Author Archives: Anna Clutterbuck-Cook

"our tea party has cookies!"

16 Friday Apr 2010

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Right-wing celebrity of the moment (a girl can hope, yeah?) Sara Palin appeared in Boston this past Wednesday, April 14th, for a whinge session with the Tea Party movement folks (there are even some here in Boston, who knew?) who are pissed about possibly getting better health care and all. So a group of gentle souls decided to hold a polite counter-protest in the form of an actual tea party. The kind where you dress up and have biscuits.

These tea partiers dressed to the nines (or at least the four-and-a-halves) and carried pretty signs with such slogans as

“Tea Drinkers for Civilized Discourse”

“Impoliteness does not bring peace.”

“Our tea party has cookies!”

and

“There is no trouble so great or grave that it cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea” (courtesy of philosopher Bernerd-Paul Heroux).

Hanna and I were unfortunately both working and unable to make the occasion (not to mention our lack of proper attire!) but a couple of folks who did make it have posted pictures on Flickr, the photo-sharing site, which are a joy to behold.

Have a lovely weekend, one and all.

*image credit: Parasol! made available by pensive.wombat @ Flickr.com.

"but the important thing is, knowing that doesn’t make you as mad."

15 Thursday Apr 2010

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Today is the final day for filing tax returns* and apparently, some folks on the right have been getting upset that people such as me and my girlfriend (working four jobs we made a total gross income of just under $30,000 last year) pay little or no income tax in addition to payroll taxes (medicare, social security, state and local taxes, etc.). Nick Baumann @ Mother Jones explains.

I was mostly grateful that our tax returns enabled us to buy Hanna a pair of new work shoes without worrying about overdrafting the checking account, and maybe put a little money away in the savings account. But it turns out there are some people who are hopping mad that we have the unmitigated gall to be living below the poverty line.

Thankfully, we can count on Jon Stewart to highlight this craziness and make light of it. While simultaneously underscoring, of course, just how incredibly myopic, privileged, and, well, simply mean it is to scapegoat economically marginal folks for paying less tax.

Not to mention: WTF? Aren’t these people the ones who think there is too much tax already?II? Shouldn’t they be jumping with joy that over 40% of American households are in such dire straights economically that they’re in effect starving the government of funds? Pretty soon we’ll have smaller government by default. You can’t have your no-tax cake and eat it too, people!

*(in case you finished them back in February, like me, and had forgotten there was a deadline still to come)

k.a.p.t: children as commodities

14 Wednesday Apr 2010

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Reminder: Kids Are People Too.

I often suspect that our outwardly child-centric culture (the one that obsessively tracks celebrity “baby bumps” and coos over the latest convert to parenthood, the one that freaks out when couples try to limit family size or seek permanent pregnancy prevention through surgery) is actually deeply allergic to the concept that children are, in fact, not accessories but actual human beings. I’ve argued before that our obsessive adoration of all things “cute” and child-like actually points toward a callous disregard for the actual lives of actual small human beings.

The recent case of a Tennessee mother returning her adoptive son to Russia with a note saying she no longer wanted to parent him (“I’ll remember you all in therapy!”) has given us an opportunity to consider a whole tangled web of complicated ethical issues such as the moral ins and outs of international adoption and the lack of structural support for parents with children they feel unequipped to care for. However, as Pilgrim Soul @ The Pursuit of Harpyness points out, it also suggests the level to which our culture has accepted the commodification model of parenting.

My question, you see, is this: what is our culture teaching people if they are consistently displaying the signs of believing that child rearing and child care is some kind of consumer lifestyle in which they will metaphorically purchase happiness by “selflessly” devoting themselves to a child? That the care of children is not viewed as a collective responsibility but rather an optional joy, and when it turns out that the experience isn’t joyful, that it’s too hard, you just, you know, go back to the store. Complain about the service you received. Call it a day. What happens or doesn’t happen to these kids when they are basically unwanted, no one talks about. That’s somebody else’s problem.

This manifests in more ways than clueless Tennessee women putting foreign children unaccompanied on planes. It manifests in the fact that foster care systems are often a disgrace, that school systems are a low funding priority, and that this country, for example, doesn’t have a functioning health care system to support people who do parent children of the non-Wheatabix-cereal-box-beauty commercial variety. These attitudes, I’m saying, have consequences. Generation after generation of these kids suffer both emotionally and materially from our habit of demanding certain habits from them, and no one really gives a shit. When was the last time you heard a politician get on his high horse about seriously reforming child services, and I mean, not in a “those social workers must be fired” kind of way, but in a “let’s have a conversation about whether this is the kind of society we want to be” way?

Go read the whole post @ Harpyness, since it’s totally worth it. And now I have to get back to polishing a presentation for Saturday’s conference.

quick hit: feminist cognitive dissonance

13 Tuesday Apr 2010

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So just last Saturday, I blogged about wrestling with how to live out feminist values in the real world. Then yesterday, Amanda Hess @ The Sexist wrote about what she calls “feminist cognitive dissonance,” or the fact that

a simple awareness of feminist issues can’t magically negate the power of the culture in which we live. Here, validation is still dispensed based on how well you conform to the ideal.

Some of us desire that validation more than others, or need to conform in some places in order to, say, keep our jobs in order to pay rent — while completely disregarding them in others (say in the privacy of our own bedrooms). Complicated shit.

Hess quotes from a piece on the difficulty of giving good sex advice in a fucked up culture.

Nagoski [Hess writes] notes that “most of the time it takes more than normalizing statistics to liberate someone from the burden of fear.” In other words, simple awareness that our cultural ideal has been hoodwinking women into hating ourselves isn’t enough to make us stop. “What can an educator provide? Sadly, most often it’s advice about how to conform more to the cultural lie. Which makes me feel like a fraud,” she writes. “It’s like trying to send the message that weight doesn’t matter, and then giving dieting tips.”

You can check out the rest of the post at The Sexist under the title of Female Orgasms, Skinny Girls, and Feminist Cognitive Dissonance.

sunday smut: links on sex and gender (no. 17)

11 Sunday Apr 2010

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Sunday rolls around once more, and with it fun stuff on sex and gender for your weekend leisure reading!

As I catch up on my reading and put this list together, mostly supervising the reading room at work, the MHS is hosting a conference, Margaret Fuller and Her Circles, in honor of the 200th anniversary of Margaret Fuller’s birth (23 May 1810). In conjunction, we have also mounted an exhibit, “A More Interior Revolution”: Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, and the Women of the American Renaissance, open to the public Monday-Saturday, 1-4pm through June 30th. If you’re in the Boston area, come on by and check it out!

Lori @ Feministing offers us an alternate advice column in response to a young woman in Vermont who wrote to Dear Wendy asking what to do about the fact that everyone calls her a slut, and on the way by links to a recent piece by Chloe Angyal @ The Huffington Post reflecting on why media literacy won’t solve the problem of women and girls’ negative body image: “Fashion models, [the girls surveyed believe], are too skinny, unrealistic, and look unhealthy and sick. And yet 48% wish they could look just like them. This is, to state the obvious, a serious problem. It’s one thing to want to be beautiful for beauty’s sake. It’s quite another to want to be unhealthy for beauty’s sake.”

Teen mom celebrity Bristol Palin has recorded an anti-teen-parenthood PSA message that has been criticized by many feminist bloggers (among them Roxann MtJoy @ Women’s Rights Blog) as a message that basically comes across as “only rich, privileged kids like me should have sex.” What I think is fascinating is that Palin is voicing (though in a bizarre, through-the-looking-glass way) what many feminist bloggers have pointed out: that she had a robust support system that enabled her to carry her pregnancy to term and become a teen parent without many of the long-term negative effects that her less-privileged peers can suffer. Yet she rather than speak out for reproductive justice so that all girls and women have the same ability to choose parenthood she did (if they want to), she shames less-privileged girls for having sexual desires and acting on them. No points.

Anat Shenker-Osorio @ RhRealityCheck reflects on the problem with understanding sex (“what bodies are”) and gender (“what bodies do”) as distinct and oppositional categories (male/female) when in reality — biologically as well as culturally — they are often somewhere in the muddled middle. “It’s too long been standard practice to enforce a one-to-one relationship, to dismiss any divergence between sex, gender identity and even sexual orientation as some kind of problematic aberration. In fact, deviation from the mean is an interesting, useful and common aspect of humans in our forms and functions.”

Amy Romano @ Our Bodies, Our Blog writes about the unequal treatment meted out by professional associations, the legal system, and the general public towards midwives and OB/GYNs. While midwives live under constant threat of having their ability to practice curtailed or revoked with the slightest whiff of malpractice, doctors who performed a c-section on a woman who was not pregnant have faced little in the way of professional consequences.

On a similar note, Miriam @ Radical Doula calls our attention to the website “My OB Said WHAT?!?” which encourages women whose care providers (whether nurses, OB/GYNS, or midwives) has said off-the-wall shit to them during prenatal care, labor and delivery, and post-partum care. For example

“The baby can’t do that. You haven’t had a cervix check.” -L&D nurse absentmindedly while reviewing papers, to mother with a history of fast labors, when the mother stated “The baby is coming” 20 minutes after arriving in the hospital. The baby was crowning.

I particularly enjoyed this one because the exact same thing happened to my mother (who also had fast labors) when she went to the hospital to give birth to my brother twenty-six years ago. Like babies and mothers’ bodies somehow wait for the nurses to check all the little boxes in the appropriate order before getting on with things!

Harriet Jacobs @ Fugitivus has a brief post up on what it means to be a “fat acceptance” blog, and I appreciated the way she articulates the difference between telling your own story and judging others.

Do you want to talk about your own body image issues? That is awesome. Do you want to talk about the “obesity epidemic” and how if people would just eat X while dancing in a circle with Y and clapping their hands for Tinkerbell they would win the anti-gravity BMI trophy of HAPPINESS? You don’t get to do that here. Everybody gets to be the size and shape they are, everybody gets to eat how they want here, and nobody here gets to tell them they have to change, or there’s something wrong with them.

I still haven’t formulated a comment policy for my own blog, mostly out of laziness (too little traffic to make it an issue 99% of the time), but when I see stuff like this I realize I should sit down one of these days and really articulate what I believe to be civil discourse. Not pushing your own shit onto others, even (most especially?) strangers on the internet, is definitely one such criteria.

Feminist bloggers the blogosphere over squealed with glee over the news that a group of scholars disappointed in the multifaceted, intersectional gender analysis that is women’s studies, men’s studies, and gender studies, have established a new discipline that they call “male studies.” Tracy Clark-Flory @ Salon describes the group’s position and expresses sadness that their oppositional stance toward feminism could prove counterproductive for thoughtful gender analysis. Sady & Amanda @ Sexist/Tiger Beatdown rap about what this says about the state of gender politics and Amanda Hess (who can’t seem to stop giggling about this) offers some possible names for consideration as appointments to future male studies departments.

In a similar vein, figleaf @ Figleaf’s Real Adult Sex reflects on why anti-feminists are so worried that women’s advancement means men’s downfall. “Summary: A highly-exasperated reflection on the embarrassing, sometimes embarrassingly earnest, anti-feminist belief that if the playing field is leveled men can can’t compete with women.”

And finally, this week, on a thoughtful note, this column passed along to me by Hanna from The Guardian in which Denis Campbell @ The Guardian discusses the complicated ethics of transatlantic surrogacy and adoption. In the words of one couple, “I resent people saying that British couples who resort to surrogacy are buying babies abroad. We didn’t buy Harriet: she’s not picked off a shelf. She’s not a ‘designer baby’.”

*image credit: Snake on a Naked Woman made available by lucy10 @ Flickr.com.

feminist values: calling on people to have some thoughts

10 Saturday Apr 2010

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Cross-posted at Feministing Community.

Hanna and I have been talking lately about feminism and feminist politics, comparing our very different experiences with various incarnations of feminist theory and feminism as a political movement. One of the things that we’ve been talking about is the question of hypocrisy: if someone (a feminist in this case) critiques a certain behavior, beauty ritual, book/song/movie, word/phrase, cultural belief, etc. and yet still engages in (possibly even takes pleasure in) said behavior/ritual/belief, does that make the person hypocritical? Or are they just being pragmatic or realistic? And if so, does that mean that there’s no point to engaging in critical feminist analysis, if in the end we all end up pragmatists: does that mean that the status quo wins out in the end anyway?

There was a time in my life when I would have answered with an unqualified “yes, absolutely.” I will always remember the conversation I had about shaving my first year taking college classes (I was seventeen) when I had just discovered theoretical and political feminism as something that — rather than being of historical interest — was of living, breathing political relevance. I had this Creative Nonfiction professor (whom in retrospect I would say I had a huge crush on) whom I met with to discuss an essay I was working on, and in the course of the conversation I said something to the effect of:

“Anyone who shaves their legs is supporting the patriarchy.”

Yes, I did. I really did.

And my professor, bless her heart, gently suggested that given that we live in a complicated, messy, real world in which actions have multiple meanings and sometimes you do a thing for complicated, messy, personal reasons — given all that maybe, just maybe, it was possible to shave your legs because it made you feel less self-conscious about your body, or shave your legs because you enjoy the ritual of shaving, or shave your legs because it makes it easier to lotion your dry skin and none of these things makes you less of a feminist. I was skeptical.

But I didn’t forget what she said. And, over time, I’ve learned to live with the dissonance that is a fucked up world that — try as hard as we might to improve — is never going to be perfectible (and we should probably be grateful for that!). And living “within and against the rules” of that imperfect world (to borrow a phrase from theorist Sidonie Smith) is hard. Because we’re at one and the same time unique individuals and products of our culture; our desires, our like and dislikes, or comforts and discomforts, they are often a confusing jumble of “me” and “society.” Figuring out when Society is worth resisting, because it compromises my Self too much to be borne — that’s practically a full-time job. An important one, but an endless struggle. Sometimes even more difficult are those times when my Self and Society appear to be in accord: do I just think they’re in accord? Do I want that because I’ve been encouraged to want it? Or do I want that because that luminescent Self at the center of my Being desires it?

Or is it a combination of both? And when, oh when, does it matter — discerning one way or another?

(See, for example, my reflections on the sex and gender roles in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series)

I’m pretty sure all of you thoughtful people out there on the internets have examples of these difficulties in your daily lives. And I’m curious how y’all manage to navigate the perilous waters of Self and Society, to make a meaningful life for yourself “within and against” the rules of to culture as-is, while you’re striving to live as if the world was the place you wanted it to be. Is living “as if” even practical? Is compromise always hypocritical? How do you have compassion for yourself (as a human being) who sometimes has to make the best of an imperfect situation? How do you hold on to your vision of a better world while slogging through the everyday? How do you make sense of the desires you have, or the actions you take that are, on some level, counter to your core values?

Please consider this an open thread for discussing any of these questions. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you’ve brought together feminist values with life in the world.

booknotes: best sex writing 2009

08 Thursday Apr 2010

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So apparently, Best Sex Writing 2010 just came out and I’m a year behind. But I picked up Best Sex Writing 2009 at Powell’s in Portland when I was there shopping with the birthday money my brother and his girlfriend had given me (thanks Brian and Renee!). I didn’t realize until after I’d gotten the book home that the woman whose torso is pictured on the cover has no navel which is freaky and probably means she is actually an alien from outer space, or possibly a genetically engineered human like Luke Smith. Which is a little not okay (and now I can’t stop noticing it), but does not detract from the essays within, which gather together awesome writing on sex from the past few years and bring it together for all of us to enjoy in one single place.

This anthology works well as a pick-and-choose anthology: you can read it from cover to cover or you can dip in and read whatever piece intrigues you at the time. The pieces included are sometimes erotic by not erotica — this is not a collection of fiction designed to arouse the reader. Rather, it’s nonfiction reporting, personal narrative, science writing, and opinion pieces that take as their central topic something related to the messy subject of human sexuality. In “An Open Letter to the Bush Administration,” dominatrix Mistress Morgana Maye writes the (then) commander in chief to complain that his gratuitous use of force is driving away business: her clients lose their taste for domination when real-life humiliation of prisoners in Iraq is plastered all over the nightly news. In “Silver Balling,” Stacey D’Erasmo recounts her humorous and inconclusive quest to discover the definitive meaning of sex-related slang term a friend tosses off during a phone conversation. On a more serious note, Don Vaughn reports on the sexual problems as a common (yet under-acknowledged) effect of PTSD, while Amanda Robb explores the Purity Ball phenomenon and Keegan Hamilton reports on how the “oldest profession” has gone 2.0.

One of the funniest (and also saddest) pieces in the book, Hanna and I agreed, was Dan Vebber’s “Sex Is the Most Stressful Thing in the Universe,” in which Vebber describes losing his virginity in college with his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend Molly (names have been changed).

Beginning with her phone call, and throughout our quest to purchase birth control, Molly’s constant mantra was “We’ve got to get this over with.” Is there any sentence in the English language that conveys less passion or romance? Thanks to the last moments leading up to our attempt at sex, Molly provided me with at least one: “Just so you know, this is going to be really painful for me, and I’m probably going to be bleeding all over the place.” This final sweet nothing imparted, and the fortress of contraception having been built (including Molly’s mood-killing-last-minute dash behind a closed bathroom door so she could put the sponge in), it was finally time for me to get a boner and fuck my way into adulthood. Three, two, one…go!

Needless to say, the encounter went down hill from there. It’s a great piece of writing, though also painful in that it so clearly illuminates the need so many of us have for a less competitive, performance-based conception of sexual intimacy (and here I mean “performance” as in “quick! ace this pop quiz!!” rather than improvisational jam session). Molly’s reaction to her boyfriend’s failure to “perform” in the expected manly fashion illustrates once again how Patriarchy Hurts Men Too: if women are supposed to dislike sex, find it “really painful” and “bleed all over the place” the first time, dudes are supposed to be perpetually oversexed and ready to penetrate said women at any moment, in any circumstance, or they’re somehow less-than men.

Anyway, this was a great anthology for airplane and airport reading (yes, really) because it had short pieces that I could pick up and put down as I boarded planes, listened for boarding calls at the gate, took naps on the long transcontinental flights, and so on. They’d also make great selections to read before bed if you know you’re only going to be able to stay awake for 5-10 pages before your eyes start to droop . . . I don’t know about you, but sometimes I’m more in the mood for something short and nonfictional than I am for something that requires me to invest in — and keep track of — the lives of multiple fictional characters. I’m definitely keeping my eye out for 2010 and look forward to what personal and political revelations the contributors have had this year.

quote of the day: not in front of the grown-ups

07 Wednesday Apr 2010

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Hanna found me a copy of Alison Lurie’s 1990 book Not in Front of the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children’s Literature on the $1 cart at brookline booksmith, and yesterday I started reading it and came across this quote.

I think we should…take children’s literature seriously because it is sometimes subversive: because its values are not always those of the conventional adult world. Of course, in a sense much great literature is subversive, since its very existence implies that what matters is art, imagination, and truth. In what we call the real world, on the other hand, what usually counts is money, power, and public success.

The great subversive works in children’s literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, expressive, noncommercial world in its simplest, purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change. That is why such literature is worthy of our attention and will endure long after more conventional tales have been forgotten.1

1 Alison Lurie, Not in Front of the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children’s Literature (London: Sphere Books, 1990), xi.

UPDATE: Reader fairbetty has alerted me in comments to the fact that the American edition of this book was published under the slightly different title of Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children’s Literature.