Domesticity – Page 4

A flaming barrel of video game stereotypes, part I

Flaming barrel hits hapless plumber!

Let’s see what the flaming barrel of stereotypes has for us to day, shall we kids?

1. Video games can ruin your relationship!

Ah, such a classic and volatile subject. Gal feels like she and her guy aren’t spending enough time together; obvious culprit is guy’s “males only” hobby that he spends a lot of time on! This story, which could take place in almost any decade of the last century, used to be about golf or football (or in some more eccentric cases, reading
books) but now it’s told more about video games than anything else. And of course, video games are an even more juvenile waste of time, right? Combined with feminism, you have a heady mix of couch-potato disempowerment that’s sapping the manhood and responsibility from a whole generation of guys! Woe!

Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to go that way. Rachel Shukert’s story in Salon, which has been the most read piece on that site for the last couple days, ends with a suggestion that a lot of people have made to resolve this “dilemma.” Gaming really doesn’t have to be such an exclusively masculine pursuit, so why not play video games together? We’re currently enjoying a bumper crop of games that aren’t designed exclusively for the post-adolescent trigger-happy guy crowd, from almost every title on the Wii to Rock Band, which Shukert credits with “saving her marriage.”

The thing is, in order to reach this turnaround ending, Shukert first has to set her marriage up as a morass of communication problems and neglect that any thoughtful reader will quickly realize couldn’t actually be fixed by Rock Band. She establishes a more familiar domestic diorama where video games are A Big Problem. Shukert writes exaggerated, campy prose, and at one point mocks herself as a pile of “pathetic, whining neediness.” Her attempts at comic hyperbole give me a glimmer of hope that her actual relationship might not really resemble the hoary scene out of the Honeymooners that she paints. But it still grates like Wolverine playing Chopin on a chalkboard to watch the actors in her scene go through the tired old paces of misogynist relationship roles:

I click on another page, where a forum of concerned women instruct me to regain Ben’s attention by walking around the house dressed in skimpy outfits and waggling my hips provocatively. One enterprising poster, aptly named Cyberhottie69, even suggests draping one’s naked breasts somewhere impossible to miss — like the coffee table, or on his head, like a doughy, undulating hat.

The angle Ben is sitting at makes this impossible, but I sit beside him on the couch, unzip my hoodie to reveal the lacy top of my bra, and press my breasts firmly against his bicep.

Read More…Read More…

OOOOoooooOOOOoooOOOooo!

I spent a good part of today refinishing my sad, sad bathtub.

Whee! Paint fumes!

It looks *fabulous* now, though. Even though I’m still lightheaded from the vapors.

Sex shouldn’t matter in politics. Let’s all be gender-blind!

Here’s what happens when USA Today tries to write from a feminist point of view: you end up with a headache.

Women are more kind and nurturing than men. They are natural altruists, placing the common good — including education, health and the environment — ahead of their narrow personal interests. And that’s why we need a woman president. Right?

Wrong. We don’t need a female president, any more than we need a male one. Instead, we need to jettison the gender stereotypes that block half the population — the female half, that is — from participating equally in our politics.

Oh boy.

Read More…Read More…

Shorter Rena Corey: Back to the kitchen, ladies! Our liberation was in the mop bucket all along!

No, seriously. And it’s just too haaaard to try to get men to pick up the slack, so those 70s feminists must have been wrong about the drudgery! And Rena’s just the kind of contrarian rebel who’s gonna get in the face of a dead woman and tell her what for!

The problem with our liberation from housework is that it left no one at home to create such a haven. My generation of women threw out the baby with the bathwater, as it were — and now we’re scratching our heads and wondering what’s missing.

I’m sure we all remember that the guys were supposed to pick up the slack. But that idea really didn’t seem to catch on, did it? Yes, we all are acquainted with a Mr. Mom or two who can watch the kids, do the laundry and bake a mean batch of brownies, but those guys are the exception. Study after study has pointed out that, although men are helping more around the house than they did a generation ago, women are still the ones pulling the “second shift” after coming home from a full day at the office.

And for some reason, be it genetics or societal brainwashing, 40 years of liberation has not changed the fact that the female of the species is most often the one who cares about matching towels and well-equipped kitchens. Case in point: My husband and I rented a furnished house for the summer once from a confirmed bachelor. His kitchen had three — three — corkscrews, a couple of martini shakers, a well-used (read dirty) microwave and not a heck of a lot else. The stove didn’t even work properly. And don’t get me started on the bathrooms (a word to the wise — do not sit on a toilet seat without first inspecting it for cracks). My husband, incidentally, thought the place was just fine. Though I hate to come across as a biological determinist, despite decades of attempts to reeducate men, you simply cannot make one of them care about how the towels are folded.

So there you are, Betty — despite your best efforts to raise our consciousness and liberate us from the broom and dust mop, there are renegades among us who insist on liking housekeeping. Oh, I don’t enjoy the minute-to-minute minutiae of the job, any more than someone in the corporate world enjoys time-wasting meetings or bureaucratic directives. But I like the results — a refuge for everyone to come home to, with a nice meal on the table and clean linens (well, most of the time) on the beds. My home is my little kingdom where, on a good day, with a lot of organization and a little bit of elbow grease, things run as smoothly and peacefully as I wish the big outside world did.

Whoohoo. You really showed Betty Friedan, you did, there, Rena. Next up: why chastity and modesty is rebellious!

Via.

say grace

Let’s take a break for a second.

No better place than the kitchen table, right?

Take a break from the mess and exhaustion and day-to-day, and where do a lot of us end up? Right there, at the kitchen table, if we’ve got anything like a kitchen. When I think of the home I want to make someday, I think of the smell of the kitchen–garlic and coffee and yeast and dried peppers–at the heart of it. And when things are rough, I go, like many of us, to comfort food. Hot and sour soup, nursed carefully with a big spoon. Meatloaf with a good old-fashioned Midwestern ketchup glaze. All sorts of stuff probably bad for me but that makes things better, somehow. The kitchen table, no matter where I live, warm in winter, usually with a teapot close to hand, sometimes with a glass of something stiffer, is the center of the home and its warmth.

Food isn’t just a feminist issue when it’s a problem, after all. It’s not just the many of us not getting enough nutrition, not getting access to fresh and nourishing foods; it’s not just the many of us afflicted with eating disorders; it’s not just the messed-up cultural messages we all get about what we put in our bodies. Food is also a vitally important way to look at our connections to each other, to our ideas of family, to our traditions. Look at the way many people identify so elementally with the staple their ancestors have eaten: rice, maize, wheat, potatoes, taro, olives. Look at the way we’re constantly told the myth of the family meal as a binder of loved ones in troubled times. We’re made of the foods we consume, from the very beginning. Pathologized or not, the food matters.

So have a seat.

Read More…Read More…

The Single Woman’s Apartment

Gawker has the list.

Sadly, my apartment does not match up — I don’t have stacks of magazines or Nair or self-help books or stuffed animals or cat hair. In fact, the only things on the list that can be found in my apartment are scented candles and “anything pink” — but that’s only because I have a set of pink sheets which used to be white, until I accidentally washed them with my red sheets. The commenters are a little more accurate when it comes to objets d’ Single Girl:

Read More…Read More…

This week’s social ill caused by feminism is?

Magic 8-ball says: Childhood Obesity. Oh, noes! It’s because feminists hate children, isn’t it? No, not quite:

Middle-class mothers who work long hours increase the risk of their offspring being overweight or obese, according to an astonishing new study.

Astonishing is right, but some women have always worked:

Research revealed by The Independent on Sunday for the first time will turn perceived wisdom on its head with the revelation that the nation’s higher-paid working mothers bear much of the responsibility for the country’s ticking obesity time bomb, and not the poorer working-class families who are usually blamed.

You hear that, all you highly paid professionals with children(women only, sorry men)? Not only as feminists are you responsible for the destruction of families, but you make them fat too!

More shockingly, the risk of childhood obesity soars in direct correlation with family income. Children in families where household income is greater than £33,000 are significantly more likely to be overweight or obese than youngsters from families with the lowest incomes, the new study shows. And in higher income households, the longer a mother worked each week, the greater the risk of the child being overweight.

More shocking is that they are just now figuring out that families with low incomes have less disposable dollars to spend on things like soda and chips. Those conscious working mothers who chose childcare facilities because of the nutritional programs that they offered, you don’t get off so easily either:

Compounding the misery for working mothers, the study found that children’s weight problems got worse if mothers relied on a nanny to hold the fort while they pursued their careers. Children in childcare are 24 per cent more likely to be overweight or obese than children cared for by their mother or her partner.

Ladies, if you are not aborting them, abusing them by not marrying the father, or abandoning them in childcare then you are plumping them up with your selfish work hours:

Dr Colin Waine, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, said: “I do not wish to condemn these women but I do think the priority has to be the health of the child and its continued health into adulthood. We are in danger of raising a generation of young people with a much shorter life expectancy than previous generations.”

Next week’s edition of Blame Feminism/Working Women: Alzheimer’s, how parents with working daughters are at a higher risk.

The Revolution Will Not Be Crocheted, Preserved, or Canned. Or, Hey, Maybe It Will, But If So…

Basically, Kim of Bastante Already! has this piece ruminating about her lack of affinity for the traditional womanly arts.

Amid her notes that she hates gardening and cooking and simply doesn’t have the wherewithal for making a beautiful “nest” right now, she asks,

In damn near every feminist periodical (Bitch, Bust) and on many feminist blogs, there’s this big, trendy push to get all Knitty and Crafty and Womanly Arts with our bad selves.
What is up with that?

Well, a few different things are up with that…

I’m Never Getting Married

I actually don’t know if that’s true, but the closer I get to standard marrying age, the less I think it’ll ever happen — first because I think marriage is kind of a crock, and second because I’m becoming fairly certain that there just isn’t anyone out there who I want to be forever bound in marriage with.

Before anyone gets mad at me for calling marriage a crock, let me just say that I think marriage can be a good thing for a lot of people. I think that, in rare instances, it can be egalitarian. I think it offers a valuable support system, and that it is an important cultural symbol.

I’m just not sure it’s for me. As far as I can tell, most people end up getting married — yet I can’t imagine that every one of those people, or even most of them, found someone who, social constraints and cultural expectations aside, they would actually want to spend the rest of their life with in a monogamous relationship. I don’t think it’s cynical for me to point out that most people settle. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. Marriage is the cultural norm. It brings tons of benefits with it, including important social ones — men and women of a certain age are expected to be married; married people socialize with other married people; not being married is often viewed as an indicator that something is wrong with you. At some point (early 20s in much of the country, early 30s in places like New York), it seems like everyone around you is getting married, and if you’ve been with the same person for a while and you get along well enough and love each other, then marriage just makes sense. And of course, there are those rare people who find the love of their life and enter into a fabulous marriage that they whole-heartedly want to be in and that trumps all other aspects of their life in its perfection. But those people are few and far between.

Which isn’t me making a judgment about the goodness of marriage, or saying that a less-than-storybook marriage isn’t worth having. For most people, it is. Marriage is a powerful social and economic institution, and ain’t nothing wrong with wanting to enter into it.

But, being that it is a powerful social and economic institution, it continues to reflect cultural norms that are wrapped up in gender and power. Same-sex marriage rights are perhaps the best example — same-sex marriage is offensive to social conservatives precisely because so many of us rely on gender difference as a way of organizing society and our experiences, and marriage equality challenges those notions. “Traditional marriage between a man and a woman” is valuable because men and women are presumed to be fundamentally different, and because marriage is reflective of an ingrained power structure. Within traditional marriage, there are gendered requirements that go along with the roles of “husband” and “wife.” The roles and the requirements are different, and with delineated, sex-based roles and requirements comes a power differential. Traditionally, men held most of that power. They still do — even in our modern, supposedly egalitarian construction of marriage. Without that gendering of power, same-sex marriage would not be an issue.

And then there’s the engagement ring thing. I’ve honestly never given much thought to the politics of engagement rings — I long assumed I would get married and would have a fancy engagement ring, I had a general idea of what I liked (platinum band, square-cut stone, maybe a blood-free diamond but probably an emerald) and that was that. When I started doubting the whole marriage thing, the issue of the ring was the last thing I was concerned about. As for marital politics, issues like name changing and distribution of domestic labor seemed more important, or more visible. I didn’t think much about it until I read Jessica’s take on engagement rings in Full Frontal Feminism. Like O’Rourke, Jessica thinks that they’re very problematic. And I’m inclined to agree.

Read More…Read More…

The Rejection: The Magic Kingdom’s Carousel of Progress.

It hurts me to say this because Walt Disney World holds a landmark place in my heart. But the Carousel of Progress, in Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom of Walt Disney World, is watchable only as an artifact of an American narrative we no longer want to tell. Queue up and watch the 21 minutes of patriarchal late capitalist GE-approved “progress.”

Read More…Read More…