Copyright © 1999 by Dave Badtke

I grew up in the Chicago area and regularly went on field trips to the Art Institute. While I’d like to tell you that my school buddies and I learned from our teachers to appreciate the Institute’s world-class collection, in reality our mission was to find nudity. Ineffectually constrained by our teachers’ barked commands, advance scouts would report back with giddy yelps when they entered a room or rounded a corner unexpectedly coming face to canvas with our quarry. Scurrying forward out of control, we would draw together in paroxysms of giggling and poking like a gaggle of geese watching a predator from a safe distance.

Shocking, I know, and less than you should have expected from a 1950s’ schoolboy, but your outrage may be tempered, your sympathy piqued when you consider that National Geographic and the Museum were to us what Victoria Secret catalogs and MTV are to today’s kids.

Given this early training, you might well understand my discomfort when I visited Arts Benicia’s recent exhibition, "Confronting Identities: New Images of Women and Girls", and walked alone into the room displaying Heidi Struble’s In Perfection: Photographs of Real Women. Each work consisted of three contiguous frames, 16 inches on a side. On the left was a photograph of a woman in her home; in the middle was text in the woman’s handwriting in which she commented on the shifting nature of body image; and on the right was a nude photograph of the woman again in her home. The black-and-white photographs were small, approximately 5 ½ inches square, making it impossible for me to stand at a safe distance: I had to move in embarrassingly close.

A tape played in the background in which various women explained why they had chosen not to pose nude.

"Right on," I said to myself. "No way I would have done what these women did." Personally, I have a hard enough time wearing a bathing suit to the beach.

And perhaps that’s one of Ms. Struble’s points. We are constantly judging our body images against ideals, women historically more so than men, though that may be changing as the media-idealization of men escalates. Many of us, as a result, hide from certain activities or confound our public encounters by anguishing over appearances. Fearing that our body image cannot possibly meet expectations to which we feel others are comparing us – though ironically we rarely apply these perceived standards to others - we subject ourselves, at best, to self-conscious discomfort and, at worst, to a host of psychological and physical diseases as we try in vain to measure up.

As one woman writes: "Some days I’m unbeatable. Other days I’m a raisin, shriveled and ugly."

Ain’t it the truth!

From Ms. Struble’s room, I moved to Kym Hoffschildt’s exhibit done in collaboration with Dennis Gaxiola, Breaking the Plane: Our Youth Look at Gender, and into the world of girls wrestling boys. And, no, I’m not talking about what you might be thinking or about professional wrestling’s bicep-buffo performances. I’m talking about that incredibly grueling sport in which two competitors in the same weight class become entangled for exhausting minutes during three timed periods. Add to this the possibility - judging from this exhibit, frequent occurrence - that boys lose to girls, and you have the makings of gender-breaking encounters at their most extreme.

Ms. Hoffschildt displayed stylized portraits of girls in wrestling clothes next to statements from the athletes, their parents and coaches. A tape of conversations ran in the background while slides were displayed in the center of the room on a piece of white cloth hanging from the ceiling.

While most sports are played at arm’s length or greater, contact between wrestlers would be considered intimate, perhaps even claustrophobic, were it not an intense contest of agility and strength. This feeling was well captured by the dark room and photographs, visible only through a narrow viewing angle when standing directly in front of each picture, and wrestler banter that created a pit-like feeling of tension and closeness.

My mother-in-law was with me on my second visit and asked me if I would have been able to wrestle a girl in high school. "No way," I found myself saying again. As one father said: "…[T]he boys are pretty much in a lose, lose situation here. I mean if they beat a girl, so what, but if they get beat by a girl, well then that’s terrible."

Which reminds me of Polly Gaillard’s exhibit, which I wrote about last week, in which Sarah said: "…I see a change – women are going to take over the world pretty soon."

Though I’m not a betting man, I’d give this prediction pretty good odds.

- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.

Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com  

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