Family – Page 3 – Feministe

Daughter of the Patriarchy: Admissions

“When I was your age, my parents wouldn’t send me to college,” my mother was telling me. “I had to work my way through on my own. I don’t want you to have to stop. I will do everything I can to help you keep going to school. Your education is the most important thing to me.”

We stood in the kitchen, a printed letter lying on the counter between us. It was not good news.

I glanced up at my mother with a strained smile. I knew that if wishes could be cashed at the bank, I’d be writing my admissions essay to an ivy-coated castle. Instead, I was trying to find a way to pay the bill from my last semester of community college in time to register for fall classes. It was already August.

It’s fun for a girl or a boy: Conspicuous consumption edition

Anyone engaged in consumerist big-box shopping this season (which ideally would be avoided, although particularly when dealing with Tinkerbell-obsessed four-year-olds it can be hard to find an acceptable Etsy substitute. Merry frigging Mithras) has probably walked into a toy store, looked at the pink section full of “girl stuff” and the blue section full of “boy stuff” and heaved a sigh.

You’ll be pleased to know that London toy store Hamleys has done away with the pink and blue in favor of a gender-stereotype-free layout grouped by type of toy. Shoppers will search for the perfect gift in “Soft Toys” and “Arts & Crafts.” Parents of Lego-obsessed daughters can go straight to the section designated for building toys, rather than wandering around pinkville digging through boxes of My Pink Dreamhouse to find something that will build an airplane. Parents of sons who like dress-up can go to the costumes section to pick up a doctor costume or a nurse costume or a princess costume or whatever else he’s into. And no one looking for a telescope will have to wonder if astronomy is a “boy thing” or a “girl thing.”

Hamleys says the integration hasn’t come as the result of any de-gendering campaign but is in preparation for a larger renovation.

“We are in the process of detailed planning for a complete refit of our store on Regent Street. As part of this planning, it was made clear to us from consultants’ and customer surveys that our store directional signage was confusing. As a result we commenced changing all our signage in October of this year in order to improve customer flow.”

If that’s really the case, it’s is actually more encouraging to me than any kind of conscious pink/blue integration effort–it’s a response to parents who don’t particularly care about “boy toys” or “girl toys” but just want to know where the damned colo(u)ring books are already.

My parents have never been rabid materialists, but during the early-’80s Cabbage Patch Kids shopstravaganza my dear mom did make the requisite 5:00-a.m. visit to the loading dock at K-mart to wrestle with other moms before the dolls were gone. That year, my older brother got a Cabbage Patch astronaut named Jeffy and I got a little yellow-haired girl named Stephanie. She was quickly abandoned face-down under the tree in favor of something else I found more interesting. My brother was devastated that I should treat poor Stephanie with such heartless disregard and immediately picked her up and set her to playing with his astronaut. Your move, Toys R Us.

On a vaguely related note: Is it just a southeastern U.S. thing, or do kids in other areas refer to action figures as “dudes”? I’m always entertained listening to kids play as one kid’s “dudes” face off against another kid’s “dudes.” I’ve always thought that if I owned a toy store, the action-figures section would just be labeled “Dudes.” Of course, ideally the doll world will diversify such that instead of fashion dolls for girls and action figures for boys, we’ll see the “dudes” joined by a significant number of action-packed… “dudettes”? Just call them all “actioneers”? Dunno. Makes the naming of the section a little less punchy. But it’s a hit I’m willing to take in the name of feminism.

Fall Into the [Reverse Gender] Gap

This is a guest post by Jessica Mack.

One of the concepts that I hope fades out as we enter 2012 – along with flash mobs and marshmallow vodka – is the “reverse gender gap.” Somehow, in the American obsession with doom and gloom, small but important gains for women have become a reason to worry. They’ve become a reason to claim that the gender gap is not just closing, but – worse – it’s reversing.

“She always knew who she was.”

The Boston Globe has a sweet, heartbreaking, heartwarming story of Nicole Maines, her twin brother Jonas, and their parents. Nicole knew from toddlerhood that she was a girl, and her family and friends are supporting her in developing “a physical female body that matches up to [her] image of [her]self.” Nicole is fourteen.

From the beginning, Nicole* liked Barbies, mermaids, and princess dresses, wanted to know when she would “get to be a girl,” and cried hating her body. Identical twin Jonas told their father, “Dad, you might as well face it. You have a son and a daughter.” It took them an adjustment period, more than a few mistakes, and a lot of research, but they did–Wayne and Kelly Maines took the bold step of… trusting their child. They contacted a physician who specializes in child gender management services, and with judgment and cruelty from some sides and acceptance and support from others, they embraced their daughter. By fifth grade, she was wearing long hair and dresses and living fully as Nicole. Now, at age 14, under the supervision of the physicians of the Gender Management Services Clinic at Children’s Hospital in Boston, she is taking drugs to suppress puberty until she can begin estrogen therapy to help develop a grown woman’s body.

Read the Maines’s story at the Globe–there really is more to it than I can do justice. Even with the judgment they’ve suffered–and the family ended up moving to a different town to escape the abuse of some in their community–what’s striking is the support they’ve gotten from the kids’ friends and their new school. Jonas, of course, loves–and is protective of–his sister, and their parents love having a daughter. And every family, whether their children are transgender or cisgender, could learn a lesson from them.

“I believed in Nicole,” her mother said. “She always knew who she was.”

*post has been edited to correct name and pronoun errors on my part; discussion of that is in comments

The deficient single woman

Chally is a former Feministe staffer. She writes at Zero at the Bone.

I’m really quite troubled by the centring of romantic/sexual relationships at the expense of all other ways of organising lives. Right now, I’m going to explore this in terms of single women being seen as deficient.

I’ve seen so many divorced and older single women pushed out of their social worlds. They’ve been encouraged to build social lives around “couple friends,” and once or if there’s no partner, well. Single men, as far as I’ve seen, don’t seem to face the same freezing out. Wives, after all, are taught to fear the stealing of their husbands, and that they ought to do everything they can to keep them. This is an intensely heteronormative story, too, obviously.

What’s a single lady to do? Get fixed up quickly, of course – although there’ll still be something wrong with you if you are only settling down with someone later in life, or maybe this is a pale shadow of the real life you had with your first husband, because first is always best, or there’s something wrong with you if your presumed previous relationship failed, because ending always represents failure. You really can’t win, so you’d better keep out of social sight and mind.

Singleness is treated as something to be fixed. It’s treated as a state one would surely want to change as quickly as possible. If you’re single, you’re automatically miserable, and everyone’s going to try and figure out what’s wrong with you – there’s nothing wrong with your former gentleman callers, of course. There’s no room for you to be single and happy or indifferent. The romantic narrative of the West has no way to deal with women who aren’t seeking a man, or holding on to one. It definitely doesn’t know how to deal with women who don’t experience romantic or sexual desire. Single womanhood as a sustained and satisfying state just doesn’t compute for a lot of people.

Part of overcoming the shoving aside and suspicion of single women would be, well, to first stop devaluing singleness, and also to look at alternative ways of organising ourselves.

What would society look like if little girls weren’t expected to organise their lives around finding a sole and central heteronormative relationship around which everything else in their lives must then revolve? We could explore different living arrangements. As it is, many wealthy couples keep two homes and stay together on the weekends or at night, simply because they have the monetary and social capital to go with that desire. Maybe it’d be nice to live with friends, or alone, or switch everything around once in a while. We could explore not just a different social structure for living spaces, but explode the normative linearity of life. Maybe you want to have kids before you find love, and we’d shifted enough that the resources to do that comfortably without a dual income would be available to you. Maybe you experience happiness in other bits of life and don’t feel deficient if your life isn’t centred around sex or romance. Maybe all this could also open people up to sexuality and love we’re taught to repress: if you’re not told you have to find a nice fellow to marry, it’s easier to realise you actually want to settle down with the girl next door.

There’s nothing deficient about finding yourself single, or pursuing the kind of life you want. I know that much of my personal unhappiness comes from not fitting various norms, and feeling like I ought to be more normal in order to have a happy life. That’s not an unwarranted fear as there’s real social marginalisation attached to being non-normative. If we expand our ideas of the kinds of lives that are acceptable, older divorced women; young ladies like me who are starting to build their lives; queer, asexual, and poly people; hey, even happily married straight people – all kinds of people! – will be better served.

Cross-posted at Zero at the Bone.

The Rights of Children – Yeah, I Went There

The U.N Convention on the Rights of the Child is the latest in a line of international agreements on the human rights of children and has been ratified by every member of the United Nations with the exception of Somalia and the United States. Somalia hasn’t refused to ratify the treaty, they’ve just not had the institutions in place to make treaty ratification a reality. In the US, the Convention has met staunch opposition from the right where opponents argue that it strips away parental rights, conflicts with the US Constitution and is generally bad news. So what does the heinous piece of international law say?

Resonance

Jill just linked to this intensely personal piece by Jessica Valenti. In it, she describes trying to sort through the feelings of wanting to love her daughter, but being scared because it was never certain if her daughter, born almost three months prematurely, was going to be okay. I didn’t have Jessica’s experience, and it resonated in very weird ways for me. This isn’t a complete version of events (there are definitely some parts of it that are too personal and painful to write about, even now), but it covers all the basics.

I had a completely painless pregnancy. I was more tired than usual early on, but I never had morning sickness, no acid reflux, nothing. I can’t even remember being uncomfortable. The worst thing that I can recall about the whole thing is getting food poisoning about 7 weeks before my daughter was born and having to sit in Labor and Delivery while they gave me an IV and tried to convince me to have a few saltines.

That was all before I went through labor and delivery. My due date had come and gone and my midwives wanted to make sure that there were no signs of fetal distress, so they sent me for a monitoring test to check. The results were initially inconclusive, and the person who was on call in the testing center was not one of my midwives, but a physician who specialized in high-risk obstetrics. He came over to me and my husband looking very grave and said I needed to get ready to have my daughter that afternoon. After a lot of back and forth, I reluctantly agreed and asked if I could have time to go home, pack a bag and get organized. They agreed and so I did that. I was admitted to the hospital on a Thursday afternoon. (My daughter wasn’t born until very early Sunday morning.)

When I came back, one of the midwives was there and she talked with me about options. After an excruciating experience with getting my IV placed, we agreed to try mechanical induction first and then go from there. That didn’t work. Neither did pitocin. Neither did rupturing the membranes. I was still there on Saturday, exhausted beyond belief. I hadn’t eaten anything since Thursday lunchtime and late on Saturday night, it was finally agreed that they’d do a c-section.

It was *awful*. Because I’d been having contractions for so long, my muscles were incredibly fatigued and overworked. The measured blood loss was 1800 mLs. (At 2000 mLs, you need a transfusion.) They screwed up the pain meds. I remember them telling me I had a daughter and then blacking out.

When I came to, my daughter was clean and wrapped up. I could see her next to my bed in a bassinet, but I had no idea how I was ever going to get to her. I felt worse than I could ever remember feeling in my entire life. When the nurses came to check on me, I told them that I had terrible abdominal pain. They said that was normal. I insisted something was wrong. The pain seemed totally unrelated to where the c-section was and it didn’t feel like stitches or an ache. The nurse took my concerns to the high-risk obstetrician (again on call), who seemed to think that I’d never had a baby before and had no idea what I was talking about, that pain was normal. He said I was fine and that I could eat something. My mother had brought homemade blueberry muffins, so I had one. It was the last thing I had to eat for the rest of the week.

The pain that I was feeling turned out to be a ileus, which is when the GI tract stops working for a period of time. It’s well-known in abdominal and GI surgery, but extremely rare in c-sections. You mostly hope that an NG tube will keep things out of your stomach and that the situation resolves itself in a few days. You can’t eat or drink anything, and it’s *miserable*. My situation was severely exacerbated by medical mismanagement of the NG tube and the entire situation culminated with me throwing up is the most pyrotechnic ways imaginable and briefly not breathing. After that, I demanded to be moved and they sent me from the mother baby unit up to med/surgery. I got a negative pressure room that would normally be used for burn patients so that there wouldn’t be concerns about the baby picking up any weird hospital-based infections.

And that was how I tried to bond with my daughter right after she was born: terribly ill, in excruciating pain, tethered to all kinds of mechanical equipment, and a tube up my nose. I had no earthly idea if I was going to get better and if I did get better, what might happen after that. But I was determined that no matter how sick, how miserable, and how wretched I felt, I was going to take care of my daughter.

She was mine and I was not, under any circumstances going to let anything happen to her. I would drag myself upright, force myself to take the two steps to the bassinet where she was crying. I would nurse her in weird positions because my arms had been stuck like pincushions for IVs and there were limited ways to position her that didn’t involve mangling the needles. I couldn’t even believe that nursing worked because I was growing ever more dehydrated and I wasn’t eating, but I absolutely refused to give in.

If you asked me, I don’t think I would ever describe what I felt for my daughter then as love, at least not a sort that I’d ever heard anyone else describe. It was just fierce determination to make sure that she was okay. I didn’t feel giddy or mushy or ga-ga over her. All I wanted was to protect her and to make sure that whatever agonies the hospital was visiting on our room were falling on me. I can remember thinking, “Kid, you are asking so much of me right now. Please just make this worth it, because I am having such a hard time seeing it right now.”

It was a very long time before I grew out of that sense of feeling like I was throwing myself physically in front of whatever was happening. I never really knew how to relate to mothers who talked about holding their children immediately after birth and feeling blissful. I am 100% certain that bliss never, ever even crossed my mind. As much as I wanted to feel happy when I looked at her, my own pain (which was being treated with fucking ibuprofen) was blinding. There are two pictures of me in the hospital and one of me leaving the hospital with my daughter. In all of them, my face is kind of gray and I’m not smiling. There’s sort of a keep calm and carry on sort of vibe about them. They look like they’re about survival.

When people ask me now how sick I was, I just tell them that I lost all of my baby weight plus another 10 pounds by my daughter’s two week check up. I spent 11 days in the hospital and was given an extra three weeks of medical leave (in addition to my six weeks of maternity leave) to recover enough physically to go back to work. It was about a year before my body really approached the state it had been in prior to that epic disaster.

I love my daughter more than anything, but it’s always going to have the mark of what happened at the hospital when she was born. At this point, it a very faded scar, but it is the sort of thing that won’t ever fully fade. I’m perfectly fine with not having been blissed out with my kid at birth, because she is an amazing child who astonishes me every day. But like Jessica, I really, really wish there was a better narrative for this sort of thing.

My feminist life – after childbirth. Yes, it does exist.

A friend of mine likens becoming a mother to being in a “twilight zone between human and animal.” It sounds wrong – but writing this as my son, Lev, sleeps beside me in his basket, having turned 3 weeks old today and cried for most of the morning (inspiring me to flounce off to sleep in the kitchen – coming back, I found his dad napping with Lev in perfect harmony. Babies do sense their mother’s stress!) – I can relate.

I’m still the same person. I’m also a walking dairy farm, a cleaning machine, a soother of pain, a goddess who makes nearly every decision in Lev’s tiny universe so far, and sometimes I’m also just a comfort blanket to lie across on. In other words, I’m mother to a newborn.

Let me tell you – my participation in the feminist movement did NOT help me prepare for this turn of events!

Magic Genitals (Part 1: Erykah Badu)

(or: She’ll Make You Change Gods!)

I am, to the untrained eye, a hippie-dippy, no-relaxer-wearing, Whole Foods shopping afro pixie faerie princess. I research traditional African spiritual practices, keep florida water and incense on hand, I bathe with Dr. Bronner’s soaps, I eat vegetables some folks have never heard of (kale, daikon radishes, red leaf lettuce), and I don’t shop at Wal-Mart unless it’s a matter of a medical issue (it never is). By some standards, I am simply progressive and/ or bourgeois. By the standards of some other folks, I am Most Likely to Work A Root On You or Most Likely to Make You Watch a Documentary on Orgasmic Birth Despite Neither of Us Expecting a Baby (Or both. At the same time. So I can have a baby with you.) I suppose that drinking coconut milk kefir & wearing/ stringing strands of waistbeads make me more different than some folks can fuck with. Fine. Whatever. But, it wasn’t until I was about 25 or 26 that I’d heard this from a paramour: “You gonna try to Badu me? Make me worship my ancestors or somethin’?” **record scratch** “Badu” him?

I wasn’t foreign to the idea that Ms. Erica Abi Wright supposedly turns her men out and makes them do “crazy shit.” André Benjamin supposedly started wearing wigs and furry pants after he broke up with her because she’d changed him*. Common’s crocheted pants**, vegetarianism, and the entire Electric Circus album were allegedly her fault. And the jokes bouncing around on sites like okayplayer.com and crunktastical.net about The DOC (daughter Puma’s father) and Jay Electronica (a freakshow anomaly in his own right, and daughter Mars’ father) needing to run for their lives were plentiful. It never really made sense to me to assume that one cis woman’s relationship with any one cis man could be the sole reason he changed himself. Because that’s what people do when they enter into deep, committed, loving relationships, right? They change some shit around, they grow a little bit, and they learn some shit. At least, that’s what I always thought was supposed to happen.

I want to explore the idea of magic muffs as related to the chatter I’ve heard about Erykah, very little of which is based on the words/ ideas of people who actually know her. She’s is a great example of the myth of pussy persuasion, but it goes deeper, wider, and waaaaay farther than anything having to do with rappity rap dudes and the company they keep. I picked Erykah as the primary example of this meme because, quite honestly, I’m tired of the #1 search term leading people to my WordPress blog being ‘Erykah Badu’s Pussy’. (No, really.) I know what probably led people to search that term, but I’m certain that what they found wasn’t to their liking.

I’m going to try to give a little background on the idea of pussy sorcery, vajayjay voodoo, hooha hoodoo, coochie conjuring, voodoo vadge, peach persuasion, or muffin magic. Source of such an idea: folkloric accounts (and sometimes community gossip) regarding a cisgender heterosexual woman “working a root” on her (or anybody’s) cisgender heterosexual man to get him to comply with her wishes. To leave his wife, to stay with her, to give her money, to buy her things, etc., this woman has to do some seriously wild stuff. Incant a love spell, put blood in his spaghetti sauce, maybe put a hex on the woman he’s with at the time. Usually, these ideas are discussed specifically within the context of getting and “keeping” a man. There is even the more subtle (but possibly more widespread) thought that a woman who is extra wonderful in bed is trying to trap a dude. That’s the most basic pussy sorcery, isn’t it? She’s amazing in bed, so she must be tryna undo me!***

Sometimes, the speculation is: “She’s gonna make me go vegetarian/ buy organic/ stop sayin’ ‘nigga’/ quit eating pork/ stop watching porn/ act white/ do yoga.” Why are those bad things? Does that mean the dude can’t change by himself, without outside influences? Does that mean that relationships aren’t supposed to change anything about you, ever? Please, don’t say, “DGF, you’re being silly!” because I’ve heard grumblings from men before about this very concept. I’m not making this shit up, not in the least. There is a song about Erykah Badu’s crotch supposedly being a catalyst for change. I am a bit confused as to why it would be okay to decide that changing is a bad thing, but, okay. Maybe it’s that good old patriarchal notion that whatever the man in the hetero relationship wants to do is always acceptable, no matter what. Actually, I’m fairly certain that that’s what it is.

Regarding Erykah Badu’s public image and the public images of those men she’s been romantically involved with, I have to remember that the public persona of any man who raps (whether it’s an image he fully controls, or not) is almost always linked to a hypermasculinity specific to the way our culture views men of color, and black men especially. That they are these rocks of animalistic sexuality, that they are somehow the inventors (or at least the best executors) of misogyny, and so on and so forth. Where is there room for love in this construct of the black man as unlovable? (Don’t worry, I’m not actually waiting for an answer.) Also, I have to ask the same question of the construct of black women — cunning, manipulative Sapphires. Or, we’re Jezebels who’ll spread at will, or Mammies who are incapable of any meaningful interpersonal interaction that does not come from caring for other people. These constructs all frame black people as unlovable. And that’s the crux, as I stated before, of the idea of this supposed sex sorcery.
Erykah Badu does not actually reflect any one of these constructs. Nor did she, upon debut in the industry, have an identity in line with any of the then-popular black women entertainers (see: Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, Mary J. Blige, Faith Evans, Brandy, Sade, Aaliyah or Monica). Erykah’s image was pro-black, possibly identifiable as pan-African, and most certainly swathed in notions of mysticism and an “earthiness” synonymous with the Southern United States. She was the throwback to the seventies hippie flower child who lit sticks of incense on stage and drank tea while performing. This rendered her different-with-a-capital-D. Erykah Badu attended a four-year college (not typically discussed when analyzing the lives of black entertainers). This possibly makes her part of the black bourgeoisie. So there is a class issue at play, especially if a large part of her potential listening public is not college educated. Again, different-with-a-capital-D. The idea is that she is not anything like this monolithic identity of blackness, and especially not black cis womanhood. And that’s a problem.

Erykah Badu has seemingly spent time with and slept with whomever she wanted. She has three (3!! Oh my God, how dare she?!!?!?!??!) children with three different men — never mind the fact that these kids are approximately 14, 7, and 2 years old, which suggests that the relationships producing each child were not happening simultaneously. I think that this is why I’ve observed such vitriol regarding her relationships and her choice to have three children with three different men. Never mind the fact that her kids are (approximately) 14, 7, and 2 years old, meaning that the Maury Povich Show “baby daddy drama” that seems to nowadays be synonymous with black single cis women parenting probably is not part of Badu’s family life. She’s said on record before that she has great relationships with her children’s fathers. How shocking, right? Someone who is not doing the nuclear family thing appears to be satisfied with it, and their entire cache of personal business has not been spilled into every media channel possible! Never mind the fact that she is grown, and from what I gather, in control of her crotch — just like the men she’s been in relationships with. No glittery gravel pit glamouring here.

The mysticism (via no apparent affiliation with Western religions of any kind) has been a constant theme in Erykah’s music and personal image, in my opinion, further removes her from widely accepted constructs of black women’s identities. She doesn’t seem to want or need King Jesus like Vickie Winans, and she most certainly has not been to Oprah’s Legends brunch situation in a big ol’ church hat like Patti Labelle. I’d reference a widely popular non-Christian black woman entertainer here, but quite honestly there isn’t one. Again, Erykah is different-with-a-capital-D. In a society where we are taught that same is safe, being different means you are dangerous on some level or another.

Taking into consideration the fact that Badu is from Dallas, Texas — the Southern United States — I think it’s safe to say that she is more likely connected to the fabled and oft-maligned old ways of American black folk than a lot of us Eastern Seaboard big city dwellers. This reifies the idea that she is at the very least witchy – our ancestors dealt with earth more, they were reliant on land in a way that many urbanites simply are not. Following this somewhat jumbled logic means that even when she’s fucking someone, the witchy woman is supposedly conjuring something — she’s imposing on her partner’s will in some way through sorcery. I find this rather unlikely, as most people I know are too busy enjoying the sex they’re having to think about too much else. But what do I know? I seriously doubt that this woman was having sex with the intent of turning these men into her minions or whatever. But what do I know?
Maybe I’m talking in circles now. Maybe I’m just tired of trying to wrap my mind around the bullshit notion that it can be someone’s ‘fault’ that someone else they dated and HAD CONSENSUAL SEX WITH is “different” as a result of that relationship. Maybe I can’t come up with many linear ideas on this subject because there is so much overlapping and intersectionality going on that if I had an infographic to accompany this post it would look like a spirograph picture. Or something. I just can’t anymore.

I just know that the next time someone asks me of my intentions simply by fucking (and maybe cooking for) them, I’m likely to reference “Fall In Love (Your Funeral)” by Miss Badu herself: “… we gon’ take this shit from the top/ you’ve got to change jobs/ and change gods,” just to see their reaction.

_____
* In the song “A Life in the Day of Benjamin André,” 3 Stacks says himself that he was drawn to her because her headwrap reminded him of the turbans he wore to cover his locks. He was already dressing like Geoffrey Holder’s character from Annie at this point; I doubt that the ensembles from the “Rosa Parks” video were a far stretch.
** Pants that, per the bonus DVD that came with Com’s Be album, Erykah asked about. As in, “Are you certain that you wanna wear crocheted pants, Lonnie?” Watch the interview. I’m not searching for any video of it. Further, a feature on this same DVD with Com’s then-stylist, on the same DVD, suggests that he never was really any good at dressing himself. At least, once he started thrifting and wearing less baggy clothes — totally in line with the change of life that many of us experience as we enter our mid-to-late thirties.
*** I think this is what comedian Katt Williams may have been trying to say in “The Pimp Chronicles” when he said that any cis woman, as long as she has a vagina, rules the fucking world. If only it were actually that simple, or even true.

Tag: Family