ON GIRLS AND TRAINS IN QUEENS

A week or so ago during that balmy spell we had I was heading to work on the train when I noticed something peculiar. My fellow 7-train riders had come prepared for another typical February chill but were instead met with a late-May blast of sunlight and warmth. Naturally, it was hotter even in the car than outside and a few of the heavier dressed riders were understandably uncomfortable. I saw a young woman out of the corner of my eye and thought little of her. When she took off her coat though the response in the rest of the train surprised me. She removed her jacket to reveal a t-shirt and, as you would expect, her arms and neck were bare. She was neither particularly attractive nor was she repulsive but nonetheless a good number of the train’s occupants turned to look at her as soon as she began taking off her jacket. And while you would expect this of any man on the subway, it never occurred to me that she would attract so much attention from the female riders. But heads turned mechanically, as if conditioned, all up and down the subway car. Why?

For one thing, I think we’ve been taught, women and men alike, to immediately need to determine a woman's physical (and thus true) value. For women it’s a matter of comparison, of judging, of seeing how you stack up against the sexual competition, but also a way of measuring your own worth. Some of this is biologically induced; it would make sense for natural selection to make women, well, competitive, and their physical appearance is the easiest and most natural way to establish sexual primacy. At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering if all those magazines and TV shows and movies didn’t make us turn the female form into a commodity, something to be assessed and appraised like a house or a sports car. If it were a man taking off his jacket no one, women included, would be as likely to turn their heads. But a woman’s body is somehow different and considered an object for consumption by both men and women alike. For men a woman’s body is simply a source of sexual gratification and titillation. No surprises there. I don’t, however, think the women on the train were carnally interested in this particular girl. They had other concerns: What was her complexion like, how toned were her biceps, how much hair did she have on her arms, how did her fingers wrap around the steel pole, did she paint her nails, how many freckles did she have? A never-ending process of evaluation swept over the contours of the girl's arms and neck. We’ve seen women as instruments of commercialism for so long it’s no wonder every detail of her body was consumed by the 7-train riders. A woman is thus 'kidnapped' to allay or exacerbate another woman's insecurities. My hair’s thicker, my waist thinner, my legs fatter, my face rounder, my arms less muscled and on and on until she's just another glossy magazine cover. That appropriation was probably what I thought the most interesting and disturbing. For many women on the train the girl in the t-shirt was taken and used to reassure some, to reprimand and threaten others. What must it be like to be a woman and evaluated by other women in such a relentless way? What kind of stress do women put on one another and themselves as a result of their cold appropriations? Do their eyes ever leave one another alone or are they forever locked in this inhuman appraisal of the flesh? The young woman wasn’t so much a mirror as a scale built and stolen to praise or punish oneself.

Or maybe they just liked her t-shirt.