I thought it was just a photo

I wasn’t expecting a lesson in male privilege. I thought I was just decorating. But one of the candidate photos was from a late night wander through September streets of Venice, complete with its ancient arches, golden light, and salt-faded nostalgia for an age that might have been greater, must have been horrific, but undeniably had flair. It’s not the most interesting photo, but I like the reminder of that unique city after dark, the quiet shifting of its sirocco air, and the sense that you’re seeing Venice itself wake up after the humans have gone to bed. The question was with human silhouette, or without?

It’s not a very romantic silhouette. If a woman in a gown had been walking home, that would have been better. Or a gentleman, paused with the yellow light on the brim of his fedora. This was some schlub with a daypack and an awkward gait. Hardly romantic, just right place right time.

So I posed the question to my lady. “What do you think of this one?” I gave her a moment to look. “And with the figure, or without?” I clicked over for comparison.

Bangkok was at its best after dark

Normally her first response to these questions is pursed lips of consideration, but this time she flinched. “Oh no, those are creepy.” I was flabbergasted. How so? They’re sepia-textured memories, or tilting recollections, maybe boring, but not creepy.

“No, they’re definitely creepy,” she informed me. “They’re walking home alone at night through empty streets with lots of dark doorways and alleys, hoping you get home safely.”

Because why not wander the closed market of a border town?

When I walk around a city late at night, as I love to do, and pass a darkened doorway, my thought is probably “Is there a photo here?” if I notice it at all. I don’t think “Is there someone in there about to jump out and attack me?” No one wants to live in fear, but choosing not to is much easier for me, through no effort of my own. The stakes are just lower. If I’m wrong? I lose my camera. Maybe a black eye. I am not forced to confront the thought that the very sanctity and safety of my body might be taken from me, by a monster that actually exists.

Okay, Havana is safer than my kitchen, but still.

The difference between my lady’s perspective of that midnight street and my own was a shock. But that’s the problem, the disparity is so...quotidian. Ubiquitous and insidious. I try to be aware of my privileges, in the hope that awareness is an important step towards extending them to everyone, but the manifestations are sneaky and constant.

So did I print the photo? No. I don’t need to post an image of menace in my everyday life. But I do hope I can take the lesson, repeated as often as it takes, that we have not yet reached our goal.

Step by step.

[Did I post too late on Friday? It's here.]

What would you like to know about Cuban women?

The classic cars of Cuba are obvious. Music jumps into your ear from every angle. Lavish colors surround you, blending with the heat into a chromatic and caloric smoothie of multisensory stimulation from which there is no escape, and none you’d want anyway.

It took me a little longer to notice something else quintessentially Cuban. The women. Well, no, I noticed the Cuban women immediately. Believe me. What took me longer to notice was the absence of…how do I say this...pseudo-women? Because in America, they’re everywhere. They’re in every magazine, every commercial, every billboard. They peer down and out at you with unnaturally long limbs, enlarged eyes, and preposterously skinny waistlines. The photoshopped American misinformation of what a woman looks like.

They don’t have that in Cuba. Not yet. (God I hope they never do. What an achievement that would be!)

Growing up in American male privilege, I was only aware of the toxicity of this ubiquitous visual violence when it reflected in the anorexia of this friend, or the bulimia of that one, then once I paid attention, in the harried self-esteem of just about every female I knew, under assault from an early age.

What age? When does this marketing nonsense begin to wound? How does that work? How does it feel, what does it do? And in a place like Cuba, protected from the malignance of an advertising strategy based on convincing women that they’re not good enough (unless they buy this product to “fix” themselves!), how is growing into a woman different? What is it like to be raised without Barbie, without Twiggy, without the wasp-waists of Disney princesses?

These are questions I wondered about, but was helpless to ask. I couldn’t just walk up to a cubana and ask “In my country women are pressured to despise themselves, what’s it like here?” So for me it was just a matter of stifled conjecture. But here’s the thing: Lydia has a master’s degree in American Studies with a focus on gender and popular culture. Basically, a master’s in exactly this stuff. She could actually investigate it, in a more meaningful way.

So that’s what we’re going to do. Starting on Thursday.

Americans still can’t go to Cuba as tourists, but with her degree in one hand and my let’s-call-it-a-career as a writer/journalist in the other, her brain in our head and my Spanish-speaking tongue in the mouth, we qualify under the journalist (or would it be the researcher?) category. So we’re going.

Are you interested in what we find? She already has a set of questions that we hope to ask an assortment of Cuban women (perhaps men too?) but I’m curious: what would you ask? What would you want to know about the influence of media on women’s body image?