My Cousins and The Babies

A few years ago, my cousin, J[1], had a baby. No one in the family knows who the father of J[1]'s baby is, mainly because J[1] doesn't want to talk about it. As far as I can tell, everyone seems to be fine with that. She probably knows, and has the information about his family history in case there are medical problems, but we're all more focused on her son, D.

Well, J[1] and D inspired another cousin, A[2], to have a baby of her own. In her case, she was married to I[W], and we all know who the father is. Well, I[W] was finishing a PhD in English, but was unable to find a job as a professor. My cousin had the baby, but realized that it would be a better idea if her husband was bringing in the income so she could stay home with the infant, as opposed to the other way around. After all, she would be the one breastfeeding, and she didn't want to switch to formula. So, according to my parents, my cousin told her husband to get a job. Now, I[W] may just be feeling stifled by that job right now, but my dad thinks that he isn't exactly ready for the responsibility of having this kid.

So many anti-feminists decry feminists who do defend the "traditional" value of the mother staying home with the baby. The problem with that logic is the lack of logic. A real feminist is a logical person, and realizes that not all traditional values are necessarily bad. Infants do need constant care, and breastfeeding is best. Logically, that would mean new mothers would do best to take time off, especially during the first few years, to care for their children. But after breastfeeding is done, the gender of the parents to stay with a child - at least until they enter school - is irrelavent. In that situation, mommy could stay with the baby until then, then the partners would switch roles, and daddy could stay home.

But that gets to the real problem with staying out of the externally defined workforce - explaining the gap on the resume. But I postulate that wo/men should include infant care on their resume. It might not bring in any money, but it is work, and it demonstrates a lot of responsibility. As someone that has hired at least 7 people in the past nine months, I have to say that I would be impressed with a resume that listed taking care of an infant as part of work experience - for any job. I will go so far as to say that the only people that would not be impressed are complete idiots.

Who is emotional now

This video clearly demonstrates that the Republican party has been playing on emotions since at least 1984. Oddly enough, this is the party aligned with the ideas of conservatives and anti-feminists - aka sexists. As I read on pandagon, sexists do not believe that women make rational decisions. Well, I knew this tenant of sexism before reading that, but the line really hit me, probably because of the story I'm about to tell.

Back during second wave feminism, consciousness raising groups came together and realized that the anecdotes of ordinary women came together to form real evidence of oppression. So in that spirit, I will offer some anecdotes of my own.

Recently, I had a guy working for me that I found interesting, and we seemed to get along. But oddly - to me - he never seemed to want to communicate with me outside of work. About a month and a half ago, I learned from his co-worker (my other employee), R, that he is a cookie-cutter sexist, except he claims to be liberal. His parents married in the late 1950's and his mother never had an outside job, save a waitressing gig at 16. She also never had a driver's license and raised two boys. One of whom is the 27 year old I employed who has never had a job that paid more than $13 an hour [in Northern California, no less], and has been working on a 2 year degree for the past 7 years. Oh, and he lives at home too. From what I've heard, I seriously I doubt that he has any appreciation for the isolation his mother has endured her whole life out here in the California suburbs.

Apparently, the type of woman he prefers is just like his mother - a woman who wants to devote her whole life to the service of men. One that will take care of him so he doesn't have to take care of himself. Last week, R told me a story he learned about one of this guy's ex's. After they broke up, she began to date his friend. He was very angry with his friend, but not with his ex. When R asked him why he wasn't rightfully mad at his ex, he explained that "women are too emotional" and he couldn't blame her. It is really too bad that nobody stood up to him and told him the truth. She probably realized that he was an asshole and a loser, then dumped his ass to date a more interesting guy - one that might have even thought of her as a person, his friend. His friend is the one that can't be blamed - if anyone can't be blamed for a situation like that. The long and short of it is that this guy doesn't think that women are full people. He even argues that lesbians aren't really attracted to women, they just couldn't get a man. IRONICALLY - R once told me, in an email conversation, about the sexist employee, that "It is difficult working with someone who is so emotional."

So now, my assignment supervising people has come to an end, and I'm free to pursue my former subordinates as friends. As a newcomer to this state, and a 20-something myself, I was eager for this moment, and before discovering the vile reality of my employee, I was hoping to really get to know him. In a good twist of events, I managed to actually befriend R. He, unlike the first guy, has an effective career plan and a healthy understanding of women. So I realized, in the end, why the other guy never wanted to talk to me outside of work - I don't have a y-chromosome, rendering me - to his tiny brain - not human. Furthermore, I have no desire to become a subservient housefrau. If he was to actually date me, he would need to grow up and begin taking care of himself. PATHETIC

So there is "women stereotyped as too emotional to make rational decisions", now my anecdote about "rational women stereotyped as heartless bitches"

Oddly enough, when I dumped my own boyfriend just last month, I realized how men developed the stereotype of women as heartless bitches. I made a very rational decision. I didn't do it as well as I could have, admittedly, but I had never done anything so mean before in my life. It was difficult for me to take the rational action I needed to take, especially in the face of my ex's reaction, but in the end, I buckled down and did it.

My mother then told me of an instance when, as a teenager, she kept dating a guy she didn't like just so she could have a date to the Christmas dance. After the dance, she told him that she never wanted to see him again. Her reaction, even 40 years later, was "someone once told me that was a very cruel thing to do." Of course it was cruel, but my mom only told me that she "didn't like" the guy. He could have been a complete asshole, or a total loser and my mom could have just been too busy to bother finding a better guy for just one dance.

But my point is that both of these guys probably think of us as bitches for our rational decisions. My own ex didn't understand what he had done wrong, when the reality was that I realized that we weren't a good match after all. I can't accuse my ex of being a traditional sexist, he wasn't. For the most part, he just didn't want to have political conversations, which included sexism and feminism, even though we completely agreed on nearly everything.

For traditional sexists, women are either blameless animals, driven by emotion, or cold, heartless bitches, completely devoid of emotion. That dichotomy is a lot easier than accepting us as adult human beings, who strive to use our rational and emotional minds to make the best decisions possible.

Then again, rejecting women's humanity is an easy way to reject one's own responsibility and remain a child. My former employee obviously had no handle over his emotions. A traditional sexist begins his life watching his father exploit his mother's labor, and is encouraged to do much the same. After all, he is the posessor of the magical penis, and women "don't have the mind" for anything else. I use quotes because my former employee actually once claimed that women "don't have the mind" for music simply because the wife of a friend of his wasn't as into tooling around in their basement with guitars as they were.

That has to be the most disgusting thing about this whole pile of bullshit. That the people refusing to be responsible think they are "better" than the women with whom they live. Not only that, but their deluded minds make them think that they are better than ALL women, even with their unfinished humanities degree and that 980 on the SAT. Heaven forbid a sexist is actually good at something, then it just gets worse.

But back to the video at the head of this post. I found it very ironic that the party of most sexists - certainly the party of the most vehement anti-feminists - has been manipulating people's emotions for more than 20 years now. Meanwhile, the party of the feminists is the party of rational explanations. Even reading feminist reactions to the gutless sexist comments on a few blogs has shown me that sexists do nothing more than spit out unfounded rhetoric* and feminists respond, attacking every paragraph with logic and evidence.

I'd participate, really, I would, but like my father, I get too passionate about things and I don't have the patience to engage in online arguments with sexists/idiots.

*On Alternet, one actually insinuated that feminists don't realize that men work because they have to - like women just sit on their asses all day too. Thank goodness I grew up in a matriarchal family where the head of the family was a woman who taught us all that hard work was essential to a good life. In the early 1990's, when my uncle was shirking his responsibility to milk the cows, she would trudge up that icy driveway to the barn - even with her osteoporosis and arthritis - to milk the cows herself. Furthermore, we live in a system that has been built around the unpaid labor of women as a given. But I digress - I don't have time to get all the sources for you, so do it yourself. Start with Alternet.org

Postulations on Workload Distribution

In order to sustain a nice home, one must do the following things

• Maintain the organization and cleanliness of possesions
  • Laundry
  • Dishes
  • Straightening home
  • Disposing of waste
  • Vehicle maintenance
  • Cleaning dirt accumulated automatically (dust, etc)
• Prepare food to eat
• Run errands to obtain items necessary for comfortable living
• Care for members of the household unable to care for themselves (children, the elderly, and/or pets if present)
• Maintain the grounds or any plants

In a household with one adult, that one adult handles the entire workload for herself. The level of work goes up with each additional member of the household, especially if the members are dependants OR able bodied adults unwilling to share in the workload. When a household consists of two able bodied adults, those two adults can, and should, negotiate an equitable workload balance.

In my mother's family, the women handled everything inside the house and the men handled everything outside. As you can see from the list generated above, this is two bullets out of ten. In practice, the women often had to pick up the slack when the men did not do their work. The men did not offer the women the same courtesy.

There is no formula for what tasks should go to whom, so instead, I offer this suggestion. Measure the workload by the amount of downtime each person gets. Downtime is the time used to pursue one's own interests outside of work for income and work to sustain a nice home. If one adult in the house has a hobby on which s/he works for one hour per day, then the other member of the household should have the same. Please note that shopping for necessities - including clothing - is not a hobby. Both partners should feel the same sense of fulfillment and acomplishment she would feel if each were independent. Both partners should also fully appreciate the other's contribution to the household and neither should fancy herself "better" than the other.

That wrestler that died

Last night, I decided to check out the LJ Pics generator and saw a few RIPs to a wrestler - Chris Ben-something or other. I figured he'd had a heart attack or something. But today, I learned that he had some kind of emotional issues, and actually killed his wife and kid and then took himself out. Why don't these men just kill themselves first? Why do they need to take their adult female partners out with them?

I'll tell you why - its because for thousands of years, society has taught men that their wives are their property, and not full, independent human beings. Yes, I think this guy was mentally disturbed, but his wife wasn't [necessarily]. But now she is dead because of HIS mental illness. He could have just killed himself, but because he assumed that his wife was a part of him, he had to kill her too. Of course, the other possibility is that he was abusive in the first place, and killed her accidentally, then saw what he did and killed himself to avoid accountability (granted, he's dead, the ultimate accountability).

On an individual level, all domestic violence is a mental health issue, but when combined with a patriarchal society that teaches men that they hold dominion over the female adults with whom they live, it becomes about sexism.

If girls are so good at math, where are the female mathematicians?

Girls are good at math until they reach Junior High. Another important thing happens in Junior High. Many young girls and boys begin dating, and boys begin to sexualize girls. But it isn't just boys as the agents of change. Girls become interested in these relationships, and begin paying more attention to the people around them than abstract theories, and math, especially after a while, is rather abstract. English, social studies, and the earth sciences are more tangible, and thus see more interest from young people more focused on life around them, which is what happens in Junior High. Men mistake the disinterest for lack of ability, and do not encourage girls the same way they encourage boys. And thus, math departments in colleges become sausage fests.

I never went through this process, and I continued to focus on my studies and excelled at math. But I found that math wasn't that important. Math wasn't going to figure out the problems of the world, math wasn't going to hold my interest. The grand purpose to the study of math did not impress me at all. Math Departments and mathematicians are just as useless as any English major, or rather, English majors are as useful as mathematicians. But that is just a tangent, a hypothesis, a thought for everyone to ponder. You can unpack that idea for yourself, or you can reject it wholesale, I don't give a crap.

No, my point is this - I was never sexualized in Junior High. I was unattractive, and I didn't dress well. I was over weight and my hair was weird. Even the gross kid avoided me. But I was smart. I consistently vyed for the top spot in the class - I never even looked past the top five for my name. I tutored the so-called "cool" kids and I never wanted to be anyone but myself. I spoke to anyone, regardless of social rank. And I wasn't sexualized. Sure, it hurt to know that I couldn't get a date. Sure, I wished like hell to be skinny and pretty, but any time I wished to be someone else, I always remembered that doing that would mean giving up my brain, and I couldn't do that for the world.

I made a promise to myself as a young girl - or rather, I just made a realization. I thought that I wasn't pretty, so I may as well be smart. That one moment, at the age of 4 or 5, seemed like an embarassment for so long. I told my first counselor during one tear filled session. Later, my mother learned that I felt that way, and it hurt her that her daughter thought she wasn't pretty from such an early age. But as an adult, I wonder why I worried so much. Pretty didn't get me my Master's degree. Pretty didn't get me $70k a year with tons of room for advancement. No, pretty didn't, but that committment to being smart did. And now I know I'm not ugly, but I am still reaping the benefits of thinking I was, because it made me smart.

From the BBC: Argentine Prostitutes Fight Back

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6234620.stm

Prostitutes in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, have launched a campaign to raise awareness about the difficult circumstances in which they work.

On the ground by the main statue they have daubed the words "No woman is born a prostitute".

It is the title of a book published by two women, Sonia Sanchez and Maria Galindo, which looks at Argentine society and the role prostitution plays within it.

"We're taking control of the streets," said Maria.

"It's a small but important step."

Sonia said: "We're saying enough is enough. Prostitution isn't a job. It's sexual exploitation and it's big business."

Other slogans daubed, then painted over, around the square read: "The pimps rule here" and "Here they exploit the bodies of girls, and the police do nothing".

My Matriarchal Roots

A grew up in a matriarchal family. I really did. This is not because the men were not there - my grandparents and parents stayed together, and in what appeared to be good relationships between equals. This wasn't even because the women were the primary breadwinners of the families. Rather, my family understood that women were people, and expected women to be just as successful as men.

I grew up in rural America; I grew up the older of two daughters. My mom is an educated professional, and my dad is a farmer. I was born on my dad's 36th birthday, in the Wisconsin summer, not in the nearest hospital to where my parents lives, but the one with a chair to allow my mom to sit up as she gave birth.

I grew up being expected to work when I got old enough. I grew up weeding gardens, picking up apples, picking raspberries, shoveling snow and later loading hay, feeding cows, and lifting heavy things. My parents expected it of me, and I saw it in the people around me. My grandmother worked hard, and loved it. And nobody got out of tasks for their gender.

On my mother's side, my grandmother was a typical housewife and my grandfather worked in construction. But my grandmother emigrated from Germany as a single woman. When her parents expressed concern, before she left, that she would go to America and become a prostitute, my grandmother threw it right back in their faces. She asked them if they thought that they had raised her so badly, that she would, in the late 1920's, think that prostitution was a viable life path. They didn't, and she didn't, so she took her brother's advice and moved to America.

There, she met my grandfather, but due to the depression, they did not marry - they possibly didn't even have sex - until about 1940. They then had four kids. They assumed they were done at three kids, but that fourth pregnancy, my mother, caught them by surprise. Of course, there are no mistakes in a Catholic family. Because they already had two girls, my mom was supposed to be a boy, oops. All of the kids went on to get education. The first became a nurse and married at 25. My uncle went to Vietnam and then used the GI Bill to go to college. He married in 1986 or 87, as I remember. My mom's other older sister went through a great degree of soul searching, even a stint in the convent, before really moving out on her own, but not without a great deal of fuss from her parents. Now she is a cultured and educated professional. Finally, my mother, the baby of the family, used the roads paved by her sisters to not get married right away, and lived during her 20's. She went to college and got a BS, then decided to go to graduate school and get a Master's degree.

Without being a typical consciousness-raising, bra-burning feminist, my mother was strikingly independent. One of her favorite stories is of the year she saved her money to buy a summer pass to the local pool, only to learn from her mother that she needed to stay home to cook lunch for her father. After putting up with that for a while, she finally put her foot down and told her dad to make his own damn lunch and went off to enjoy the fruits of her own labor and planning. Another story regarding my grandpa was the time his wife left him instructions to cook dinner, but she neglected to tell him to either turn on the oven or put the bird (chicken?) in the oven, so he didn't. What may have been a protest on his part about having to actually do something for the family turned into a funny story about my grandpa's ignorance.

But I did not grow up with those relatives - oh, I visited them a lot, but my mom had moved 12 hours away, to rural Wisconsin, and met my father, who was living with his family after his stint in the Navy and 5 semesters at UW Madison. I was closer to that family, and that was the true matriarchal family. And the matriarch of the family was my dad's mother. She was the youngest of 10 kids, and she was a daddy's girl. Her life was about work, everyone appreciated it, and she gave the orders.

She had a degree from a teaching college, but her career was as a farmer and a mother. She taught all 12 of her kids how to read and write before they went to school. She sold raspberries primarily, but also sweet corn, tomatoes, currants, strawberries, and apples every summer. She and her husband raised cows, pigs, and chickens, managed the biggest farm in the township, and ran a successful small business. She made cider, soap, bread, quilts, doughnuts, and she did her laundry with an old ringer washer. I don't know if there was anything my grandma couldn't do.

And she loved us. She loved everyone, and she gave. She did what needed to be done, and she accepted everyone. She was scary as hell, and she wasn't afraid of anything. She raised a generation of strong people, and even with their faults, they managed to raise my generation, and we're doing well. We're strong men and women, and we'll always remember where we came from. We carry the spirit of my grandmother - a woman who wasn't a feminist only because she didn't really need the movement to tell her that women could, should, and would work like men. I said it twice before she died, but I can never say it enough - Thank you Grandma, for everything.

Nine of my grandmother's 12 kids were girls, but only four of those girls went on to have kids of their own. Two of the remaining five never married - not to mention my mom's sister that never married. But unlike the patriarchal fear mongering, these three women are all still wildly successful. All three are home owners, and one owns about three houses - at least three - including the house where she grew up, the farm.

Most of my aunts and female cousins are successful professionals, including two nurses, three teachers, a high ranking army officer, and a firefighter. Many are married, and along with the three mentioned before, I have a couple of older female cousins that aren't married either. I grew up watching these women, and importantly, so did my male relatives. The men of the family behaved as if women were people - they knew their place beside women, not in front of or behind.

My matriarchal family did not berate women and girls for being women and girls - nor did it berate men and boys for being men and boys. The family did not expect anyone to not work because of her gender. If anything, my matriarchal family taught everyone that women and men could, would, and should work, and hard too. So I grew up knowing that I could do for myself. My dad doesn't think we should get married until we are thirty, and he is highly critical of the men my sister and my cousins do bring home. One cousin recently had a baby, and my dad isn't sure if her husband is up to the responsibility of being a father. I'm so glad that my family raised everyone to be an adult - a fully functioning, independent adult, male and female.