Safe Space REMIX: Ground Rules for Dance Parties

In sex education, we use ground rules to build safe space during structured conversations. A lot of these safe space rules can be useful guidelines in everyday life, as well. In response to certain experiences from this past weekend, I’ve decided to remix these ground rules to apply to a specific situation in which groups of people come together to make themselves vulnerable: dance parties. What are some simple guidelines that we can use if we want to build a safe space in which to dance together for an evening?

Please tell me what you think, and add your own ideas to this list, in the comments.

1. Consent.

·      Check for enthusiastic consent before dancing with someone.

·      When someone says “no” to dancing with you, you say “okay, thanks.”

·      Note that consent is specific: Yes to dancing is a yes to dancing, not to anything else. You need to ask again if you want something else. And they may or may not say yes again.

2. Respect.

·      Respect other people: their bodies, their dance moves, their clothes, their choices…

·      Respect the physical space: help keep it clean, watch where you put your things, clean up after yourself…

3. Sharing space.

·      Step out of the center of the dance floor to give other people and other circles a chance to fill it.

·      Watch where you fall and flail so you don’t hurt other people.

·      Be aware of which spaces are getting too crowded, and where there is more space available.

4. Drink responsibly (or not at all).

·      Know that “I’m drunk” is no excuse for violating any of the other safe space guidelines.

·      Stop drinking before you get sloppy.

·      Or on second thought, maybe “no drinking” is another option.

5. Sex-positivity.

·      Enjoy the ways in which dancing connects you to your own body; respect the ways in which other people are enjoying their own bodies.

·      Limit (or avoid) explicitly sexual behavior, for example, dance-floor make-out sessions.

6. Confidentiality.

·      The dance floor is a communal space and is not for public display.

·      Ask for consent before taking or posting pictures.

·      Avoid gossiping about people’s dance-floor behaviors after the party is over.

7. Self-care.

·      Go where you need to be: Dance alone when it feels good; dance with a dance partner when it feels good; join a group when it feels good.

·      Ask for help when you need it.

·      Speak up if someone hurts you or makes you uncomfortable, even if you think it’s by accident.

8. Accountability.

·      Building safe space is an ongoing process; be open to feedback about your behavior.

·      Be sensitive to and aware of other people’s boundaries and comfort levels.

·      Avoid making assumptions about other people.

9. Love your DJ.

·      Show appreciation that the DJ is an artist bringing you a gift.

·      Do not touch the DJ’s equipment.

·      Make meaningful requests that you think your fellow dancers would enjoy, too.

10. Celebrate.

·      Make your body feel good; make yourself feel good.

·      Include everyone in the celebration.

·      Encourage everyone to express themselves through dance.

My hope is that these guidelines would help people create a space together in which they could all really let loose and personally get the most out of their dancing experience while also connecting with each other through the process of dancing.

These are just my ideas, and I’m just getting started. I look forward to getting your feedback and working through this draft to produce something that can really be useful in future dance party situations. Please tell me what works for you, what feels unreasonable, what seems off, what you think is missing, etc. 

Striving for thinness, and the toll it can take

Last week, I saw lots of uproar over news about brides-to-be taking on extreme measures to lose weight, the most recent of which includes putting a feeding tube through one’s nose for 10 days while refraining from eating anything through one’s mouth.

Ridiculous, right? Crazy, like, who would do that, besides the most vain, shallow people looking to throw money down the tube (no pun intended)?

To avoid blaming the victims, let’s look at the culture and at the industry. The wedding industry is set up under the assumption that brides will want to lose weight for their wedding—no matter what their present weight actually is. I had one friend who told me that a salesperson had actually encouraged her to purchase a dress that was too small because “obviously” she would be losing weight before her wedding day.

A few months after I got engaged, I was visiting an old friend of mine at her parents’ house. They were ordering pizza and her mom offered me a slice. When I turned it down she said immediately, “Oh! Of course! You have a dress you need to fit into.” Wait, what?

When I started looking for wedding dresses, I very quickly recognized the game of “does this dress make me look fat” and “does this one emphasize my small parts in all the right ways.” Personally, I was more interested in “does this dress make me look like myself” and “does this dress let me hug and dance and jump in all the right ways,” but such questions seemed secondary to those trying to sell me their products.

What does this industry-wide focus on bridal thinness teach young girls about love and romance?

The industry of bridal thinness is part of a culture conflating thinness with goodness and desirability. Young girls are taught to dream of the perfect marriage as the height of their personal accomplishments—and in a culture in which weight is a sign of a woman’s success or failure, weight becomes a key aspect of her success or failure at being a bride. Furthermore, as the wedding industry—and the brides themselves—play into the idea that a bride’s weight is of utter relevance on her wedding day, the sexualization of women becomes reinforced. By “sexualization” here I mean the reduction of a woman to the value of her body as a sexual object. Another meaning of sexualization includes reducing a body to specific body parts, and in many of the articles I see references to a stomach that is flat enough, thighs that aren’t too wide, and biceps that aren’t too flabby. It’s not just about the size of the body, but the “perfection” of the pieces. Women are taught to pick themselves apart. Aren’t there so many other ways in which women could eagerly prepare for marriage?

How do dieting and sexualization set up a bride to participate as an equal partner in a healthy relationship?

Um, that might be a trick question. Well, I will offer five brief thoughts on how it hurts her and holds her back from her partnership and her other close relationships:

1. Sexualization—Being sexy for someone else is different from being sexy with someone else. Does she need to feel thin enough in order to feel worthy of receiving and enjoying sexual pleasure? Studies have found a connection between self-objectification (which includes dieting behaviors) and lower sexual agency and sexual assertion. If her focus is being diverted towards being sexy for someone else, is that diverting or otherwise compromising her focus on her desires and what she deserves?

2. Inauthenticity—How does this pressure to diet and be thin affect her ability to advocate for her own needs and desires not just in her sexual relationship, but in all her relationships? Planning a wedding is a complex process of negotiating a lot of different people’s values and opinions. A bride being pressured to turn away from her natural appetites and instincts may also learn to turn away from her needs and instincts in other contexts, thus compromising her ability to be present and genuine in already tense relationships, including with her partner and with close friends and family.

3. Energy drain—Food provides energy. Calories=energy. A person needs calories to think, to get things done, to move around and make decisions and be assertive. Reduced calories means reduced energy means reduced action. Not to mention the spiritual drain that guilt and shame around weight and eating can take on a person.

4. Performance—I didn’t like to think about how many people would be looking at me throughout my wedding day. Seeing me; viewing me; thinking about how I appeared. I made an intentional decision that I didn’t want my wedding day to be about performing for others. Instead, I wanted it to be about my experience of my own life, joy, friends and family. And I think this choice needs to be made every day, and it starts at home before we leave the door. Do I consider myself and my body as something that performs for others and is viewed by others, or do I get to embody myself through my own experiences throughout the day?

5. Beauty as power—the princess/queen for a day fantasy. In the wedding industry it’s about looking like a princess. In Jewish tradition, brides are to be treated as queens for the day. So if the bride’s job is to be thin, what does this say about women entering positions of power? Is power only earned through the achievement of thinness? Are only thin women worthy of power? Or maybe it’s simpler. Maybe it’s thin=powerful. Except that directly contradicts #4, above, reduced calories=reduced energy. So what is it? Maybe women are pressured to be thin in order to divert their power from that of a true leader to that of a figurehead. A bride may be the face of the wedding, the body front-and-center in all the photo opportunities, but where is her true power? And for what can she use her power, on that day and in the future?

I would love to hear your thoughts on these questions and tensions.

Why I will wear white

I originally imagined that I would wear blue jeans and a pink tank-top for our wedding. It’s my favorite outfit! And I wanted to wear something that would allow me to be and feel like myself. Upon further consideration of occasion and dress code, I considered a flowing skirt and a tank top. Seemed reasonable.

I simply could not stomach the associations I had with the white bridal dress. The association with virginity and the implication of purity are not ideals that I seek to embrace and support. I have discussed with other women who are both sexually active and getting married how it feels insincere to get married in a white dress that implies virginity.

I’m not getting married to make myself into “an honest woman.” I have been honest all year, living with my partner, making a life together, and enjoying each other both emotionally and physically. I think both our past and our future are part of the process that we will celebrate on our wedding day.

As we started to talk more and more about our wedding, I learned a little more about the Jewish wedding ceremony. Matt mentioned his hope that he would be able to fast (not eat) the day of the wedding, as is tradition. I attended other Jewish weddings and saw the grooms don kittels, white robes. I found out that Jewish tradition considers one’s wedding day as if it were a personal Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year. Both fasting and wearing white are elements of Yom Kippur that symbolize renewal: seeking forgiveness, separating oneself from past transgressions, and getting the opportunity to earn life anew. One element of Yom Kippur that I always appreciated as a child is the way in which it acknowledges error as inherent to human life. The central prayer of the service on the eve of Yom Kippur is Kol Nidre, and it declares that all vows made in the year to come shall be considered void. This prayer is a legal process in which Jews, together, declare and embrace their human weakness. Although they will spend the day ahead of them fasting and repenting for what they and others in their community have done wrong, they are not expected to become perfect in the year to come.

I felt really drawn to this imagery because it focused on process, on improvement without perfection, and on the wedding as a day on which to renew oneself and one’s life intentions.

Upon discovering this association between one’s wedding and Yom Kippur, I said to my partner: I’ll wear white if you wear white. Let’s both wear white. Let’s have ourselves our own Yom Kippur. And he said yes!

(Note: our wedding takes place on Rosh Chodesh, the first day of the Jewish month, on which fasting is prohibited, so we will not be taking on that element of repentance.)

When I put on a white dress this Sunday morning, I will make no claim to virginity, or purity, or perfection. Rather, it is a move in which I will be reckoning with my own imperfections, failures, and weaknesses. It will be a statement in which I declare my intention to enter the wedding with a sense of repentance and renewal. I have erred in the past—in this relationship, in other relationships, and in other areas of life—both intentionally and unintentionally. On Sunday, I will seek forgiveness, and I will seek a new start. When I approach my beloved under the chuppah (wedding canopy) and see him, too, wearing white, I will know that he also seeks forgiveness, and that he also loves himself and me as imperfect beings. We will both make mistakes in the future—within our marriage, with our management of our household, with our other relationships. And the commitment we make to each other in the wedding ceremony includes standing by each other through those future mistakes.

The white we wear symbolizes the freshness of our relationship, the pursuit of personal improvement, and our celebration of our own and the other’s human fragility. For the wedding ceremony itself, we will emphasize this symbolism through putting on the ceremonial white robes. Throughout the rest of the day, our white outfits will communicate that we take this day to pause for renewal and celebration amidst a long and complex process of partnership.

How my Self Esteem Plummeted during Wedding Planning

I can’t exactly identify when it happened, but I’m sure it was sometime this spring semester. I hadn’t had this experience since about fifth grade, so I didn’t recognize it at first. But it kept happening. More and more. And I still can only guess at why: My self-esteem had plummeted.

I blame the wedding planning. But of course, there are some other confounding factors, the most obvious one being my first year of graduate school. Does graduate school make someone’s self esteem plummet? Since I had never had that experience before in my many other academic and professional endeavors, and since I basically feel okay about how I am doing in school, I am going to continue to attribute this phenomenon to the wedding planning process.

It’s a strange sensation, because rationally I still know that I am a great person in a lot of ways. But there is something about the social, emotional, and commercial challenges of this process that really got to me. As an attempt to dissect what happened, I am going to use the break-down for “Confidence” that we use in our research on adolescent development.

Confidence in Physical Appearance: I started out with loads of this, but I have to admit the constant focus on the details of my appearance during this one day are making me much more self-conscious than I enjoy. How will my dress fit? Will there be any blemishes on my face? Will my legs be adequately smooth, my fingernails properly groomed, and my hair not too flat and not too frizzy? I think a lot of my approach to dealing with my appearance is to wear bright colors. Since deciding to wear white, my usual strategy for telling myself I look stunning has been taken away. At least I will be wearing a kittel (ceremonial robe) during the wedding ceremony, so my attention will be completely taken off my appearance for the most important part of the day.

Confidence in Peer Acceptance: I usually have loads of this, also, but the contradictions in wedding planning mean that with every decision I make, I know there is someone who disagrees with me. I know there are people I love and respect that would have wanted me to make the other decision. Also, the more and more that I argue with people, disagree with people, fail to compromise with people, and am unable to give other people what they need from me, the worse and worse I feel about myself. A large part of my identity is based on my ability to nourish my relationships and to contribute flourishing friendships. The more conflicts I have with friends and family around the wedding ceremony, the more my self esteem plummets. And it is a vicious cycle, because with low self-esteem, I find it thoroughly difficult to hold my own when I experience tension with loved ones.

Confidence in School: As much as I hate to admit it, planning this wedding definitely affected my performance as a student and as a budding professional in my field. At the same time as I find this fact difficult to accept, I rationally believe it is completely understandable. I think it is incredibly important to strike a balance between one’s personal and professional lives. But when the wedding itself is already making me feel like I just can’t do things right, going to school and struggling there because I am overwhelmed, exhausted, and overcommitted makes me feel even worse. I gain a lot of confidence and self-respect by excelling as an educator, researcher, and activist. Scaling back from those activities this year, and performing slightly worse on the activities I did do, made me feel bad about myself.

Confidence in Area of Interest: I think the main reason that wedding planning led my self-esteem to plummet is that I didn’t feel like I was good at it. I didn’t have a real vision for what I wanted before I started, so that meant each detail was a new thing to navigate. I also haven’t been part of planning a lot of weddings previously, so a lot of conflicts were completely unanticipated. And sometimes I would come up with my own answer to something, and I would just be told that I was wrong. Most of those times I really was wrong—I didn’t really know what I was getting into and thus couldn’t really imagine what I needed. So a lot of the time I just didn’t feel competent. With the tasks for which I had no interest and no talent—such as selecting flowers—I just delegated completely (thanks, Mom!). However, sometimes I really did want to be part of the conversation, I just felt unprepared for the tasks at hand. Spending such a great amount of time and energy doing work in an area in which I felt truly unskilled really hurt my self-esteem.

I want to add something about the Wedding Industrial Complex, too. Because the Wedding Industry is just that, an industry and a business, it is set up to make you feel you lack something, or have specific needs, so that you will go out and buy something or hire someone to make everything better. The wedding industry is designed to kick-off this self-esteem plummet. However, the self esteem is then supposed to be rescued through purchasing and hiring. I really tried to hold myself back from extra expenditure, so I do not know how I would have felt if I had been more commercially-oriented. Or, on the other hand, I don’t know how I would have felt if I had fully committed myself to an anti-commercialist wedding.

In conclusion, I have this to say: last weekend was my bachelorette party. Two of my best friends in the whole world threw me an absolutely fabulous celebration full of surprises. I had friends present from childhood, high school, college, and these post-college years in Boston. If all of those totally fabulous, smart, caring, and fun people chose to spend a weekend celebrating with me, then there must be something good going on with me. The weekend reset me, centered me, and built a foundation for my self-esteem. I am feeling a little more ready to go into the last stretch before the wedding knowing that I am a good person, I have tried really hard to go through this process with integrity and care, and many outstanding people will be there to celebrate with me. I know my self esteem will continue to grow and get stronger, and I actually think the wedding is going to help, in the end, because of all the people that will be there.

Doing Femme

Yes, wearing makeup can be a feminist act. Wanting to appear feminine and femininely put-together can be a feminist desire. I never meant to imply otherwise. What I meant to say is that wearing makeup is not always a feminist act. Sometimes, it is a demonstration of internalized oppression, a desire to hide flaws, an act of objectification and submission, a nod to the system. When I wear makeup and skirts and pink and feel I’m doing that as a feminist act, I call that femme. I feel feminine, beautiful, brilliant, and powerful. I feel in control.

Doing femme means simultaneously critiquing and celebrating femininity in a variety of forms. It means embracing the aspects of femininity and female-focused culture that I find empowering and pleasurable in conjunction with embracing aspects of myself that totally clash with traditional conceptions of what it means to be feminine and womanly. Femme is about embracing contradictions, strengthening personal agency, and having a whole lot of fun. At least, that’s what femme means to me.

My last post was also about embracing contradictions. This contradiction: my decision to wear makeup does not only come from a place of femme desire and personal agency. It also comes from a place in which I feel I need to be girly in order to be accepted, in which I fear rebellion at risk of my own comfort and privilege, in which I yearn to achieve that standard of prettiness that I see held up as the ideal. Yes, that girl exists inside of me. Those fears and insecurities are a part of who I am.

Those fears and insecurities don’t make me any less femme and fabulous. Or do they? To be honest, I had not thought about it much until this week. I had associated doing femme with the times and places in which I feel truly free and empowered to be myself, to live and breathe and show off my own contradictions, to push boundaries. I had associated doing femme with weekends, vacations, or those days that seem so stressful that my best coping mechanism is to break out the red dress and black lace tights and go for it.

Until now, I had not thought to associate femme-and-fabulous with that place of insecurity and fear. When I chose to wear makeup at the wedding, I knew I could be radical and choose not to; but I still felt pressured by a desire to conform to mainstream practices of female beautification. Because I felt this pressure, this strong influence and pull that would, in the end, be a strong element of my decision, I didn’t feel I was doing femme. If it wasn’t totally free, it couldn’t be femme, right?

I realized today (through a conversation with a glorious femme friend) that not only had I been holding myself up to a ridiculous and damaging ideal, but I had also been holding up femme to an ideal that restricted it. I was trying to protect my femme identity from my own imperfections. I was protecting my femme identity from the parts of me that feel insecure, disempowered, and scared. But that’s not fair. What will it take to free my femme identity and let it flourish?

Femme can be imperfect. The reality of my inner experience is that, at this point in my mind-twenties, I can proudly and strongly embrace of my own power and beauty and brilliance. I am quite femme-confident. AND. And I have a good chunk of that internalized-female-oppression that entails a constant questioning of whether I am measuring up or not. I have both. And I bet a lot of other people do, too! And that’s okay. And that’s difficult. And it’s real. And yes I am using the word “and” over and over again on purpose to demonstrate that finding personal agency includes this process of embracing over and over again the contradictions of our own desires. And we can find beauty in these contradictions. And we can find power. And we can find feminism.

We can find these things, if we’re willing to risk looking for them.

The Social Construction of Desire

I have a confession: I am getting my makeup done professionally for the wedding. Well, let me qualify that confession: A close friend of one of my best friends is a makeup artist and has offered to come to my parents’ house to do my makeup and the moms’ makeup. I am really happy to be supporting a friend (financially), and I am really touched that she wants to be a part of this process. However, I am still letting her paint my face.

I went back and forth with this decision for a while. I had a very explicit conversation with one of my best friends in which she told me that getting professional makeup was completely optional, that I could choose to do my own makeup the simple way in which I do it before I go to work or before I go to a party. I could choose not to wear any makeup, but I probably wouldn’t, since I do enjoy wearing some simple makeup items (especially eyeshadow). So I knew I had a choice. And my friend-in-common with this makeup artist brought me over for a trial run, and I actually thought it was pleasant enough and that my face still looked natural enough with makeup on. And, as yet another friend pointed out, it will be one more thing that someone else will take care of on the day of the wedding, I will not be in charge of my own makeup. I will have support in that task as I will in many others, and this support is something I have deeply cherished throughout the process of this wedding.

I am sharing this story not because I think my makeup is that important, but rather because it illustrates the clashing and crashing of so many different desires, some that come from my feminist values, some that come from my aesthetic preferences, and some that I know are socially constructed from my two and a half decades of living and breathing in a materialist patriarchy. This clashing and crashing has been incessant throughout the planning process. The kicker is, all of the desires are real, they are all strong emotions that I experience and with which I need to cope. I cannot have everything I want because so many of the things I want conflict with other things I want.

I want to not care about how I look. I want my appearance to be a mere detail in the exciting and spiritual proceedings of the day. I want to not have to edit, adjust, and cover up my natural physical states in order to show that I can rise to the occasion.

But I also want to look good. I want to feel pretty, I want to be happy with how I look in the pictures, and I really want my mother to be happy with how I look in the pictures. And I want to express physically the glowing joy and ecstasy I feel emotionally about the commitment and partnership that this day is meant to celebrate.

Mostly, I want to not feel self-conscious. I want to not be wondering if others are judging me for different choices I have made about my appearance. But that’s not an option. Just as it’s not an option for me to make a decision that I myself won’t have a way to judge, it’s not possible for me to make a decision that others won’t be able to judge.

I need to ask for acceptance, and I need to ask for forgiveness. I need to ask for these things from myself, and from my partner, my friends and my family. I need acceptance of my strong, complex and often-conflicting desires. I was, am and will be inconsistent, but passionately so.

All Dressed Up and Nowhere Safe to Party

Dear Eve,

I know what you mean. I know, and it breaks my heart. I know because I once studied, slept and partied on a college campus, and I know because I have read about other college campuses. I know that college can be a time of extreme empowerment and extreme disempowerment.

I know because this morning I got an email from my university with news that a sexual assault taking place in a fraternity house was reported this weekend.

The Golf Pros/ Tennis Hos party theme is clearly sexist and objectifying of women. However, when the fraternity advertises a party by saying, “Everyone makes mistakes, but not all mistakes are bad,” that is evidence of rape culture. That is part of a culture in which unwanted sex is actively expected of girls and then dismissed as a “mistake” and promoted as “good.”

I know that evidence of rape culture is ubiquitous on college campuses.

What I don’t know is how, why, and what can we do about it?

I apologize for my silence since you posted on my blog one month ago. Your post upset me and moved me from the moment I read it, and I have thought about you and your words regularly since then. i am sorry that I have been silent. We cannot be silent.

How did you feel when you saw the advertisement for that party? What do you think went through the minds of girls who had friends in that fraternity, who were looking forward to that party, who talked for hours with their friends about what tennis ho outfits they could wear, but who noticed their friends made no comments about whether or not mistakes would be made that night, and what makes a mistake good or bad, and how to choose for yourself what mistakes to make.

It’s hard to be a woman on a college campus these days. It’s hard to find sexual agency and to feel safe. I don’t feel we are safe when I see those posters. I don’t feel safe, and I don’t feel that any woman who attends that party is safe. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that woman should not attend those parties. Because we should dance and drink with the best of them, and make great friends and great memories. But we should be able to go to parties and still have our bodies and decisions respected…

we should, but that is not yet the case for most women at most parties.  

Eve- what can I do for you and your friends? What can the health services staff and the women's center staff and other people on campus who want to help you feel safe and help you access empowerment--what can they do for you? What can I do for the girls at fraternity parties at my own university, to help them?

Furthermore, what can we say to the frat boys who made those posters and hosted that party?

Thank you, Eve, for sharing. I encourage you to share more.

Yours,

Mimi

The Body Positive New Year Challenge, Week One: Dressing Up

Sunday: self-massaged my tight leg muscles using oils
Monday: told a friend about the challenge
Tuesday: went to work dressed ready to dance
Wednesday: gave my students non-food items as prizes and gifts
Thursday: cried, briefly, in the morning
Friday: read a book about healing trauma in and through the body
Saturday: wrote my blog posts about the challenge

The first few days of this challenge were quite exciting, but it definitely became more difficult to think of what to do as the week went on and my attention drifted elsewhere.

My most body positive day was Tuesday, when I went to work dressed ready to dance. I really dressed up because my students had a major presentation that evening, but I realized in the morning that I really enjoyed moving my hips in that outfit. I felt good the whole day not because I was actually dancing, but because even walking reminded me of my body is amazing ability to dance and how much I enjoy it.

How do your clothes affect how you feel about your body? How do your feelings about your body affect the choices you make about what to wear? When is dressing up a body positive action, and when does trying to dress a certain way contribute to negative feelings about our bodies?