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Category: Feminism

Guardian: Debbie Stoller Interview

Debbie Stoller is interviewed by Zoe Williams for the Guardian on the knitting wave, feminism, men, and more:

In person, she elaborates: “Women’s work is never done, and it’s drudgery, and it’s tedious, and you always have to do it again the next day. But you know, here at Bust a lot of the work we do is drudgery. It’s all work. Taking care of the home, or putting out a magazine, or picking up the garbage, it’s all work. Even this job, which is my dream job, is not always so satisfying. This is the thing that I feel 1970s feminists got really fucked-up in. That was the aim of any life – you can become president, you can become anything you want to be, and any fulfilment you’re going to get, as a woman, will be to do with the job that you have.”

And she’s right – I think this might be the core battle in modern feminism. The status of paid employment as an elevated pursuit that would provide self-expression and self-respect, regardless of its nature, held total sway at a time when women were fighting to get into the workplace. Now that we’re in, that ideal – of perfect fulfilment through work – very rarely obtains. Surveys in this country and in America show women often saying that they’d rather be at home with their kids after all. Data points like that are used more and more often by the Daily Mail, by far-right pundits like Ann Coulter, by rightwing, mainly American, academics, as evidence that the feminist revolution was a terrible mistake. Conclusions that would have been heresy in the 80s – women were betrayed by the quest for equality, work just makes them unhappy, they would have been better off at home – are trotted out with alarming shamelessness now. There are far too few people like Stoller, pointing out the obvious – some women find work a grind because that’s exactly what it is. Men find it a grind as well.

The secret to gender parity doesn’t lie in shunting women from one arena of toil to another, then back again; it lies in everybody being able to range freely between one probably partly boring pursuit and another, according to his or her ambition, without certain activities being irrationally denigrated for their traditionally female associations. This point needs to be made, trenchantly and repeatedly, and knitting is as good a way in as any.

This excellent read via Dr. B.

Feminist Blogs

I am currently rearranging my blog links into categories, one of which is “feminist blogs.” I am including not only those people who write on feminism, but also those who declare themselves expressly feminist, pro-feminist, womanist, etc.

If, when it appears I am completed, you would consider yourself a blogging person who falls into this category but is not included on this list, let me know here in the comments. Male bloggers, please give me permission to include you, as I know some men occasionally have issues with the label. Conversely, if you find yourself on the list and don’t think you should be there, plase let me know. No backlash, I swear.

AND, if you are a feminist blogger who is not already included in my list of links, drop me a line and I’ll include you. Link for all!

Andrea Yates and NOW

I am not the biggest fan of NOW, but being the most recognized feminist organization in the United States, feel the need to come to NOW’s defense in this instance.

Jay Tea at Wizbang, in discussing the recent ruling to re-try and -sentence Andrea Yates, wonders:

It was really driven home to me this time, though, when it came out that the National Organization for Women had raised the funds for the appeal. Does NOW really want to be associated with a woman who murdered all five of her children?

It goes even deeper than that. I happen to be pro-choice on the abortion issue, as is NOW, but do they really want to leave themselves open to charges that they favor the right of women to kill their children on a whole new front?

Allow me.

Ignoring the implications of baby-killing and NOW in the pro-abortion rights movement, NOW does not support “the right of women to kill their children.” Thie difference between the abortion of an unviable fetus and the killing of five self-sustaining children is something I never hope to argue with a man who declares himself pro-choice. Bad choice of language, Jay Tea.

Yates, if a victim of anything, is a victim of bad medical care and of an illness that was not well-known or oft discussed until after her murder case broke the news. Post-partum depression and post-partum psychosis are now well-recognized as forms of serious illness that must be watched for, treated, and maintained after the birth of a child. Yates was considered by all experts in the trial, but for the expert whose testimony was rescinded, to be emotionally unwell and did not know right from wrong at the time of the killing. Add that she had been removed from her medication and was isolated from outside help by virtue of her family’s lifestyle, despite everyone knowing and later publicly acknowledging that she was unfit to watch the children, and this case becomes the ultimate tragic example of how poor medical treatment for mental health plays out in the most horrific ways.

NOW’s support for Yates was again and again announced by the organization to be an attempt to ensure that the judiciary, the medical community, and the culture-at-large “consider tragedies of this sort in the full context of the nature of postpartum depression,” and calls for more research into the illness. In addition, NOW took an official stance on the nature of this post-pregnancy condition where no official literature existed before.

Previously dismissed as the “baby blues,” postpartum depression is a virtually paralyzing condition of depression brought on by the onslaught of hormones and trauma on the body after the birth of a child. On the other hand, postpartum psychosis is recognized by the government as:

a very serious mental illness that can affect new mothers. This illness can happen quickly, often within the first 3 months after childbirth. Women can lose touch with reality, often having auditory hallucinations (hearing things that aren’t actually happening, like a person talking) and delusions (seeing things differently from what they are). Visual hallucinations (seeing things that aren’t there) are less common. Other symptoms include insomnia (not being able to sleep), feeling agitated (unsettled) and angry, and strange feelings and behaviors. Women who have postpartum psychosis need treatment right away and almost always need medication. Sometimes women are put into the hospital because they are at risk for hurting themselves or someone else.

Sounds like Andrea Yates.

Antepartum symptoms are often observed as well, as they were in the Yates case.

After the Yates trial broke, many women came forward on a public level to announce that they could, in some dark and often shameful way, sympathize with the illness and the outcome. Some admitted that they too had felt so unfit, depressed, and/or desperate, that they had thought about hurting their children. And then they often felt worse that they had had these uncontrollable thoughts and feelings at all. But the outcome of this public discussion became an important commentary on the isolation of parenthood, gender roles in marriage and parenting, household responsibilities, the importance of sound mental health, and the societal expectations of motherhood. Women were allowed to admit that good motherhood is not instinctual, but learned, and that it takes many women some time to bond with their children in truly meaningful ways.

One reason that the Yates case is so shocking on a gender level is because it smacks to the ground the notion that motherhood comes naturally.

Why does the testimony of Patrick Dietz matter? This comes to mind:

The effect of Dietz’ testimony was to give jurors the impression that Yates had killed the children believing she could escape responsibility by pretending to be insane, based on the non-existent episode of Law & Order.

As does this (from the comments of Wizbang):

The prosecution used it to impeach a defense expert witness, i.e., made the expert and her opinion look less credible. The implication was that the expert did not factor in that Yates got the idea from this program when rendering an opinion whether she knew right from wrong.

Then, in his closing, the prosecutor argued that Yates got the idea to kill her kids from the L&O episode she saw, therefore she had both premeditation, the necessary intent, and knew right from wrong. One problem: She never saw the episode because it does not exist…

[The courts] do overturn verdicts for insufficient evidence. An element of the offense that must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt is her mental state, i.e., premeditation, intent, etc. Except for Dietz, all the evidence from the experts was that she was nuts. If you subtract Dietz because his evidence was false, all you are left with is evidence that she did not know right from wrong.

Andrea Yates’ lawyers will not seek her freedom. Even if she wins the retrial, she will be under watch by the court system and will likely remain institutionalized for the majority of her life. In addition, if necessary, the state has the opportunity to try Yates for the death of two other children, an option they likely decided to guard in case of some unexpected turn during an appeal like this one.

NOW fought for the rights of this woman because it became apparent very quickly that she does not belong in a prison, but in a hospital. And unlike the assertions of those who commented at Wizbang that NOW supported the notion that “anyone at home with 5 kids would go crazy,” I have yet to find anything by any member of NOW that supports that assertion. These antequated and stereotypical renderings of mental illness do no one any favors, especially those in dire need of treatment for mental health.

If one good thing came from this tragedy, it is the new recognition of the necessity of women’s mental health in motherhood and in the postpartum period. I can’t think of much else to incite optimism whatsoever.

I Was a Teen Mom

I was a teen mom. I suppose it’s a label I’ll carry around for awhile, watching people do the mental math when they discern my son’e age minus my own. I’ve written about this many times before. I got pregnant within days before my eighteenth birthday and Ethan was born before I turned nineteen. I barely finished high school, but continued with my education and now I’m this close to finishing my undergraduate degree. If you’ve been with me for awhile, you know that I plan to go on to graduate school and gain the idependence and self-reliance that I so want.

I did all this without going on welfare, without succumbing to homelessness, avoiding abusive relationships, and not letting the surprise of pregnancy remove me from my goals. How? I have a whole lot of help from people who absolutely adore me and Ethan. Because we’re so adorable.

A paired book and movie have come out in recent years that I intend to get my hands on, “Growing Up Fast” by documentarian Joanna Lipper. One thing about the Alternet article that profiles Lipper and covers this book/movie and the teen parenthood phenomenon irritates the hell out of me:

Growing up in Manhattan, Lipper was both “very focused academically” and athletic, playing on basketball, softball, and volleyball teams. “I loved to read, definitely as a teenager and throughout my whole childhood. I lived vicariously through stories and I always loved storytelling.” After high school, she attended Harvard, where she studied under esteemed professors like film-theory philosopher Stanley Cavell and literary theorist and cultural critic Elaine Scarry – an experience that, she gushes, “changed my life. I just really, really, really loved it.”

This quote in itself isn’t inherently bad, but considering the context of the article and the content of the movie, it seems to juxtapose the successful Lipper against her unsuccessful teen parent interviewees. After all, teen parents don’t read, lose all professional opportunities, and only come to teen parenthood through poverty, ignorance, and naivety. Further, the image of teen parenthood is so stereotypically hopeless that I nearly sprained an eyeball from rolling my eyes so often.

In the film version of “Growing Up Fast,” Lipper introduces six young women: Shayla, a doe-faced beauty; angry MaryAnn; Colleen, a chunky Christian with a junkie boyfriend in the clink; Jessica, a model student whose reckless rendezvous with an older man who has already fathered three kids results in her own; Sheri, a wounded-looking teen abandoned by her boyfriend during her pregnancy; and Amy, a rebellious, stubborn party girl who got pregnant twice, by two different men.

Further, whenever anything about teen parenthood is compiled, there is always a mom who says something like this:

In the film, 16-year-old Shayla explains her mind-boggling motivation: “I thought it would make my life a lot better, not only in my relationship with C.J., but with my friends. I thought it would bring my popularity up because people would be like, ‘Hey, she’s got a baby, and that’s cool.’ “

Lipper’s “research” was conducted in one solitary city, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a factory town treading loss of industry and jobs. While this might serve as an interesting case study, it isn’t anything near a norm for most of the teen parents I know. I grew up in a fairly affluent community, not Manhattan of course, in an affluent family. I took to reading like a fish takes to water, wasn’t particularly interested in children unless you count teaching my nieces and nephews how to armpit fart, and I obviously too enjoy storytelling. And I made some questionable choices, got pregnant, made the choice to have Ethan (but not without some incredible soul-searching and back-and-forth as I imagine many unplanned pregnancies entail), and when I had Baby E, things changed.

Sure, I grew up quickly and had a long bout of crippling depression, but there were plenty of helping hands along the way. My family came in just as I needed them most, a family friend counseled me through the pregnancy, and my many friends decided to swoop in and regard the little one as, not tragedy, but my destiny. This made all the difference.

The only teen parents I know who could perhaps be considered “unsuccessful” are those who have or had no help at all. They had abusive authority figures that labelled them failures before they even started parenting; intermittent help that was given and rescinded with no way to predict which day would bring what; unhelpful, contrary, or absent parenting partners; little education and no hope for upward movement; and poor parenting models on which to operate their own parenting styles.

I have long been an advocate for a mentoring program for single parents, some sort of public funded project that aligns members with other single parents and former teen parents, people who have been there and can guide floundering or nervous newbies into success. That’s what I had and so desperately needed, and this is to what I contribute 90% of my success, the other 9% being my tenacity and sheer will. Add 1% of inertia and you have the perfect equation.

Somewhere we fell short, allowing pro-life groups to take over teen parenting mentorship and support, where I presume a more liberal or feminist approach to early parenthood would provide the knowledge necessary to guarantee success — information on birth control, advice on navigating public services, legal rights, expectations, but with a healthy dose of personal choice. Young parents need the scaffolding of outside hands, knowledge, and yes, sometimes money, to ensure that they and their children can succeed and not be derailed by this enormous life change. In addition, young parents need contacts with peers who share similar circumstances, and with whom they can collaborate.

Being a single, teen mom is not the best arrangement, but it need not be disastrous. Shaming, blaming, and proselytizing teen parents is useless because it operates only in hindsight and doesn’t allow for a potential healthy, happy future for either parent or child.

Rather than enforcing and reenforcing stereotypes about teen sex, teen pregnancy and teen parenthood, we have to be willing to embrace the parents we tend to shame to ensure that their progeny have a chance. Treat us like we’re naive, irresponsible, and incapable people and don’t be surprised if you end up with naive, irresponsible, and incapable parents. Or even better, ignore those of us who don’t have babies to climb the ladder of high school popularity and ignore those of us who do just fine regardless.

We’ll be here, plugging along despite you.

Required Reading:
Girl Mom Dot Com – “Girl-Mom is about empowerment. Girl-Mom is about defying social stereotypes, and fighting for our rights as mothers.”
One Young Parent – For teen parents (both moms and dads), their families and friends, and for those interested in helping them.

Neither site glamorizes teen pregnancy or parenting, but provide a supportive online community for young people having children.

And one more myth-buster: Teen motherhood has little impact on welfare costs, a study by professors at the Heinz Graduate School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University.

Where’s My Survey?

Yahoo News reports that Blog Creation, Readership Rises in 2004:

Readership of online journals known as blogs grew significantly in 2004, driven by increased awareness of them during the presidential campaign and other major news events, according to a study released Sunday.

Twenty-seven percent of online adults in the United States said in November they read blogs, compared with 17 percent in a February survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

I can’t wait until blogs are known as “blogs” instead of “online journal” or some other such crap.

And then after a lengthy explanation about the use of blogs in Dean’s presidential campaign, and blogging the tsunami, and the obligatory mention of Power Line,

Blog creators tend to be male, affluent, well-educated and young; 70 percent of them have high-speed connections at home, and 82 percent have been online at least six years.

Of six qualifiers mentioned here, I meet three. I am young, have had a personal realm on the internet for eight years, and am reasonably well-educated. Apparently they polled Matt Yglesias and the boys at Pandagon for this survey. WATW?: At least Time magazine remembered us.

And as reading things like this always causes me to do, I wonder why the hell I never get polled.

The Trouble With Howard Stern

[This post brought to you by Rad Geek. Opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of feministe or Ms. Lauren. etc. etc. etc.]

O.K., I’ll cop to it. I was just about ready to cheer on Howard Stern’s "jihad" against the Bush administration; I was almost ready to accept the story that he was canned from Clear Channel as retribution for his anti-Bush stance (rather than, say, because of Clear Channel’s financial worries about escalating FCC enforcement and the $495,000 they recently paid out in fines), and to welcome him to the fold as a funny guy with a lot of fans and media connections that could help our cause in November. I was, in short, perilously close to forgetting what a halfwit misogynist twerp Howard Stern really is.

Then I heard that he’s bankrolling a remake of Porky’s, the 1982 backlash blockbuster that spawned a generation of astonishingly mean-spirited sex farces centered on teenage boys leering at, manipulating, and humiliating young women. And it’s all coming back to me now.

Sorry Howard, you’re on your own this time.

An Outrageous and Ordinary Story

[I’m one of many guest writers posting for Lauren while she’s away. My name is Charles Johnson; I normally write at Rad Geek People’s Daily.]

We’ve heard a lot about the vicious torture of men in Abu Ghraib and other detention centers around Iraq—almost exclusively by men, but yes, by some women too. The Right is so desperate for any explanation other than the sheer, evil brutality of war—the war that they clamored for, the war that was supposed to "liberate" the Iraqi people—that one leading theory seems to be that evil pro-choice lesbian mind rays made them do it (link via The Austro-Athenian Empire). Lost in much of the sensationalized coverage and handwringing, however, is the fact that we have merely been given photographic documentation of outrages that are part and parcel of the horrors of war. This is nothing new; and while it is outrageous it should not at all be surprising.W arfare is little more than the logic of patriarchal command and control writ large, and the brutality of that logic as acted out in Abu Ghraib is awfully similar, in motivation and in tactics, to the acts carried out every day by men who rape women and other men, and men who beat their wives or girlfriends, all across the country.

Nowhere is this more evident in the ordinary, and horrifying, story—buried all too often under the numerous stories about the attacks on Iraqi men—that the rape of Iraqi women has apparently been part of the unwritten Standard Operating Procedure at Abu Ghraib:

In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found them hard to believe.

The note claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees, who were, and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several of the women were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men, it said. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail to spare the women further shame.

. . .

Astonishingly, the secret inquiry launched by the US military in January, headed by Major General Antonio Taguba, has confirmed that the letter smuggled out of Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as “Noor” was entirely and devastatingly accurate. While most of the focus since the scandal broke three weeks ago has been on the abuse of men, and on their sexual humilation in front of US women soldiers, there is now incontrovertible proof that women detainees – who form a small but unknown proportion of the 40,000 people in US custody since last year’s invasion – have also been abused. Nobody appears to know how many. But among the 1,800 digital photographs taken by US guards inside Abu Ghraib there are, according to Taguba’s report, images of a US military policeman “having sex” with an Iraqi woman.

Taguba discovered that guards have also videotaped and photographed naked female detainees. The Bush administration has refused to release other photographs of Iraqi women forced at gunpoint to bare their breasts (although it has shown them to Congress) – ostensibly to prevent attacks on US soldiers in Iraq, but in reality, one suspects, to prevent further domestic embarrassment.

. . .

In Iraq, the existence of photographs of women detainees being abused has provoked revulsion and outrage, but little surprise. Some of the women involved may since have disappeared, according to human rights activists. Professor Huda Shaker al-Nuaimi, a political scientist at Baghdad University who is researching the subject for Amnesty International, says she thinks "Noor" is now dead. "We believe she was raped and that she was pregnant by a US guard. After her release from Abu Ghraib, I went to her house. The neighbours said her family had moved away. I believe she has been killed."

Oh, and, by the way? It turns out that the Army already knew what was going on in Abu Ghraib. In November. They decided to start doing something about it in January when they learned that the photos existed, and the word might start getting out to the Western press. You, of course, didn’t hear a damn thing about it from our fearless leaders until April became May, after a good six months of Army concealment and CYA operations, once the truth finally came out in the pages of the New Yorker.

Firing Rumsfeld might have seemed like an appropriate demand a while ago. But with what we know now? That’s way too little to ask. Rumsfeld knew. Bush should have known. How could we face "Noor" and tell her that the most we thought we should do was to quit paying one of the men who is responsible for her torture and who is all too likely to have been an unwitting collaborator in her murder? Bush should be impeached and Rumsfeld should be indicted.

What excuse could we have for urging anything less?

Rape, As I Know It

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

While watching the commentary on the Kobe Bryant rape spectacle, my stomach drops. I’ve written about the case often — I follow all news on traditional women’s issues fairly closely — and yet I have never expressed what I really mean to express on all this trial mess.

As I sit down to write this, I’m not sure that it is appropriate to write on. I haven’t done much serious writing about myself on this blog so far — too many privacy issues, too many risks. But I think I’m going to raise the risk level on this one and finally express some things I’ve been dying to say. Been hurting to say, really.

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