Here’s the link! Feel free to post comments here; feminist-friendly moderation of this thread is in effect.
Live From Glenn Sacks’s Blog: Biological vs. Legal Fatherhood
Friday, November 7th, 2008I’m Not Happy
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008“My”* guy won last night. We have elected our first black president in the United States; a date that will go down in history and I am predicting might be one of our generation’s “Kennedy moment”**. We will be asked by our children where we were when we heard that the first black president was elected.
Anti-choice measures all across the country failed tonight (including the 3-peat “Parental notification” measure that failed in California). Children won’t have to worry about being thrown out of a house or beaten because of an unwanted pregnancy.
Dole, the atheist-baiting bigot, was defeated in Nouth Carolina.
But, like getting an A on all of your classes but failing one, my disappointment today is about Proposition 8 in California. I was hoping against hope that people wouldn’t want to take away people’s right to marry. I was hoping against hope that even though they wouldn’t give the rights to people, that they would recognize those self-same civil rights when the courts were forced to step in.
But they didn’t…
And now, after a major stepping stone forward for the civil rights of one group, all I can think of is the civil rights lost to the ones who tripped and fell. They lost their right to legal recognition of their love, and all of the privileges therein. All of the rights of marriage: the health care from the partners insurance, the community property, the tax break, the visitation rights; all of the things that took me and my Hubby 15 minutes and 65 bucks; are being taken away from people who are my friends and loved ones.
All so people don’t have to tell their children that gay people exist. All so people get to keep the magical word “marriage” to their happy little heterosexual selves. All so “traditionalists” who don’t what the hell the word “tradition” means can stay stuck in their backwards, bigoted world, afraid of how fast the world is changing, and too lazy to want to keep up with it. And this is bigotry; plain and simple. This is not wanting homosexual people to have the same rights as heterosexual people, because some pastor said that a 2000-year-old book written by a bunch of bronze-age, nomadic goat herders about a megalomaniac, sadistic sky fairy that had been translated and re-translated a bunch of time through the centuries had a few, taken-out-of-context phrases that meant to literally say that “gays are icky”.
I’m disappointed, and I’m furious. I’m angry because I’m now going to be told that the gay rights movement just needs to ask nicer next time, and if they wouldn’t be so in-your-face about it, and just wait nicely, then they would have won. I’m angry because people are proud in their bigotry: they are CELEBRATING it under some sort of fuzzy definition of “values”. And I’m angry because anger is a much more productive emotion than sorrow.
*Technically, I would have preferred McKinney. But, Obama’s the one I voted for.
*That and 9-11.
Live From Glenn Sacks’s Blog: Child Custody, Part Two
Monday, October 20th, 2008Part Two of my two-part series on child custody after divorce is up over at Glenn Sacks’s “Feminist Dissident.” As before, to allow those who wish to examine Part Two from a feminist-friendly perspective to actually be able to do so in a constructive fashion, the fabulous violet and I will be heavily moderating any comments made about the article over here on this thread at PAB. (PS: If you were banned from the comment thread of Part One, you are not automatically banned from the comment thread of Part Two unless you repeat your Part One behavior.)
Forbidden: ad feminam statements and wild generalizations about what women believe or do and what feminists believe or do. Also, if I or the fabulous violet (or any other PAB moderator) ban you, that’s all she wrote, folks. Arguing about somebody else’s ban or about the fact that these particular threads are under any moderation scheme at all will only allow you the opportunity to share the solidarity of the Hypnotoad.
Allowed: reasoned, polite argument, based in accurate reporting of facts and people’s previous statements, and civil answers to direct questions.
Live From Glenn Sacks’s Blog: Child Custody, Part One
Thursday, October 16th, 2008Part One of my two-part series on child custody after divorce is up over at Glenn Sacks’s “Feminist Dissident;” I actually wrote it as one piece, but it was a trifle on the lengthy side so Glenn split it up into two parts. When Part Two comes out I will throw up a link to that as well; Glenn said he’d probably post it a few days after Part One. To allow those who wish to examine Part One from a pro-feminist/feminist-friendly perspective to actually be able to do so in a constructive fashion, the fabulous violet and I will be heavily moderating any comments made about the article over here on this thread at PAB.
As you’ll see, Part One is simply an in-depth look at what child custody requests are made by which genders and how often those are agreed to by the courts, and speculates as to why. Part Two will express my own opinions about how child custody should be assigned.
“Men” and “mankind” apparently not being defined to include “ambulatory wombs.”
Monday, July 21st, 2008
After having spent my adult life variously not being a mom, being a married mom, being a single mom, being a mom who stayed at home and being a mom who worked outside the home, I have come to the conclusion that if you are a fertile woman of childbearing years, no matter what you’re doing in terms of marriage and motherhood and career, you’re wrong. To wit:
1. You’re married, you get pregnant, choose to give birth, and decide to stay at home with the baby.
Lazy! Self-indulgent! and just GIVING away all the advances women have made in terms of career equality! Get a job!
2. You’re married, you get pregnant, choose to give birth, and decide to work outside the home without the baby.
Selfish! It isn’t all about YOU and YOUR fulfillment anymore, you have a child to think of now! you just don’t want to have to live within your means! You need to raise your OWN child!
3. You’re married, you get pregnant and choose to have an abortion.
Murderer! If you didn’t want to have kids you should have gotten your tubes tied! If you have a husband and a home, there is no excuse for not stepping up to the plate and carrying that life you created to term!
4. You’re married and you choose not to get pregnant.
Immature! Self-centered! Look at Europe–do you want to see our culture crash too? It isn’t all about you, you have a duty to society! It’s time to GROW UP and take on your responsibilities!
5. You’re not married, you get pregnant, choose to give birth, and decide to stay at home with the baby.
Leech! It isn’t society’s responsibility to care for your child conceived due to your irresponsible behavior! Get out there and get a job!
6. You’re not married, you get pregnant, choose to give birth, and decide to work outside the home without the baby.
Slut! Our culture is collapsing because of the explosion of all you single mothers! Why didn’t you give that baby to a real family that could raise it properly instead of shoving it off onto strangers!
7. You’re not married, you get pregnant and choose to have an abortion.
Slut! And now you think it’s okay to take another human life so you can just erase your careless, selfish behavior! You spread your legs, now you need to step up the the plate and take your medicine like an adult!
8. You’re not married and you choose not to get pregnant.
What’s wrong with you? Are you that ugly and unpleasant that no man wants to commit to you, or are you just a selfish whore?
I Really Think The Federal Government Should Be Subsidizing This
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
“My administration will give unprecedented support to strengthening marriages. Many good programs help couples who want to get married and stay married.” -President Bush
Apparently there’s money for it. See?
So all I need to do is write up my grant proposal! I’m conducting the efficacy study right now.
First we created our characters…together. (oh sigh!)
Then we began questing…as a team!
We bonded over Midsummer Festival Flame dancing:
By the end of the night, waiting in the Deeprun Tram station, we were exhausted but absolutely inseparable.
Our relationship has a new strength, a new thrill, a new depth, a new joy. For only $14.99 a month.
Let’s Talk About Feminist Mothers
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008The first I actually heard about Rebecca Walker’s “Mommie Dearest”-style expose of the horrors of growing up as well-known feminist author Alice Walker’s daughter was on Michelle Malkin’s website–yeah, I admit, I periodically nip over there, mostly because she’s just so controversial that I just KNOW she must have SOMETHING to say that’ll really wow me…in an interesting and thought-provoking way, not like the time she talked about how she went and stalked that family whose kids were on some kind of government medical assistance, that did wow me, I admit, but not in the way I was LOOKING to get wowed…
It was a fairly short byte on her site–I read it, thought “Sad,” and didn’t give it much more thought til the issue started popping up on the feminist-oriented blogs I like to frequent. The latest entry into the fray I read was Feministing’s Courtney on Alternet: “Alice and Rebecca Walker Clash: Do Feminist Mothers Have to Choose Between Dreams and Diapers?” which included a link to Rebecca Walker’s original article. My own thoughts about my mother, a self-identified feminist, and her raising of me are complex enough that while I suspected in advance that I wouldn’t quite fall entirely in line with Rebecca Walker’s take on feminism specifically, I thought it’d be interesting and thought-provoking (I do spend a lot of time searching for those sensations, I admit) to see what another woman who perceived herself as having a somewhat poor experience being raised by a woman who strongly identified as a “feminist” had to say.
Not much, as it turns out. And she’s a bit old to be rebelling against Mommy’s beliefs because she’s pissed at her, so it isn’t really even excusable on those grounds.
I don’t want to turn this into a woe-is-me! rant about my childhood and adolescence. Really, all I want to say are two things–
1. Being neglected by your mother and then being cut off from her affections because you violated her ideological beliefs has nothing to do with the particular ideological beliefs you violated and everything to do with your relationship with your mother.
2. The fact that you personally are having fertility problems and love to be a stay-at-home mom has absolutely nothing to do with the philosophical validity or lack thereof of the idea that our society should not discriminate against members of it based upon their gender.
Honestly, I had a very similar experience with my mother when my first child was born–she really didn’t care about him at all (the second one, either). However, feminism was not to blame. She was. Not to put too fine a point upon it, but by that time in her life my mother was one fucked-up individual. If she’d been Wiccan, or Mormon, or Fundamentalist Christian, or a satanist, or a Ku Klux Klanner or a member of an anarchistic militia or even a Conservative Republican, she’d have been equally fucked-up. Sad but true.
There are reasons she was all fucked up and some of them even had to do with the opppression of women in general. None of them had to do with feminism. My mother was a very bright woman; she did understand what feminism actually meant and clearly recognized the rightness of that belief system. She was simply incapable of practicing it, crippled as she was by a haze of poorly suppressed rage at the course of her life, probably untreated bipolar disorder and substance abuse problems likely resulting from the same. She tried to seize all the feminist “advantages” she perceived and yet simultaneously tried to bank on the so-called “privileged” status of women in a patriarchy–recognizing the flawed nature of this attempt, she tried it all the same. She even got away with it to some extent, in her youth because she was very beautiful and charismatic, in her older age because she was scary as shit.
I don’t know what Alice Walker is truly like, as a mother or in any other aspect of her intimate personality. I sincerely doubt she ever matched the depths my mother sometimes sunk to and her daughter does not appear to be claiming this, which is a good thing–I’d still love The Color Purple even if she had, but it’d take a little of the joy out of it all the same. I’m sorry that she and her daughter have reached this unpleasant impasse of publicly aired outrage and I hope for both their sakes they pull out of it.
But it doesn’t really have anything to do with feminism.
Ode to My Father
Sunday, June 15th, 2008Like many others, my father and I don’t see eye to eye: politically, socially, or culturally. He thinks feminism is a bunch of girls whining, and an effort to keep hard-working men down. He likes to be in wide-open spaces, where there is no one to talk to, I like the energy of the cities. He was looking forward to “Don’t Mess With the Zohan”, the movie I’m looking forward to is Batman.
But, my dad has taught me a lot of good things about the world, and despite what he may say, I am liberal because I listened to him, not in spite of what he might say. He taught me that you should treat people fairly, even when they don’t act fair. Hard-work may not always be enough to get what you want, but you’ll never get what you want without it.
My dad has made missteps and mistakes in his life, professionally, personally, and as a father, but he has also made sacrifices and has loved me as best as he can. He always watched my crappy little plays in elementary school, and watched me hit foul ball after foul ball when I was on the baseball team. Every home game for my basketball team he was in the bleachers, cheering me on. After my first Tae Kwon Do meeting, he was there to say it was okay when I got knocked in the face so hard I blacked out. He may have been in his uniform, and he may have been as bored as anyone could look, but he was there; proud of his little girl.
My dad is a good person, and possibly the most important lesson he could teach me was this: the people I disagree with, whether or not it’s in politics or just what makes a movie good are not evil. They aren’t monsters, they don’t go to sleep at night thinking about how to make the world a more dark and dismal place. They are also not actively stupid, ignoring the evidence that is right in front of their faces (although, sometimes it does feel like it). They are our friends and family, that just have…different…values than us.
So, here’s to you dad. Happy Father’s Day.
Blogging While Maternal
Friday, June 6th, 2008
Their secret identities are still safe.
As anyone who’s been reading my posts for a while now knows, I am a mommy. S’matter of fact, I’ve been one for like 10,000 years now–okay, not really. It just FEELS that way. Sometimes!
I haven’t blogged overly much about the offspring for the following reasons: (1) One’s own children are of course always deeply fascinating topics of contemplation, discussion and analysis, but other people’s generally aren’t, (2) I am used to compartmentalizing my maternity into an absolutely personal and familial mode, and therefore don’t really feel the pressing need to blog about it here (or discuss it at work or at social occasions with childless acquaintances or in any other setting where children are not the primary focus) and (3) violating my kids’ privacy makes me cringe.
Oooh, what was that? Children should have privacy?
Ah me, My Father (A Continuing Series)
Thursday, June 5th, 2008My father* was in town today, and we spent about as friendly a day as we get. I am one of the weird people that the conservatives cackling about how they are outbreeding the liberals always seem to forget about: both of my parents are conservative. My mother is a crazy, born-again Christian kind of conservative, and my dad is “the government is stealing from me to pay for lazy people” kind of conservative. And I turned out an agnostic, feminist, liberal pinko commie. Go figure.
Anyway, my dad does not actually believe that women are discriminated against “anymore”. Among some of his choice rationalizations for why sexism does not exist, despite the evidence I present to the contrary are “Women Are Just Different**” and “This One Women Was Promoted Over Me, Just Because She Was a Women” and “Women Lie”. He asked me to give him one example of discrimination that I have ever suffered in my life.
After pausing to process the enormity of said request (ONE?!? This week? Today?), I settled on one that was about as unambigous as you could get: when I played baseball as a little girl. When I played, I played on one of the boys teams. I was treated horribly, and the entire time I was told that I should quit. The other teammates did quite a variety of things to me, to make it was fairly clear that I was in boys territory, and that I was not welcome. The coach, while not actively encouraging in this, did turn a blind eye, and was fond of such phrases as “you throw like a girl” and “stop being such a pussy”.
My father, in a process that rivalled glacial races for speed, finally decided that this was a “real” example of discriminiation. But, after that brief moment of cognitive dissonace, out came the rationalizations. The boys who clearly felt okay in pushing me out of their space were “just kids, and kids do stupid things” (so, what about the coach who tacitly endorsed it?), and really it was the fault of the city for not having a girls team** and it was because I just wasn’t as good as the boys who had been playing since they were old enough to walk. From this conversation, I did get him to say that maybe Title IV wasn’t a waste of money, and to admit that perhaps girls weren’t as good as boys (on average) because they didn’t get the same level of socialization when it came to sports.
Two realizations came from this conversation: one, I think feminism is about the right to be an individual. On that baseball team, it didn’t matter how good I was or wasn’t*** I was just the girl. I just wanted to be Antigone, a player learning how to improve in a sport, and have fun. I never intended to make any sort of statement, I just wanted something to do to kill the boring afternoons that the small town I grew up in offered. But, I was part of this monolith called “girls”, and wasn’t allowed to just be me.
Two, my dad flat out admitted that he has more problems seeing a girl get injured in a sport than seeing a boy get injured. This I really, really don’t understand. My dad believes in “protection” of women, yet never had any problem beating up on them himself. This is a very weird disconnect that I have never been able to wrap my head around.
*When Marc first offered me a chance to write a Punkass, I turned him down because I tend to write excessively about my personal life. If people want me to do more serious pieces, or at least less personally-oriented ones, please say so.
**Which I’m fairly sure would have turned into “it was the girl’s fault for bringing it on herself” if the girl in question had not been his daughter.
***In the spirt of full disclosure, I sucked. I wasn’t the worst player on the team, or in the league by FAR, but I was no where near the best player in the sport.
The Deification of Stay-At-Home Motherhood
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008This just really, really irritates me.
Mother’s love worth $117,000 per year, study says
No, THAT isn’t what irritates me…actually I’d say that mother’s love, or any healthy parental love, is priceless. I think we’ve all seen how damaged people can end up being when they aren’t on the receiving end of much, or any, as children.
THIS is what irritates me:
If a stay-at-home mom could be compensated in dollars rather than personal satisfaction and unconditional love, she’d rake in a nifty sum of nearly $117,000 a year. That’s according to a pre-Mother’s Day study released in May by Salary.com, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based firm that studies workplace compensation.
The eighth annual survey calculated a mom’s market value by studying pay levels for 10 job titles with duties that a typical mom performs, ranging from housekeeper and day care center teacher to van driver, psychologist and chief executive officer.
This year, the annual salary for a stay-at-home mom would be $116,805, while a working mom who also juggles an outside job would get $68,405 for her motherly duties.
1. Personal satisfaction and unconditional love? Have the people who write these articles ever actually BEEN a stay-at-home mom? Those particular rewards do exist, of course…however, they tend to be instances of, not a continuous ecstatic flood of. They share the field with feelings of personal frustration and unconditional unappreciation.
2. What duties does a typical mom perform that equate specifically to chief executive officer? I would be willing to agree to small business owner, but CEO? I hate to recycle my own point, but it’s a relevant one–have any of these people ever actually been a CEO?
3. Hate to have to YET AGAIN burst the bubble of ignorance bobbing around so wildly in this article, but a working mom also functions as a housekeeper, van driver and psychologist. The only thing on that list that she outsources (so to speak) is the day care center teacher. And this results in a $50K pay differential? I don’t think I’m ever going to put any credence in anything that Salary.com has to say ever again about typical salaries. ‘Cause I assure you, most day care center teachers don’t make $50K a year.
One stay-at-home mom said the six-figure salary sounds a little low.
“I think a lot of people think we sit and home and have a lot of fun and don’t do a lot of work,” said Samantha Russell, a Fremont, New Hampshire, mother who left her job as pastry chef to raise two boys, ages 2 and 4. “But they should try cleaning their house with little kids running around and messing it up right after them.”
A little low? Lady, does your kids’ other parent even make that much?
Cleaning your house with little kids running around and messing it up right after you? That’s HORRIBLE AND UNIMAGINABLE! Working moms never have to deal with THAT bullshit–we keep our kids in cages when they’re home.
The biggest driver of a mom’s theoretical salary is the amount of overtime pay she’d receive for working more than 40 hours a week. The 18,000 moms surveyed about their typical week reported working 94.4 hours — meaning they’d be spending more than half their working hours on overtime.
Working moms reported an average 54.6 hour “mom work week” besides the hours they spent at paying jobs.
So the working moms are reporting their NORMAL 40 HOURS (if only that) outside the home, thereby making the entire 54.6 hours of the “mom work week” to be overtime, for a total of 94.6 hours (assuming they are not also working overtime at their paid job)…and yet stay at home moms, who are averaging 0.2 hours LESS with either IDENTICAL “overtime” hours or LESS “overtime” hours…still make $50K more?
Add “no math classes” to “never been a stay-at-home parent” and “no clue what a CEO actually does” to the list of issues experienced at Salary.com.
Russell agreed her job as a stay-at-home mom is more than full-time. But she said her “job” brings intangible benefits she wouldn’t enjoy in the workplace.
“The rewards aren’t monetary, but it’s a reward knowing that they’re safe and happy,” Russell said of her sons. “It’s worth it all.”
Because working moms know their kids are in danger and miserable at all times. OH, that must be why we lock them in cages as soon as we get home! At least we know then that they’re safe.
Please, people. You know what stay-at-home motherhood is? It’s a lifestyle choice. Just like any other lifestyle choice. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it; there is equally absolutely nothing right with it. It deserves neither praise nor censure. It just is. Licking the concept’s ass, which as you can see above takes a lot of reality-stretching if not outright shattering, does nothing but make the ass-lickers look stupid, and completely devalues the parenting put in by parents of BOTH genders who also happen to bring in the dough to keep the little family in food, clothing and shelter.
Miss Manners! NOOOOOO!
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Miss Manners (left) after becoming a pod person.
Miss Manners is the greatest. I wanna be Miss Manners…except that I don’t see myself getting less lazy as the years go by and her advice always seems to require that one exerts extra effort and boy howdy, dealing with people daily already whups my butt. Seriously. However, I adore the ascerbity, justice and wit of her replies to her many Gentle Readers.
Therefore, I was horrified when I spied this headline on msn.com.
Miss Manners: She’s Not ‘Wasting’ Her Education By Staying Home With Her Daughter
Recently