Pressure test
Of dishwashers, corpses and pubic hair
My house was built in the 1940s and one of the previous owners was fond of DIY fixes that flouted building codes and common sense. It is not unusual for me, even decades into owning this house, to find some jerry-rigged pipe or wiring that defies belief.
We had a new dishwasher installed last week and the installer looked into the space where the new appliance would sit and asked, tentatively, “is that, uh, the bathtub?” Yes, it’s the bathtub. Right there. Because there is no wall or divider between the kitchen and the bathroom on the other side. The electrical connection for the dishwasher was, to my surprise, an ancient extension cord going to the basement. Which is also visible through the space behind the dishwasher.
Fortunately, an electrician had already added a new outlet under the sink when doing other work. But it never occurred to me to check and see where the old dishwasher was plugged in before said outlet was installed.
The gaps and fixes and odd spaces connect symbolically with how I’ve been thinking about narratives I carry around power and gender. Just when I think I’ve done all the excavating I need to do, I turn and find another gap, another hole in the floorboards of my understanding, another inexplicable connection.
Because that dishwasher that was plugged into the basement? I was there when it was installed. I don’t remember suggesting it should be connected to an extension cord in flagrant violation of building codes and good sense, but that’s what happened. On my watch.
The narratives, the stories about who we get to be, how important we are, if we are listened to or dismissed, can be gaps in our foundational understanding of who are and how we move through the world. Some of them are minor inconveniences, others can burn the whole house to the ground. I want to find them and fix them.
Pressure Test
In the past two months, I’ve been doing a slew of facilitating with leadership teams in my job. In each session we do some kind of planning, and the plans have action items. When we are reviewing the plans I do an exercise called the Pressure Test.
· If we are sitting here a year from now and this didn’t work, give me one reason why.
· What are we missing?
· What are we not considering that can impact our ability to make this happen?
This isn’t about inviting the infinitely irritating “Devil’s Advocate” approach where largely unlikely scenarios are strewn about, usually by an individual who wants to seem strategic by obstructing everything.
This is about building the cultural muscle to take a pause and consider if you missed anything. Asking this in a team means intentionally allowing everyone to contribute, especially people who might have less power or influence but are on the front lines and privy to information and experience senior leaders may lack.
What would it mean to pressure test our ideas and narratives outside of work? How would this work personally? Could I get to awareness more quickly if I pressure tested myself on personal narratives? When I’m being inundated by horrible news and destructive narratives about many marginalized groups, including women, how can I stay grounded and not be swayed in my understanding? How can I stay alert to the obvious gaps and dangers in cultural narratives which appear to be sound on the surface but are damaging at the core?
The Personal Pressure Test
What am I missing?
I understand many of the ways in which my understanding of my body, my agency, my power as a woman, has been impacted by destructive cultural narratives. I read and listen to many women whose work I admire who point out concepts I might not have thought about, Tressie McMillan Cottom who adds insight not just about race, but also about culture and class. There’s a long list of women who educate me.
But I keep asking myself what I’m missing and how the missing information might be leaving me vulnerable.
Lately, I have been feeling a tremendous amount of grief around the way girls and women are treated in this culture and the way I was and am treated as a woman. I’m unpacking the ways in which I have internalized these narratives and the cultural violence they’ve done and how that has impacted my whole life. It is painful. I’m noticing small things and seeing the weight of them accumulated over a lifetime.
Corpses
I watch lots of police and detective shows. Only in the past few years did I really see the way violence to women’s bodies is fetishized. The murder victim is often a woman, and frequently her dead body – usually young, slim and naked – is displayed as an object, like a roast on the table, inert and available for consumption. The conflation of youth, nakedness and death is distressingly necrophiliac, but so common it is a trope I stopped noticing with my conscious mind.
Shows like the ever popular SVU series that focus on sexual violence portray a wide range of victims, and there is an undeniable satisfaction in seeing the perpetrators get arrested. But the show is still focused on sexual violence which is largely a problem for women and children.
Pubic Hair
“What kind of man wants to have sex with a woman who looks like a child?”
Years ago, a good friend of mine from college and I were talking. She is a physician and she talked about that moment in her practice when most of the women she saw had removed all of their pubic hair.
We were both were creeped out at the idea that the cultural standard of sexual attractiveness had shifted to require that adult women looked like prepubescent children.
“What kind of man wants to have sex with a woman who looks like a child?” we asked.
Well, we know the answer to that one, don’t we? For years, being sexually attractive included removing a key marker of puberty. Of course, people cite other reasons, and everyone gets to do what they want to with their bodies. But how did we arrive at a cultural assumption that a woman who looks like a child is more sexually desirable?
News articles and social media posts talk about the trend in the last few years away from hair removal to a more natural “full bush.” Some of this is said to be part of the body positivity movement.
What if it is actually about asserting our right to be attractive as adult women, with all of our secondary sex characteristics. What if this trend is really a bunch of women deciding they don’t want to have sex with men who prefer a pre-pubescent body?
What evidence counts?
It makes me sad to see how long it took me, in reading about the release of the Epstein files, to understand that the damning evidence already existed, in the statements of the women who were abused as girls and have spoken out, for years. They weren’t listened to.
The frenzied focus on the release of the files, which is of course important, often read as if the files were the only credible source, the written exchanges between these men, and some women.
It was not the only source. The strong reaction to the image of Pam Bondi refusing to turn and look at the women behind her who were victims of the sex trafficking and pedophilia perpetrated by Epstein tells me I’m not the only one realizing that there always was enough evidence, and it had and has authority. We just didn’t want to acknowledge it.
Centering ourselves
I talk often about the pitfalls of assuming social and cultural failings are ours to address as individual women rather than a systemic issue. The new mother who blames herself for not “handling things” better without considering the impact of limited parental leave, the expense of childcare, and whatever gendered narratives her husband and family may carry about whose job it is to care for the children, the house, and the emotional labor of the marriage.
I wrote about it here last week – who is being centered right now and why? Because my personal pressure test often includes that question – who is being centered and why?
I can, of course, opt to not center myself. But as a woman, knowing the ways I was indoctrinated to center others, especially men, at home and at work, I try to take a beat and ask myself why? The only people I now automatically center are my grandchildren, because they are very young. This doesn’t mean I don’t center others, it just means I try not to do it reflexively.
The best pressure test is other people
Community, whether it is a group of friends, a book club, or a recovery circle, can be the best way to pressure test your narratives. My friends and I talk about what we are reading, listening to, what comes up for us, what old narratives are being revealed. My spiritual communities challenge my ideas about the care of creation – why do I keep ordering shit from Amazon – and a whole host of other topics. Often it is uncomfortable.
But it is valuable work not just for myself, but for my daughter and grandchildren. If I am clear about the narrative obstacle courses that I encounter, I will have a better chance of not passing them onto my grandchildren.
I was young when I had my children, and steeped in many destructive and limiting narratives. Just as I was the one who supervised the dishwasher installation with the rogue extension cord, so I raised my daughter in a cultural and narrative structure that I now see was deeply flawed. It my job to fix that for the next generation, to try, as best I can, to make the small repairs as I go so they will have a safer, more functional foundation.