Endurance is the art form preferred by our sex.

Folket som älskar landets stenar allra mest. Citerat ur ”Är svensken människa?”

The past couple of days I’ve spent at my father’s house on Brännö, an island in the West Archipelago outside of Gothenburg – also known as the city where I was born and raised. Here I’ve been enjoying a healthy diet of several swims daily in the ocean, plenty of wine in the evening over dinners while conversing with my father, my two sisters – one is Lillbubb, the other one is my “plastic sister” [that’s what the children of your parent’s partner is called in Swedish] – and my father’s girlfriend. Yesterday me and my ‘plastic’ little sister – born in 1996 – spent several hours lying in the ocean on a float in the sunshine while trying to get a more even tan and discussing life in general. Eventually I had to ask her why both she and my ‘real’ sister Lillbubb pair their bikini tops with masculine bathing shorts that reach almost all the way down to their knees. Lillbubb obviously has her reasons; reasons which my ‘plastic’ sister does not share. She said something like “you know, you see all these perfect models everywhere on TV and in magazines and you get these ideas of how the female body should look like and then you realize that your body doesn’t look like that and so you want to cover up your thighs because they’re all ugly in comparison and stuff”. She’s fourteen and in my opinion her body looks just fine. When I was her age we weren’t allowed to cover up our bodies when we realized they didn’t look like they were “supposed to” according to the models on TV and in magazines – instead, we developed destructive eating disorders and starved ourselves for years so that we’d get closer to the ideal – and also so that we’d please our mothers. Back when I was a teenager, we didn’t have the option of wearing masculine shorts in order to cover up our imperfect bodies because that would diminish our opportunities of getting hit on at the beach and not being hit on at the beach was like social suicide. But the idea that “if you’re not even close, then you shouldn’t even try” is all new to me. And even more new is the idea that before starting eighth grade you should have to become aware of how “not even close” you and your still undeveloped body are and simply give up. It is so new and unfamiliar to me that I get upset enough to write about it on my blog. Of course, I’m not blind and even I’ve paid attention to the fact that the generation that comes after mine – mine being those born in the 80’s and the next one covering the 90’s – is much ‘fuller’ than what we were allowed to be when we were their age. In a way it feels liberating that they’re not succumbing to our destructive eating disorders – ‘cause that’s pretty much a ticking bomb and won’t allow us to have sex without thinking “does he think my stomach looks fat in this position?” when becoming grown women – but still, they’re victims of the same distorted image of the female body displayed in our popular culture today. For example, on my birthday one of my best friends Annie gave me the first three seasons of “The Big Bang Theory” wrapped in a package that said “all you can geek” – that was rather funny actually – and I’ve watched almost all of it by now and all I can say is that there are too many scenes in this show where they’re eating take-outs. In general, in that show they almost always eat. And a girl like Penny – the only truly hot girl in the show, by the way – could obviously not eat that much and keep her hot body simultaneously. But if you’re, let’s say, fourteen or fifteen, and watch that show – and several other shows with girls looking just like that and eating junk food as often – you’ll jump to the conclusion that your body must be somehow defect if you can’t eat like she does and still look like she does. Okay, so I’m twenty-five and for several years now I’ve heard people warning me of how my metabolism will slow down after twenty-five and so I should watch what I put in my mouth, but even without this truthful as well as helpful knowledge I know that the actress who plays Penny doesn’t eat so much as a bite of what she’s seemingly “consuming” on a daily basis in the TV-series. Maybe this is more my problem than the problem of the 90’s generation, because my generation was never served an option to under-eating and overtly working out so as to keep our bodies looking similar to what we saw on TV and in magazines. We were taught that if we didn’t constantly strain ourselves in order to remain thin enough to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated any given day of the year, then we’d never get boyfriends to have sex with us nevertheless have parents that were proud nor approved of us. Maybe this is more my problem. But the thing is that I didn’t even know that yet another generation will be put through the very same thing until I had spent so much time with this ‘new’ generation of young women going through their teens right now. And that they’d be shaped by the same pointless popular culture made by silly and stupid men who really only want a woman who’s “happy and horny”, but they’ll be stooped into thinking – just like we did – that men won’t make out with us unless we look like a playmate. I wish I could tell the younger generation that everything will become different and better when they grow up and but I don’t think I can. I’m still captured within the senseless ideal of those of us that were brought up looking on Britney’s unnaturally flat stomach for years and years… all the while thinking “if I don’t look like that, who will ever love me?” When my body actually looked the closest to the ‘model body’ I was eighteen years old and my boyfriend at the time had to endure awfully painful intercourse with me because my hip bones kept piercing into various parts of his body. But nobody tells you these kinds of things and no man – unless experienced and not a subscriber to the image of the flawless woman as portrayed by popular culture of our day [ha! good luck finding one of those!] – will realize it when he says “I think you should loose those pounds” until he’s the one with a bruised stomach.

During my time in Sweden I’ve come to understand where I stand politically with a little help from the geological spot where I take my daily power-walk when I’m staying with my mother. I walk over the bridge and find myself in an industrial area where the most of the traffic is different work vehicles – mainly trucks of various sizes – and whenever I walk through this area the drivers find they need to honk their horns and beep at me. This happens not every once in a while but EVERY freaking time and over and over again when I power-walk through this particular area. It is not heavily trafficked, so there’s not really any other need to honk. On the morning of my birthday this one truck driver honked his horn for so long that it turned out to sound like he was making me a small serenade. I – of course – gave him the appropriate finger. It sort of reminded me of when I was seventeen and tried “walking through Memphis” in Tennessee and couldn’t because I constantly stopped traffic. I am aware of the fact that I take my power-walks wearing a mini-skirt, but that’s not an invitation for men to show their approval by making loud sounds from their WORK VEHICLES. If you find that I look good from behind, then there’s really no need for me to be informed of this – I actually know that my behind looks pretty alright with or without any honking of horns. Also I’m against men groping innocent women on public transportation. This is a growing problem of which I don’t think everyone is aware. I understand that men are “the weaker sex” indeed and all that, but seriously – since when has honking your horn at a girl on the street or ‘innocently’ feeling up a girl on the bus got a man ANYWHERE?

To sum things mentioned in this post up: women in our popular culture and modern society are treated as objects and thus they feel as objects and if they do not measure up to the current standard of the ‘object’ per say, then they’ll hide their imperfect bodies – which means ‘not appropriate to be treated solely as sexual toys for careless boys’ – and feel less feminine in the process. Instead, we endure.

Why do I not currently feel like taking up dating again? Because I know far too well how it all plays out – and never am I pleased nor satisfied with the meager outcome of this socially agreeable diversion. Let’s say it’ll go something like this: you meet me and I’m exteriorly pleasing to you and so you try and make interesting yet pointless conversation dedicated to the sole end of asking me out on a date. I agree. We go out on a date. You order some kind of alcohol so that we both get rather tipsy with time and stop caring about the fact that we have little to nothing in common. After leaving the restaurant we kiss and you’re probably rather bad at it but I’m so good that you’ll never know. Then we go to your place where I come to realize that despite all of your degrees of higher education you still haven’t’ learned how to unhook a bra and so I do it for you and pretend like it doesn’t matter all the while I begin to pity you more and more. Then we have sex and while you try your best moves I remember something funny one of my friends said the other day on an entirely different topic and so I start to laugh a little bit and you think you’re doing something wrong and then I realize it is high time for me to start faking something or else we’ll be here ALL night long. We duly go to sleep; you do the famous “hug-snuggle-let-go” move and I’m relieved. In the morning we might have sex again and while you do that I can plan my day and make it look and sound like you’re the best I ever had. But the truth is that you’ll only have your chronologic spot in the list of men I’ve had before and will have in the future; not on the list of the best men I’ve had in all of my life at all. After three days – that’s the universal rule – you will call and I will not answer.

That’s why I do not currently feel like taking up dating again. I’m not saying I’m about to get a cat or anything, all I’m saying is that the next time it is going to take a lot more than an average man to get me to agree to a date. Instead, I endure – even though “we were not supposed to endure our lives”.