A Woman in Every Pot

In response to recent mass murders by self-described “Incels,” there were a couple of high-profile articles sincerely recommending forced redistribution of women. In case you missed them, please follow these links.

This suggestion was dismissed as absurd for the obvious reasons: that the Incels’ misogyny is 99% of what makes them undatable, and that women — being autonomous humans — cannot be forcibly “redistributed.” But I think the obvious responses are incomplete because a lot of people, when confronted with the idea that women aren’t slaves, respond by thinking “But maybe they should be; maybe things would be better if they were…”

So today I would like to explain why trying to control women more is not merely unethical — it is also a totally counterproductive approach to the exact problem that the above-linked dudes are trying to solve.

Let’s lay out the problem: Some portion of the young, straight men in society are unable to find women who want to be with them. This can make a guy frustrated, angry, often violent, maybe suicidal — while the same guy might be happy and feel motivated to be a productive member of society if only he had a wife or girlfriend and possibly also children.

What happens if we try to solve this problem by decreasing women’s freedom and economic power?

Look at it from the woman’s perspective. If you don’t have the opportunity to earn a living wage yourself — and your mate’s economic contribution makes a big difference when it comes to getting food, health care, etc., for yourself and your kids — then Geezer McMoneybags starts looking really attractive compared to the charming young guy who is barely able to make a living wage himself. That’s not being shallow or superficial, that’s rational self-interest.

But let’s change the scenario a bit. Suppose the woman is able to earn a living wage, and her spouse’s financial contribution isn’t a deciding factor in her kids getting to grow up in a safe and healthy environment. Now she’s freer to prioritize other qualities in a mate. The man himself — his time, his efforts, and his character — becomes more valuable than what’s in his wallet.

Just look at it from an anthropological perspective. Societies with a more patriarchal culture (and with more economic inequality in general) tend to be more polygynous. In other words, the top tier of powerful men monopolize multiple women, either through officially recognized polygamy or through a series of marriages. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are a whole lot of frustrated and hostile men that the ones at the top can use as cannon fodder.

If you want a male-dominated society full of manly men vying with one another for dominance, then you’re talking about a society that — by design — has quite a lot of losers. It’s not a bug, it’s the whole point. Some Incels and others in the Manosphere have suggested that teenage girls should be assigned to men and forced into marriage. But where do these teenage girls come from? If you are one of society’s losers, do you really think that a patriarch in a country where he legally owns his daughter is just going to give her to you, as a participation trophy for being born male?

Maybe a solution that is more equitable for the women is actually also more equitable for the men. Obviously women don’t want to be the third string wife to some gross, old, rich, powerful asshole (like Donald Trump, to name one high-profile example). Sure, some will choose that path regardless. But given more attractive options, women are more likely to “redistribute” themselves — rather than sharing each others’ (old rich dude) sloppy seconds. A society where the women have more opportunity to choose men based on their personal merits is a society with fewer male losers.

The catch is that in this scenario the man has to be better than nothing. Literally. Because when women can get by economically without a man, then having no man at all is on the list of possible options. So if you’re a guy and you want to be with a woman, your presence has to be more attractive than your absence.

This should not be a high bar to cross. The overwhelming majority of women are either straight or bi, which means that by definition they are attracted to at least some men. Sadly, too many young guys who go looking for dating advice online end up getting sucked into misogynist communities. If your problem is that you are having difficulty attracting a woman, I can hardly think of a more counterproductive solution than finding a bunch of fellow losers and working yourselves into a collective lather over how horrible women are.

A more effective solution is to work for a more egalitarian society. And keep in mind that women are people — with their own interests and motivations — not prizes.

Also published in The Medium.

For the love of nerds, part 2

In the past, I've argued that we feminists shouldn't focus on misogyny because most guys aren't like that, and because it's better to focus positive attention on the positive than negative attention on the negative (thus increasing its exposure). Sadly, I was smacked in the face with the negative bits wrecking stuff that would otherwise be cool, like atheism -- specifically some "thought leaders" who unfortunately demonstrated that the ability to criticize religion doesn't necessarily imply an ability to think critically about one's own prejudices.

Through that story (and related stuff like GamerGate), I somehow ended up subscribing to We Hunted the Mammoth -- a blog watching (and mocking) the "Men's Rights Activists." It has become the train wreck I can't look away from. This blog is a kind of smorgasbord of schadenfreude because the people being mocked are such incredible villains -- and yet their villainy is its own punishment:

You know how they say "Living well is the best revenge"...? Well, the MRAs are living proof of the converse.

To see what I mean, a new article came up on my reading list (see here) that makes some of the same points I made in "for the love of nerds, part 1":

Back when I couldn’t get laid, I wondered what I needed to do to get laid.

And so, I worked on me. I worked on my education, my personality, my skill set, my career and my body. And guess what happened? SEX! And love and marriage and family and success and all that awesome stuff.

An MRA is a loser who doesn’t look inward on how to improve, but looks outward on whom to blame for sucking, because self-improvement is hard. Also, not having women praise their genitalia the way it happens in porn makes them angry.

The saddest part -- perhaps even sadder than watching them ruin atheism, gaming, and other nerd pursuits -- is the sheer stupidity of this loser-fest. Consider one of the most sad/funny recent episodes of "We Hunted the Mammoth": the vagina bus. The guy is whining about how awful it is that he has to buy a woman dinner (perhaps multiple times) to get laid, and even then she's not required to sleep with him. And in the same post he bemoans how awful it is that women sleep with different partners.

How can someone fail to see the problem with this logic? Does he think that women are non-player-characters that are generated anew each time you fire up your game console?

The most ridiculous logic error comes from the men who interpret their own lack of success as evidence that women shun nice guys and only sleep with assholes. The thing is that if your first instinct is to blame the women for not giving you some rightfully-earned sex, then you're probably not nearly as wonderful to women as you think you are. There may exist women who seek out abusive partners, but if that's really why you struck out with someone, then you should be glad to have been rejected because you don't want to get involved with someone who has profound emotional/psychological problems. And if you think all attractive women pick abusers over good guys, then I can say with a fair degree of confidence that, in reality, you are the problem.

I blogged about one of these guys back in 2009, but the most astonishing example was Elliot Rodger, who decided to kill a bunch of people in order to punish women for wrongly choosing undeserving guys over him. Dude, you are not only a flaming misogynist, but a murderer. If anything, your failure to get a date shows that women aren't too shabby at picking decent guys over horrible guys. Again, this sort of delusion is fed by the evil-for-the-love-of-evil villain trope, that encourages people to see their own interests as obviously pure goodness and their rivals as simply evil.

So we have a bunch of guys whose problem is they can't attract women, and their solution is to gather with a bunch of fellow losers and work themselves into a lather about how horrible women are. Really, I would be hard pressed to come up with a more counter-productive solution if I tried. Well, maybe a murder spree...

Anyway, this interesting article about Arthur Chu hit on one of the reasons why I care so much:

If lonely nerds are to be wooed away from defeatism and rage, he believes, they must be reached with camaraderie as much as reason.

I care about this because the lonely nerd is my favorite type. I want to see him rise to the challenge and succeed. I don't want to see him get sucked into the vortex of his own futile rage and be destroyed by it. I don't want to see him throw his life away because he can't overcome his initial setbacks. 

I want him to succeed because my adorable husband was a super nerd, and now I have two beautiful, brilliant yet somewhat socially-challenged sons. And I want them all to be happy.

What I love (and don't love) about the Lego Movie!

If you've followed the Legos tag on my blog, you can probably guess that I approached this film biased towards wanting to like it. So you can take that as your grain of salt when I tell you that I found this film loads of fun -- and I felt that its clever and imaginative aspects were original enough outweigh the flaws.

The big item The Lego Movie got right was exactly the point the Lego Universe role-playing video game got wrong, as I explained a couple of years ago on one of my other blogs. "Lego Universe" (the game) was basically a generic adventure video game in which the characters and backgrounds happened to be made out of Legos -- but it totally ignored what makes Legos so addicting. You want to buy a given set because of the clever ideas they showcase in the instructions, and then when you get bored of that set, you can take it apart, put together the pieces (and ideas) in your own new ways.

The Lego Movie was built around the idea of how Legos really work. The tension between following the instructions and doing your own thing was the central conflict of the film (and neither was presented as the one right answer). I know that doesn't seem like much of a moral dilemma to base a film on, but it's a real question, and one that's unique to the world of Lego. So they took advantage of their assets to make something original.

Another original point I loved was the treatment of the prophecy trope. I just don't get what is supposed to be so compelling about the story of the young protagonist who is destined by prophecy to solve the universe's problems. I discussed this recently in Harry Potter and the three tropes, and then when my kids recently decided to re-watch the Star Wars films, I noticed they used the same damn three tropes. (Well, with one difference -- in Star Wars, but mom didn't sacrifice herself for her kids so much as randomly die when the plot required it.)

The Lego Movie gave us a far more interesting and entertaining look at how prophecies work. The film explored how belief a the prophecy affects people's behavior, and showed people continuing to hold their beliefs even in the face of contrary evidence (like the fact that Emmet was "the special" but wasn't a master builder).

One trope The Lego Movie unfortunately used in the traditional phoning-it-in way was to have the entire conflict center around the protagonists having to fight the villain who is evil just for the sake of being evil. As I've said before, I really hate this trope, and it drives me nuts that it is so ubiquitous. Can't we as a culture come up with anything more interesting than that to offer our kids? But I forgive The Lego Movie for this, and even for using the painfully unoriginal formula in which the villain ties the hero to a time bomb and leaves him there (to escape). I forgive The Lego Movie because Lord Business and Bad Cop were pretty entertaining as villains go -- and because insisting that films not use the "evil villain" trope would be to hold them up to a impossibly high standard, more challenging even than the Bechdel Test.

Speaking of the Bechdel Test, yes, The Lego Movie passes it. Not with flying colors, but, happily, one of the fun jokes of the piece (where Unikitty is listing off the things Cloud Cuckoo Land doesn't have) was an exchange between two named female characters. Overall, the treatment of gender wasn't too bad, but could have been a lot better. I essentially agree with this article by Tasha Robinson about how Wyldstyle's awesomeness served mostly just to demonstrate Emmett's awesomeness.

Although I think Robinson's analysis is right on the money, I want to temper it with a couple of remarks. First, it's not really true (as Robinson claimed) that "Her only post-introduction story purpose is to be rescued, repeatedly". Wyldstyle has action sequences throughout and saves the day multiple times. The climactic win in the end was due to Wyldstyle's broadcast encouraging the ordinary citizens to use their own creativity to build whatever they want. Of course her brilliant idea centered around her great epiphany that Emmet was actually awesome -- thus proving Robinson was right with the second half of her claim about Wyldstyle's purpose: "to eventually confer the cool-girl approval that seals Emmet’s transformation from loser to winner."

I mention my one technical quibble with Robinson above because I want to contrast it with what she said about How to Train Your Dragon II. I read her article before watching How to Train Your Dragon II, and thought about her claim about Hiccups mom, that "once the introductions are finally done, and the battle starts, she immediately becomes useless, both to the rest of the cast and to the rapidly moving narrative. She faces the villain (the villain she’s apparently been successfully resisting alone for years!) and she’s instantly, summarily defeated." And I went into the cinema thinking, "Oh, come on -- it can't be that bad." But it was!!

The mom's uselessness in the end of How to Train Your Dragon II struck me as really weird and incongruous because the action scene was just so damn long. Like a lot of films, the whole last section of the movie is a sequence of action segments as the heroes eventually defeat the villains. In all this time, they couldn't come up with one thing for this amazing mom character to do that is critical to saving the day? And it's the contrast with the Lego Movie in particular that makes the problem in How to Train Your Dragon II especially striking: in the action sequence at the end of the Lego Movie, every single one of the main hero characters (Emmet, Wyldstlye, Vitruvius, Unikitty, Metalbeard, Benny, Batman) gets an individual moment of doing something critical.

Of course, listing off the main characters like that gives another hint about the Lego Movie's gender problem: of these seven heroes, only two of them are female. OTOH, it could be worse -- it could be just one. Unikitty, by the way, is very cool and entertaining. She's not defined in relation to some male character. She's a princess, but her princessness is about running a fun fantasy land, not finding a prince. Plus, she has her own interesting personal conflict trying to remain cheerful at all times -- and learning how that doesn't exactly work (reminiscent of the "Turn it off" number from The Book of Mormon).

In The Lego Movie's favor, they cast a black character in a role that would stereotypically be played by a white character (instead of putting a black character in a stereotypical black role) -- and they played it up in a funny joke where Vitruvius confuses Gandalf with Dumbledore. I wish they could have done a little better at mixing it up for the ladies.

Personally, I'm the parent who is as interested as the kids in playing with our Lego collection. And I thought it was fun that the Lego Movie included such a parent character. The sad part is that if they'd cast that part as someone who looks like me -- i.e. a woman -- it would have been criticized as "tokenism" or as unrealistic or something. We're not at the point where I can simply watch an ordinary movie and expect to see a character I can relate to, in my own gender, and have it be perfectly ordinary and not even noteworthy. We've still got a long way to go, baby...

This point aside, the film has a lot of really clever, funny stuff in it. Looking at all of the amazing details of the Lego worlds in the movie makes me want to get to my Lego table see what I can build! (With the kids, of course.) We can make our own little world where everything is awesome!

Win-win for Feminism!!

When I was writing my post the other day on the grand reunification of the feminist movement, I was kind of wondering what it looks like from the other side's perspective. And I think this piece by Amanda Marcotte "There Is No Such Thing as Radical Feminism Anymore" perhaps captures it.

It's very short, so go read it and come back.

I agree essentially with Marcotte's points. I take issue with her refusal to call the anti-trans radical feminists by their chosen name. They still exist, and they still call themselves radical feminists -- they were recently profiled in the New Yorker. And, more to the point, they really are one modern splinter of the radical feminist movement of the 60's and 70's. To deny them that name is a little like saying that the FLDS have no business calling themselves Mormon.

On the other hand, Marcotte is totally right that those radical feminists are not anywhere near the mainstream of the feminist movement. One can certainly argue that they aren't the true intellectual heirs of the earlier radical feminists. Marcotte is also totally right that the original radical feminists brought us a lot of fantastic ideas that are now completely mainstream, at the heart of current feminist thought:

It was not enough to pass the ERA or legalize abortion, they believed, but we should also talk about cultural issues, such as misogyny, objectification, rape, and domestic violence.

Personally, I can't help but feel like "Yay, my team won!!" As I wrote the other day, on the issues I cared about, my position won the mainstream, and sex-positive feminism succeeded in making itself irrelevant.

But the other side won, too. Their bad ideas, like trans-women not deserving to be seen as women, plus the items I mentioned the other day, have been stripped off and shunted to the margins, and their good ideas have won the mainstream of feminist thought. They also succeeded in making themselves irrelevant as a separate movement.

It's the textbook example of a win-win situation.

Stuff the atheists can learn from the feminists!

Whatever happened to sex-positive vs. sex-negative feminism?

Back when I was in college and grad school, I thought there was a significant division within the feminist movement over the question of whether sex is good or bad for women. As I've written, my thoughts on this division have evolved, and it's not just me. The division has disappeared to such a degree that when I was writing my latest post on Saturday, I started wondering whether it ever really was a thing. Was I just hallucinating?

So I got out some of my old feminist books off the shelf, and confirmed that, no, I was not hallucinating. I think the following statement from Ariel Levy in the 20th anniversary edition of Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse kind of sums it up:

With the possible exception of the Shakers, it is difficult to think of an American movement that has failed more spectacularly than antipornography feminism. In the late 1970's, when a prominent faction of the women's liberation movement -- including Brownmiller, Dworkin, Steinem, Morgan, Audrey Lourde, the writer Grace Paley, and the poet Adrienne Rich -- turned their attention to fighting pornography, porn was still something marginalized, as opposed to what it is now: a source of inspiration for all of popular culture. [...] If the antiporn crusade was a losing battle, it was also a costly one: it divided, some would say destroyed, the women's movement. The term "prosex feminist" was coined by women who wanted to distance themselves from the antiporn faction.

The idea was that sexually explicit words and images created for the express purpose of arousal are inherently harmful to women. Not just abuses within the porn industry or negative messages in some types of porn, but the whole kit-and-kaboodle, on principle. It supposedly caused rape. This theory was part of the mainstream of feminist thought as recently as 2006 when I wrote my blog entries "A feminist in favor of porn" and "yes means yes".

One problem with the "porn causes rape" claim is that there was never any evidence to back it up. And, as I explained in "porn and me", that inspired some people to claim that instead of insisting on evidence, we should value supposedly female types of reasoning like intuition or some other such rot -- which made me hate the antiporn feminists all the more.

Then there was this little problem with antiporn crusader Andrea Dworkin muddying the waters on the definition of rape (as I discussed here). In the early days of the Internet, I had the misfortune of getting into a dispute with a feminist who claimed that heterosexual sexual intercourse is inherently degrading to women -- that, regardless of her desire or consent, the mere act of a penis penetrating a vagina is psychologically harmful to the vagina-haver -- and cited Dworkin as proof that this is "the feminist position." I assume this is a misrepresentation of whatever Dworkin said, but the experience reinforced my impression that Dworkin has had a very harmful impact on feminist thought.

As a consequence, people like me ended up going too far in the other direction. As recently as ten years ago, I would have told you that I don't think that feminists should focus on issues like date rape or misogyny. I would have given some reasonable-sounding reasons for this, but looking back, I think it was more a question of the fact that those issues were claimed by Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and their fans -- and, frankly, I didn't want to be in the same movement with those guys.

But then what happened?

With the rise of the Internet and the corresponding rise in instant access to all sorts of content, the evidence became overwhelming that sexually explicit imagery for the purpose of arousal is not inherently harmful to women -- and, in particular, it does not cause rape. The idea that porn causes rape dropped completely out of the mainstream of feminist thought.

One of the awesome things about this development is that it demonstrates quite conclusively that basing one's conclusions on evidence is a female type of reasoning! The other awesome part is that we don't have feminists debating about whether sex is good or bad across the board -- we've realigned along the idea that consent and autonomous choice are the measures of whether a given sex act is good or bad. And now we're mostly all friends again.

Last Saturday morning I wrote about how making women feel safe and welcome in the atheist movement actually increases the probability of a given straight male atheist getting (consensually) laid. I want to add the disclaimer that that's not the reason why women should be included in the atheist movement. Women should be included in the atheist movement because women are people too, and can contribute to and benefit from the movement just like any other people. However, since the sexists were claiming that the feminists are just a bunch of man-hating prudes, I wanted to make it clear that that's not true. Helping guys get consensual sex is not the point of feminism, however it is a noteworthy side-effect.

Unfortunately, since Saturday morning, Richard Dawkins's descent into taking leave of his critical thinking skills has only gotten more appalling (see these links). He has decided that his new battle is to make sure we lady atheists know our place in the atheist movement.

Sam Harris also got into the act, posting a defense of his claim that critical thinking is a guy thing. Harris surprises me less than Dawkins. Sam Harris is the guy who claimed that guns are on balance beneficial to women, including in situations of domestic violence. He even posted on his FAQ that his debating opponent's case was based on evidence that shows the opposite, yet, instead of wondering (and researching) why that might be, he continued to repeat his initial reasoning for his original (debunked) assertion. That's not how critical thinking works. A similar thing happened when Harris debated a security expert over his idea that airport security should intentionally adopt a policy of racially profiling people who "look like Muslims." Basically the biggest mystery is how this clown got on the stage in the first place.

Does the arc of history bend towards justice? In general, not necessarily. But the atheist movement -- with its love of the scientific method in all its error-correcting glory -- is a different story. The "Men's Rights Activists" that are currently such a blight on our movement...? Their influence will decline and vanish, even if some of our most popular big names choose to sign onto Team Sexism.

In the worst-cast scenario, Richard Dawkins will do about a decade's worth of damage to the atheist movement he helped to create -- and he will flush his own legacy down the toilet in the process. (Are these tweets really what you want to be remembered for, Mr. Dawkins? Because that's the direction you're heading...)

This should be an interesting ride.

Atheism and ruining it for everybody!!

After this latest round of sexy sexism in the atheist community, I've decided it's time for me to weigh in.

I hope that you recall that I'm the lady who advocates having sex on the first date. I am enthusiastically sex-positive. And today I would like to remind you that free love only thrives in an atmosphere where there is a healthy respect for consent.

Back when I was young and cute (before becoming a (happily married) old lady), I would have been more than happy to go to atheist conferences with the express intention of hooking up. And it is the people who are in favor of clear anti-harassment policies at conferences that make that sort of thing possible. I'm sorry to have to explain something that should be a no-brainer, but just because a chick is looking for NSA sex, it doesn't mean that she wants to be harassed or raped by whichever guy sees her first.

If you are a straight guy looking for a little fun and love, the rapists and rape apologists are not doing you a favor. Quite the opposite. Those guys are telling women: "If you wear that, if you get drunk, if you flirt at a conference -- then it's your own fault if you get raped." And when that's the message that wins the day, then that smart, hot, fun girl you might have met at that conference...? She won't be there. She's smart enough not to go.

Richard Dawkins in particular has been putting his foot in his mouth lately with idiotic distinctions. ("Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that's an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.") Well, let me make one of my own:

Personally, I have never been raped. I have had an ex-boyfriend lock me in an apartment, hold a knife to my throat, and threaten to kill me (see here). Given the choice between the two, I'd say I would have preferred to have been "just" raped. (And, by the same token, I'm pretty damn glad it didn't happen in the US where the equivalent guy would have had a gun -- in which case I probably wouldn't be here typing this today.) But those aren't the choices. It's not like there's one camp that says, "Oh, I would never rape a woman -- sure I like to mutilate and kill them, but not rape them," and the other says, "Oh, would never hurt a woman -- I just like to non-violently harass and rape them." The real two camps are the people see women as autonomous humans and those that don't.

In my situation, it wasn't rape, but it was the same damn thing. It was a question of a man being led to believe that if a woman won't be with him in the way he wants, then he's perfectly justified (as man) in making her do what he wants. She has no business making such decisions for herself.

It is the rapists and rape apologists who say stupid shit like "You should be glad he only raped you -- he might have killed you and cut you up in little pieces." Because those were his options. A normal person says something more like, "Wow, I'm sorry you had any contact at all with that criminal -- he needs to be stopped before he rapes again, or worse."

As far as Dawkins is concerned, I don't think he is for or against hearing more diverse perspectives in the atheist movement. I think it's simply a subject he's never has any reason to think deeply about, and, consequently, unsurprisingly, he has nothing insightful to say on the subject. Unfortunately, because he's the famous guy, he gets quoted on it, and his voice is amplified above the voices of people who actually have expertise and interesting things to say about it.

I agree with Terry Firma that it would be in Dawkins's own interest if somebody would succeed in persuading him to stay the hell away from Twitter. I was thinking that two twitter scandals earlier. But I'm less in agreement about this point Terry made:

It’s not a breakdown of his intellect, which is intact. Rather, Dawkins seems to suffer from an extreme form of tone-deafness. It’s almost as if Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock is modeled after him: cool, rational, detached, and faintly amused by the emotional human fools with whom he is forced to interact.

I think that is an insult to Mr. Spock, who is one of the most awesome fictional characters of all time. I mean, Spock might say insensitive things when asked, but he would have the good sense not to go out of his way to broadcast his random stupid musings.

I think Dawkins's real problem is a debilitating case of "I shit gold" syndrome. After being worshiped for such a long time by so many smart people, he's come to believe that any idea that pops into his head must be made of gold. It has severely compromised his ability to critically analyse his own thoughts and actions, which is unfortunate because (not just criticism, but) self-criticism should be one of the most highly regarded virtues in our movement.

Coincidentally, I should be going to see Dawkins in person today. He's here in Zürich giving a lecture at the Denkfest -- friends of mine will be in attendance. And because I want to make friends with the Zürich Freethinkers (who, I think, organized the thing), I am very hesitant to be typing this. I don't want to be "the difficult one" like I was back in church, many years ago. Yet, I also don't want my attendance to be registered as a vote for "we have to get somebody like Dawkins because he brings in the audience and the money." Therefore, I will be attending tomorrow. I am totally in favor of and impressed by everything about this conference except for the fact that it was billed as "RICHARD DAWKINS!!!! and some other people..."

I hope the local freethinkers will be willing to forgive me for this. I'm sure they are already well aware of how herding cats works. We mean well, but we are simply never going to all get in line.

But hopefully our movement is capable of self-reflection and learning.

Jane Eyre and divorce

Suspense and... surprise! Building up to unexpected revelations is the central device used by Charlotte Brontë in her novel Jane Eyre. The book's most famous plot twist is far from being the book's only plot twist.

(I hope I don't need to say "spoiler alert" here. I assume that if you've heard anything at all about Jane Eyre, you already know what Jane's big surprise was. If not, and you don't want it spoiled, go read the book before reading the rest of this essay.)

Part of creating an effective plot twist is designing a plausible explanation for why the surprise information wasn't already known. For example, Jane didn't know about her uncle and cousins on her father's side because her spiteful aunt deliberately kept the information from her.

Then there was the time when Jane was so in love with Mr. Rochester, but she was convinced that he was planning to marry the beautiful Miss Blanche Ingram. One day Jane got the wonderful surprise that Mr. Rochester never had any intention of marrying Miss Ingram, and, in fact, he wanted to marry Jane instead! And why was that a surprise? Because Mr. Rochester actively pretended to court the penniless aristocrat for weeks (and had ordered Jane to sit in the room every evening and watch him flirt with her beautiful rival) -- expressly for the purpose of making Jane jealous.

Wow! what a.... romantic...(?) thing for him to do. That's almost as romantic as the time when Edward Cullen showed Bella that he knew where her key was hidden, and told her he'd been sneaking into her bedroom every night to watch her sleep. (My friend Holly said that the fact that both Mr. Cullen and Mr. Rochester have the same first name is no coincidence.)

The biggest plot twist -- the revelation that Mr. Rochester had been keeping his first wife locked in the attic and pretending like she didn't exist (so he could marry Jane without her knowing that the marriage wouldn't be legally binding) -- now that requires one doozy of an explanation!

Mr. Rochester can't very well say that he loved his first wife -- and was devastated when she started losing her mind -- but then a few years later decided he deserved a new wife. That would make him a bit of a fair-weather husband, and it would raise the obvious question (which was actually addressed in the book) of what would happen to Jane if she one day lost her marbles. Would she find herself locked in the attic with Mrs. Rochester #1 while Mr. Rochester galloped off to find himself a third?

Certainly not! So he needed a better explanation.

As Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester explains it, the horrible Miss Mason tricked him into marrying her for her immense fortune when he was a penniless second son, not in line for any inheritance of his own! Their respective families rushed them into marriage when they had barely met -- and in particular, no one had informed him of her family's history of insanity.

Soon after the marriage began, Mr. Rochester concluded that his wife was a wicked, despicable creature. Then, when his father and his older brother conveniently died -- leaving him with his own fortune so he didn't need hers anymore -- boy did he regret being saddled to her!

There's a bit of a problem with this story, and perhaps you've noticed as I did:

Given that Mr. Rochester hardly knew his wife (and inasmuch as he did know her, he hated her passionately), and given his obvious personal stake in the situation, he could not be trusted to sincerely keep her best interests at heart when deciding on an appropriate treatment when she started showing signs of dementia.

Would it be good for Mrs. Rochester to be taken to a foreign land -- away from everyone and everything she's ever known -- and locked away in isolation in the secret chambers in the top floor of her husband's mansion? I'd say that's a pretty obvious "no." But in those days the husband was the owner and the wife was property, so no one had any grounds to second-guess this ill-advised plan.

With Mrs. Rochester hidden away, poor Mr. Rochester had no choice but to wander the glittering social scene of the wealthy class of Europe, hiring beautiful mistresses to comfort his lonely heart in France, Italy, and Germany. But as tragic as this disastrous marriage was for Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester, for the heiress (Bertha) Antoinette Mason it was infinitely worse.

Eventually Mr. Rochester decides that his first marriage is so wrong on every level that it should hardly be considered a marriage -- and he should be able to get on with his life. I totally agree with him on this point. I would recommend the merciful modern solution to such tragedies: a divorce. One where a judge would award each party a fair settlement. Sadly, in their society, that option did not exist.

It's a weirdly glaring omission in the book that when Mr. Rochester decides to move on with his life, nobody asks what should become of his wife's fortune. If he's decided that he can remarry because his first marriage is void, then shouldn't he, I dunno... give it back? He could give it to her brother, for example, and place her in her brother's care. Or he could use the money to create an independent trust for her that would be managed by experts to see to it that she passes the rest of her days in comfort and safety with the best possible care.

But no. Mr. Rochester gets the money and Mrs. Rochester gets incompetent surveillance in the secret chambers of the house (where her occasional glimpses of her husband courting other women further enrage her madness) until finally -- luckily for Jane and Edward! -- she commits suicide and stops being an obstacle to their happiness.

All of that is just reading between the lines of the book Jane Eyre -- where Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester is intended to be sympathetic and even lovable. But clearly I'm not the only one to notice that his story in his own words is a little fishy, and if it were a true story, there'd be another side to it.

The challenge of creating a fictional other side to the story was taken up by the author Jean Rhys in the novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Allow me to just quote the introduction by Francis Wyndham to give you the idea:

For many years, Jean Rhys has been haunted by the figure of the first Mrs. Rochester [...] it is in no sense a pastiche of Charlotte Brontë and exists in its own right, quite independent of Jane Eyre. But the Brontë book provided the initial inspiration for an imaginative feat almost uncanny in its vivid intensity. From her personal knowledge of the West Indies, and her reading of their history, Miss Rhys knew about the mad Creole heiresses in the early nineteenth century, whose dowries were only an additional burden to them: products of an inbred, decadent, expatriate society, resented by the recently freed slaves whose superstitions they shared, they languished uneasily in the oppressive beauty of their tropical surroundings, ripe for exploitation.

As you might guess, the story is incredibly sad and disturbing. And it is brilliant in the way it so perfectly fits with Edward Rochester's story and character. Some of the components of the story don't exactly match what he said. Yet if you read Wide Sargasso Sea as the back-story, the tale he recounts in Jane Eyre is exactly the way you'd expect him to tell the story to himself ten/fifteen years later, given all of the decisions he'd made in the meantime.

Naturally, in Wide Sargasso Sea Edward Rochester is not cast as a black-hearted villain, cruelly calculating how to further his own interests at the expense of others. The story presents him just as he'd described himself: as a naive and inexperienced young man who'd been raised in wealth, expecting to be obeyed by all those around him. Consequently he was unwilling and unable to understand the frighteningly unknown country his father had sent him to, much less the troubled girl from a troubled family that came with it.

Now, despite all I've said here, I think that Jane Eyre is a remarkably feminist story for its time. Jane is portrayed as interested in marrying for love -- but absolutely not on anything less than her own terms. She'd rather support herself on a small salary running a school for girls than give up her independence for wealth or adventure.

Jane would have been more than happy to accompany her handsome new-found cousin on his mission to India as a colleague, but if propriety demands she marry him to do it, the deal is off. Similarly, when Mr. Rochester offers her his villa in France -- where nobody has to know anything of their situation -- she'd rather run away in the night than risk being tempted into accepting the proposition. (This was mostly on religious principle, but she was probably also influenced by what Mr. Rochester had said about how awful it is to take a mistress: "to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading.")

It's true that their romance was largely built on eroticizing the power dynamics of the master-servant relationship. Yet when Jane finally agrees to marry Edward, it's only after she's demonstrated that she doesn't need to be married to him, and she can approach him as an equal.

Of course since not every girl gets to have an unknown rich uncle appear just in time to die and leave her a fortune, it would have been nice if Jane could have been on equal footing with Edward simply on the principle that women are people too, and have rights -- rights like the right to own property regardless of marital status and the right to sue for divorce, when necessary.

The happy ending is that this book probably had a big influence on shaping people's attitudes towards divorce, which led to changing the laws.

My Vagina Testimony!!

This is the presentation I gave for the "Vagina Testimonies" -- a Mormon version of "The Vagina Monologues" -- at the 2012 Sunstone Symposium.

I'd like to bear my testimony that I don't believe in chewed gum and licked cupcakes. And I never did, not even at my most Mormon.

Mormon kids learn some very interesting lessons about sex. For one thing, they learn that doing it is a sin next to murder, and that even thinking about it -- even wanting to do it and imagining it -- is almost as bad as actually doing it.

Girls get the additional message that sex somehow uses them up. That the act of sexual intercourse somehow transforms them from being a pristine, fresh-out-of-the-wrapper stick of gum to being a wad of chewed-up gum, or from being a pretty, fresh cupcake to being a slobbery, disgusting cupcake with all of the delicious frosting licked off.

I totally believed and internalized the first message, that feeling lust means you're an unspeakably shameful sinner. I spent many years as a kid cowering in the closet of shame for the crime of entertaining the occasional sexual fantasy -- and enjoying it -- instead of putting up other actors on my mental stage, as we're taught that righteous and holy people are supposed to be able to do.

I never bought into the other message, though. I'm not a cupcake at all, licked or otherwise, I'm a person. Any guy who would seriously consider the hermetic seal on my vagina -- and the ignorance that seal implies -- to be an important part of what makes me a good partner for love or marriage...? Screw him. He's an idiot. That's great that he doesn't want to marry me because the feeling is very mutual.

I know a lot of women consider an invitation into that sacred space to be one of the greatest gifts they can give. Allowing another flesh to enter your body is, for some, an almost life-altering big deal. And as I've listened to other women's stories, I've come to understand that that feeling isn't entirely the result of bad lessons about chewed gum and licked cupcakes. We all have our different perspectives and experiences.

However, for myself, I have always felt empowered by my natural inclination that it's not that big a deal. Sexual intercourse (and here I mean traditional vaginal penetration) can be a wonderful pleasure. It can be an expression of love. In some circumstances it can be something bad. But it doesn't represent handing over some essential part of myself to another person -- any more that a man is permanently diminished by giving me his essence, or whatever the metaphor would be if our social prejudices were reversed.

By the time I entered Brigham Young University at age 17, I was convinced that the church's teachings on sexuality were totally wrong. I saw sex as something playful and fun; something that might be part of a relationship, but not necessarily.

One of my freshman dorm-mates from Budge Hall told me about a game she'd played in her naughtier days called "I never." Basically, a group of people sit in a circle and take turns saying "I never did X," and everyone who has done "X" has to take a drink. It sounded amusing, and since most of the X's were obviously about sex, it kind of inspired me to make my own game of having sex in unusual places.

In particular, I had sex with a boyfriend in the bathroom of the BYU library and with another in the annex of a BYU chemistry lab. (I know I'm admitting to having broken the honor code -- and I've discussed that decision on my blog here.) Later locations included a cave, a boat, a stairwell, a bank vault (to have "safe sex"), a convent, and probably some other places I don't remember. And yet, after all that, I never got around to playing "I never"!

That's your cue to take a drink.

When dating, after I finished with BYU, I always made a point to have sex as early in a relationship as possible, generally on the first date. On my blog I wrote a number of semi-serious reasons for this: for fun, for efficiency, for the element of surprise, and to weed out guys who disrespect "sluts" and/or who don't actually want to have sex with me, for whatever reason.

It was also because I didn't like the dynamic I'd observed in chaste dating relationships, where sex is this giant elephant in the room; a relentlessly ever-present objective/anti-objective that places all other activities in the shadow of thinking about what you're not doing. I felt like it was better just to do it, and have a clear head to relate to each other as humans while deciding whether the relationship is one you want to pursue.

Today my attitude hasn't substantially changed, even if my behavior looks quite different. I've been happily, monogamously married for more than eleven years. I choose to be monogamous -- not because extramarital sex is a sin -- but out of love and respect for my husband. Even if sex doesn't transform me, it's not totally devoid of emotional consequences that could affect our relationship, and my adorable sweetie is now the only one I want to be with.

I hope that my example shows that a girl -- regardless of what sexual experiences she may or may not have had -- is not a cupcake or a stick of gum.

I say these things in the name of all that is good and chooses not to be holy, amen.

People who are different than me

They are so dang hard to understand!!!

Here's an inspiring example of getting it, though:

It made me realize a simple truth: “This woman isn’t some unassailable mystery, or some video game that responds to a proper combination of insult, backhanded compliment, quarter-circle-forward-fierce-punch… She’s like me. She’s a normal human being.”

As embarrassing as it is to type now, back then that seemed like a revolutionary thought.

I think an epiphany like that isn't something to be embarrassed about. Empathy -- especially towards people that you can't immediately identify with -- is harder than people commonly realize. The "unfathomable woman" is an extremely common trope, and not because people are doing it on purpose...

The difficulty isn't limited to men failing to empathize with women, or even limited to people of more privileged groups failing to empathize with people from more marginalized groups. (For example, a gay author might wrongly imagine that he doesn't need to do research or exercise empathy to write convincing straight people.) Similarly, here's a popular blogger analyzing a famous Christian author's attempt to write a non-Christian character:

First of all, Arthur has always struck me as a character misunderstood by his writer. Finley keeps trying to force him into the role of Chief Villain, subtype Spoiled Brat (male), but it fits very awkwardly on Arthur. Sometimes he feels sorry for Elsie, sometimes he doesn’t, sometimes he’s nice to her, sometimes he’s very weirdly mean to her. It’s all very inconsistent and unnatural.

That’s probably because Finley herself doesn’t know why Arthur would hate Elsie. Clearly, because Elsie needs trials to overcome with the Power of Christ(tm), but other than that, there’s just no justification for Arthur’s villainy. It’s all very random. What does Arthur have to gain by making Daddy Dinsmore angry at Elsie? What was he hoping to achieve, and what does that failure mean that he’s so dejected by it? We’ll never know because Finley herself didn’t know.

On a related note, through my extensive blog reading, I recently stumbled upon an interesting example of what I like to call the central tension of feminism:

For every trait or role that's considered feminine, some women will say "Stop saying this negative thing is 'feminine'!" and other will say "Stop saying this negative thing is feminine!"

Here's the 'Mormon Child Bride' taking on a celebrity over how to affirm femininity and women's strength.

Of course, the range and diversity of women's experiences doesn't have to be a weakness -- check out this news item about how it can be a strength!!

Battle for Dream Island!!!

As a parent, I end up having to watch a lot of low-quality kids' entertainment. My general strategy is (as long as it's not something actively offensive), just not to worry too hard about it, and let my kids learn and decide for themselves what they like. And when I find kids' programming that I think is clever, to recommend it:

Enter Battle for Dream Island, a cartoon series my kids found on YouTube.

I've gotten hooked on this series with them because I think it's clever and funny. But there's an additional, unusual aspect of it that impressed me:

The series started with twenty contestants (all of them anthropomorphized objects) with approximately an equal split between male and female characters. Yet -- even though it's a cartoon -- the female characters aren't given any of the typical signals to mark them as female (eg. big lips and eyelashes). The characters vary widely in personality, hence aren't gender-stereotyped. I know this shouldn't be exceptional, but I don't think I've ever seen any cartoon do this. And yet it works. It works great, in fact!

The series is almost over (after a run of a couple years), but I look forward to seeing what the artists do next. Go Leafy!!

(see also this post for contrast)

The trouble with "The Help"

I admit it -- I read The Help and enjoyed it, as an entertaining novel. It struck me as a little odd to have a novel about racism with a white person writing the perspective of a black person, but it's not a priori impossible to do it well.

Then, courtesy of the Hathor Legacy, I found an interesting series of reviews that explain a lot of problematic aspects that I hadn't quite put my finger on.

From Rebecca Wanzon:

One of the three narrators, Aibleen, says that she realizes she is more free than the racist character that destroys her livelihood, a claim that encourages readers to feel better about segregation because, in this logic, nobody can take real, psychological freedom from anyone. Freedom is really about how you feel, not about, you know, the law. It makes Jim Crow an inconvenience, not an obstacle.

I read an Amazon review of the novel that told a reader not to worry that they would have to read over 400 pages of depressing oppression. This is true -- "The Help" makes Jim Crow palatable. I don't think this is a good thing.

African American women had voices before Miz Skeeter gave them the idea

From Duchess Harris:

So instead of incorporating a real Black woman’s voice in a novel purported to being about Black domestics, the Skeeter/Stockett character is comfortingly centralized, and I can see why white women relate to her.

Her Black characters lack the credibility reflected in Coming of Age in Mississippi, a 1968 memoir by Anne Moody, an African American woman growing up in rural Mississippi in the 1960s. Moody recalls doing domestic work for white families from the age of nine. Moody’s voice is one of a real Black woman who left her own house and family each morning to cook in another woman’s kitchens.

Sounds really interesting -- maybe I should pick up a copy of that book...

Grown-ups and choices

When I last blogged about women and choices, I encouraged women to think about their own biases and to consider other women's situations before judging other women's choices. This may lead some people to the (erroneous) conclusion that I think all women's choices are equally good and empowering. Or that I think that feminists should never criticize other women's choices. (The latter would actually be a logical impossibility because I would be implicitly criticizing women's choices to criticize other women.)

Women make a lot of bad choices. Just like everybody else. Part of being a grown-up is accepting responsibility for your choices. It's accepting that people will criticize your choices. And when people criticize you, you have the choice to ignore them or to decide that they're full of it (just projecting their own issues onto you), or even to take their critique into consideration. Or some combination of the above.

On the other hand, I don't think it's a feminist argument to claim that another woman's (unempowering) choice isn't really a choice, or that she's somehow not responsible for that choice because of the way the patriarchy messed her up in the head. I think that if an adult woman is of sound mind and body, then she should be assumed to be competent to make her own life choices and she should be held responsible for her choices. Like a grown-up. Even if some women's ideas are negatively influenced by the patriarchy (or by something else), feminists should not argue that women need to be protected from their own choices.

Keep in mind is that being totally self-actualized and well-adjusted isn't the norm. It's not that women are messed-up by the patriarchy unlike ordinary people who aren't messed-up. Pretty much everybody has some kind of baggage. So when you see bad behavior, criticize away, and criticize with an underlying assumption that a grown-up woman can hear and learn from criticism -- she isn't just a puppet with a patriarchy hand pulling the strings.

Now, some of you probably thinking "Chanson, you're arguing with a straw-man! No feminist argues that the patriarchy renders women incompetent to make adult choices!" Not so. I've had this argument with fellow feminists more than once (though, fortunately, pretty rarely). And I was reminded of it just recently because of a discussion on MSP. On that thread -- in an interesting twist -- a gay man was passionately arguing that the hetero-patriarchy renders gay men unable to be held accountable for their own choices and behavior. If he (or someone else) had been arguing the same thing about women, I would have put up more of a fight.

That said, please note that often women's choices really are limited by ignorance, economics, and coercion. So when I talk about choices here, I mean choices among the range of real options and opportunities the woman has to choose from. Increasing women's educational and economic opportunities is the best strategy for encouraging women to make empowering choices on their own.

Sex-positive vs. sex-negative feminism

When I sat down to write on being wrong a couple months ago, my first task was to go through my past posts for illustrations of how I have learned from being wrong. One of the first points that came to mind (which I hadn't really blogged about) is the divide between sex-positive vs. sex-negative feminism. No, I haven't switched camps -- it's that I've stopped believing that there's as sharp a divide on this issue and I've stopped believing that this divide is as central to feminist thought.

And this is a change of opinion that has come about in just the past couple of years, through reading other women's blogs and memoirs.

Here's an example of what I mean. Take Greta Christina's post on "elevatorgate". I agree with pretty much everything she said. Maybe everything. The issue she wrote about is male/female sexual interactions, and Greta Christina is pretty much as "sex-positive" as they come. But would a "sex-negative feminist" take on the incident be any different? Perhaps in tone, but in content? Probably not.

I've sort of grown into the conclusion that -- for a huge number of feminist issues, perhaps most -- the sex positive/negative distinction is irrelevant or doesn't make sense. And while some feminists can reasonably be divided into these camps, probably most can't.

To see my evolution on this issue, the best place to start is my post porn and me -- where I described how my outlook was shaped by some of my earliest encounters with feminist theory of sexuality. In a nutshell, I felt that women who enjoy having sex with men (including women who are aroused by the thought of arousing a man) should not be told that they're messed-up in the head or that they hate themselves or that they're tools of the patriarchy. And they should especially not be given this slut-shaming in the name of feminism.

While I was enjoying the pleasures of grad school, I once attended a talk given by Andrea Dworkin. My reaction? I was horrified. This was nearly twenty years ago, so my memory of the lecture is a tad vague. All I remember is that everything is rape. Everything. Even things that aren't sexual are rape. Naturally, I felt that expanding the definition in this way not only trivializes the experience of people who are actually raped, but (more importantly) it is counter-productive in the fight against rape. You don't solve a problem by obscuring it, you solve it by first understanding it. Of course, before I even walked into that room, I already felt that her stance on porn was totally counter-productive with respect to addressing the problem of rape. So who knows what she actually said that day...

My stance on porn hasn't changed. There exist images in the category of pornography that are offensive -- as there are in all media genres. But images of women that are created and used for the express purpose of male arousal are not a priori harmful or degrading to women. If anything, it's the opposite.

On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to draw a clear dividing line between explicitly erotic materials and other forms of entertainment. And, while I think it's A-OK for men to enjoy looking at depictions of sexy women, the overall entertainment industry has a bit of a problem with portrayal of women. Specifically, a piece intended for a general audience typically includes only one female character, and even for her to get a spot on the stage she has to be beautiful and she has to be the love interest who is peripheral to a main [i.e. male] character. (Even God's favorite musical suffers from this, as much as I love it overall.) Maybe this problem is related to erotica. It's certainly related to attitudes towards women and sexuality. After contemplating this for a number of years, all I can say is that I think it's not simple.

So I guess feminism ranks pretty high on my grand list of things that aren't that simple...

SAHMs: Who's got your back?

Over on Main Street Plaza I've just posted SAHMs: Who's got your back?

(It is the latest instalment in my series on Feminism and women's conflicting interests.)

Insights on Mormon culture, thanks to "God's favorite musical"!

I haven't seen "The Book of Mormon" yet, but you can hear the songs online, and people have already started discussing them on Main Street Plaza.

When the reviews of the musical first started appearing, I remember there was a lot of focus on whether they got the doctrinal details right (Is Kolob a planet or a star? Does God really live there? etc.). But it appears that what they really got right is unique character of Mormonism — what it’s like to be Mormon! (And, really, placing less importance on the precisions of doctrines like Kolob and more importance on Mormon practice and attitude is, itself, quite accurate.)

If you have an opinion on any or all of the songs, please vote in our poll and tell us about it. Here's my favorite (followed by what I wrote about it):



A lot of the songs had me going “Wow, fantastic! And so true!” But it was listening to “You and Me (But Mostly Me)” that made my whole youth and childhood pass before my eyes. Standing there, happy to supportively sing “my best friend…” while somebody Awesome! sings his heart out about serving God. And it didn’t hurt that the song kind of reminds me of ’80′s pop, and of “Humble Way” from God’s second-favorite musical:



This same missionary scenario — including the leader/subordinate relationship, and the fact that it’s cute that they’re not really humble about their awesome task — is exactly what the song “Humble Way” was about. “You and Me (But Mostly Me)” is what “Humble Way” wanted to be (if it had been totally brilliant).

I completely agree with Holly’s assessment that this would be perfect sung as a duet between a young LDS guy and his fiancee. I don’t think that’s reading anything into it that’s not there. Hierarchy colors so much about Mormon interpersonal relationships. And the (officially unequal) partnership between missionaries sets the model for marriage.

One point that is pure genius is the fact that their unequal relationship isn’t quite the central focus of the song. The leader’s earnest desire to do something great for mankind and God is as central (if not moreso). And the fact it’s tied in with his own ego is winked at.

You can see this symbolized in the Mormon temple endowment ceremony (which I haven’t been through, but I’ve heard about it). The fact that the wife covenants to obey her husband is OK because the husband is making a covenant with God. If you complain (or do anything other than stand beside him being supportive), then you’re the buzzing fly that’s detracting from a man and his important business between him and God!

I can’t imagine any song could more perfectly capture what Mormon patriarchy feels like.

And I can't wait to see the whole musical!!

Free to be a homemaker...

One point where I feel like the feminist messages of the seventies were fairly effective was in convincing people that men are also responsible for housework and child-rearing -- that it's not automatically the woman's job. There's still a long way to go, but I have the impression that, for men and women of my generation and later, expectations on this front changed noticeably compared to the previous generations.

This is true for child-rearing in particular. Not so long ago, pushing a baby-buggy was equivalent to wearing a dress. I have a vague memory of this being a popular comedy situation, to show the poor man having to take care of his child for an afternoon. The director would even have the poor sap wear a frilly apron over his dapper suit, to emphasize the absurdity of the situation. He's a man and he's trying to take care of a baby -- hahaha!! Now you see men walking down the street carrying babies in pouches or pushing them in strollers, and it doesn't cross anyone's mind to see that as strange.

The "Free to Be..." album I discussed the other day had a track about how it's OK for a boy to want a doll because he might want to learn to nurture babies too. (Aside: this track, like the one about boys crying, seemed to portray bullying as inevitable, but basically said the boy shouldn't be bullied for wanting a doll.) Then there was another track that struck me as almost controversial: "Housework".

"Housework" is a poem that says, essentially, that those smiling ladies you see doing housework in TV commercials for detergents -- they're only smiling because they're actresses. Really, nobody likes doing housework, and that's why the mom and dad should share the housework load.

My modern-sensitivity-and-awareness brain immediately makes the connection between that statement and the central tension of feminism: For every role/trait that is seen as feminine and bad, some women will argue "Stop seeing this bad thing as feminine!" and others will argue "Stop seeing this feminine thing as bad!" And often both positions have merit.

It makes me wonder OK, is the above dissing SAHMs? And hence feeding the supposed enmity between career women and SAHMs that is so overhyped?

Then I wonder: Am I just being hypersensitive about this, from reading too much feminist Mormon housewives? I mean, is it really insensitive and un-PC to say that even homemakers don't like housework? Plus, I know that many SAHMs would totally agree with the moral of the poem: that the housework is not just one person's responsibility...

Thoughts?

"Free to Be" -- forty years later...

I remember how old I felt when I first noticed that I could start a sentence with "Twenty years ago..." and speak from first hand experience. Now that I'm on the cusp of forty, I can easily tell you about stuff from thirty years ago, and it's only getting worse...

But, aaaaaaaaaanywaaaay....

Right up there with Schoolhouse Rock, Free to Be... You and Me totally captures (for me) the messages to kids in the '70's. According to the wikipedia article, "Free to Be has become a cult classic across the United States amongst many who were children of New Age parents in the 1970s" -- which I find kind of funny because my parents back in the '70's were pretty far from "New Age" (they were conservative Mormon Republicans). And yet I still think it's a [cult?] classic.

My parents aren't the ones who played it for me -- I don't remember exactly where I first heard it. But I bought a record album of it myself (for fun) as an adolescent in the '80's, and my mom (despite having opposed the ERA like a good Mormon), didn't appear to object to it. I recently found a CD of it, and I've been listening to it to see what I think of it now.

If you're not familiar with the album, it's a collection of clever and fun songs and skits that challenge traditional gender expectations. One central point to keep in mind is that essentially all of the messages in the album were countering other messages that kids were also hearing quite loudly. So every time you hear a song on it whose theme makes you go, "Well, duh, everybody knows that" -- then you've found a point where this album (and other voices from that time) had an impact and changed cultural assumptions.

The song that sounded (to me) the most dated was the one telling boys "It's all right to cry." I have two little boys, I watch tons of media directed at them, I read popular parenting advice, and I talk to lots of other moms in Europe and in the US, online and in person. I haven't done a formal study, but the gendered message I remember from my childhood -- that it's shameful for a boy to cry -- has fallen out of favor, and it's not just Glenn Beck. ;^)

It's my impression that our cultural expectations have changed on at least three fronts: (1) getting your feelings out instead of holding them in is viewed today as healthy and not exclusively feminine, (2) It's somewhat more acceptable for boys to express feminine traits and interests, and (3) Childhood bullying in general is no longer seen as inevitable or acceptable. Keep in mind, folks, that "Free to Be..." came out a mere three years after the popular Johnny Cash song A Boy Named Sue, in which it's presented as a more-or-less reasonable act of love for a father to name his son "Sue" specifically for the purpose of ensuring he'd be bullied, and hence come out a tougher man in the end.

Part of the spoken text says that crying boys aren't "sissies," but instead boys who are afraid to cry (and hence risk being called "sissies") are the "sissies" [implying that being a 'sissy' is still bad]. Naturally, that way of deflecting-yet-reinforcing the label "sissy" wouldn't be considered OK among liberal parents today. That said, I'd be pretty surprised if our gender awareness hadn't improved at all beyond what was on the cutting-edge-of-mainstream forty years ago.

The whole album is quite heteronormative (to anachronistically use a term that has come into ordinary public discourse fairly recently). That is, the album assumes that girls grow up to be mommies, boys grow up to be daddies, and (if they get married) mommies are married to daddies, period. Again, keep in mind that this was a mere three years after Stonewall, so mainstream awareness of LGBT issues was a fair distance in the future. The message that both girls and boys can grow up to be whatever they want to be was already pretty controversial. And teaching one generation of kids not to be limited by gender expectations helped set the stage for them to question gender roles even further -- in ways that many people in the previous generation didn't think of.

A track that hardly seems dated at all is the tale of Princess Atalanta. Female characters in kids' movies and television have sadly made a lot less progress than many parents (like me!) would hope (see, for example, The Hathor Legacy). Most parents of little girls I know are powerless against the lure of the Disney Princess pink ghetto (though I've heard some creative strategies for dealing with it). But I really like the way Atalanta's own autonomy takes center stage in bringing about her "happily ever after". [If you read the wikipedia entry, they explain how "Free to be" took some major liberties compared to the original story, but, really, no worse than Disney does.]

So, which song do I like/remember best after all these years? Probably the title track. Anyone else have memories (fond or otherwise) of this album?

Career women vs. SAHMs round II: There Can Be Only One True Choice!

See Round I

Throughout my life, I've been happy and pleased with how much our culture has improved from a feminist perspective. [When I say "our culture" here, I'm sticking to my own experience, hence I'm talking about the US and Europe.]

The kids of my generation (Gen X) were brought up with expectations that were dramatically different than the expectations that our parents had been raised on. If a girl decided she wanted to grow up to be a scientist or an astronaut, she could expect to be encouraged, not shot down with "Honey, don't you think you'd rather be a nurse or a mommy?" Boys, too, were finally brought up with the expectation that a father is responsible for his share of the childcare and housework. In the fifties, if a man was pushing a baby carriage, it was the set up to a joke -- it was almost the equivalent of dressing him in a flowery dress. Today, you constantly see men taking care of babies and children, taking them to school, etc. It's expected.

In my feminist world, the women of the twenties and earlier showed that a woman could do a man's job, but they typically had to choose career or family because back then -- to have a brilliant career and a family -- you needed to have a wife back home. The natural next step (for a feminist born in 1971 like me) was to try to build a world where a woman could reasonably expect to have both a successful career and a successful family. With the right support network, it's possible. And -- as an added bonus -- the father gets the opportunity to play a more hands-on role in raising his kids, rather than just being expected to bring home the bacon and then go smoke his pipe in his den while the mom rears the kids.

As much as things have changed for the better, traditional roles have obviously not been thrown out completely with yesterday's trash. Traditional expectations about men and women are alive and well, even among liberals and feminists. Here's my impression (and feel free to disagree with me in the comments):

I think that -- even in our enlightened day and age -- men are judged more for their career/worldly success and women are judged more for their marriage and family.

Here's a taste of what I mean: If there's a couple who are both doing great in their careers -- and they have a baby and toddler at home -- nobody is going to say to the man "Don't you feel guilty or selfish spending so much time on your career while your baby is raised by strangers in day care? Don't you think maybe you should take a year or two off from work, or switch down to part-time?" Whereas you can bet your bonnet that the wife will be getting that critique from some of her peers, friends, family, etc. On the other end of the spectrum, if both parents are unemployed (or underemployed), and they can't afford decent food, clothing, and shelter for their kids, the man is the one who will be judged as a failure for it. As for women who choose to remain single, your career has to be pretty spectacular before people will stop pitying you as the poor, old maid who was too unattractive to land a man.

Now, many men do take time off and/or reduce their hours when their babies are small, and many women are largely or primarily responsible for paying for their their kids' food, clothing, and shelter. But it's like those things are often viewed as a charming plus, and not viewed as being your real responsibility.

This whole elaborate prologue has been to explain why I hate it when people pretend that career women and stay-at-home-moms are mortal enemies, locked in some eternal, petty cat-fight.

If you're a straight woman with career dreams and ambitions, you might magically get lucky and find a husband who will take primary responsibility for child-rearing and who will put his own career on the back-burner in order to support your career more fully. But don't count on it. A successful man, OTOH, can absolutely count on finding a wife who pick up whatever slack is needed to allow him to "have it all" -- the happy well-cared for family and the brilliant career. (The men on the bottom end of the success spectrum can count on having neither one.)

If you're a straight woman who wants a family, then, in our current society, you're almost always faced with a balancing act. You might want to devote yourself full-time to your career and also devote yourself full-time to your kids, but you can't do both. Whatever balance you come up with, you're almost certainly going to feel some regret about the things you chose not to do. You'll occasionally feel like "I wish I didn't have this proposal due tomorrow morning -- I should be reading my daughter a bedtime story right now," or "If I weren't stuck at home covered in baby vomit 24/7, I'm sure I could have earned that promotion!" (Naturally the balancing act is that much worse if you're not in the privileged set, and you need to work to put food in your baby's mouth, when meanwhile people are judging you as a negligent mother for working when you should be taking care of her.)

Regret often leads to defensiveness. You hear a woman at a party talking about her exciting new project at work (respectively, talking about all of the amazing educational activities she did with her kids last week), and you start to think she's talking directly to you, judging you and your choices as inferior. Occasionally, this defensiveness can lead to a vicious circle where some women start to believe that their own choices are the only valid choices for mothers period, and career women are all selfish bitches (respectively SAHMs are all brainless layabouts).

I don't like to take it there. If you feel good about your own choices, then you have no reason to feel defensive about other women's choices. (And if you really regret your choices, lashing out at other women is certainly not going to improve the situation...)

I have so many friends who are moms, and they're all over the map when it comes to working outside the home. Some work full-time, some are full-time SAHMs, and some -- like me! -- have reasonably successful jobs outside the home, but choose to work part-time in order to devote some time to homemaking. All of these ladies are intelligent, responsible, fun, etc. I'd rather say, "Look, we all have a difficult balancing act to perform, and how we manage it depends on our opportunities, skills, and temperament. The right choices for me and my family will almost certainly be different from the right choices for you and your family, and that's OK."

I'm glad when there's a variety of possible choices. Even if not every choice is equally empowering or "feminist," it's feminist to respect grown womens' ability to make good choices for themselves and for their families.