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Category: relationships

Privacy Matters: the Personal, the Public and the Police

Digby at Hullabaloo notes that occasionally even David Brooks can be correct: privacy for normal citizens going around their everyday personal, family and community lives is essential for our very sanity, which is why the question of government agencies monitoring our every keystroke is such an important question of liberty. But as Brooks points out in his NYT op-ed and as Digby elucidates further, privacy for police officers on duty is a very different question.

Want to do something for Autism Awareness Month?

This series of tweets from @twoscooters sums up the major division in autism activism – the parents of autistic children not listening to the opinions of adults living with autism based on their own life experiences, and too many media and medical organisations siding with those parents:

Alternative Family Structures: The Baby Book Edition

If you’re part of an non-conventional family and about to welcome a new child, finding a baby book is…probably the last thing on your mind, actually, as you have a million and one other things to think about.

But it was really preying on my mother’s mind. She didn’t want me to have to get a baby book with a traditional family tree, one side of which would be left blank, and no spaces to write down the baby’s real family, i.e. the friends with whom I live. So she went searching, and she found me this:

Welcome to the World Baby Memory Book: Celebrating All Families

It seems to be out of print, but it is a sweet book. It does not ask you to specify your baby’s (presumed) gender, and the family page is perfect for a family like mine. Instead of a tree, there are two pages with spaces to list the baby’s family members’ names, their relationship to the baby, and to add notes of anything you want about them, arranged in a column. With that set-up, there’s not even enough room for all of the baby’s family–never mind about an entirely blank page where the father’s side of the family might be.

So I thought I’d give the book a little love here. It’s not without a problem–while most of the illustrations are of cute little animals, there are a few of babies, and I would have preferred that those illustrations not be of only white babies–so it’s not going work comfortably for everybody by far. But it’s something.

You can’t possibly be crying?

Guest Post by Malinda: “It wasn’t long into my adult life when I lost my daughter to Spina Bifida, very unexpectedly. Not only was the pregnancy unexpected, but so was her death. And I found myself thrust into a completely different part of life, in uncharted waters. At 20-years-old I had an immense amount of grief to learn to cope with; but at the same time I needed to find my way back to “normal” life, whatever that may be.”

MRAs: Pretty Much What You’ve Always Thought

Trigger warning: MRA nonsense, physical abuse

Edited with clarifications because apparently my writing is not conveying what I want it to here.

Seriously. Seriously.

I cannot stop laughing.

Look, I know that MRAs are terrible people who do terrible things and have made many women’s lives utter miseries. But have you read this Buzzfeed article on Paul Elam that Angel H. quoted and linked for us the most recent open thread? (Thank you, Angel H. You are the best!)

He is obviously a terrible person, comparing child support payments to Jim Crow, to say nothing of treatment of his daughter, a braver and kinder person than he’ll ever be. But look at this:

Men’s rights activists often cite the first time they realized it’s a woman’s world. They call these “red pill” moments, after the scene in The Matrix when the main character is faced with the decision to swallow a red pill and recognize the true nature of the world or take a blue pill and continue living a lie. For Elam, that revelation came at age 13, when his mother tried to force him to take his diarrhea medicine.

Elam’s brothers held him down on the kitchen floor while his mother screamed and hit him with a wooden spoon until a concerned neighbor knocked on the door. “I felt like I was engaged in the battle of my life,” Elam said. “I was a rebel from that moment on … I’m still that 13-year-old kid on the floor that won’t take the medicine.”

When Elam was 17, his mother grabbed a photo of his high school crush out of his hands without asking him first. When Elam took it back from her, his father belted him. Elam’s analysis of the incident was that his father’s life was solely about serving his mother — “and nothing else.”

[New paragraph: This is the evidence Elam adduces to show, the moment he realizes that women run the world. His mother had power over him when he was a kid–so did his father and his elder brothers, but never mind that–and uses it to abuse him in one example and, well, just be kind of rude in the second example, and this–this–is the proof that men–grown men, mind you, grown men with agency, who apparently hit their kids of their own free will (Elam goes on to spank his grandson for opening a fridge door, and his mother isn’t around to blame for that one)–are being shafted in this society of ours.]

Lo, truly, the oppressed peoples of the world are throwing their arms open to welcome their beleaguered brother–police murder of black people, sexual violence, institutionalized transphobia, gay-bashing–all pale in comparison to what men suffer when they can’t get over their mommy issues. Truly Elam is under the bootheel of the female oppressor if anybody is. [Edited to add: This is what the MRA view of the world comes down to: it’s good old-fashioned mommy-blaming. Father did wrong? Elder brothers did wrong? It’s Mom’s fault. You can add it to the list of things mothers have been blamed for over the past 150 years, everything from schizophrenia to “inability to deal with color blindness” (I am not kidding). It’s not even new or innovative misogyny. It’s just mommy-blaming.]

I realize that child abuse is no laughing matter, though I have to say that what Elam suffers here is significantly less than what I went through. But…dude, really? Your mother, your brothers, and your father physically abuse you, but somehow it’s all your mom’s fault even though most of your abusers were older males? Um, OK, Elam. You…keep telling yourself that.

Elam, my misguided flower, that’s not a gender dynamic. That’s a parent-child dynamic. You want to do something about that? Advocate for children’s rights. (But seriously? I went through worse for worse reasons and…I’m finding it hard to see you as a poster-child for abuse survivors. Both my parents went through far worse and neither one is a misogynist asshole.)

What do you think he imagines adolescence is like for girls? [Added: Does he think we don’t get hit?] That we don’t have to take medicine when we’re sick and our teenage crushes are treated with respect and delicacy? Lo, his mother grabbed a photo from him without asking first! How can he bear up under the strain? My mother made fun of how the boy I had a crush on looked and my father laughed with her! My scars, let me show you them.

“I followed in many ways in my father’s footsteps,” Elam said. “If I was attracted to a girl … it was my job to please her, and to be and do anything to please her….”

OK, dude? Again, that’s not oppression. Wanting to please the person who turns you on? That’s just…being human. What do you think your reaction to being into someone should be?

This confirms everything I’ve always thought about MRAs: they’re fainting flowers who can’t actually handle the exigencies of normal life, or in other words, wimps. Dude. Try navigating through life when you have an actual problem to handle and then get back to me.

And I can’t. stop. laughing at them.

I swear I have a long, thoughtful post coming up. I just…dude. Diarrhea medicine? Your mommy? Paging Dr. Freud, here, I think.

Edited a la Kitty’s point in comments. What I had wanted to convey was that child abuse was clearly no excuse for misogyny, but as I said in comments, clearly my own issues came into play instead. And then edited once more because if Fashionably Evil, a regular, thought it was the abuse itself that I was finding funny rather than the inept reasoning based on it, then the writing needed clearing up.

The past was a terrible place–don’t let anti-vaxxers take us back there

I want to maintain Feministe’s proud tradition of attacking anti-vaxers, because these people are the scum of the earth. These are the people who have benefitted most from modern medical advances, but who not only refuse to protect their own children from diseases that used to kill and disable huge numbers of children (and adults, for that matter), who want the benefit of the common good (herd immunity) without contributing to the common good, who fundamentally don’t care if children and adults who can’t get vaccines because their immune systems are compromised die. They are scum.

I fundamentally think that anti-vaxers won’t listen to reason or to evidence, any more than any other kind of science-deniers will. Despite the fact that hundreds of years of organic food and no industrial waste coincided with mass child death and epidemics, they believe that feeding their kids the purest food and water will keep them healthy. They believe that good hygiene wiped out disease (yeah, you know what? By the early 1950s, when polio was still scourging the industrial world, hygiene was well understood. Washing your hands doesn’t prevent polio. You know what prevents polio? The fucking polio vaccine, that’s what.).

Well, fuck them. I strongly believe that we need to ostracize them completely. I already know some pediatricians will not allow children who are not vaccinated into their practice, because they don’t want to put their pre-vaccinated and immuno-compromised patients at risk, and good on them. Schools need to not admit them. We need to make them social lepers. It is fucking criminal that it is the children of anti-vaxers, who have no control over the assholishness of their parents who will bear the brunt of this, just as they will bear the brunt of preventable contagious illness, and we need to ostracize the parents as well, in every way possible.

I mean, look at this asshole:

It’s not my responsibility to inject my child with chemicals in order for [a child who has leukemia] to be supposedly healthy,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s very likely that her leukemia is from vaccinations in the first place.”

“I’m not going to sacrifice the well-being of my child. My child is pure,” he added. “It’s not my responsibility to be protecting their child.”

CNN asked Wolfson if he could live with himself if his unvaccinated child got another child gravely ill.

“I could live with myself easily,” he said. “It’s an unfortunate thing that people die, but people die. I’m not going to put my child at risk to save another child.”

He blamed the Jacks family for taking Maggie to the clinic for care.

“If a child is so vulnerable like that, they shouldn’t be going out into society,” he said.

You know what? It fucking well is all of our responsibility to keep each other’s children healthy. That’s what it means to live in a fucking society. And it is not fucking “unfortunate” when children die. It’s a trauma and tragedy from which the family–to say nothing of the child–never recovers. A preventable trauma and tragedy. And you shouldn’t take your child for fucking medical care when she’s sick? Does this asshole, who is a doctor, even hear himself? He is scum. He is evil. And he should lose his medical license for spouting this bilge. I can’t emphasize this enough, no matter what his beliefs may be, VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE LEUKEMIA.

He could live with himself if he got someone else’s kid killed? Could he live with the lawsuit? Or–and I was just talking about this with my father–could he live with that kid’s parents coming after him with guns? My father and I were talking about a news story he’d read years ago about a father who stepped calmly and openly up to the man who had murdered his child and shot to death him as he was being walked into the courthouse for his trial. My dad told me that he completely understood, because as far as he was concerned, if you outlived your children, your life was over. That nothing else mattered anymore, life would just be ashes, and that that was why he wouldn’t care about losing his freedom at that point. Does this asshole think he’s immune to that? That a parent who loses their kid thanks to his bullshit won’t come after him? And I tell you what, I would raise money for that parent’s legal defense.

In better news, here’s a news story about heroic parents suing to keep unvaccinated kids out of his child’s school. Good on him. I hope he wins.

I fucking hate these people. Vaccines and antibiotics are two most important and effective medical advances we have ever made. In the 1940s, mortality for children 1-4 was 250 deaths per 100,000 children, and for children 5-14 it was 100. Now it’s around 25 in the first category and around 15 in the second. Infant mortality was around 50 per 1000 live births and is now around 6. There are pretty horrifying disparities by race and class, but the pattern of decline has actually been the same. Why? Fucking vaccinations and antibiotics are why. Maybe anti-vaxxers find the prospect of learning disabilities and autism more upsetting than that of dead children, but that says far more about them than anything else.

Where are the forced-birthers on this issue? They’re so eager to destroy reproductive choice for women in the name of saving babies–why are they silent when it comes to parental choice regarding vaccines? Surely if “it’s not a choice, it’s a child” were ever an appropriate slogan, it is here.

Alternative family structures

So when I was growing up, I had an understanding: one would grow up, fall in love with someone of the opposite sex, marry him/her, have kids, and be happy. As I got older, this understanding was expanded to include the possibility of falling in love with someone of the same sex. These, as I understood it, were my options, along with the ever-popular dying alone and childless (it would’ve been childless for me, I’m not commenting on anybody else’s child-having preferences). The older I got, and the lesser my aptitude for romantic relationships was revealed to be, the more convinced I became that dying alone was my doom.

That’s actually not what has happened (yet, anyway). I have grown up, but I never fell in love with anybody, at least not in a way that stuck, and as yet I have not married (it seems less and less likely to happen, though I won’t rule it out). I live with my best friend and her husband and their child, my godson. I am pregnant with, I’ve just found out, a baby boy (if the kid is cis) and my best friend is due to deliver my wonderful goddaughter any minute now, actually. And we are a family.

Since this seems to confuse or arouse the interest of a good many people, let me just make it clear: I am not sleeping with anybody in my family constellation. That’s not the kind of relationship I’ve built my life around. This feels right to me, as I’ve always had very enduring, very intense best friendships, lasting for years. Of the best friends I’ve had since turning 13, one friendship ended when my friend’s parents very deliberately separated us by moving her out of state (they thought we were gay; we’re friends again now); one ended when we did drift apart after several years; one ended when my best friend died; and one is my best friend now. That’s not a bad track record. That’s not a bad kind of relationship to build a life or a family on. My sexual/romantic relationships though–one, when I was in my early twenties, lasted a year and a half. That’s the best I’ve ever done. More usually, they last 3-6 months and are long distance and fraught with anxiety and insecurity. That’s no way to raise a child. It’s really no way to be happy, either.

I feel like I’ve hit the family jackpot. I can be happy with the people I love best in the world, who love me best. We take care of each other. And the pressure is off, I can date or not date, and it has absolutely zero effect on my long-term family plans. I can have the best of both worlds–a loving, reliable family, and I can still sleep with cute, feckless young men on the side, if the opportunity arises.

I know another family trio, a polyamorous family, who are equally happy. And of course, middle-class white people are quite late to the party when it comes to non-nuclear family structures. The essential role of extended family in African-American communities, including family who are not blood kin, such as othermothers, is well documented. I first ran across the concept of othermothers in the work of Patricia Hill Collins, I believe Black Feminist Thought. And numerous cultures, including Native American ones, build family with and around people and relatives white people would term “extended” family.

These families are real and effective in doing all that families do–caring for each other, supporting each other, fighting with each other, raising children if children there be. But, like same-sex marriage in most of the US until the past couple years, they have no legal protections. People with resources and knowledge and money can see a lawyer and draw up a number of documents, none of which are iron-clad–co-parenting agreements, wills, stand-by guardianships, health-care proxies. But there is no recognized way to make somebody part of your family unless you marry them or adopt them. Even if you are family, there is no way for say, a sister and brother to legally protect a primary family they choose to make together. Why? We do we base our standard of family on sexual relationships between two people not otherwise related? Yes, reworking our definition of family would require reworking lots of things–how we apportion health insurance, for instance. But so what? The way we apportion health insurance in this country is pretty stupid anyway. What makes sexual/romantic relationships so special that they deserve recognition available to no other kinds of relationships? Or, to put it another way, what makes my decade-long bond with my best friend so much less deserving? If love, as we have said, makes a family, why are we making invidious distinctions among types of love and family bonds?

Bad Sex

Content note: bad sexual experiences, like it says on the box.

 

There’s something I’ve wanted to discuss in a feminist context for a while, and I guess now I have the platform, right?  I find myself nervous, though, because discussing it involves talking about some personal experiences that I usually prefer not to publicize.

I’ve mentioned in the past, I think, an impatience with what I have experienced as sex-positive feminists being unwilling to discuss negative experiences of sex, to dismiss them as not having “full consent” and therefore not being really sex, or something of that nature.  Sometimes I can feel quite alone in having had many experiences of sex that were really very bad.  And no, they weren’t rape.  They were experiences to which I fully and freely consented.  They were also experiences that were horrible, in some cases traumatic–but with one exception, I really don’t think they were rape (the exception I try not to think about).  I do think they are heavily inflected and dependent on a misogynist culture that keeps women from trusting themselves, feeling good about themselves, feeling good about their bodies, feeling confidence.  And maybe men have experiences like these too?  And just don’t talk about them?  I honestly don’t know.

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time hanging around a given bar scene in NYC.  Giuliani had just come to power, and it was hard to get into places if you were under 21, which I was, so if you were a teenager and you found a friendly bar that would pour out for you, you tended to stay.  This scene had a number of bands circulating through it, as scenes do, and I had a crush on a big man in one of those bands.  He was–and is–significantly older than me and married.  Like, my father’s age.  (It’s probably not irrelevant that my father had just left my family and he and I were not on speaking terms.)  Dude was cute–insofar as my quirky definition of cuteness goes.  He was very smart, which was important to me, because I’m very smart (no false modesty here, I don’t have time), I was at the time, and I don’t have a lot of patience.  And he was very, very political in a way that I have a hard time finding outside of my immediate family, in a radical-left, know-your-history kind of way.  I still find that deeply alluring (one of the reasons my current favorite band is my favorite is because when I first heard them a few years ago, one of their songs referred to the police as “the pigs” and I hadn’t heard that since I was a little girl, so I fell immediately in love).

And at first, he was rather sweet to me, in a flirtatious sort of way, but in a way that indicated that he knew I was underage and had a crush on him.  Then two things happened.  One was that I turned 18; the other was that his girlfriend moved away (this is a whole other kettle of fish not worth going into right now).  I guess he had some spare time because he moved in on me hard.  There was a lot of buying me drinks and taking my hand going to secluded parts of the bar and staring deeply into my eyes and telling me that age didn’t matter, what mattered was how two people felt about each other.  You can tell that age does matter and that I was 18 because I fell for this crap.  And then there was a lot of making out in taxis and the hallways of the various buildings where I was living and once in my apartment.  And then I think the reality of what it meant to get a teenage virgin who’d never been kissed before to fall for you crashed in on him and he…stopped.  Just cut me dead.  The first time he saw me after going to bed with me for the first time.

Even before that, though, something had started to go wrong.  I’d stopped feeling anything when we were fooling around–not excitement or arousal or anything.  I just felt…detached from the whole thing, like I wasn’t really there.  That’s a feature of depression, certainly, but it scared the shit out of me–had I lost the ability to enjoy sex?  I can look back and say poor baby, a middle-aged married man fingering you in a taxi is not conducive to a kid’s sexual flowering, but that wasn’t my perspective at the time.  And understand this–he checked in with me every step of the way.  Did I want to be here?  Did I want to be doing this?  I always said yes.  But in a very real way, I wasn’t there at all.  My therapist at the time told me it was dissociation.  But it terrified me.  It was like I couldn’t feel anything.

So why did I keep saying yes?  I didn’t want him to stop liking me (fat chance).  I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t cool.  Nobody else had ever found me attractive.  And while I knew I was smart–I had all kinds of support and validation for that–the idea that somebody thought I was pretty?  Attractive?  Beautiful?  It was powerful.  It was important.  I really, really needed it.  But understand: he never said anything like that.  He never put any pressure on me.  But I still ended up doing things I didn’t want to do and didn’t enjoy.  My decisions were no doubt the result of a misogynist culture that taught me to value myself and my sexuality poorly; they were no doubt the result of rape culture that taught me to prioritize his experiences over my own.  But there were mine.  I was of age.  I consented, repeatedly.  This wasn’t rape.

I don’t mean to exempt this dude from blame.  He was an asshole, no doubt.  He should have known better–hell, he probably did know better.  It wouldn’t have taken a genius to realize that I was uncomfortable and unhappy.  It wouldn’t have taken a genius to realize that there was no way this situation was work out well for me.  It wouldn’t have taken a genius to think that a schoolgirl’s first sexual experiences should not have included giving a married man a blow job in a hallway that smelled like urine.  It’s just that he wasn’t a rapist.  And that’s a low bar to set.  He’s still scum.  (We actually have enough interests in common and NYC is a small enough city that I run into mentions of him from time to time, interviews, that kind of thing.  I have no idea if he runs into mentions of me, or, if he does, what he thinks.)  And for years I had several symptoms of PTSD related to these experiences–intrusive thoughts I couldn’t control, for instance.  I couldn’t talk about this in detail in therapy without dissociating–when I tried, I became literally nauseated.

The thing about dissociating during sex is that once you learn how, it’s pretty easy to do, and doing it–counting ceiling tiles until it’s over–often becomes easier than saying “this isn’t working for me,” so I’ve done it a lot, though not for a few years.  And the thing about what happened to me is that I lost all faith in my desire.  My gut reaction to feeling attracted to someone was to stay as far from them as I could, on the grounds that nothing good could come of that.  When you combine those two things, well, I ended up making myself sleep with men I wasn’t attracted to because I really liked them and they treated me well and it would be a great relationship, women I wasn’t attracted to because I started out being attracted to them but then they started being really nasty to me when it seemed too late to turn back, men I started out being attracted to and whose technique turned out to lack a certain je ne sais quoi.  And that’s a lot of lousy sex too.  A lot of wondering what was wrong with me that I wasn’t enjoying sex, like I was supposed to.  It really did a number on my head.  And my body.

And none of that was rape either.  It was all stuff I did to myself.  I made those decisions.  I consented.  I often initiated, because I could think of a good reason not to have sex and “I just don’t really feel like it” didn’t seem like a good enough reason to me.  I’ve been to bed with men because it just seemed easier to get it over with than deal with me not wanting to.

I will never do any of that again.  But it lasted for a long time, years, years of therapy.  I was really fucked up, and I have never found a good feminist analysis of the situations I kept finding/putting myself in.  For so many years feminists have had to keep hammering home that rape isn’t “just” bad sex.  That’s so important.  But I’d like to talk about bad sex now.  Is it gendered?  I feel like my experiences have got to be gendered.  I’ve never heard a man talk about anything like this, but of course my experience does not have to be universal.

Thoughts?

In defense of “bad” abortions

Most women don’t need to be told the story of a woman’s abortion (or two abortions) after forgetting to use birth control in the heat of the moment. Most of us know a woman who’s done that. About one in three women will be her. Statistically, several women reading this post at this moment have not just had an abortion, but have had a “bad” abortion. So they don’t need to read about someone else’s just to understand.