Tag Archives: feminism

a few thoughts about "children-are-people" conversations

28 Wednesday Jul 2010

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It seems I can’t help myself.

maia @ Feministe wrote a post yesterday about the freedom people in American culture feel to act on their prejudices against young people.

there is this weird thing in western culture, especially n american culture, where people/adults seem to believe that they have a right to discriminate against children.

recently, i was hanging out at a bar, when a friend called and invited me to come hang out for a few drinks and chill time as the sun came up. cool. then, i heard a bit of whispers in the background and the question posed to me: is aza with you?
ummm…what? why? does that matter? …

im not a feminist ( yeah, i said it…shrug). but i dont understand people who claim to be feminist on one hand, and on the other hand think that children should be designated to certain public and private spaces, not mixing in ‘normal’ public areas, such as restaurants, stores, airplanes, etc. cause in us culture, when you create little reservations for children, you are really creating little reservations for mothers. it is the mother who will be sent away to take care of the child. and how is that supporting all women and girls?

The post, as has become predictable in these situations, attracted the good, the bad, and the ugly as far as commenting goes, weighing in with a comment thread that (as of this writing) clocks in at just under 550 separate posts. As Brandann Hill-Mann @ Women’s Rights Blog points out,

There is a conversation that needs to happen, where we discuss how children are part of our society, how they have a right to exist, to take up space. How we are here to protect them and teach them to exist in the adult world because they don’t yet understand how to navigate our world alone. But we can’t really have that conversation, because every time we do, someone has to assert that children just should not be in certain places because children infringe on their rights, ignoring the rights children should have, but don’t.

To demonstrate this, take a look at the wonderful post written by maia at Feministe about how to support parents in public spaces, and the 400+ (at the time of this writing) comments in it that have burst forth with numerous remarks about how children are unholy terrors in restaurants and ruining things for everyone else.

I’ve written about these issues on this blog repeatedly and at first I thought I would just pass this one by — I tried to ignore the comment threads and forget all the crap people were yelling at each other about children (notice how children themselves rarely get to participate in conversations about what would improve their lives or the lives of those around them??). But riding home on the T this afternoon I couldn’t get the hate out of my head, so I’m going to blog a few observations. Maybe that’ll help.

1) The specter of the “entitled” parent needs serious unpacking. I’ll admit right upfront that I’ve used this specter myself. “Oh no,” I’ll reassure someone, “Of course I’m not talking about those parents when I’m talking about children’s rights. I’m talking about the considerate ones. The ones who never get in your way and whose children are always quiet and polite. The ones who never inconvenience us.” The thing is, just like feminism is for bitches, children’s rights are for kids. All kids. Not just for kids whom we think are “acceptable” (as defined by us). As a feminist, I see how people who don’t follow the expected rules for their class of person are considered to be acting “entitled.” Women who expect to be taken seriously — or just take up the same amount of space on a bus. Black men who refuse to back down about something and get handcuffed. A trans woman who requests bathroom privileges and is labeled a troublemaker. “Entitled” behavior is often in the eyes of the beholder — and people who assert their basic human rights in the face of discrimination are often judged by others as acting entitled.

I’m not saying people don’t behave like assholes — we all do, sooner or later. I’m just saying that to fall back on the “entitled yuppie mothers” stereotype to defend your distaste for families in public places is too easy. “Entitlement” needs to be problematized, dissected, looked at with a critical gaze. Next time you think someone is acting out of a sense of “entitlement” think about why, exactly, their behavior seems out of line. My bet is that at least seven times out of ten it’s going to be behavior you’d tolerate (or at least not let color your feelings about a whole class of people) if it was done by someone whom you weren’t pre-disposed to suspect of ruining your day.

2) Where do we get off judging the parenting decisions of others? A few weeks ago, Jessica Valenti blogged about how as a pregnant woman she is suddenly subjected to a much more intense level of scrutiny and intervention than as a non-pregnant person. This scrunity follows parents (especially mothers) into parenthood. Parents and non-parents alike in our culture feel free to offer their own expert opinions on every aspect of parents’ interactions with their children and the way that parents and children interact with the wider world. While, obviously, everyone is entitled to think what they want in their own head (I’ve totally been there — I get as pissed at what I think of as “bad” parenting as the next person), but I’m continually amazed at how presumptuous folks are about airing that critique in public forums. Two things alarm me about this

a) What makes you think you, personally, are in a position to act as judge? I’ll admit upfront that I’m particularly sensitive to the policing of other peoples’ parenting because I come from a family in which my parents made some pretty non-conventional parenting decisions — decisions that, according to a great many people, were seen as borderline abusive. When I was a child, kids were taken away from parents who tried to home-educate them, particularly if those parents were not simply replicating school-at-home lessons. All through my childhood, I experienced the suspicion and policing of adults who did not trust me, my siblings, or my parents, simply because we didn’t follow the conventional rules. When my mother tried to act as a liaison to facilitate our interaction with suspicious adults, she was branded a trouble-maker, a controlling mother. Things were written in our medical records, warning future medical staff to watch out for my mom.

This is all to say, I’ve known first-hand how the judging process works. It makes the judgers feel powerful and the judged feel small. And it has nothing to do with the actual well-being of actual children, since most judgments are made by people who have firm convictions about what is “right” and “wrong” when it comes to raising children — all children — with little or no flexibility of thought when it comes to individual families and individual children.

Next time you see a parenting decision you disagree with, I’d encourage you to imagine at least for a moment (even if you later reject the notion) that this decision was the right decision for this parent with this child.

Which leads me to the second half of this “judge not lest ye be judged” observation: the trump card of the judgers. The “what about the children who are being mistreated!” argument. See, I think a lot of the time this is

b) Self-interest disguised as concern for children. Judging parents in public spaces does not help truly vulnerable children. When parents sense they are being critiqued by others around them, they’re likely — especially if they are already abusing their children — to take the shame they feel out on their children. So by shaming the parent you’re making it worse. Do not intervene in situations where you feel a child is actually being maltreated unless you have the ability to follow up and ensure that that child is actually going to be protected going into the future. I’m assuming most feminists (who are well-versed in issues of domestic violence) understand this principle. Which is why I also sense that a lot of the concern expressed about children (“but what about the bad parents! should they get away with it?”) is actually, again, about our own subjective irritation at people who are different than us.

While I sympathize — who doesn’t feel irritable on occasion? — it’s just not the fucking responsibility of all people at all times to cater to our own individual desires for how the world should be regulated.

3) Feminism is for children as well as for bitches. It was, in part, my experience being policed as a child that facilitated my openness to feminist activism and feminist theory, especially the notion that oppression is intersectional and systemic. That the only way to true change is radical change — change that dismantles the system predicated on power that is power-over (the kyriarchy) and replaces it with with power-with. Power-with being the sort of power that recognizes the authority of experience and skill without creating a world divided between the haves and the have-nots. As Hanna so often reminds me, to depose one privileged group and replace it with another, to critique one set of cultural norms that advantage group A and advocate replacing them with a set of cultural values that advantage group B or C does not change the basic pattern: we’re still stuck in a world with winners and losers. With people who are scrabbling desperately to acquire and hold onto resources and acknowledgement that is (so the kyriarchy tells us) in limited supply. I’m not buying it. I’m not buying that there’s not enough love and care and resources in the world to take care of all people, no matter how broken, no matter how small. But in order to make sure that everyone’s needs are being met, we need to quit playing the winner-loser game. We need to quit turning around once we’ve established our right to exist and shove the next person waiting in line. Instead, as self-proclaimed feminists we should be welcoming them in.

Which is why it’s so hard for me to defend certain parts of the feminist movement (like, say the feminists who claim that ageist prejudice against children doesn’t exist … echoing the those who laugh off feminist concerns about sexism as so second wave already!) Sadie Stein @ Jezebel mocks maia’s post and suggests, in a parting shot, that “ageism” only counts if its legal discrimination, not just social prejudice. If you replaced “ageism” with “sexism” do you honestly think that many feminists would agree with her? Yet her scoffing resistance to understanding children as a vulnerable, disenfranchised group in our society is all too common in the feminist blogosphere.

My advice on how to change all this? (Since I know you’re dying to have unsolicited advice from your friendly future-feminist librarian …)

4) Don’t demand perfection, but do challenge yourself to think twice. We all make snap judgments based on our prejudices and stereotypes about types of people. We all feel intense reactionary hate at the person who takes the last seat on the subway when we want to rest our aching feet, or the parent whose child is fretful and screaming in the checkout line on that afternoon when a migraine is building behind your right eye. I’m not a fan of self-judging, self-guilting, self-blaming, and relentless self-policing. Punishing yourself for being human isn’t going to make the world a better place to live in; it’s just going to make you unhappy, your loved ones miserable, and probably not make those parents and young people you’ve been critiquing a helluva lot happier (unless they’re the nasty sort of people who get off on revenge — in which case perhaps I should exempt them from my ‘all humans deserve respect mantra’?!)

Instead of punishing yourself, acknowledge the feeling. Acknowledge the thought. Let it know it’s been recognized and heard, and that it represents some portion of your self that is trying to care for you in the best way it knows how — however flawed that attempt might be. Accept the feeling into yourself, but don’t let it consume you.

And then move on. Let the feeling go.

Or, if you’re feeling so inclined, consider where it’s coming from, and why you feel so desperately like your own sanity is in the hands of all these other people in the world who, like you, might just be having a rough day.

The best way to dismantle the kyriarcy is by recognizing and taking pleasure in the uniqueness of all beings, one being at a time. Including yourself.

So go forth. Care for yourself. And think twice before judging those around you. Perhaps particularly those who are further out on the margins that you yourself are. Perhaps, if you stopped pushing them away quite so hard, you’d discover that you actually had a lot more in common than you thought at first glance.

Peace, and good night.

booknotes: her husband was a woman!

27 Tuesday Jul 2010

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Cover art for Her Husband was a WomanA few weeks ago, when I was in Maine for the weekend I found time to read Alison Oram’s slim little volume on gender crossing in mid-twentieth century England (1920-1960s, roughly), as reported in the popular press. Her Husband Was a Woman!: Women’s gender crossing in modern British pop culture (New York: Routledge, 2007) explores how gender identity and sexual orientation was understood — or at least reported — in tabloid newspapers, and how it changed over time from the dawn of the twentieth century to the postwar era.

While clearly a scholarly monograph with a very narrow focus, Oram’s book does a nice job of historicizing how we understand the relationship between gender crossing behavior and sexual identity. She is careful not to read backward onto women in earlier eras categories of identity that did not exist (transgender, for example) or were understood differently then. At the same time, she describes how those categories emerged and how they, in turn, influenced how gender crossing was reported in the press and understood by the individuals featured in the stories.

She draws mostly on stories of women we would today likely understand as transgender or butch lesbian: women who were read as men in their society (through the clothes they wore and the social roles they fulfilled) and were partnered with women. Some women began crossing as a way of escaping the constraints of femininity (to see better-paying employment, for example) and found it suited them. Others seem to have been drawn for more nebulous reasons to identify as men.

Oram compares the stories of these on-the-street gender crossers with women who performed in drag on stage, in situations where the audience knew the actor was female but bought into the male persona on stage. These performers, who were well-known and adored throughout the late 19th century and into the 20th provided a framework for tabloid journalists to understand gender crossing as something that was not necessarily tied (as it would later become) to lesbianism — even though many of the real-life gender crossers were in same-sex relationships.

According to Oram, the early tabloid reports focused on the performance aspect of gender crossing, marveling (in a positive sense) at the women’s ability to succeed in moving about the world as a man. As the twentieth century wore on, and scientific models of gender and sexuality were more widely discussed, medical language about sex changes and lesbianism began to creep into the reports. Gender crossing became more closely linked to same-sex relationships (which in turn were suspect) and the theatrical element of women’s drag performances faded.

The book is a quick read, which I highly recommend to anyone with a particular interest in how cultural interpretations of gender expression and sexual identity have changed over time.

quick hit: "oh, inversion. how I shake my fist at you"!

24 Saturday Jul 2010

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Danika @ The Lesbrary has a fun post up sharing notes from a conversation between herself and a friend Cass about Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928).

C[ass]: The term ‘homosexuality,’ while in use in 1928, didn’t yet have its modern definition or its now understood division from gender. Inversion, on the other hand, completly tied sexual orientation to one’s gender and gender expression. A person labelled female at birth could not, by defition, be an invert without displaying masculine traits and masculine leanings. Therefore, in order to be a novel ABOUT inversion, Stephen has to be masculine. If we are using our modern lens here, then we can agree that, despite her masculinity, Stephen is not automatically male. The fact that her parents gave her a traditionally male name is out of her control. Lots of girls who continue to identify as women like to dress in pants rather than dresses because they are easier to walk and play in. Looking “like a man” or being masculine doesn’t make a person a man.

The conversation with her father is trickier, but if she has a crush on a girl, and thinks that only men and women can have relationships together, it’s logical that she would want to be a man in order to be happily in love with a woman.

D[anika]: True, but coming from a modern perspective, that assumes that you are by default the gender you were assigned at birth and only the opposite if there is overwhelming evidence. We don’t have overwhelming evidence that Stephen would identify as a man, but we have a lot less evidence than there is for Stephen identifying as a woman. She can’t stand to even be around women, except the ones she falls in love with.

That makes sense, but it isn’t just around having a partner that Stephen is frustrated at being labelled a girl. In fact, as some point she said “Being a girl ruins everything” (not an exact quote)

C: […] [H]er gender and gender expression can be on the trans-masculine spectrum without her necessarily being trans. In 1928(ish), being a girl DID ruin everything!

I think you are the gender you understand yourself to be, but sadly I can’t ask Stephen. 😉

Check out the whole thing at The Lesbrary (and if you enjoy part one, then check out part two posted by Cass @ Bounjour, Cass!).

friday fun: homophobes not welcome!

23 Friday Jul 2010

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As previously mentioned, my sister and her boyfriend just moved to Austin, Texas and by all accounts it is an awesome place. Here’s something that makes it a little more awesome. I’ll let my sister tell the story.

I wrote this in a bathroom at a cafe a week ago on a chalkboard (meant for customer use).

blackboard reads: My sister is bisexual. I come from a tiny town that hates homosexuality. THANK YOU, Austin for accepting all people [heart] MRC.

Today, I went back. Under is someone wrote, “well, we don’t really support homophobes, so you’re welcome.”

I thought that was a grand response.

Happy Friday everyone. Spread the love :).

in love with new blogs: Emily Nagoski :: sex nerd ::

22 Thursday Jul 2010

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I’m really bad about updating my blogroll regularly, but I do have this exponentially growing list of blogs I follow on Google Reader. So I thought I might do a weekly (posted on Thursday) series for a while called “in love with new blogs” in which I highlight some of the bloggers and blogs I think y’all might be interested in.

And I’m going to start with one I recently discovered (or possibly re-discovered; it looks familiar so I know I’ve come across it before but why oh why did I not subscribe to its RSS feed then?? because this blog is awesome!): Emily Nagoski ::sex nerd::

Emily Nagoski is a health educator who lives in Northampton, Massachusetts and works at Smith College. In her own words

In 2006, she completed a Ph.D. in Health Behavior with a concentration in Human Sexuality. She also holds a MS in Counseling Psychology and a BA in Psychology with minors in Cognitive Science and Philosophy. She’s worked for well over a decade in the field of sexuality education and has grown into an impassioned advocate for social justice through sexual fulfillment. Politically progressive and unapologetically atheistic, Emily has strong opinions and a big vocabulary, and she’s determined to use both to make the world a better place for human sexual expression.

And maybe in another ten years I will have a job (somewhat) like hers! ‘Cause damn, that sounds like fun.

Emily Nagoski ::sex nerd:: offers one post a day, roughly speaking, on the subject of human sexuality. Combination sex column, opinion column and ideas-in-progress space, this looks to be a great (and often funny!) resource for sexuality information.

A few recent posts to give you a flavor of her style.

differential desire.

So look, I’m going to say this thing, and you’re going to listen and believe me because… I don’t know, why would you believe me if you haven’t believed it from anyone else? Because I’m clever and have a PhD and things? No, you’ll believe me because it’s just true. Because in the patient corners of your heart, you’ve ALWAYS known it’s true. It’s this:

You’re not broken. You are whole. And there is hope.

You might be stuck. You might be exhausted. You might be depressed, anxious, worn out by the demands your caring makes on you, and in desperate, dire need of renewal. You might be tired of feeling like you need to defend yourself. You might wish that, just for a little while, someone else would defend you and protect you so that you could lower your guard and just be. Just for a while.

Those are circumstances, they’re not YOU. YOU are okay. You are whole. There exists inside you a sexuality that protects you by withdrawing until times are propitious.

I completely get how terribly frustrating it can be that your partner’s body feels like times are propitious right now, while your body is still wary. And it’s even worse because the more ready your partner’s body seems, the more wary your body becomes. It is The Suck, Like Woah, for both of you.

But it’s in there, your sexuality. It’s part of you, as much as your skin and your heartbeat and your vocabulary. It’s there. It’s waiting. You’re okay. Just because you’ve had no call to use the word “calefacient” or “perfervid” lately doesn’t mean it’s not longer available to you. Should the opportunity arise, there it will be, ready, waiting. Like the fire brigade. Like a best friend.

There’s a bunch of stuff you can try to create propitious circumstances.

read the rest here.

what I got wrong about LUGs.

Now imagine you’re a person who’s always identified as straight and then you come to college and you meet this amazing person who happens to be the same gender and you just fall head over heels, even though you never even imagined being in a same-sex relationship before… are your feelings less genuine simply because they might not have occurred in a less inclusive environment?

Should you choose NOT to get into a relationship this person you’re attracted to, on the grounds that you might not be attracted to that person under other circumstances?

Is the only REAL love a love that would thrive even in a hostile, hateful landscape? Only if you can love through being egged and threatened on the street is your love real?

That’s not the standard we set for straight relationships or relationships that look heteronormative.

I can totally see where the resentment would come from, and yet… I can’t bring myself to judge a person’s individual, internal, emotional experience on the basis of its political import. How could *I* know whether or not someone really loves someone else? Can I tell from the outside whether she’s a “real lesbian” or “just experimenting?” If it not my relationship, is it any of my business?

read the rest here.

how to fall in love (if you’re fictional).

With so many barriers lowered these days, it’s hard to generate compelling and original reasons for your hero and heroine NOT to get together. I think sci fi romance, vamp stories, werewolf stories, shapeshifter stories are so popular because you can invent all kinds of rules about how risky it is for a human to mate with a whatever or who knows. And historicals, where you can use the rules of society that USED to keep people apart but don’t anymore.

Dorothy Sayers needed three novels – two of them VERY long – to disentangle her hero and heroine from their stigma. He saved her life; it’s a problem. 5 years later he allowed her to risk it, thus giving her life back to her. Her “Greater Than Themselves”? Detection, murder investigations and, under that, the truth at all costs. Her big “They Know” scene takes place in a punt on the Isis in Oxford, where they both went to school and which represents intellectual refuge from the discord and bitterness of the human world.

Me, I like writing Reunited Lovers stories because the stigma is built in: one of them done the other one wrong, enough that they split up. How are they ever going to fix it? But whatever brought them together in the first place makes a perfect Greater Than Themselves.

So now you know the trick to falling in love if you’re fictional.

read the rest here. I say she made extra bonus points there for the Dorothy Sayers reference.

Sometimes, she’s a little women’s sexuality is different and more complicated than men’s! for my taste, but I think the overall advice she gives about being open to more fluid, expansive definitions of sexuality and sexual activity is good so I’m willing to at least go along for the ride and keep reading.

reconsidering twilight fans: a couple of links

20 Tuesday Jul 2010

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Feminists have a complicated relationship with the Twilight series and fandom, as I have previously documented on this blog. this morning, I’d like to share a couple of items that challenge us to remember that, however retrograde and problematic the series and its surrounding franchise are in terms of gender and sexuality, writing off the fandom as gullible or unenlightened is hardly helpful and (I would argue) hardly feminist.

First, Mathilda Gregory @ The Guardian (thanks to Hanna for the link) reminds us that fans are not necessarily passively imbibing the narratives handed to them — and it’s insulting to the fans (primarily teenage girls and women) to assume they are.

Has there ever been a franchise whose fan base has been so maligned? It’s starting to feel like some of the male critics of Twilight are just uneasy that, for once, something that isn’t aimed at them is getting such a big slice of the zeitgeist.

Meanwhile, instead of defending the film, some feminists aren’t happy either because of Bella’s passivity and the tale’s theme of abstinence before marriage. Well, OK, author Stephanie Meyer’s devout Mormonism does give weight to that reading of the text. But it’s not really as simple as that. We can presume a lot about the author’s intent, but that’s not necessarily the message the films’ fans are taking away from it.

The second story, from Amanda Marcotte @ RhRealityCheck comes in the form of a podcast interview with Tanya Erzen about the contours of Twilight fandom. Check out the podcast or, if you can’t access audio on your computer, this recent essay by Erzen @ The Revealer about the religion of Twilight fans. Here’s an excerpt.

In my interviews and survey of 3,000 fans, the majority express sometimes contradictory beliefs in the supernatural while asserting adherence to traditional religious institutions. Yet, while Twilight won’t replace organized religion, it reflects a longing for sacred and extraordinary experiences in everyday life that are perhaps missing in traditional religious venues. In pilgrimages to Forks, Washington, the setting for the books (in July 2009 alone, 16,000 fans trekked to Forks like supplicants at a holy site, more than the total number of visitors in 2008), fans indulge the fantasy that a supernatural world exists alongside our own, searching for vampires in the woods and lingering outside the re-imagined home of Bella. Rather than fueling interest in vampirism, a concern among some Christian critics of the books, the series provides what Laderman calls “myths that provide profound and practical fulfillment in a chaotic and unfulfilling world.” It’s also impossible to separate these moments of spiritual enchantment from the Twilight franchise, which ceaselessly offers consumption to women and girls as a way to retain the feelings of belonging, romance and enchantment. There are Edward and Bella Barbie dolls, lip venom, calendars, video games, graphic novels, and fangs cleverly promoted and eagerly purchased at conventions and online stores. Yet, the shrines attest to the way fans also transform these objects into something personally vital within the messy entanglements of commerce and enchantment.

The impulse of a lot of feminists (including myself!) is to act to protect young women from narratives we think are abusive by arming them with the skills to deconstruct the Twilight series’ sexism and anti-sex messages. However, to assume that young women don’t have those skills simply because they have appropriated the stories and continue to enjoy them smacks of misogyny. That is, it plays on the stereotype that women (and young women particularly) are shallow, flighty, clueless and particularly vulnerable to outside influences. That their sense of themselves as persons worthy of respect, as persons smart enough to challenge the messages they’re being fed by the media, is uniquely endangered. As Susan Douglas has pointed out recently, there are reasons to be concerned about assertions that young women don’t need feminism. But it is also important to make sure that feminism does not become as didactic and authoritarian as the sexist culture we’re challenging: exchanging one power-over system with another does not a revolution make.

So I’d argue: be wary of attempts to deride Twilight fans because of their age and/or their gender. And be aware of how criticism of fans — even if it’s not explicitly sexist — trades on negative and stereotypical constructions of femininity. Like criticizing Hot Girls for being Hot rather than criticizing the culture that rewards them for meeting gendered expectations, making teenagers feel shamed for their reading and viewing choices does little to support their sense of agency and critical self-awareness that (I believe) so essential to feminist consciousness.

quick hit: the myth of work vs. home life split

13 Tuesday Jul 2010

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From Amanda Marcotte @ RhReality Check comes a wonderful interview with Amber Kinser, author of a new book, Motherhood and Feminism (Seal Press, 2010). The following passage, while focused specifically on mothers in the workplace, speaks to a lot of the issues I was blogging about in my recent post on feeling guilty for wanting a balanced life (starts at roughly minute 19:00).

There is an assumption in the workplace that if you’re a mother your primary loyalty is always going to be your family even during the workday and that that’s a problem. The assumption is, for men, your primary loyalty is always going to be at the workplace and that that’s not a problem. And if you’re single and you’re … childfree and female then we don’t have to worry that you’ll be called away, you know, to go pick up a child who’s sick from school or go take care of a disciplinary matter or go the Halloween parade at school.

So part of the problem [of discrimination against mothers in the workforce] is this mythical — and I talk about this in the book a good bit — this mythical split between public and private. The workforce still operates on the assumption that home life is separate from work life. It never has been, it isn’t now, and it never will be. And so part of the problem is the problematizing of people who are invested in their families. So that if someone has to go to the piano recital during the school day or someone has to go take care of a sick child this goes up against workplace policy and norms. And so what we do is penalize — largely the women, because they’re the ones who end up doing it — who do that. That’s where that motherhood penalty comes in — instead of shifting workplace norms so that they can accommodate the fact that public life and private life are not, you know, they’re just not distinguishable. Men are better positioned to be able to pretend like they’re separate than women are and so they benefit in the workplace.

The full interview can be heard as part of Amanda’s latest RhRealityCheck podcast, Pro-Choice, Feminist Support for Motherhood.

Kinser is emphasizing the parenting angle here, because that was the thrust of the conversation she and Amanda Marcotte were having. But I would extend her observations not only toward men who are attempting to parent more actively but also to individuals who are not parenting. Being invested in family life, or private life, is a choice all of us can make, regardless of whether we are parenting. Caring for, or enjoying time with, a partner or a parent, extended family members or close friends, are equally important and a necessary part of life. They should not be something we need to sideline or make invisible in order to be valuable workers, but of course in an economic system that is built to value only efficiency and workplace productivity, those values are difficult to “sell” as a benefit to one’s employer.

multimedia monday: the pre-roe politics of abortion

05 Monday Jul 2010

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Terry Gross and Linda Greenhouse @ Fresh Air | The Rhetoric That Shaped The Abortion Debate

To give you a taste, here’s Linda Greenhouse on the development of the rhetoric “the right to choose” and “pro-choice” for the advocates of abortion access:

Jimmye Kimmey was a young woman who was executive director of an organization called the Association for the Study of Abortion (ASA), which was one of the early reform groups and was migrating in the early 1970s from a position of reforming the existing abortion laws to the outright repeal of existing abortion laws, and she wrote a memorandum framing the issue of how the pro-repeal position should be described: ‘Right to life is short, catchy, composed of monosyllabic words — an important consideration in English. We need something comparable. Right to choose would seem to do the job. And … choice has to do with action, and it’s action that we’re concerned with.’

Introduction to book and full transcript of the show are available at the Fresh Air on website.

okay, it’s been a while since a really ranty post …

02 Friday Jul 2010

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…but I’ve been sitting on this column by Hanna Rosin @ Slate for a while now and I just can’t get the anger out of my bloodstream. So I’m going to blog it out and see if that helps.

Oh, Ms. Rosin. If only you would quit writing stuff that makes me so mad! I really liked your work in God’s Harvard, I did, and although you glossed a bit too, well, glossily, over the non-fundie history of home education and emoted a little too strongly about the cherubic goodness of your subjects — despite the fact they’re happily growing up into the next generation of Dick Cheneys and Karl Roves — I was willing to forgive you the oversight. Write it off as the slightly rose-tinted view of a researcher who has grown close to, and thus a bit fond of, her subject. I mean, we’ve all been there, done that.

But you keep on writing shit about gender that pisses me off. In this case, your post up at Slate’s Double X blog about Dr. Poppa, the pediatric urologist at Cornell University who has been performing cosmetic surgery on babies whose clitorises are deemed “too large.” (See sunday smut no. 27 for my initial reaction.) Rosin is upset by the outrage in the blogosphere, which she believes focuses unduly on the sensational nature of Poppa’s research (“he touches six-year-old girls’ clits!”) and ignores the fact that the good Doctor is trying to reach what in her mind appears to be a positive goal: girls with clits that don’t look like penises (achieved through surgical reduction) and yet still retain the nerves necessary to give the patients sexual pleasure.

To his critics, however, these details [Poppa’s quest for a better clitoroplasty] don’t matter. [Dan] Savage calls this a conspiracy of “out and out homophobia.” He claims the medical establishment pushes these operations because girls with bigger clitorises are more likely to be lesbian. This claim is a stretch; girls with CAH are only slightly more likely to be lesbians or tomboyish when they are young. The vast majority are heterosexual and comfortable as girls. Gender norms have shifted pretty drastically in the 40 years that this operation has been performed, and still more than 95 percent of parents choose it for their children. Why? Because much as Savage might like it to be, the world is not yet a place where most little girls can have a clitoris that looks like a penis and feel entirely at ease. And few parents would want to use their daughter to test that proposition.

I just — I can’t — I’m floored by the the utter wrongness of this as a goal. Aside from the question of trying to regulate children’s sexual orientation and gender presentation (see the coverage of hormone treatments for potentially CAH babies as another, related example of how fearful we are of children who might possibly not conform: don’t try to tell me this isn’t about gender and sexuality policing), Rosin overlooks the fact that we’re talking about medical practitioners who perform potentially debilitating cosmetic surgery on infants.

It’s not that “details don’t matter” (excuse me??) The details fucking matter. The detail, for example, that decisions about what a “normal” clit looks like are aesthetic decisions, made by doctors influenced heavily by cultural norms (see Anne Faustos-Sterling’s Sexing the Body). The detail that this is not surgery the children need in order to be physically healthy or experience sexual pleasure. In fact, it jeopardizes their sexual pleasure so that their genitals will conform.

Now I realize, despite my own aversion to being cut open with sharp instruments, that some people are less freaked out by surgery than I am. And I realize that surgery saves lives. I also recognize the right of adults to alter their bodies, even when not medically necessary, to better suit their vision of how their bodies should look and feel — even if I would not make those same decisions. But children whose bodies are physically healthy should be allowed to grow up without surgical alteration until they are adults and have the cognitive and legal ability to make up their own freakin’ minds. By suggesting that parents who consent to altering their children’s bodies in this way — again: risking their child’s capacity for physical pleasure out of the desire that their bodies visually conform to the gender binary — are saving their children the possibility that their genitals might make them ill-at-ease, Rosin is leaning on mid-20th-century theories about psycho-sexual development (themselves highly homophobic) that suggested children were somehow irreparably damaged by any experience of ambiguity when it comes to their gender or sexual orientation.

Has she not stopped to ask herself whether, maybe, it’s adult fear of nonconformity, rather than young peoples, that is driving this need to surgically alter our children to erase the beautiful variation that is human existence? Isn’t it better to tell and show your child that you think her body beautiful than to make it clear — through imposing upon her painful surgical procedures and years of follow-up medical tests and treatments — that she is somehow not quite “right”? Isn’t it better to make your home a harbor from whatever toxic gender-enforcing messages are out there in the culture than to be the first to rigorously enforce those standards? What object-lesson are you teaching your child here: That it’s important to conform to arbitrary cultural standards no matter the cost? That one must sacrifice pleasure for the sake of superficial appearance? That to be a “girl” or a “woman” one must alter one’s body to fit cultural expectations of what it means to be feminine?

Above all, it sends the message that the person you are when you are born is not okay, that your physical body is not acceptable even if it is pain-free and carries you everywhere you want to go, and gives you pleasurable sensations, digests your food, thinks complex thoughts, learns new skills, experience a full range of emotion, and helps you explore the world with curiosity and joy.

Again, this is not meant to be anti-surgery in cases where surgery can demonstrably improve a patients life. But activists have been pointing out for years that it is beneficial to be patient and allow children to grow into their own sex and gender identities in the fullness of time, before limiting their options prematurely by surgical means.

Rosin’s critique of Poppa’s online critics makes it sound like we’re a bunch of irrational drama queens who are unable to think about children and sex in close textual proximity without losing the ability to reason. I really, really wish she would quit being so fearful that children not surgically modified will be unhappy with their genitals and start asking why we feel such a strong need to police peoples’ genitalia in the first place. If she’s really worried about these children who are going to grow up feeling awkward about their bodies (as an aside: isn’t that really just part of the human condition? who doesn’t feel awkward in their own skin sometimes?) shouldn’t she be using her platform as a nationally-recognized journalist to speak out more forcefully against the conditions that make them so?

There. Rant over. I’m now feeling a bit calmer. And will go home to enjoy the company of my partner, who often despairs at the amount of verbiage I am willing to generate in the name of feminism. Sorry, honey! I think it might be congenital. Maybe they have a surgery to correct it?

friday fun: my sister tells a story about street harassment

02 Friday Jul 2010

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As @feministhulk observed this week, HULK TRY TO OPEN MIND, SMASH EPISTEMOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS WHICH LIMIT HULK’S THOUGHT, BUT HULK WILL NEVER GET CAT-CALLING.

My sister, Maggie recently moved to Austin, Texas and started a personal blog to share pictures and videos with family members. Last week, she posted this story about two guys who harassed her at a local mall, trying to recruit her (they claimed) for a modeling agency.

Since Maggie is a great storyteller I mostly want to let this story stand on its own and let you make of it what you will.

I do want, briefly, to say this. What struck me when I watched the video is how important it is to remember that sexism and beauty standards end up hurting even the women who are supposedly privileged by them. In this situation, because Maggie’s harassers thought she looked “like a model,” they felt entitled to proposition her in the coffee shop at the mall. This is a different type of harassment, to be sure, than the ridicule we who don’t fit the norm experience. It’s easy (because women are encouraged to compete with each other when it comes to beauty) to resent the attention “hot” women receive from strangers. But those women I know who experience that attention usually don’t feel more than passingly gratified. Mostly, they feel under constant siege from people who act like their bodies are somehow public property, perpetually on show, simply because these women had the gall to walk out of the house in the morning in something other than their pajamas (and at times even then!).

My sister has learned how to reject these intrusions and even turn them into humor. She’s in a position to recognize the harassment for what it is and protect herself. But, as she points out some young women might not be so critical of the harassment disguising itself as flattery. Which is why raising awareness of the fact that this kind of harassment is not okay — particularly through humorous means such as the collaborative Hollaback! website — are such awesome resources. Make sure all the people in your life who experience this kind of public harassment know there are ways to speak up and fight back.