edge. On municipal buses and huge billboards towering over the city, Kate Moss reclined nude, her bones so accentuated and her face so sunken, she looked as if she was starving.
Why isn’t anybody mad about this?
I wondered. I sure was. I wanted to do something, something louder than writing Calvin Klein a letter. I knew others also had to be sick of seeing models photographed to look as scrawny, weak, and vulnerable as possible. I wanted to do something big enough so that others might be motivated to do something as well. At first I envisioned myself scrambling up the scaffolding to deface the billboards. But instead, I chased after buses for weeks until I got a good photo of the ad. Then I scanned it into a computer and changed the text to read: “Emaciation Stinks—Stop Starvation Imagery.” I made posters and conned friends and family into helping me plaster the city. About-Face, a San Francisco group dedicated to combating negative images of women, was born.

3:30 P.M. I have such a nervous stomach. I am always nervous on poster nights, but this torrential downpour is making me crazy. I fear volunteers are already jumping ship and making other plans. I’ve got to try and eat something.

My goal in using posters is to make a public statement that is familiar: stylish, big, and on the streets with the other images. Our second poster was of a brightly colored circus cage (like on a box of animal crackers) with fashion models trapped inside. The banner read, “Please Don’t Feed the Models.” The cage was a perfect symbol of the ways women are kept—and keep themselves—in check, not only by the beauty rituals that hold us captive (not leaving the house without makeup, not going to
the beach with hairy legs), but also by the constant pressure to remain within verbal, physical, and sexual confines. I scrawled the idea on a napkin one night, gave it to my graphic artists, and two weeks later pasted the big posters all over the city in honor of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week.

7:00 P.M. We decide to go ahead despite the rain. Twenty-three people show up. We divide into nine teams, each with paste, rollers, and a map with a specific section of the city circled. It is still drizzling as we set out.

Postering is thrilling. It’s rebellious, and you envision yourself skulking in the streets looking shiftily back and forth like a spy. It’s a rare event that brings kidlike excitement to a bunch of cynical city dwellers, and the combination of doing something that’s illegal
and
that you feel strongly about is too compelling to resist. It makes you feel powerful and righteous; it makes you think you can effect real change in the world.

On the downside, I have been tracked down and screamed at by construction managers, causing my stomach to knot. I am a hyperresponsible person, the classic “good girl.” Yet I do what I think is right in my gut even if I might get in trouble or piss someone off. We don’t set out to anger construction managers or create more work for them, but guerilla tactics are a perfect way to reach people on the same visual level that billboards do. And they get media attention. The week I posted my Obsession spoof I appeared on five television newscasts and countless newspaper and radio programs. Since our first postering, About-Face has received support from thousands around the world. Phone messages, letters, and e-mails come from parents, teachers, school nurses, grandmothers, and teenage girls themselves. They say, “Thank goodness someone is taking this on.” They say, “How can we help?”

9:00 P.M. The teams come back with paste in their hair and on their clothes, and with stories to tell: “We totally plastered this site near the park.” “People were stopping and asking about the posters, so we gave them some.” “We ran out of paste and bought flour to make more.”

We collect the goopy rollers, rags, and cans, load up the cars, hug, and say “See you next time.” My volunteers are ordinary, law-abiding,
polite types who go home gushing with bravado. They, like me, are transformed by the experience.

The day after a postering, many of the 400+ posters will be torn down by annoyed construction workers. But some will stay up for months. While they won’t be as noticed as a Calvin Klein billboard, they will still produce a reaction. Some folks will miss the point, others will totally get it, and some—like you?—may even be inspired to perpetrate an urban assault of your own. After that, you may find yourself on a cross-town bus, passing a poster hung on a plywood wall. A sense of pride will well up in you. You’ll smile smugly and turn to the stranger next to you: “I did that,” you’ll brag. And you should; instead of being complacent, you took a stand.

Next are two girls-in-pants stories: one kinda quiet, one kinda not. Interestingly enough, they happened at the same time but in different places. Girl telepathy? –Rivka

Girls were not allowed to wear pants in my elementary school. This was PS 104, a public school, so no uniform was involved.
The rationale was pure gender stereotyping; pants were simply considered inappropriate attire for girls in the late 1960s.

One freezing winter day when I was eight and in the third grade, I decided that common sense should prevail over this rule. I don’t think I struggled long with this decision, but I’m sure I conferred with my mother. After checking the outdoor thermometer and seeing its bitter cold reading, she was with me. So I pulled on a pair of pants, grabbed my brown-bag lunch, and headed out, braced for both the weather and the angry lecture I expected to get at school.

As usual, I walked around the corner and three houses down to pick up my friend Mindy so we could walk together. When she opened the front door, Mindy saw my pants. She was wearing a skirt. As soon as we got outside, she changed her mind. We went back in and she put on pants. The two of us went to school that day warm, comfortable, and betrousered. Our teacher didn’t say a word. Nobody told us not to do it again. I took that as a positive sign, and I didn’t wear a skirt again for three years.

I guess I was an elementary-school role model, because soon after that day, other girls started wearing pants, too. The clothing barrier had been broken forever at PS 104. I didn’t get an award at assembly for this—in fact, no one ever mentioned it—but in my heart I felt like a champion.

“I’m tired of freezing my ass off every morning waiting for the school bus,” my friend Roberta said as we lay on her bed eating Fritos out of the bag.

“It’s such a dumb rule,” Eda scowled.

I nodded in agreement. “Yeah, we should do something about it.”

Eda, Roberta, and I were best friends in the seventh grade at Junior High West, a 2,400-student school in a suburb outside of Boston. It was early winter, in the late 1960s, and microminis—very, very short skirts—were “in.” Pantyhose hadn’t made it to the mass market yet, so we actually had to wear stockings and garter belts, which I
hated.
The garters/short skirt combination made it difficult to even move without revealing too much. However, at the time, every school in the country had a dress code. Skirts were the only option for girls, even during the coldest winter months.

“Hey, wait. I have an idea,” I said, grabbing the last handful of Fritos. “Tomorrow, just for one day, let’s wear pants to school to protest.”

I may have been a little shrimp—I weighed only sixty-nine pounds—but I had a strong social conscience. It was during the height of what they called “the Vietnamese conflict,” and I regularly skipped school to go to all kinds of protests: Stop the War, Ban the Bomb, End World Hunger, Fight for Women’s Lib. Though only eleven and twelve years old, all of my friends were politically active. We had politics before we had our periods.

Eda, Roberta, and I hid our pants in our book bags so our mothers wouldn’t see them, then we changed in the girls’ room before the first bell. We were excited. The stir began as soon we
left the bathroom. A buzz just started. You have to understand, today it would be like someone walking buck-naked down the hallway. We weren’t in pants long—fifteen minutes tops—before the homeroom teacher sent us to the principal’s office.

“Do you want me to call your parents?” Principal Harry was a typical authority-figure-macho-schmuck. He tried to bully us. “This is the school rule…
blah, blah, blah.”

We had expected this. We knew we’d be forced to change; being rebels, we just wanted to see how long it would take. Even after we were back in our miniskirts, word spread. It was
the
subject of conversation during all three lunch periods. Some girls even talked about bringing pants the next day: “Right on. Maybe
I’ll
do it tomorrow.”