Category Archives: politics

“Not buying what you’re selling” feminism

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I am a-quiver with righteous indignation. Honestly, if you’re not reading “Perfect Madness” — well, there is no if. Get it. Read it.

More than just motherhood today, it’s about the toxic culture of America today. Anorexia, bulimia, “choice,” abortion, college, looking hot — for young women today our entire realms of experience are so narrowly inwardly focused. The pressure and quest for perfection. Sublimating everything to be perfect, to be attractive, to be willing and adept sexual objects, to exercise control over the most personal of things — your person. To be intelligent, to be successful, to be beautiful, to have white teeth, to have glowing skin, flat stomachs, rounded breasts, smooth hairless legs, glossy hair. To be “strong” and fit and flawless. To have a good job, a good husband, good children, a nice wardrobe, a nice car, nice things. To have a perfectly clean and perfectly updated house. To have well-behaved drool-free pets. To have no body hair. To have perfectly arched eyebrows, a healthy bank account, to be well-read. To not fail. To never falter. To take the sins of the world upon our backs. To be upon our backs to take the sins of the world.

To say yes. To say “OK”. To say “Whatever you want, I don’t care, do with me what you will.” To accept lower wages, buyouts, reduced healthcare plans, substandard yet expensive child care, to make the nanny happy, to make the husband happy, to make your children happy, to make your boss happy, to make the stranger on the street happy to look at you. To smile. To hold it in. To suck it in. Only to let it out when nobody is watching, nobody is listening.

This is fucking psycho, people. We need to be allowed to take up space. We need to demand to take up space. We need to be fully flawed people. We should be content with normal grooming and hygiene. We need to be able to say, Fuck you. We need to be able to say, This isn’t working, I want my money back. We need to be able to say, I want. I need. I expect. I deserve.

Fucking toxic culture, people. It’s turned every problem we have as a culture, as a class, as a gender, as a nation, inward on ourselves. Micromanaging our loss of control and our fear into highlights and salad.

We need to mobilize. We need to fucking scare the shit out of Congress. We need to lay down our flattening irons and take up arms, metaphorically speaking.

If you get raped, it’s not your fault. If you have sex, you don’t deserve punishment. If you get pregnant, you don’t deserve to be hung out to dry — the same people pushing to eliminate abortion ought to be pushing for a male birth control pill, for accountability, for women as people.

It’s a subtle problem, this toxicity. It seems like it’s just the way things are. We are fed lies through one ear — through the media, through Hollywood, through our own politicians and families and friends — and we believe it. We believe we have made choices and must accept the consequences — I “chose” to get pregnant, to keep the baby, to buy a house, to get married, to work part-time — therefore I deserve skyrocketing housing prices, tax rates, health-care costs. It’s not America’s fault I can’t pay my mortgage or my rent — It’s not America’s fault I want to spend time with my baby — it’s not America’s fault I can’t pay for groceries on what I make working part-time, because I chose that.

But on some level it is America’s fault. More and more resources are being snipped and yanked from under our feet. We have no support systems, because we must go where the jobs are — everything is all connected. Deregulation. Capitalism, the Bush Administration, cronyism, the oil industry, big business, corporate life. Money. Power.

The middle-class is suffocating and we are not demanding back what we have lost. Women are asphyxiating, metaphorically, under the increasing weight to keep control, being told we have all these choices and if they don’t pan out, we must have chosen wrong. We aren’t turning to the government and demanding tax hikes which will go toward the greater good, rather than tax cuts for the wealthy that result in ever more social programs and resources and support networks and money for schools being cut.

It seems like things will never change. The government will push and push and take and take and we will continue to shake, wide-eyed, wondering how we will survive.

The “Mommy wars” and all these books about motherhood focus on a different class of people than the one I belong to. I don’t have the luxury of choosing whether or not to work. I don’t get to have a maid and a nanny. Owen’s not going to be able to take lessons and be an overscheduled kid. He doesn’t get organic food. He gets off-brand diapers and hand-me-down toys.

I’ve been thinking about the Blogher second-day panel called Mommyblogging Is A Radical act, which Sweetney and Finslippy will be presenting. I’m ready to put aside micropersonal issues and focus on the personal as political — my daily life as a middle-class American woman, and what I can expect and what I can demand of my government and my national culture.

I am ready to mobilize, y’all. I am ready to scream, to march in the streets. I am ready, also, to stage a mass letter-writing campaign, to go straight to my elected officials and hold them accountable. It’s sick that many of us — most of us? — don’t have the time to wade through the maze of local and federal government bullshit, but it’s time to go Town Hall on their asses. Momsrising.org is on the right track, but we need more than be covered respectfully in the mainstream media. We need real, concrete, life-changing help. Living wages. Affordable healthcare. Quality and affordable child care. Systems of support. A national culture of support, one that says children are not punishment for a woman having sex for pleasure, but rather something we all have a stake in. Before we abandon Roe V Wade altogether, we need to strengthen sex-ed programs, not just for horny high-schoolers but for adults, too. Simple and accessible birth control. RU-486. The Morning After Pill. And a culture that for fuck’s sake doesn’t pin the worth of a woman on how much she weighs or whether she’s a fucking sexkitten.

What we are told as girls certainly has not matched with the way we have found real life to be, with the way we feel lost and stranded at sea with no one to rely on but ourselves. No one will listen, no one cares — well, fuck that shit. Let’s stand up. Let’s eat that twinkie. Let’s demand what is rightfully ours — a nation that supports us, not one that gives good lip service and expects us to do the same.

Mother’s lib (or, Everyone Works)

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Just one more tidbit before I go: That whole “Mommy Wars” thing? Where the “working moms” hate the “stay-at-home” moms and vice versa? I knew that was a social construct, a media stand-by for slow news days and attention-grabbing headlines. But the point was brought home recently that something around 70% of mothers do some sort of part-time work, whether it’s one hour a week or one week a year or unpaid labor aside from housewifery or, in my case, 25 hours a week without benefits. Seventy percent! Or something close to that, I’m not looking it up right now!

Aside from the very wealthy (who are sure to have some kind of help, be it maid service or nannies or what have you) most moms, even ones who identify as stay-at-home, do some sort of work. And most working moms are not necessarily doing 50+ hours a week at a high-powered suit job. I could call myself a stay-at-home mom who does some office work, if I wanted to. I choose to call myself a working mom, because that’s what I feel like, and because I have gotten enough fucking grief about putting my child in day care that I am going to take that phrase, “working mom,” and reclaim the hell out of it.

Amalah recently quit her job, and commenters came absolutely out of the woodwork to laud her for making “the right choice” and staying at home. Even though, technically, she’s not a “stay at home-er,” because she’s got one or two free-lance gigs lined up, making her a work-at-homer. But the sheer dichotomy of thought about working, and about the “relief” so many of us dream of when we think about staying at home with our kids versus the stress of having to manage work plus family life — well, it’s all bullshit, don’t you think? Especially when you’re by yourself with virtually no social support network.

Part (OK, all) of what makes working stressful for me is child care. I love my job. I love designing newspapers and I love working in publishing, have done since I was 14. It’s been my life’s dream to be a part of producing a publication intended for mass consumption. But my job does not allow me to work from home, nor does it subsidize child care of any kind. And my mortgage does not allow me to stay home. And my heart will not allow me to raise my child in an apartment or a rowhouse.

So I work. And I pay two hundred and fifteen dollars every week for owen to get four and a half hours of care, four days a week.

But like I said before, if he gets sick — I’m screwed. My neighbors are octogenarians, except for the 40-year-old guy a few houses down who seems to have a drinking problem. No one on the block has young children. No one at my office has young children (that I know of. OK, maybe this one guy. But they’re at least grade-school age). None of my friends are within a five mile radius, and even if they did, they have children and/or jobs as well.

I have virtually no social support network. None.

Which is why we’re moving. Raising a family is certainly survivable this way. We’re not perishing or anything. But the specter of disaster is constantly hovering over my shoulder, and if shit hits the fan, I want to live in a close-knit place with many different kinds of support. I want to know my grocer. I want my son to have kids to play with aside from his day-care buddies. I want to be able to chat with my neighbors about gas prices without them mistaking today for 1961. I want Owen to play out in the backyard without hearing Forty-Year-Old Alcoholic yelling belligerantly about “Fucking Whores and Catholics and Spics.”

The biggest lesson I’ve learned so far, in my 15-month mothering career, is that to expect a person to do this alone is homicidal. I’m dead grateful that I have a job right now, that I have the Internet, that I have a library card. But I keep thinking how much richer my life would be if I had a woman next door with a toddler; if I had my mother in law two streets over to tell me how to launder vomit out of denim; if I had a neighbor girl I trusted wholeheartedly to babysit a few times a month.

The problem, in my opinion, is not working vs non-working, it’s all of us moms together expecting ourselves to do everything “perfectly” and not expecting or demanding society at large to give us a fucking hand already.

I hate him with the passion of a thousand hates

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God. I’m so angry. I’m so, so bitter. And Bush just sets my teeth on edge.

I just spent an hour and a half watching Primetime’s “System Failure” program and then the Bush’s address to the nation and THEN the reaction from a handful of evacuees who were just overjoyed at the thought of military control and a mobile home to live in. I mean, I guess maybe those would be good things, to them, to have.

But I kind of agreed with the reporter who was interviewing them about their reactions. “Do you think he should have done more? Do you blame anybody? Are you skeptical about the president’s intentions?” Obviously leading questions cheerfully shot down by evacuees, but fuck if he wasn’t asking what I was thinking.

I’m disgusted, appalled, cynical, jaded — and now we find out that, surprise surprise, Halliburton has a hand in Katrina cleanup — and the Homeland Security investigators can’t investigate it because it’s part of a contract that was awarded by the Pentagon last July. Oh, and contractors are exempted from affirmative action, as well as enabled to pay workers below minimum wage — even if a “majority” of those workers ARE residents of the stricken area, as Bush insists they ought to be, they’ll be making shit pay to rebuild their towns and neighborhoods.

And here’s food for thought:

The national media is mistaken when it claims that the Bush administration failed to respond to the crisis created by Katrina. The administration responded swiftly ñ to the needs of Halliburton, Bechtel and Fluor Corporation and to its campaign contributors and corporate lobbyists who knew that the administration would quickly turn the tragedy into a profit windfall.

That’s what happens when the administration is worried more about profits, spin, and percentage points in the polls than about real people, real lives, real Americans — not just the wealthy.

And don’t get me started on the new, more stringent bankruptcy law going into effect Oct. 17 — a law which is going to make it a lot harder for low- and middle-class people to escape the economic devastation of Katrina.

I’m sickened, I’m skeptical, and I’m still crying for all those babies at the domes and the convention centers. Bush says he’d like to see people out of shelters by MID-OCTOBER. Mid-October. Christ.

A thousand hates, people.

I blame it on the Roman Empire

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Watching a NOVA special on the origins of life got us all het up about these Christian firebreathers and their Big Book and One True Way and the impossible answers they want evolution to provide.

I just wanna say this: Some of my best friends are Christian. Religion has done an awful lot of good for mankind, especially in the “good works” arena.

But dumb blind faith, willful ignorance of facts, and one suspiciously recorded Good Book do not a scientific thesis make. Please, teach your children your religion. Put your faith in the Big Man in the Sky. But don’t pretend that “Intelligent Design” is anything more than fancy Creationism, and I won’t march into your church/synagogue/mosque demanding that you teach “the other side of the story” when you talk about Genesis.

Science and Religion can coexist. There could be an Intelligent Creator who made the Big Bang and set the world on its well-documented evolutionary path.

[But who made the Creator? If you can’t believe life arose from, say, amino acids under extraordinary pressure, as has been proposed, how do you propose I accept that a Creator was created? Or don’t you like to tango that way?]

But maybe there was not. My point is, religion belongs at home. It’s a very personal thing. Chances are you and I don’t agree on articles of faith, and that’s fine. But if you want to convince somebody, that’s what door-to-door evangelism is for, not public school classrooms. Your way is not everyone’s way, and it’s pretty arrogant to think that it is.

Let our teachers teach the science, the evidence — as we allow them to do for everything else, including chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics, etc — and you be the ones to teach your kids your morals, your values, your faith. That’s what parents do. Hard science, though, is best left to the scientists and teachers who have studied it.

Why, it’s all about shoes, shopping and Mister Right, of course!

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If you’re a fan of motherbloggers [as I am] and chick lit [as I am — don’t knock it, man, there’s some good shit under that pink label] then you ought to be reading Jennifer Weiner’s blog. She’s a big time best-selling [I think] author of such goodies as “Little Earthquakes,” and mama to a little girl called Lucy.

She’s also fighting the good fight while being snidely spat upon by people who think chick lit authors should be kicked until they’re dead.

There are people out there — usually men, but not necessarily — who just can’t stop the hateration on “chick lit,” “chick flicks,” “mommybloggers” and the like. I’m still amazed at the pink ghetto that women are instantly tossed into when they decide to create something, especially if that something has a female protagonist or a “women’s interest” topic [oh, like parenthood, for example, or relationships. Ooh, run for the hills]. The easiest way to dismiss something still is to call it women’s work, and it’s so much easier to slap a demeaning label on a piece of work than it is to actually consume that work and critique it on its own merits.

tags: chick lit, JenniferWeiner, books. [What the hell are tags?]

A little something you can do

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Via Bitch Ph.D. [Fri., July 28]:

1. First and most importantly, this press release by the Feminist Majority Foundation: Senators Boxer, Mikulski, Murray, Landrieu, Cantwell, Stabenow, and Clinton—you know, the women who are actually leading the party right now—are saying they will “insist” that Roberts clarify his position on abortion. If one of these is your Senator, please write her and tell her thank you. They have also set up a website where you, the American public, can submit questions you would like them to ask Roberts. This is what we call leadership; this is what we call acting like an opposition party; this is what we call being responsible and responsive to your base. Why the boys have to be so divisive about their pet issues and refuse to support the party, I don’t know, but be sure and submit a question and write the Big Seven and tell them how much they rock.

Note, Baltimorons: Mikulski is a Maryland senator, y’all, so contact her. And! She has her own Wikipedia entry, too!

Impeach Bush

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Or at least demand accountability for the Downing Street Memo.

Here’s a way to send your opinion directly to your U.S. senators and representative.

Here are the last 25 messages sent from the above link.

Representative John Conyers held a hearing on the memo June 16, but newspapers, political figures and regular old people still don’t seem to get it. Bush lied to us. It’s been proven, time and time again. And he didn’t lie about blowjobs, he lied about war, a war that has killed thousands of our men and women, sons and daughters, not to mention Iraqi innocents, and it has cost us billions upon billions.

Regardless of your political affiliation, don’t you think it’s time to get a manipulative, dishonest man [and his cronies] out of the Oval Office? I do. How much more “convincing” do we need? If it’s good enough for Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, it’s good enough for this guy.

IMPEACH THE FUCKER.