Uncensored Feminista

I remember as a young girl the day that my parents decided to talk to my brother about playing little league baseball. I was livid that they would consider putting him in sports and not me, so I demanded that I play baseball too. Of course, at that age I didn’t know that girls weren’t allowed to play baseball. Girls played softball, but that was okay with me too. I remember my mom took us both to get gloves and cleats, and she had to buy my brother a cup. “What’s that for?” I asked my mom. She said, “It’s for your brother to protect himself…down there.” Again, I didn’t question it. Of course I knew boys were different than girls and I knew that boys were more sensitive than girls and needed to protect “that” region more than girls, but I still found it a bit weird that they would have special equipment to protect it when playing sports.

So then I went for my try-outs and threw the softball like I had done several times playing baseball in my front yard with all the neighborhood kids. I hit the ball, I ran the bases, I slid into home plate, I did everything I needed to do to place well, and I played just like a boy because at that point I still had it in mind that there was no difference between boys and girls outside of anatomy and I was extremely competitive. Everyone was impressed with me and with the fact that it would be my first time playing on a little league team. They thought I had talent and I could go far. I felt so good at that moment hearing all the praise. I suddenly fell in love with softball and wanted to make something out of it. I thought I could become another Darryl Strawberry or a Babe Ruth, or maybe even another Jose Canseco. What I didn’t realize, at the time, was that in this society there was a big difference between me and all those big baseball stars. One big difference was that I was a girl. It wasn’t until later on in life that my heart was broken, but I’ll get to that later.

I went to my softball practices and was placed on the outfield, right-field to be exact. I came to find out later that this is where they put people who didn’t play too well because most balls didn’t go out there. I also found out later that I was placed there because it was my first year. By the end of my first year though I was playing center, which was a big deal because that’s where most of the balls went to, and I played good! I was on top of the ball all the time, I was communicating with my players making sure we didn’t crash into each other in the middle of the field, I was throwing the ball from the outfield to home plate and I would make it with maybe one bounce. I had talent. I had an arm most people envied. I could hit, I could run, I could slide, and I didn’t fear a thing. I was hit by a couple of balls, one of which took a bad bounce and hit me right on the mouth when I still had braces. That didn’t feel good but it only motivated me even more to play better. My mom was proud of me. She would go to all my games and she would cheer me on. She wanted me to do my best and she was proud of me. She wanted so much for me. She wasn’t one to get dirty the way I did or participate in sports, and I think it had something to do with how my grandmother raised her. My grandmother was more concerned with bringing her up to be a proper lady and to be honest I don’t know that she had the choice to play sports when she was growing up like I did. I think in a way she envied me.
When I wasn’t practicing, I was helping my brother practice. At one point I had asked my brothers coach to help me practice fast pitch because I was moving on from slow pitch softball to fast pitch and it was a change for me. We went out to the field, he pitched me a couple balls and every ball I hit I would hit them far. He was impressed. As a matter of fact his exact words were, “I wish I could have you on my team!” I was competitive and I wanted to win at everything and be better than my brother and at this I was and he would be the first to admit it. He will flat out tell you to this day that I could outplay him hands down.

One day, when I was about 14 I told my mom that I wanted to keep playing softball that I wanted to play at a professional level. I remember it was in the morning and she was driving me to school. She turned to me and said, “Honey, there are no professional girls teams.” “But why mom?! There has to be! I love playing and I play good, so why can’t I play pro?!” She turned to me, as much as she could because she was driving, and said, “I don’t know why there aren’t any teams, but there just isn’t. I think they have some Olympic teams, but they don’t have a professional league, not like they do in baseball.” My heart was broken. I loved playing more than anything in the world and I wanted to continue playing because it was a passion of mine. To find out that there wasn’t any way that I could continue playing beyond college was heartbreaking for me. Of course, I never made it to play on a collegiate level. I had lost all hope of ever playing beyond high school but that had more to do with my self-esteem and the things that I got into in high school more than anything else, or maybe it was a series of things. Maybe it stemmed from this conversation I had with my mom, but all I know is that once I got into high school my pride when it came to softball was considerably lessened.

This conversation with my mother was one of the first realizations I had that there was a gender split in society. This was the first time that I realized that there was a double standard when it came to sports. I knew I could play. I knew I could play better than my brother and better than most of the boys on his baseball team yet I was denied the opportunity to ever play professionally or even with them simply because of my gender. This was the first time that I had faced some kind of rejection that had hurt my self-esteem simply because I was a girl, but I know that had I been given the chance that I would outplay any of those boys, and I know of a couple of girls out there as well who were just as good if not better than most of the boys who were at our same level. Yet somehow because we were women we were not only denied playing with them but we would be called names too simply because we enjoyed playing. I remember people going around in high school saying that most girls who played softball were lesbians. Of course that was not true because I wasn’t a lesbian, and most of the girls I played with weren’t either, but the damage was done. We girls so we were denied the right to play with boys, or to play pro for that matter, and to this day I still think it was unfair for us to be not only denied the right to play but to be ridiculed and called names simply because we loved playing sports. Hopefully, if I have a daughter, things will be different for her or maybe she’ll help usher the change that is needed to play pro if she wanted and not be ridiculed for loving the sport. Maybe she may even get to play baseball with the boys instead of softball and keep from being segregated from the boys simply because she’s a girl.

I want you all to watch this video first, before I say anything.

Done? Good. Now this is an ad campaign that Iberia airlines started (and eventually pulled) to promote a giveaway to win tickets to Cuba. Can anybody tell me what is the problem with this video?

First of all, not only do all cuban women NOT look like these women, they don’t go around half naked the way these two did, they don’t all have these oversized lips, and they don’t coddle guys the way these two do to this baby. What they are promoting in this little ad campaign are the jineteras in Cuba, which are basically women who have been forced into prostitution in order to survive. This is an insult to women, an insult to Cuban women, and it makes me mad as hell that a company like Iberia saw fit to start this ad campaign.

So what do Cuban women look like, you may ask. Well, here, this is one of my favorite divas:

and for a more real cuban woman, there’s this one…

That me, and these are my grandparents

If you want to see more images of real Cubans you can also head over to My Big Fat Cuban Family and see for yourselves, or even to Babalu Blog. But what I feel they’re promoting in this ad is not the reality of the Cuban female population that is still in Cuba, but the ones that are forced to be sex-workers in order to survive and make a living and are taunting it as something men can look forward to when they arrive in Cuba. It’s a damn shame that these women fell they need to resort to this way of life in order to survive in the first place, but for a big corporation like Iberia Airlines to be promoting this is horrific. Read the article from the Miami Herald below, and leave me your opinions.

Airline yanks ad called ‘insult’ to Cubans

BY FRANCES ROBLES
frobles@MiamiHerald.com

Iberia Airlines yanked a promotional cartoon video off its website, featuring an infant who wins a trip to Havana and gets babied by voluptuous black beauties, after a consumer group complained the ad denigrates Cuban women.

The video posted earlier this month on the company’s website showed the baby being coddled by two black women with exaggerated full lips and wide hips squeezed into hot pants.

The women fed, massaged, fanned and danced with the infant as he sang, in an adult male voice, “Mulattas, feed me. Come on mulattas, take me to the crib.”

”It used the imagery of two sexy women of color, not nurses or home attendants . . . and the image of Cuba as the place for the male Spaniard to go and be pampered like a baby,” said Ileana Fuentes, executive director of the Miami-based Cuban Feminist Network. “If that’s not a sexual tourism ad, then I’d like to see a sexual tourism ad.”

The ad played on the stereotype that Cuba is a hotspot for single European men to find dark-skinned ”girlfriends” know as jineteras. The cartoon, part of a series of videos promoting an Iberia.com contest, was yanked from Iberia’s website but has found a new life on YouTube. Other ads featured a sheep rapping in New York and a vacuum cleaner doing the tango in Buenos Aires.

It was the Cuba cartoon that drew fire from a consumer action group, which said it was a sexist insult to Cuban tourism workers.

”Cuban tourism workers do not massage you, fan you and dance with you,” Ruben Sánchez, spokesman for the Consumers in Action Federation, said by phone from Madrid. “This ad denigrates people who work in tourism.”

He said the ad violates a 1988 Spanish law that prohibits advertising that is denigrating to groups of people. In this case, Sánchez said, the video was demeaning not only to tourism workers, but Cuban women and Cubans.

The organization complained about the ad last week and Iberia pulled it four days later, he said. Advertising professors are requesting copies so they can show them to students as an illustration of what not to do, he added.

Originally found on God is a Dyke.

I have never really had much of an issue with my weight, although according to my mother, grandmother, society, and doctor, I should. The reason being is that I’m 5’6” tall and I weigh 211 pounds. This is not considered beautiful in our society, and not to mention I am also heavily tattooed. The issue with my grandmother I find kind of ironic though because when I was at a nice, “healthy” weight, I was too skinny and she would overfeed me. Now that I’m overweight, I’m too fat and she asks me on a daily basis if I’m dieting, if I’m doing something about this, what am I eating. It seems as if she’s never satisfied, and I also noticed that she never did the same with my brothers. Granted, I don’t eat anything but junk food all the time and I know it’s horrible for me, but frankly I don’t have the time or the money right now to eat any better. I know that sounds horrible, but if you really think about it the foods that are supposed to be good for you cost so much more than the foods that are bad for you, and they take time to prepare and right now with the demands of my job, my schooling, and my family, time is a luxury that I don’t have. I’m also not a big fan of starving myself or of denying my body food it craves, which is problem number one when it comes to my weight-I’m not in control of my body, my body is in control of my body.

But I have to wonder if this has always been a problem with me or if it’s progressively gotten worse as I aged. When I was in high school I was always really active. I was in softball, I was in cheerleading, I was in anything that would keep my attention for long enough and not treat me badly. The moment I felt these sports started treating me badly, I quit. With cheerleading it was when I kept getting told by my cheerleading coach that I was too fat and I needed to lose weight because they only made uniforms a certain size. Mind you, I fit into the uniform but the problem with the uniform was the skirt. These skirts were made for girls that were either way shorter than me or had no ass. I have an ass and I’m very proud of my ass. It was this ass that got the boys attention in school, it’s this same ass that cushioned me when I had to slid into bases in softball, or all the times I fell off my bike as a kid, it was there to make sure I didn’t really hurt myself. Not to mention trying to lose it would take a great amount of work because having a big ass runs in my family.  No matter how fat or skinny you are all the women in my family have a big, Cuban ass. It’s not going to go away very easily, it would actually be going against nature if I tried, and these cheerleading skirts were so short that part of my ass would hang out the bottom. I’m also a pretty tall girl. Not extraordinarily tall, but taller than all the girls on the squad, so of course the skirt wasn’t going to cover me right, I was too freaking tall for it! Somehow the coach didn’t catch on that maybe what she was asking me to do was not a matter of me losing weight but a matter of my body shape and size, and that’s what the problem with the uniform was.  She was asking me to go against what was given to me when I was created to suit her ideal of the perfect cheerleading body and how it was supposed to fit in these 5 year old, hand me down uniforms, and I was not about to put my body through all of that simply so that I could look petite in a uniform, when there was nothing petite about me.

I know in this society there are people who love tattoos, and people who will think I am just Cuban trash because of them. Frankly, I’ve gotten used to the stares and the comments as well as the praise and the curiosity. You’d swear though that walking around the streets in Miami showing off your tattoos that the side show circus has come to town with the way people stare as if there is something wrong with me. It gets annoying at times especially when it feels like it’s a thousand degrees outside and I have to cover up from head to toe for work because of my tattoos, but it’s a choice I made almost 13 years ago, and I’m not going to say I regret it-because I don’t-I just wish I wouldn’t be judged harshly over my decision.

I actually have a really funny story about this. There was one day that I was at the mall doing some shopping. I think it was around Christmas time, but I’m not entirely sure. As I was walking through the mall I noticed this little girl who was looking at me with all the curiosity of a little girl wondering what all the colors on my body are about.  Most kids think that I took a crayon or a marker to my body and just painted myself like they do with markers. It was really cute how she was looking at me, and then all of a sudden her mother grabs her and puts her on the other side of her and glares at me as if I was going to eat her kid or something. If she only knew who I was she wouldn’t have done that. If she only knew that I was a college student, that I was educated, that I worked in a corporate job and have been entrusted to raise a child as well, she wouldn’t have done that. But the fact that there is this stigma in society about how people who get tattoos are bikers or gang members, she automatically assumed her daughter was in danger.

I see my tattoos as body modifications. They’re my adornment, just like women who decide to wear earrings, necklaces, and rings; I decided to adorn my body as well but with tattoos. I don’t sit there and judge women who have gotten plastic surgery to enlarge their breasts or to take the wrinkles out of their face, or have gotten a tummy tuck, even though I think they shouldn’t have because they need to be happy with what they were given, but I guess the same could be said about me. The thing is that I’m not putting my health and my life on the line simply so I could have bigger boobs, they are, and they are risking their lives for this version of what femininity is supposed look like and that’s scary. Yet somehow, I’m the one that’s judged in society as a freak because I have the tattoos, but these frankenwomen are perfectly acceptable because they’re making themselves more “feminine” by societal standards. I think that’s horrible and I’m glad that the media at least puts the message out there on occasions when someone does die on the table from plastic surgery. Not that I’m happy that they died, because I’m not, just that I’m happy it’s not covered up and swept under the rug as a normal consequence of what you’re putting yourself through and going on with their daily lives. What I’m referring to is Kanye West’s mother who decided to have surgery, and I forget for what, but ended up dying on the table. The worst part about it is that Kanye paid for the surgery and now he’s going to have to live with the guilt of helping to facilitate in his mothers’ death when it was something that could have been avoided, and all for what, to be more beautiful? She already was.  I sympathize with him because I do know what it’s like to lose someone important, but I feel it was something that could have been avoided had she just realized that she was beautiful just the way she is.

I don’t agree with plastic surgery for vain reasons. I believe you should be happy with your body just the way it is because it is who you are and part of what has shaped you to become the person you are today. I have accepted the fact that I’m a big girl even though society says that I should be as thin as one of my thighs. I have accepted the repercussions that come with my tattoos, because that is the choice I made and I’m going to stick by it. I have accepted that there’s very little I can do to change my appearance except on occasions to wear make-up or change my hair style but I don’t make a point to go all out every day because that’s not who I am. I have a natural beauty, just like all women do, and I’m going to flaunt that for all it’s worth, because even as I’ve aged the parts that have changed have refined themselves and made me beautiful in different ways, and I swear that when I’m older and my hair has gone all white, I’m still going to tout my long hair as if it was the thing to have and I’m going to be proud of my wrinkles and my liver spots, because these are the battle scars for the war that I’ve lived through. They will be my trophies for overcoming all the obstacles life has thrown my way and I will wear them with honor and dignity just like any soldier does with their metals.

I know this has been talked about on a couple blogs, but I’m just completely appalled that this woman would say this.

From The Raw Story

“For years, the media has told us that Hillary Clinton is the smartest person in the world,” Trotta said, “and that’s up for grabs now. And the media’s catching on to that, as well. The ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ blame has been undermined by her evasions, by her outright lies, if I may say; by her pandering, by her race-baiting–and now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Os–Osama–um, uh–Obama. Well, both, if we could…“

To joke about something like assassinating anyone is appalling. I understand the issue with the statement Hillary made, yes it was taken totally wrong and she’s a bonehead for not clarifying what it is that she meant, but for this woman to run with it the way she did and basically suggest that we should “off” Obama is scary, and to compare him with someone like Osama… I have no words. How can you compare Osama with Obama? Osama is responsible for thousands upon thousands of deaths, and what did Obama do to be compared with this terrorist?

What did she really think she would accomplish by making this backwards, racist comment? What is really just a slip of the tongue, I mean what the hell is wrong with her?!