• About Me
  • Other Writings
  • Interview Clips
  • All About Me: American Racism, American Narcissism, and the Conversation America Can’t Have
  • Video Clips
  • Boy @ The Window Pictures
  • Boy @ The Window Theme Music

Notes from a Boy @ The Window

~

Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Objectification

On Maturity and Writing In Text Message Form

11 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

"I Would Die 4 U" (1984), Anger, Black Masculinity, Crush #1, Crush #2, Depression, Disillusionment, Emasculation, Maturity, Objectification, Obsession, Pedestal, Phyllis, Pitt, Prince, Rejection, Sexism, Text Messaging, Wendy, White Plains Galleria


Dulcesita, "i would die for you," November 11, 2013. (http://www.myxer.com).

Dulcesita, “i would die for you,” November 11, 2013. (http://www.myxer.com).

In Boy @ The Window, I have a chapter on my first year at Pitt and the baggage I carried from my last months in Mount Vernon, New York, Phyllis (a.k.a., Crush #2) included. I haven’t discussed Phyllis much in the six and a half years I’ve been running this blog on all things related to my memoir. Mostly because once I got over my crush-turned-internalized-obsession, I realized that she wasn’t really all that as a person. Still, given the number of posts I’ve done on my Mom, my late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice and Wendy (a.k.a., Crush #1), Phyllis does deserve some mention, along with my stumbled-filled transition to manhood that went with the years between December ’85 and August ’88.

A key point for me in this transition was in October and early November ’87. I finally worked up the courage to write Phyllis a note about an incident earlier that summer, one in which she all but emasculated me at the White Plains Galleria. As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

Crushing walnuts in plastic bag, November 11, 2013. (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/).

Crushing walnuts in plastic bag, November 11, 2013. (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/).

I got the address, bought her a card for her eighteenth birthday, and sat down and wrote her. About how I liked her and wanted to know if she “ever liked me.” I needed to know if she and her sister really were talking about me at the bus stop that day, “one way or the other.” I wanted to know what she thought I needed in order to impress someone like her in the future. Then I added “Happy 18th Birthday!” I sent the card off on the second week in October, just a few days before her birthday.

On the second of November, I got her response. It was in purple ink, with heart shapes and circles for dots over “i”s. Reading her letter was like reading the liner notes off of a Prince album. Like the song “I Would Die 4 U,” Phyllis had decided to limit her English skills to the ’80s equivalent of sign language on paper, a real “revolution” on both their parts. I remember she started, “Thank U 4 your card 2day,” an insult to my intelligence. She would’ve been better off with, “Yo nigga, ’s up wit’ ya sweatin’ me?” She wrote indirectly that she did like me at one point in time, but added “but we’re in college now . . . around lots of nu people” She admitted that I was her and Claudia’s topic of conversation that day, but “I needed 2 get over that.” She hinted that I shouldn’t write her again, and that was it. No apologies, no attempt to understand how I felt…

After Phyllis’ wonderful response, I all but stopped going to class. I missed most of my classes the month of November, only showing up for exams or if my mood had let up long enough to allow me to function like normal. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I allowed my dorm mates to cheer me up by getting a couple of cases of Busch Beer. These were the Pounder type, sixteen-ounce cans. After getting Mike to get us the cases, we went back to Aaron’s room and started drinking. I downed four cans in fifteen minutes, and was drunk within a half hour. I started throwing around the word “bitch.” Anytime anyone mentioned Phyllis’ name – or any woman’s name for that matter — one of us said the B-word and we’d guzzle down some beer.

In today’s world of text messaging, I would’ve found Phyllis’ response so ridiculous that I probably would’ve shared it with close friends and laughed about it for weeks afterward. But as someone with the emotional and psychological maturity of a twelve-year-old in the fall of ’87, Phyllis’ response really, really, really hurt. Her letter shattered the pedestal on which I had placed her, and reaffirmed every negative thing I’d felt about myself for the previous half decade.

Depression image, Carroll College, Counseling Services, November 11, 2013. (http://www.carroll.edu).

Depression image, Carroll College, Counseling Services, November 11, 2013. (http://www.carroll.edu).

It also left me so depressed that I finished that semester with a 2.63 GPA. That, and spending the holidays at 616, made me determined to use the anger I felt toward myself and Phyllis as fuel for the next semester. And even though that worked so well that I made Dean’s List, I still hadn’t really gotten over Phyllis’ rejection by the time the school year was over in April ’88.

It took one last look at that letter — that unbelievably trifling and simple letter — to realize that even under the best of circumstances, Phyllis and I would’ve been a match made only in a mad scientist’s laboratory. I’d never be interested in a human being who talked down to me, as if I was unworthy of anything other than some simple shorthand language. Or in any woman whose expectations of men were about as objectifying as Mike Tyson’s views of women. I realized that I had finally gotten to know the real Phyllis, and in the process, had begun to know the real me, and what I needed to change about myself in order to build a better, 2.0 version of me. With that, like so much from my freshman dorm at Lothrop Hall, Phyllis’ letter became part of my garbage pile.

Sexism – It’s Complicated

03 Thursday Mar 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Academy for Educational Development, AED, Chick, Contradictions, Damsel-in-Distress, Feminism, Girl, New Voices, New Voices Fellowship Program, Objectification, Objectify, Sexism, Terminology, Woman, Womanism, Women, Youth


Sexism Hurt Everyone, March 2, 2011. Source: http://dribbleglass.com

I started writing this in response to the contradictions anyone can find in looking at Women’s History Month. Particularly the distance between feminist/womanist rhetoric about girls and women loving themselves for who they are and not how they look. Versus the everyday barrage of images about beauty and achieving it for others’ pleasure, if not for one’s own. Then I realized that this is an issue for women and men, boys and girls, regardless and because of race and socioeconomics. Then I thought that beauty isn’t the only insecurity folks who are blessed or gifted become neurotic about over time.

 

It just proves that most of us, even the most well-rounded, well-meaning and well-adjusted of us, can’t help but be somewhat sexist. And that there are many of us who represent walking contradictions of feminism and sexism who call others on their -ism “isht” but refuse to recognize it in ourselves.

Sexism is complicated by the fact that it often is more than just the mere objectification of women. After all, men can be eye-candy as well, and using the term women in the universal, at least in the Western world, equates almost exclusively to White women. I haven’t even begun to describe the exclusion of the transgender community from this conversation, as well as how embedded middle class and affluent values are in our understanding feminism (but not womanism) in our Women’s History discourse.

Such was the case for me nine years ago at my job as assistant director of the New Voices Fellowship Program at the Academy for Educational Development (AED). (It’s the organization that finds itself under suspension from government grants because of serious financial malfeasance since the beginning of last December — see my blog post from December 2010). We were prepping binders and other materials for a New Voices selection panel meeting when a staff member engaged me in a conversation about how I moved from dating to marriage. It was a question that required me to discuss my progression to serious relationships.

Though I didn’t want to go into major details about my personal life, I did want to give the young man an answer that made sense. So I started with how I saw women when I was about twenty-two or twenty-three (the younger man’s age at the time, by the way), and worked my way forward. I noted how I often interchanged the terms “woman,” “girl” and “chick” when I was younger, but had pretty much grown out of objectifying women in that manner by the time I’d started dating my future wife a few years later.

A female co-worker walked into the conference room while I was in mid-sentence, and the only thing she heard was “chick.” She demanded a retraction on the spot, which I summarily refused. “I’m not going to change a story by using a different term when I know I used that term ten years ago,” I said. I added that the conversation wasn’t really her business, especially since she walked into the middle of it without

Sexism, March 2, 2011. Source: http://swpeng.com

knowing the context of it.

 

She reported my allegedly sexist misdeed to my immediate supervisor, who didn’t know how to respond, so he did nothing. That, at least to me, was actually more sexist than anything I may have said and regardless how anyone could’ve interpreted it. That my co-worker never followed up to discuss why I happened to be using the term “chick” seemed to me a sign that even she knew she overreacted to something that was never an issue to begin with.

A few months later, the young woman had resigned, leaving to work on her master’s at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. She told me, in the way of sage advice, that I “needed to open up more and be honest” with younger staff. I just looked at her and wished her well. How can anyone be honest about anything if the first thing we say to each other is to change our stories about our experiences because the words we use can be interpreted as sexist (or racist, or fatist or any other -ist or -ism)?  It seemed to me that if anyone had any serious problems negotiating feminism and sexism, it was my former staff member, not me.

Not that I didn’t realize I had some issues regarding my feminism/womanism versus my own sexism. Most of them have come from what I haven’t said, what I have and haven’t done regarding White women and women of color over the years. As I’ll discuss in my next blog, I’ve had three decades’ worth of damsel-in-distress neurosis (I have no idea what the DSM-IV code is for that).

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below:

scr2555-proj697-a-kindle-logo-rgb-lg

Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

iBookstore-logo-300x100

Boy @ The Window on Apple's iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/boy-the-window/id643768275?ls=1

Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

You can also add, read and review Boy @ The Window on Goodreads.com. Just click on the button below:

Boy @ The Window

Twitter Updates

  • @JasonReynolds83 @surlybassey Horrible, horrible, horrible. 1 day ago
  • RT @JasonReynolds83: Please read this. A child expresses themselves, tells their truth in a poem, and adults ridicule the child to protect… 1 day ago
  • RT @stewartdantec: It’s sad that we live in a country so full of Bibles and churches but so empty of love and liberation. 1 day ago
  • RT @DrSepinwall: OH HELL NO!! One of my Haitian OG friends shared an email he got from @nytimes thanking him for all of his help on the deb… 1 day ago
  • RT @marisel_moreno: Today white ppl are catching up with what has been common knowledge among Haitians and other Caribbean people. #Haiti g… 1 day ago
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Archives

  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007

Blogroll

  • Kimchi and Collard Greens
  • Thinking Queerly: Schools, politics and culture
  • Website for My First Book and Blog
  • WordPress.com

Recent Comments

My Sampling of Super… on The White-Boy Logic of Su…
decollins1969 on “They Can Never Kill Eno…
JAYSON J LUTES on “They Can Never Kill Eno…

NetworkedBlogs on Facebook

NetworkedBlogs
Blog:
Notes From a Boy @ The Window
Topics:
My Life, Culture & Education, Politics & Goofyness
 
Follow my blog

616 616 East Lincoln Avenue A.B. Davis Middle School Abuse Academia Academy for Educational Development AED Afrocentricity American Narcissism Authenticity Bigotry Blackness Boy @ The Window Carnegie Mellon University Child Abuse Class of 1987 CMU Coping Strategies Crush #1 Crush #2 Death Disillusionment Diversity Domestic Violence Economic Inequality Education Family Friendship Friendships Graduate School Hebrew-Israelites High-Stakes Testing Higher Education History Homelessness Humanities Humanities Program Hypocrisy Internalized Racism Jealousy Joe Trotter Joe William Trotter Jr. K-12 Education Love Manhood Maurice Eugene Washington Maurice Washington Misogyny Mother-Son Relationship Mount Vernon High School Mount Vernon New York Mount Vernon public schools Multiculturalism MVHS Narcissism NFL Pitt Pittsburgh Politics of Education Poverty President Barack Obama Race Racial Stereotypes Racism Relationships Self-Awareness Self-Discovery Self-Reflection Sexism Social Justice Teaching and Learning University of Pittsburgh Violence Whiteness Writing

Top Rated

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Notes from a Boy @ The Window
    • Join 2,398 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Notes from a Boy @ The Window
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...