In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Fangirls, mean girls – and that grand pastime of calling each other “ugly sluts”

“Everyone knows that bitch got knocked up by someone else and TRICKED him into marriage! Ugly slut! I hope they divorce!”

It sounds like a comment you would find on a Daily Mail article about some celebrity drama. But the poor man allegedly “TRICKED” into marriage is meant to be my husband. And the “ugly slut” is me. A friend who had written a blog entry about how my husband and I collaborated on a play together encountered these comments, and many more. She deleted them, but not before I had already read them. The friend was shocked, but I wasn’t. The same person who had posted those comments had already tweeted at me, left abusive comments on my site, and sent me detailed arguments as to why all of my much my pictures suck via Facebook. And she wouldn’t be the first to pursue this course of action.

Hi, my name is Natalia. My husband’s fangirls stalk me on the Internet.

Read More…Read More…

Can Black Women Lead on Rethinking Marriage?

By Dani McClain, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine.

One highlight of Election Day 2012: voters in Maryland, Washington and Maine deciding, with their ballots, whether people in same-sex relationships will be allowed to marry.

Black voters in those states — especially Maryland, which is nearly one-third African American – may need to take cover. We know about the backlash black Californians faced after Prop. 8 passed. We also know about National Organization for Marriage’s cynical efforts to drive a wedge between black and gay Americans.

But what we don’t know and what I’d love for some exit poll to find out is whether black voters — especially straight black women — actually are skeptical of marriage equality for reasons that have nothing to do with homophobia. Could it be that we’re not motivated to support these initiatives because we’re not convinced that marriage should grant access to human rights in the first place?

Beyond Wedded Union

If black women are holding out for something better than marriage, then we’re acting in our own self-interest. According to a review of 2010 Census data and as reported last year, black women are at the vanguard of reframing family for the 21st century: “Among African-Americans, U.S. households headed by women — mostly single mothers but also adult women living with siblings or elderly parents — represented roughly 30% of all African-American households, compared with the 28% share of married-couple African-American households. It was the first time the number of female-headed households surpassed those of married couples among any race group.”

When these heads of household go to the polls, they may be thinking about their own desire to directly access quality healthcare or tax breaks, not whether the inability to marry is keeping someone else from the circuitous route people in the United States have come to accept.

The women described above may soon set aside any acceptance of stigma and instead start to see themselves as a political constituency. And once this happens, the same-sex marriage conversation will be forever changed. Bigots may find themselves starved for attention as the movement is forced to confront legitimate push-back.

I know that for some, that vision — outlined clearly in the Beyond Marriage statement is too farsighted for someone who faces deportation tomorrow because they can’t marry the person they love today. I know that Salt Lake City’s mutual commitment registry is too local for that Texan whose heart is breaking because she can’t visit her hospitalized partner. And I can see why the history of the fight to pass the federal Comprehensive Child Development Act in the early ’70s is of no consolation to the person who lacks rights to the child they’re raising today.

That said, these examples and the work of campaigns such as Strong Families have been sources of inspiration for me as someone who worries about the marriage equality movement’s blind spots. They’ve helped me and others understand who gets hurt when romantic and sexual relationships registered with the state (as opposed to, say, familial or friendship bonds) are privileged under the law.

There are alternatives to treating marriage as the brass ring, and progressive family economic policy — accessible to all Americans, regardless of marital status — is the goal that makes the most sense for a growing number of us.

The War On (Single) Women

Of course, even if we got all progressives on board with that goal, we’d face a real fight from the Right. Conservative rhetoric and policy have long depended on the demonization of unmarried women — from Nixon’s veto of a universal childcare bill four decades ago followed by Reagan’s welfare queens to Rick Santorum, during this year’s primary season, asserting that the way to “reduce the Democratic advantage” is to build traditional two-parent families. Through the years, the right’s underlying argument has been consistent: Within the traditional, patriarchal family structure, daddy provides so government doesn’t have to, and that’s a good thing.

The right-wing message machine has been savvy in this arena, but recently efforts to malign unmarried women have gotten a lot more desperate. Last year, two Wisconsin legislators proposed a bill based on the allegation that single parenthood is a leading cause of child abuse. Following their argument requires a suspension of logic, but the bill was really just the latest attempt to drive home the opening words of the 1996 federal welfare-reform law: “Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.”

One particularly aggressive piece of that law incentivized states to convince low-income women that the life-sustaining support they and their children needed could and should be provided by husbands rather than by government. These Bridefare programs added sweeteners to the checks of married couples while slashing — sometimes by as much as a quarter — the benefits of cohabiting unmarried adults.

Writing in the pages of The Nation in 2002, Katha Pollitt critiqued this trend in government marriage promotion: “Why should the government try to maneuver reluctant women into dubious choices just because they are poor?… Instead of marketing marriage as a poverty program, how much better to invest in poor women — and men — as human beings in their own right… Every TANF [Temporary Aid for Needy Families] dollar spent on marital propaganda means a dollar less for programs that really help people.”

How are these Bridefare marriages doing a decade later? Did they improve the financial stability of participants? Have their divorce rates been lower than national averages? The answers may be further proof that the right wing’s belief in a marriage cure is flawed. They’d also tell us something how marriage is experienced by low-income and poor women, and how those experiences match up to the messages pushed by prominent groups within the marriage equality movement.

Soccer Moms, NASCAR Dads and Satisfied Singles

The obsession with unmarried women isn’t just political. It’s cultural, too. The film amplifying Steve Harvey’s ubiquitous advice that we should “act like a lady, think like a man” is just the latest example. Two years ago, the mainstream media’s fascination with black women’s marriage rates hit a high point, and we became the topic of a conversation that we were not in a position to control. Unfortunately, that conversation was driven by media outlets that couldn’t be bothered to check their numbers.

When 2009 data showed that 70.5 percent of black women between the ages of 25 and 29 had never been married, the narrowness of that age range was often left out of mainstream news reports. Headlines implied that 70 percent of all black women had never married. The truth is that as we age a majority do, but still not at the same rates as women of other races and ethnicities. According to the same data, 13 percent of black women age 55 and older had never married, compared with just five percent of white and Asian women and nine percent of Latinas.

These stats — while not as wildly surprising as initial reports suggested — support my thesis: Unmarried black women are an untapped force for change because we’re more likely to stay that way and so are best positioned to lobby on behalf of the rights of single people and those in non-traditional families.

But there’s at least one reason why we’re not doing it. A number of black women across the sexual preference spectrum do desperately want to be married. Rather than heed some rallying cry to demand that policies reflect our realities, many of us are mired in frustration. What can feel most pressing is that marriage is out of reach because of larger social forces, such as the high incarceration rates of black men, the joblessness that has hit our communities especially hard during this recession (14 percent of black people in the U.S. were unemployed in July, compared to eight percent of the population as a whole), white supremacist beauty standards and other factors that put us at a disadvantage in the marriage market. These are real concerns.

I don’t expect that a sizable number of unmarried black women will publicly eschew marriage and brand themselves as a voting bloc anytime soon. But I do think it’s coming. And a review of how we vote on marriage initiatives may offer a window into how far away that day is.

A Simple Saturday Post: Leave Me Out of Your “Everyone,” Mr. Apatow.

I just wanted to quickly mention the trailer for the new Judd Apatow movie, “This is 40.”

Of course, we all know that Hollywood is guilty of all sorts of offenses all of the time, but it seems rare even today to find one that is quite so up front with its surface-level exclusion. The tagline at the end of the trailer reads: “This is not just their story. This is everyone’s story.”

Please, watch, if you’re so inclined:

(Trigger warnings regarding this trailer: man on a toilet, Megan Fox in underwear, humor about spousal death, anti-aging, inherent anti-lotsa-stuff…)

The trouble, of course, is with the assumption that “everyone” will see some aspect of themselves in this story… a story which appears to be about a wildly wealthy (do you KNOW how much a house like that costs in LA?), white, American-born, middle-aged, thin, conventionally attractive, cissexual, child-rearing, married couple. I’m going to give Mr. Apatow and his corporate marketeers the benefit of the doubt and assume they know not “everyone” will conform to all of those attributes at once, and are trying to make a more general point about the basic similarity of human experience, but even I—a white, cissexual, American-born woman raising a daughter—feel thoroughly alienated and offended by this at just a core level. My heart and stomach clench to wonder how other “everyones” must feel when watching this trailer and getting smacked by that tagline.

It’s obviously impossible to cast aspersions on Mr. Apatow’s film itself– at least until the movie premieres, this will remain a marketing problem– but he is a hugely powerful filmmaker in this town, and I believe it’s fair to say that the tagline came down to him. It represents at the very least a myopic and embarrassing perspective on the world. At worst, it suggests that those with the most privilege in this country are unwilling to even bother extending an invitation to see their new movie to those that aren’t adequately “like them.”

And frankly, in order to chalk up a box office success, they will presumably need more than middle-aged rich white people (traditionally not the most movie-friendly audience out there) to go see their film… So couldn’t they have come up with a slightly less exclusionary pitch?? (I’m kind of seriously asking this, and also leaving the comments section wide open here for complaints, suggestions and heavy-duty snark.)

I am very lenient about humor, and I know what Judd Apatow’s movies are like. Some of his stuff has made me laugh, some has made me cringe, some has made me cringe through laughter or laugh through cringing. In addition, I believe he has every right to tell this story—clearly a personal one—if he chooses to do so. But if his marketing is going to display a level of ignorance this enormous, and work to exclude us so egregiously, then “everyone” can certainly choose not to see it.

What does a feminist parent look like?

I have been writing my blog about feminist motherhood for five years but it took a few years of reading and writing on the topic for me to have much of a clue, really, on how to define feminist parenting, apart from just the fact that it included me – a feminist with a baby. When I first became a mother I had one feminist friend with kids and that was it.

Sometime back in the first year of blogging I started wondering who was reading my blog, and if they were parents how they would define their feminist parenting. So, I put up a post with ’10 Questions About Your Feminist Parenthood’ and I waited to see what would happen. I expected maybe half a dozen responses, if I was lucky, but over the years word has spread and all together I have received almost 100 responses.. with more still coming in. (And you’re very welcome to contribute a response of your own, too).

The responses have come from all over the world, including Australia, USA, Italy, UK, Canada, New Zealand, France, Germany, South Korea, Singapore and South America, and they have included a wide range of parenting experiences, such as primary parents, step-parents, adoptive parents, grandparents, co-parents and one set of expectant parents. Among the people responding there have been single parents and partnered parents; queer parents and straight parents; and at-home parents, parents who are also students and parents working in paid employment. The responses have been an absolute pleasure to read – they have been equal parts fascinating, charming, funny, sad, reassuring and revealing. (They make for a great paper and, in fact, I delivered a paper last year to a conference on this very subject and you can see links at the bottom of this post for a summary of my findings).

These responses have also changed some of my views on feminist parenthood. For instance, no other question received as strong a response as that of question 7, which was about how women reconciled the sacrifice involved in motherhood with their feminism. An overwhelming majority of women said they couldn’t relate to the question, and some even found it offensive. (Interestingly, a few other mothers said it was not only something they could relate to but that it was something they were struggling with in their lives, and all of those women happened to be at-home parents). These responses helped me to realise that feminism often over-simplifies the barriers holding mothers back and that it can tend to be seen as blaming mothers, themselves, rather than the patriarchal ways in which we organise the world against mothers and their care work. It also made me think that ‘sacrifice’ is a very loaded word.

So, what does a feminist parent look like? Here is a smattering of highlights from the responses I have received to my ’10 Questions About Your Feminist Parenthood’:

How has parenthood changed your feminism?

“I drank with the boys, talked music with the boys, studied with the boys, worked with the boys, and hated every girl I saw. So, being female didn’t play a role in how I lived (except I got to sleep with some of my best friends). I first called myself a feminist after giving birth to a girl who I couldn’t help but like. It forced me to realise that I am female. When the party’s over and I can’t live like a bachelor anymore. It has forced me to identify with my sex”.

“Mr Mom was a fairly unusual arrangement 20 years ago and I thought it confirmed my feminism. Instead I worked nonstop as breadwinner and mother. In many ways I overcompensated for not being home during the day by trying to be the perfect mom at nights and on weekends. Did I mention I did all the cooking and cleaning too? Yeah, not so feminist an approach.. It has taken me a long time to understand that ‘motherhood means sacrifice’ does not mean mothers are solely responsible for sacrifice”.

“When I was younger I was all about women competing in the public sphere. Now I’m all about that if that is what folks want. But also I want work inside the home to be valued more”.

“My initial reaction to this is to think that my feminism hasn’t changed, that it’s just an immutable part of my personality, but this isn’t true. Working as a midwife has exposed me to just a selection of the myriad ways that women are abused, even educated, privileged, middle-class white women. And every day I think that if they are subject to abuse because they are women, what the hell must it be like for the non-English speaking, the homeless, the illiterate, the substance-addicted and the young women that also walk through our doors to have their babies?”

What surprised you about parenthood?

“I had no idea I would fall in love so completely and overwhelmingly. It amazes me that there is this big cultural silence on this issue. Where are the songs, the stories about any form of love other than the romantic sort?”

“I always assumed that I would be a working mother. What I could not imagine is the anguish going back to work caused me. Leaving my son at 8 weeks old left me emotionally and physically bereft. I’d sit in my office at lunch, pumping and crying. Every day off that I spent with my son, I cried because I knew I would have to go back to work. Breastfeeding became a do or die situations for me because it was the one thing that I alone could provide for my son, regardless of whether I was with him all day or not. Not having any choices re. working part-time, working from home; being tied to my job in part because of benefits, it made me realise that mothering and how we choose to mother are FEMINIST choices”.

On suddenly feeling so dependent upon their male partner in a way they’ve not previously experienced (“when I was caring full-time for my son, who was born with a physical disability, I realised how dependent I was on my partner financially, and it freaked me out”), which was also a very negative experience for some (“the sinking feeling that I had tied myself to someone I really wasn’t sure I should have married. I felt like I was at my partner’s mercy. Once I had a baby he turned dictator”).

“I spent the last two months of my first pregnancy reading The Second Sex and I was so ready to raise this kick-ass, take nothing from anyone girl, and now.. that boy has three younger brothers”.

From a profeminist father: “At the end of the day, your main task is to survive and support your family and raise happy children; how you respond to the things you can’t control reveals a great deal about your character. You might discover a capacity for sacrifice and care that you never knew was there. On the flip side.. you might also find yourself erupting with petty rage and misdirected resentment, eruptions that frighten you, your child, and your partner.. when our worst emotions take over.. it is easiest of all for both fathers and mothers to fall back on traditional patterns of dominance and submission”.

What is feminist parenting?

“I wish I could say that my objection to patriarchal authoritarianism has translated into an approach to child-rearing that is gentle, reciprocal, and respectful. Let me tell you, though, I yell way too much. I pull rank all the time. I’m always indirectly playing the Bigger Than You Are card. I hate it. I also would like to claim that my experience as a mother has made me more politically active, more involved in my community. No. My experience as a mother has made me tired and cranky and frustrated.”

“As a mother I was and am straightforward about being marginalised by society for being a working class mother. So, I ‘outed’ every instance where this happened to my son (who is now 21), so he would be in no doubt about what my place was in society and, by associating, his place as a working class male. Also I was very fierce about violence against women, and to the best of my knowledge my son has never hit a woman”. (Several mothers who identified as working class talked about the importance of identifying intersection and training their children to cope with the multiple oppressions).

“Feminism has not necessarily made me a better mother. It’s given me.. an alternative, perhaps kinder model for self-critique, instead of worrying about whether the house is clean enough, I’m thinking about whether or not I’ve met my own social or intellectual needs, in order to ensure I’m fulfilled and happy, which in turn makes me a better more resilient, more patient mother”.

What are the hardest parts of being a feminist parent?

“When I look at the roles in our household I definitely do the majority of the housework. I hate what this models for my son. I feel like I’m failing him in terms of his future relationships with women (and failing those women too)”.

“Being the type of mother I am and the type of person I am means that fitting in with other new mothers has been a challenge at times. My ‘wanting to be liked’ side conflicts with my ‘opinionated and judgemental’ side. Yes, I want to be tolerant and respect other people’s choices, but I also want to speak my mind without being pigeon-holed as the freaky-hippy-lesbian mum”.

“Other feelings of failure – the first time you balance wanting your son to be whoever he wants to be and wanting to protect him from teasing if he decides he wants to wear pink to kindergarten. The catching of myself disliking my belly in the mirror. The moment when my three year old son told my woman dermatologist that she didn’t look like a doctor”.

For more, see the following links at my blog.

http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/this-is-what-i-said-a-feminist-mother-looks-like-the-questionnaire-demographics-key-themes-and-becoming-feminists/

http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/this-is-what-i-said-a-feminist-mother-looks-like-the-impact-of-motherhood-on-their-feminism/

http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/part-3-this-is-what-i-said-a-feminist-mother-looks-like-being-surprised-by-motherhood/

http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/part-4-this-is-what-i-said-a-feminist-mother-looks-like-defining-their-feminist-parenting/

http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/part-5-this-is-what-i-said-a-feminist-mother-looks-like-the-difficulties-with-being-a-feminist-parent/

(You can follow me on twitter @bluemilk)

Not Another Mummy Blogger

Hi. I’m the writer from blue milk and I’m thrilled to be writing at Feministe. I write about motherhood from a feminist perspective and I sometimes write for the Australian feminist group blog, Hoyden About Town and other times I write for a couple of mainstream commercial publications. I also work half the week as an economist but I don’t know anything about personal budgets, sorry, as evidenced by my own household budgeting, which is woeful; so, if the figure doesn’t involve at least $100 million then I’m clueless.

I write about juggling work and family, about art and pop culture, about sex and arguments with my partner, about a bunch of traditional feminist topics like rape, breastfeeding, abortion, and the sexualisation of little girls, and I also write about politics. By and large, my writing is pitched squarely within the framework of motherhood and technically, I think this probably makes me a ‘mummy blogger’. I’m not all that offended by the term. I can see that it’s meant to be somewhat insulting, even children get embarrassed calling you ‘Mummy’ once they get to school, it is just that I am too tired to care. And there is a part of me that feels if a label is stigmatised like that then maybe it’s worth defending. After all, the belittling of mummy blogging has a lot in common with the ways in which mothers are marginalised.

There’s a lot we could do to improve the public discussion of motherhood but here is where I would start. We would not be so judgemental towards mothers if we recognised that mothering is work. If you aren’t yet able to accept mothering as work then you have some reading to do – it will involve economics and history. Start with the emergence of industrialisation when family work first became invisible. And if you can’t see that breastfeeding a baby was every bit as important as collecting firewood for family survival, then keep reading back through feudalism. But once you knock that patriarchal lens of distortion from your eyes you will never see mothers and children quite the same way again. Everywhere you look you will see something a little bit horrifying – hours and hours and hours and hours of unpaid labour. It is work performed very often with love; it is work with possibilities of personal reward and great satisfaction, much like some other jobs, except it is unpaid.

We would have better public policy and better rights for women if we were able to acknowledge more honestly that capitalism is not a marketplace, it is rather, a system that involves the intersection of the market with government, families and communities. We are talking about the greatest heist in capitalist history, because it is estimated that unpaid work in the USA amounts to 50 per cent of all hours of work performed. Imagine any other resource vanishing from the national spreadsheet like that. Capitalism, in its present form, could not survive without that unpaid support. It is not mothers who are draining the system, it is mothers and carers who are propping up the system.

I don’t want to over-complicate what is supposed to just be an introductory post here, but it says something about living in a patriarchy that we would have women specialise in a very demanding area of work that is both vitally important to us and utterly worthless in terms of monetary compensation, doesn’t it?

And there’s lots of other stuff to consider – children are not ‘units of production’, they’re small people who deserve to be nurtured with love and dedication; and yes, mothers are driven by an intense maternal desire to be with their children in spite of the sacrifices; and yes, self-ownership through individual wages was an incredibly important step in feminism and who am I, a mother in the workforce, to deny it? All I am saying is that you do not need to believe in universal minimum incomes and legislated entitlements for at-home parents/carers (though it would be nice) to know that there is a problem here when we penalize mothers through regressive tax systems and workplace discrimination for providing essential care work.

And while capitalism helped women mobilise collectively and seek ownership of resources you cannot pretend that capitalism and the patriarchy are not also mutually reinforcing, which is what you are doing when you tell mothers to just stop looking after kids and get a real job, already. Because whenever a mother enters the workplace a deal is being cut somewhere for childcare. Thinking care work vanishes when a woman’s time is suddenly accounted for in paid employment is patriarchal thinking. Either she is negotiating with a partner for him/her to stay home with the children (and obviously, this favours partnered parents over single parents and high-income couples over those in minimum wage jobs); or she is asking a female relative or friend to help out (more unpaid care on the balance sheet); or she is paying someone to look after the children (and fine, if she can afford to and is willing to pay a fair wage to someone for the task; but let’s not kid ourselves, childcare is female-dominated, poorly paid, and has a history of exploiting poor women for the task).

Ok, so this mother is now at work and by being there she sends important signals to her colleagues and employers about the role of women, she also sends a message to her partner (if she has one) and her children about her identity, she’s feeding her family, and hooray! she officially exists in the marketplace. Good for feminism, but as long as we don’t get ahead of ourselves and expect her to be the entire gateway for female liberation. In fact, it’s an uncomfortable notion but dual, high-income households have seen poor households slip even further behind since women joined the workforce. Turns out when rich women are working and marrying rich husbands, who are also working, that this only widens the gap between them and poor households. Go figure. Obviously, I’m not against women in the workforce but I’m saying this stuff is complicated. It will take a few bites of the apple before we get it sorted out.

If feminism, in approaching the unresolved question of mothers, does not recognise that motherhood is messy and emotional and diverse and political then it has missed the mark. It is important not to try to over-simplify mothers, not to stereotype them and not to ignore that their tasks are real work. Again and again in my writing I try to emphasize that last point, because I suspect much of the hostility towards mothers, including between mothers, would fade if we just understood that mothers are people trying to do a job and it’s consuming and tiring. It is difficult to imagine we would be bothered with The Mummy Wars if we were mobilising around the exploitation of unpaid care in our economy instead.

Because how ludicrous, how shameful, how utterly trivial our judgements of a teenage mother suddenly become with this one acknowledgement – that she is working, that it is hard work and it is for no pay and no recognition. Or our judgements of a mother with a disabled child having an outburst in public; or a mother breastfeeding her toddler; or a mother trying to help her teenage child with their drug addictions; or even, a mother blogging. (Oh, you want to tell me how I should do my unpaid work more to your liking? Fabulous, do tell). It sometimes helps to remember that even the most privileged mother is occasionally woken in the middle of the night by her sick toddler and sits bolt upright in bed, bleary-eyed and shivering in the dark, to catch vomit or shit in her bare hands. It may take some of the sting out of her, apparently, selfish lifestyle.

It is an uphill battle though, some of the fiercest defenders of mothering as a task too precious to be sullied with the term ‘work’ are mothers, themselves. There’s a lot invested in an identity when it is all you have. This does not mean that we can’t question the decisions mothers make or criticise the institution of motherhood. In fact, I would be lost as a mother without feminism and its difficult questions. But as feminists we must ask questions and listen to the answers, we must be prepared to change or expand our theories when we get it wrong, and I advise that we tread lightly in these discussions – that we tread as someone walking over the toil of unpaid workers.

Feminism + Housewifery

I realize the rest of the feminist internet is going to disagree with me on this one, but I loved this Elizabeth Wurtzel piece on 1% housewives.

Is it mean? Yes. Is it representative of most women’s lives? No. But maybe it’s time modern “internet feminism” made room for polemics and hard-nosed viewpoints and positioned itself as a serious social movement, instead of focusing on identity and making everyone feel good.