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

Month: July 2012

Encouraging Delayed Sexual Activity Without Shaming

A few years back, the McGuinty Liberals in Ontario proposed a new sex ed curriculum for the province, one that would start in Grade One.

Naturally, people lost their shit, because Grade One students couldn’t possibly be taught about … (whisper it with me now).. sex.. in a nuanced and age-appropriate manner. Around me I saw parents react as though they were going to be showing Debbie Does Dallas to six-year-olds.

However, the curriculum outline was much more well thought out than that. The Grade One curriculum would introduce basic anatomy including body parts and their proper names. Grade Three would introduce homosexuality – as in, ‘Hey. This is a thing that exists.’ and ‘Some kids have two mommies or two daddies’. Grade Five would cover reproduction and introduce masturbation. Grade Seven and Eight classes might touch on Oral and Anal sex.

The original articles I cited when I wrote about this back in 2010 are gone, but I did find a link to the proposed curriculum.

Click Here (.pdf)

At the time I felt like this kind of curriculum made a lot of sense and was a nice step from the last curriculum update, which had been in 1997. It didn’t operate in a strictly heterosexist, heteronormative paradigm, introducing kids to concepts such as homosexuality and transgenderism on a level appropriate to kids. Granted, how well these concepts would have been communicated by teachers we’ll never know, as the curriculum was abandoned after less than three days under pressure from conservative groups that were concerned with pre-teens ‘getting lessons in anal sex’.

One of the phrases that jumped out at me in reading about this was, as opposed to abstinence as taught by many sex education curricula, the idea of ‘delayed sexual activity’. It seems to put across the idea that sex is going to happen, but let’s just try and put it off a bit, until you’re good and ready.

I have a confession to make. As a parent, the idea of my kids as sexual beings, scares the beejeebus out of me. It’s coming though, I know it. My oldest one, at eleven, has discovered ‘boys’ and while she enjoys the attention, she thankfully still makes faces at the thought of anything beyond hand-holding.

It’s coming though. I’d like to be able to put it off as long as possible.

I talk with my kids a lot, and I’m pretty candid with them. I’ve had numerous puberty talks and we’ve had numerous ‘Where babies come from?’ talks and a few ‘How do babies get there?’ talks and at least one ‘Dear God, how you NOT get babies there?’ talk. I’ve talked to them about consent and about how no one is allowed to touch them without their permission. I’ve talked about secrets and how if anyone tells them to keep a secret from me or their dad that they should tell us immediately, even if it does ruin a few surprise parties. I’ve talked to them about masturbation and how it’s totally cool and okay, just not in the living room in front of company.

I wish I could find a way to just say ‘Please, for your mother’s sake don’t do it.’ without making them feel like sex is dirty or shameful. Because I don’t fear them having sex so much as facing the issues that sometimes go with it. Coercion. I don’t necessarily expect them to buy into the idea ‘your first time should be special, and full of feeeeelings’.

But your first time, if at all possible, should be on your own terms. It should be safe. Without fear. Because you’re there and you’re ready and you really want this. I don’t want them to feel coerced, or unsafe, or unable to walk away.

I fear unplanned pregnancy. I can have all the birth control talks with them I want, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that most, namely hormonal-based methods may not even be an option due to family history. I fear them having to face an unplanned pregnancy. None of the options are pleasant. Raising a child in your teens, abortion, adoption – none of these are wrong choices, but none of them seem like particularly pleasant choices.

I don’t want them to delay their sexual lives out of some kind of moral obligation or some arbitrary idea of purity. It’s a protectiveness thing I suppose. I just want their lives to stay… uncomplicated, or as uncomplicated as possible, until they are both fully ready to take that kind of responsibility on.

Is it possible to encourage kids to wait to have sex (whatever ‘sex’ may entail – not referring strictly to PIV) without being shame-y about it?

(I just want to mention that this probably comes across as fairly heteronormative in assuming that both kids will be in heterosexual relationships. I’m not taking it for granted, I’ve actually given great consideration to the possibility that my kids could fall anywhere on the spectrum and I’d be totally supportive.)

Greetings, y’all.

Well, I don’t mind saying that I was ridiculously excited to be asked to take part in Feministe’s guest blogger series. I may have even squee’d, just a bit.

I should probably introduce myself. I am Andie, frequent reader, occasional commenter. I’m a divorced mother of two girls, a former sociology goober (as one of my profs affectionately referred to us) who, by accident of a fraught economy and a degree that was chosen more for interest than employability, stumbled into online media and print publishing. At one point in time, my goal was to become a sexual health counsellor. A goal, I may add, I have not entirely given up.

I hail from a semi-rural touristy area in Ontario, Canada – “Cottage Country”, if you will, so my experiences and understanding of some laws will have a northern slant to them.

I’ve been blogging for about seven or eight years now and my subject matter tends to vary from parenting issues, day-to-day life, pop culture, weird things my kids say, social issues, feminism, creative writing and so on and so forth. I’ve also done some writing on Health At Every Size (HAES) for a group weight loss blog (the embracing of this ideal being what eventually led me to stop writing for them).

As the mother of two girls, the oldest of whom is rapidly approaching adolescence, feminism has been an important part of learning how to help them navigate a world that may seem, a good portion of the time, pitted against them. More than anything, I want to instill in them a sense of values that embrace being strong, kind to others, but unafraid to call bullshit on the world around them.

During my time here I’d like to focus on how we, as parents, teachers, aunts, uncles, and older friends and peers influence the coming generation. I may also touch on some pop culture, as it’s a fascination of mine and in one post I’d like to expand on the issues of gentrification that were brought up in Anna’s post, but tackle them from a rural standpoint.

Before I go (I’m sick as a dog today and in need of a nap) I want to add that although I’ve spent a lot of time lurking as well as commenting and in general tend to err on the side of ‘Shut Up and Listen’ I will admit I come from a place of privilege on many axes and I may show my ass from time to time. I hope I don’t, but should it come to that, please don’t hesitate to call me out and it is my pledge that I will try my damndest not to get butthurt and to Shut Up and Listen.

Looking forward to posting!

See Ya!

Small black dog looking expectantly into the camera.Well, my guest blogging stint has come to an end. Thank you to Jill and the rest of the Feministe crew for allowing me to share some of my thoughts with all of you and thank you to the commentariat for being so engaging. I had a blast and enjoyed all of your comments. But now Chi is demanding…DEMANDING…my attention. See ya around the comments!

Equality and Justice – Bringing it Back to Where We Live

So we generally agree that equality should, at a minimum, include:

[T]hat each person be free to choose what they believe is best for themselves, knowing that they will always have the resources they need to survive and that no one will have access to a quality of life that far outstrips their own.

Ahem…let me rephrase:

One of the critical components of equality is That each person be free to choose what they believe is best for themselves.

So when someone says:

Women shouldn’t breastfeed in public.

[Every conversation about breastfeeding, ever.]

Or says:

“Real feminists earn a living, have money and means of their own.”

[Elizabeth Wurtzel, The Atlantic]

Or says:

Women shouldn’t do [X sexual practice]!

[Every conversation about sex in the feminist blogosphere, ever.]

Or even says:

That we should “bar the use of food stamps to buy beverages that contain more sugar than substance — that is, beverages with low nutritional value that contain more than 10 calories per eight-ounce serving”

[Thomas Farley and Richard Daines, New York Times]

That is not supporting equality.

And that is what “Choice Feminism” is about. Not about “conning women” into accepting existing social norms. Not about disregarding the inequalities that exist in our system. Not about selfishly ignoring others so that we can do our own thing. But acknowledging that an equal society is one in which we do not restrict people’s choices simply because we disagree with them.

Certainly, Choice Feminism is not the end of the fight for equality. We have to ensure each person has the resources to make meaningful choices about their lives. But we can’t achieve our ultimate goal without respecting everyone’s freedom to choose.

Millennials and Economic Justice

I’m a millennial.

I’m a recent college graduate—no matter how much more established colleagues in their late twenties and early thirties say, “I know how hard it is to be a recent grad” or an MSNBC (or any other news network) panel of non-millennials (read: older white dudes who seem to be the sole media mouthpieces of the economy) discussing student debt blindly compare it with their generation, as if this is going to advance the conversation on how to solve this problem further, they have no idea what it is like to come of age and into adulthood during a triple dip recession in a country and culture that keeps being gnawed away by privatization and crisis capitalism.

A few weeks before I graduated, a statistic came out stating that more than fifty percent of recent college graduates were either unemployed or underemployed. But what does “employed” even mean these days? I’m employed—but I need to juggle multiple jobs and freelance gigs to make what begins to look like a salary, forget about benefits. I have friends that are employed full time with actual salaries—but their jobs wouldn’t even think about giving them any benefits. Does that make us underemployed? What the does underemployed even mean? I’m sure there is an official economic definition, but it still sounds like a phony excuse to me.

Millennials are frequently cited as demographic statistics in articles—but the young people who are forgoing health insurance because they don’t have any other choice or are teetering on the precipice of defaulting on their loans because they ignored Sallie Mae for too long are rarely acknowledged as being trapped in a new culture of precariousness.

Saving money for the future has become a hilarious joke.

I see a lot of my friends in my generation having serious problems abusing drugs—of all kinds—as a form of escapism that becomes an obsession. I see a lot of my generation working minimum wage jobs—kicking themselves for their college degrees that they were always told they were supposed to get along with enormous burdensome debt–because they are unable to break into a career in their field of study. Others of us are constantly hustling, juggling multiple jobs and trying to find ourselves a viable space in the brave new economy. We know that even though we are working our asses off—laughing at eight hour work days as we continue to our serial jobs once our first is over—any of these gigs could evaporate at any given moment.

Our role in the labor force is precarious in a way that changes how we think about the future. Most of our future plans logically have to prioritize work, but many of us have no idea whether or not we will have still have certain gigs. We don’t commit to anything. We rarely have much savings. It is impossible to make plans. It is difficult to answer “long term plan” questions in job interviews. My personal definition of “long term” is September—and yes, I have no idea where I will be then.

Still, I have a difficult time saying that it is “hard” to be a recent grad—there are so many who are in the same, or worse economic predicaments from all ages, that these conditions are too universally normal to call “hard” for one group more than others. What I personally would call it is divisive—whereas many others have been affected by the recession, we were somewhat born into it, and are constantly coming up with a whole new set of rules to navigate what makes up the new “normal.”

It makes it difficult to take advice from older generations who do not realize what it is like to have this economic climate as the starting point of our careers. My father always tells me that my uncle used to say, “If you don’t like your job, quit.” My uncle clearly wasn’t living in 2012 in a double/triple dip recession that just keeps on dipping.

It is also difficult to know what standards we should hold for ourselves—how can you demand more when you are told that you should be grateful for anything and know that you are the last ones hired and the first ones fired? How do we know how long to put up with certain conditions—sexual harassment, late pay, expectations to be on call and responding to e-mails around the clock—before our need for sanity outweighs our need for economic livelihood? How do we convey that we are trying our hardest?

In addition to all of this, how do we talk about our place in the economy with each other? With so many of us coping with the same conditions in different ways, it seems insensitive to talk about the trials and tribulations of the workday with unemployed friends, roommates and partners. But when you work sixteen hour days regularly, what else do you have to talk about? Does it affect a relationship if one partner is struggling and another is not? How do we overcome this? (Can we?)

Our current economic climate is creating individualistic competition and exhaustion—as well as massive depression and drug addiction. In addition to being an economic crisis, it is also a psychological and existential crisis. If you think this is a dramatic statement, look at the suicides committed over student loan debt and joblessness.

However, as society is structured right now this is only going to be further institutionalized as the new and unshakable reality of living and working—or not working–in the twenty-first century. It’s not just the statistics of capitalism gone awry—it’s a whole generation that is characterized by the social and psychological effects of wild, unabated capitalism and privatization. It’s a feeling of worthlessness and defeat at the foot of this machine. It’s depression and escapism and refusal to confront the world. It’s suicides—more and more of them. It’s the sick desperation of scrambling for jobs that aren’t even that good. It’s knowing that this is not “the way things are” but that the “way things are” is rigged for profits and the beneficiaries of income inequality. It’s knowing that these beneficiaries were bailed out, and that this was at our expense.

Occupy Wall Street may have lost momentum as a movement. There may be no more camps or massive rallies, or echoes throughout downtown Manhattan. But its demands are never out of style—we need economic justice for our survival and we need it now.

Equality and Justice, Part II

Last time on posts about esoteric philosophical concepts,* we deconstructed various definitions of distributional equality and attempted (unsuccessfully, in my view) to reconstruct them in a way that fits both our human limits and our sense of justice.

Given the difficulty of constructing a definition of equality – one might wonder when the concept of equality should be abandoned altogether. Indeed some thinkers have criticized the idea of equality as irrelevant to social justice. As Harry Frankfurt argued in The Importance of What We Care About [Amazon]:

The fundamental error of egalitarianism lies in supposing that it is morally important whether one person has less than another regardless of how much either of them has…

Instead of focusing our attention on who has what, he believes we should put our efforts towards making sure that everyone has enough. When everyone has enough to satisfy their needs, Sufficiencians (okay, I totally made that up, but we’ll just go with it) believe that we won’t care if there are others who have more.

Closely related (at least in my mind) to the theory of sufficiency is prioritarianism (I did not make that one up). Prioritarians also argue that egalitarians are wrong to seek equality as an end. Instead they argue that resources should be distributed to those who are most in need.

Personally, I find the theories of priority and sufficiency compelling. The reduction of suffering is in my view the *point* of trying to create a just and egalitarian society. But the flaws we discussed with respect to welfare equality are present in these theories as well.

How do we measure comparative suffering? In many cases its easy to ascertain and I think the world would be a far more equal and just place if we adopted either of these approaches. But our view of who is suffering and the depth of that suffering is linked to social norms. At the margins people whose suffering didn’t fall into the appropriate categories might easily be left behind.

More importantly in the context of sufficiency, the idea of what is “sufficient” is amorphous. What would be sufficient for a “good” life 100 years ago would not be sufficient today. And not only because – at least in the US – we are a consumerist society, but also because technological progress permits us to enjoy things (like the internet!) that they didn’t have. Hopefully, the progress we make over the next 100 years will make what seems sufficient today appear inadequate by their standards.

While philosophers like Frankfurt would like to break us of the habit of comparing resources, I think if we’re all flying around in fancy hover cars on our way to Mars (which has fabulous beaches) while others are sitting in their apartments and walking to their personally fulfilling work – that isn’t just even if they do have the resources we consider sufficient.

At the end of the philosophical day, I guess that means I value equality as a key component of a just world.

So where does that leave us? The formal definitions are flawed in various ways, but the concept of equality is still valuable. If we can’t find a formal definition of equality that suits our purpose, perhaps we can construct a working definition that does, even if its not theoretically satisfying. The first step, I think, is identifying what concepts we believe need to be incorporated in any definition of equality.

For me any definition of equality must start with sufficiency. Being equal in dignity is all well and good, but you can’t eat dignity (believe me, I’ve tried). Everyone has to have access to the resources they need.

But sufficiency isn’t absolute. It must adjust as society shifts. Consequently, we need proportionality. No one person should have so much more than others that their quality of life far outstrips everyone else’s. Of course such a concept is not well defined. How much resource inequality is too much? I don’t know the answer, but I can say with complete confidence that the amount of resource inequality we have now is far too much.

Well-being of course is not just the product of resources. People have different preferences and so an equal world is one in which each person has the resources they need to seek fulfillment of their preferences. But to avoid the trap that opportunity egalitarians fall into we can’t attempt to impose our own values on the question of whether or not an action is a preference. Instead we must offer each other freedom to choose** what we believe is best for ourselves.

So, to summarize, for me equality requires that each person be free to choose what they believe is best for themselves, knowing that they will always have the resources they need to survive and that no one will have access to a quality of life that far outstrips their own.

What do you think?

[The last and final segment will come out tomorrow. Sorry for jamming these all at the end…but its been a hectic week!]

*Have you guys ever watched Dragon Ball Z? No? Then you won’t get this reference.
**Hopefully, it goes without saying that this is constrained by the harms principle, but if not…let me be explicit…except to the extent that such persons actions would result in harm to a third party.