I Have Boobs, Deal With It.

Sing it, Meghan McCain!

So by now most of us are already over the non-controversy regarding Meghan McCain and a certain chesty twit pic. However it is her response today in the Daily Beast that really intrigues me as it seems to encapsulate the struggles that all well-endowed women face. So McCain posted a picture of herself on twitter sporting vaguely porny looking cleavage. She claimed it was in preparation for her big night in that involved a good book and some takeout. Now I don’t know a 20 something female who would post and unflattering or dowdy picture of herself on the internet and as Broadsheet pointed out, “What do they think young Republican women wear to bed? Lanz of Salzburg?” OK, so posting a megaboobs shot of yourself online might be vaguely tacky (however again, I challenge you to find me a 20-something female who doesn’t have at least one vaguely saucy pic of herself on Facebook) but to be called a slut over it? What century are we in?

 McCain says she has, “struggled to accept the fact that the way I look in a tank top comes off more “sexual” than a flat-chested woman.”  I can totally relate here, there are some styles smaller chested women can wear without stares that I just can’t pass off without looking like Marilyn Monroe. Although it can be a nuisance at time, I’ve always ultimately thought of it as a nice problem to have. I do my best to dress appropriately for the situation I’m in, try to keep it all “tucked in” and not flash people in public, but in the end… I have boobs. They’re big, sometimes people are going to notice them. I’m not going to go around wearing turtlenecks every day or uncomfortable chest minimizing bras just because some people can’t handle the sight of a fully grown woman. 

What’s up with people behaving as if having large or noticeable breasts is a sign of promiscuity? Last time I checked, there was no correlation between cup size and number of sexual partners and if there is… boy did I miss out when I was single. It doesn’t work the opposite way, people don’t look at women with small breasts and think, “Oh, she must be such a prude.”  Why do we look at a woman who has larger breasts, breasts that are often more visible than the breasts of a smaller woman and automatically think that she’s a slut just because her body’s doing what it does naturally? 

Although breasts are highly fetishized in our culture, the fact is that they serve a very practical evolutionary purpose; feeding human babies. Unless you have a lactation fetish, that’s just about the least sexual thing I can think of. Having large breasts is not an invitation for people to stare, comment or think ill of my character any more than having a large nose or ears would be. Living with the body I was born with and feeling comfortable in it, comfortable enough to not want to hide behind boxy clothing doesn’t make me, or Meghan McCain a slut. And while we’re at it, I’m so done with slut shaming. What’s a slut? Anyone who’s had more sex than you have? I’m tired of the word slut. I’m a slut, you’re a slut, we’re all sluts. Why in this day and age do we really think it is our business to comment on who or how many people anybody else is sleeping with anyway? 

Meghan McCain says she’s proud  of her curves, but like so much of her other writing, I feel that she gets close to making a great point and then backs off it in the end. She says she’s not perfect and that she’s still “making mistakes” and that she says she’s, “learned a valuable lesson about the internet and boundaries” and hopes, “other girls can learn from this episode.” Learning to draw the line between the internet and real life is a valuable lesson for sure, but in the end is this a lesson about being who you are, critics be damned, or covering up and shutting up when a few assholes pull out the S word? After all, McCain did threaten to take down her twitter page after the whole incident, something she has never done when the media has repeatedly called her fat. Why is it that a tiny four lettered word like slut has the power to make a confident woman like McCain consider silencing herself? Why is it that we use the word slut so often to defame, discredit and shut down young women? 

It’s something to think about. In the mean time, don’t you even think about calling me and my C cups slutty. Unless, of course, you mean it in a good way.

The Small Things

Today I had my first visit to the ophthalmologist. The good news is that I have, “Beautiful, healthy, nearly perfect eyes.” The bad news is that I have a very slight astigmatism in my right eye. I’ve been prescribed glasses for night driving and for making it more comfortable to read small print, but on the whole I’m fine.

Except for a few glaring instances, beautiful, healthy and nearly perfect have been the story of my health in my adult life. Over and over again doctors have ecstatically proclaimed my perfect heart beat, good blood pressure and beautiful teeth and commended me for taking care of myself. Until recently my good health was something I was happy to smugly take credit for. And why not? I eat right, I exercise, I don’t smoke. Surely, this is the reason why I’m for the most part in exemplary health. Except I’d forgotten one key thing, something that has very little to do with me. I’ve had excellent doctors all my life. Sure, it’s on my head to make my doctor’s appointments, fill my prescriptions and follow their advice when I’m sick. But the reason I’m able to do that so easily also has very little to do with me. You see, I’ve also never gone without health insurance for more than a few weeks (when I was between jobs) in my entire life. This pretty much makes me an anomaly in modern America.

I’ve never had to desperately scour the internet for a homemade cure to my health problems because I couldn’t afford to see a doctor. I’ve never had to half the dosage of my meds or go off them completely because they were too expensive. I’ve never had to choose between having dental work or paying my rent. I’ve never had to compromise my reproductive health by skipping pelvic exams or going off the pill. I’ve never had to languish in depression or chronic pain because the crappy insurance I feel lucky to have won’t recognize my problems as real. I’ve also never had to undergo the humiliation of being harassed by medical bill collectors when I couldn’t afford to pay for a procedure that I urgently needed.

I’m not any smarter or more deserving of medical care than the people who do have to make those hard decisions every day. It’s easy to stay healthy when you can actually see a doctor. It’s also easy to stay healthy when you happen to be in one of the few professions that isn’t expecting more and more of their employees (working longer hours) while taking more and more away from them (cutting pay and benefits). Most of my friends are college educated people in professional fields and most of them have at some point or another had difficulty obtaining the medical care they needed. Not being college educated shouldn’t preclude one from having affordable health care, we all should have affordable health care. It’s just that we were taught all our lives that higher education would afford us some security to save money, see a doctor when we’re sick, have a roof over our heads. That’s a big part of why we bothered to go to college, it sure as hell wasn’t the dining hall food. Now it feels like they’ve re-written the rules and all of the sudden what used to mean security just isn’t enough anymore.

We like to think that there’s something wrong with people who don’t have insurance. They’re lazy, they’re too stupid to get a good job, they made some bad life decisions and dammit, we shouldn’t have to pay for other people’s fuck ups! What we can’t admit is that they’re just like us. If I lost my job tomorrow there would be no doctor’s checkups every time I felt something wasn’t quite right. I’d probably be pretty stressed out so there goes my good blood pressure. I wouldn’t be able to afford my gym membership anymore so there goes my “beautiful heart beat”. I’d be priced out of the organic produce that gets delivered to my door on a bi-weekly basis, in fact if I was living near the poverty level I’d be priced out of most produce (Hello Dollar Menu!) so my eating habits would go right down the toilet. I could probably manage to squeak by… unless I got sick. If I got sick I’d be screwed. That, my friends, is the scenario we all can’t bear to think about. It’s easier to just think that the poor get what they deserve and those of us who are clinging to middle class by our fingernails are somehow the Elected, as if we’re living in Puritan Fucking New England.

What if I did lose my job tomorrow? What if my luck ran out and I got sick tomorrow and my insurance didn’t want to pay for my treatment? Wouldn’t I deserve a safety net? Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t anyone?

To say I’m disappointed that there isn’t going to be any real health care reform doesn’t go far enough. I’m thoroughly dismayed by the fact that the opportunity to actually do something good for the people of this country has been turned into a political mud-wrestling match where each side hopes a definitive victory will gain them absolute power. The lives we lead every day have been completely forgotten in the clamor.

The big lie politicians tell you, the lie that gets exaggerated and amplified by the media and splayed everywhere to terrify us into our opposing camps is that there is an absolute Good and Evil in these situations and that everyone who doesn’t rally around your particular pole is moronic, evil and dangerous. The left and the right both do this, I’m not saying any one is better than the other. They can’t let us believe for one moment that we aren’t any different from our neighbors and that the survival of all that is good and just in the world doesn’t depend on your particular side having a definitive victory. If they allowed us to feel that even people who don’t share our views are basically good and we all want the same basic things out of life (we all want to be happy, healthy and safe, we all want to leave behind a better world for our children) then they would lose all their power. The power to make decisions for us that have nothing to do with making our lives better and everything to do with increasing their own power.

I’m disappointed but I’m not surprised. For now I’ll go on being thankful for the small things, knowing that for many people being able to see a doctor if their eyes hurt (or even if something worse happens) is a luxury, not a right. I’m no different from any of them. I just happen to be on the winning side of the system. For now.

Health Care Reform, Fever Style

You knew I was gonna go here eventually.

So a couple of Wednesdays ago I attended the big town meeting in the beautiful “All American City of Somerville MA” on the arm of the gallant GeekUSA. What can I say, the couple that is politically active together, erm… blogs together?

Anyway, we stood outside Somerville High School for over an hour waiting to get in. At least four thousand people from Somerville and the surrounding towns waited with us, many holding signs and engaging in political discussion. On the news later that night the town meeting was described as “mostly peaceful” without all the derisive shouting matches that have characterized other town meetings across the nation. This makes me proud even though I am ashamed to say that I was one of the people who contributed to the non-peaceful segment of the evening when I lost my shit on this snot nosed LaRouche supporter holding a giant sign picturing Obama with a Hitler mustache when he tried to engage these nice Cambridge ladies behind us about “Obama’s Nazi healthcare plan.” To the credit of the Cambridge ladies, they listened politely to him until I butted in. I might have told him that he, “should be ashamed of himself comparing healthcare to the Holocaust”, that he needed to “pick up a history book before he talked again” and that he was, “willfully ignorant”. Although I’m sure it didn’t sound half as rational and intelligent as that because I was sputtering with anger.

What can I say, I fucking hate those LaRouche guys. Yes, I’m familiar with Godwin’s Law, I still fucking hate them. The reason why those people make me so angry is not just because they carelessly misrepresent and distort history to their own ends in a way that is incredibly disrespectful to those who actually lived through the Nazi era, it is that I feel like they have to know on some level that what they are peddling is complete garbage, yet they continue to proselytize about it anyway. I just don’t understand why you would do that unless you were a crappy human being.

Moving on… healthcare. Unlike some people, I don’t like to blindly follow my leaders, even if they are leaders I helped elect. I went in there open minded but attempting to have a critical eye. I honestly wanted to cut through the bizarre three ring circus that has been the health care debate and find out what’s actually on the table here, so I could like, form an opinion on my own. There has been so much hoopla over death panels and socialism that it is hard to cut through the noise to the real problem… there are 46 million un-insured Americans out there and those of us lucky enough to have health insurance in the first place are watching helplessly as our premiums go up and our benefits shrink.

I sat in the hot, cramped Somerville High School gym for hours listening to John Kerry answer for the health care reform proposal. It was John Kerry more passionate, personal and down to earth than I have ever seen him . Here’s what I learned… and yes, Joe Wilson, I believe it.

• The new reforms will end discrimination against people who have pre-existing conditions. In a country where somebody who has had pediatric cancer can have trouble getting insurance for the rest of their lives you’d think that this would be a good thing.

• For the last time, nobody is trying to take away your health insurance, or take away your doctor, or force you into a nationalized health plan. There has never, ever been an option on the table that would end private insurance, I don’t know why the hell people are so confused about that. The comparisons between the proposed public option and nationalized health care in countries like Britain and Canada are erroneous because they are not the same thing. The public option is just that, an option. If you are unemployed, or your employer won’t insure you or you just don’t like the insurance your employer provides for you, it’s there. If you like what you have, you can keep it. Why do I believe John Kerry when he said that? Because for one thing, he said it himself, it would be too damn expensive to nationalize U.S health care.

• Don’t want to pay for everybody else? Tough shit, we’re already paying for the uninsured anyway. Apparently my insurance premiums (and yours too, if you are lucky enough to have it) have hidden costs in them meant to cover the overhead when uninsured people end up in the emergency room (that’s what happens when you can’t afford a regular doctor). If uninsured people had insurance, it would bring down the cost for all of us. Oh, and BTW, the plan is not going to cover illegal aliens. I believe that too. Think about it, trying to sneak a provision like that into a bill would be career suicide for the Dems.

• But it will destroy the free market economy! Um, isn’t competition a good thing? You’d think people who are so into the free market economy wouldn’t be so terrified for those poor little insurance companies having to um, beef up their product or actually give a shit about their customers in order to compete. If a public option forces private carriers to provide a better rate or better services to their clients it is going to directly benefit us, the consumers.

• But it’s socialism! Um, we already have medicare and medicade. Is that socialism? While we’re at it, the health insurance that government employees enjoy is (gasp!) government run! Maybe all the senators who plan to vote against health care reform should put their money where there mouth is and give up their socialist government run health care and jump into the private insurance carrier pool with the rest of us shmucks. No takers? Didn’t think so.

• But I don’t want the government in control of my health care! First of all, see bullet point #1. The government won’t be in control of your health care if you don’t want it to be. Second of all, somebody else is already in control of your health care, a large corporation that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you and will probably slash your coverage just when you need it most. I look at it this way, at least the government has to answer to the people, big insurance companies don’t have to answer to anybody. If I don’t like the job my elected officials are doing with health care reform I can vote them out in the next election cycle. If I don’t like what my insurance company is doing with my health care (hey there Blue Cross Blue Shield, raising my co-pays and taking away my physical therapy just when I needed it the most, I’m talking about you! BTW, it’s been fun trying to recuperate from a foot injury on my own!) if it’s all my employer provides, I’m stuck with it.

• Come on people, get real. We’re paying over 2.5 trillion dollars to fight foreign wars but we can’t insure our own citizens? Dick Cheney had ties to Halliburton, one of the biggest contractors in the reconstruction of Iraq and nobody bitched and moaned about how it was fascist (OK, well I did), nobody saber rattled about how it was undermining the American way. While we’re at it, I find it rich that so many people are trying to say that Obama’s health plan is “unconstitutional” when the last administration fabricated a war, justified torture, and reinterpreted laws on illegal search and seizure to justify their own ends. Wasn’t that unconstitutional? Or is it only OK to take a piss on the Bill of Rights when you are doing it to justify blowing up foreigners? Is this who we are, a nation of people who would prefer their tax dollars fund destruction overseas instead of making sure that the most vulnerable of our own are taken care of?

The more I see these fucking teabag Circuses on TV every night and see impeach Obama stickers popping up, the easier it is to get cynical about the whole thing. In the end though, I gotta be hopeful. In the end I still live in a country where one of the most powerful people in the land has to come to my stuffy, un-airconditioned high school gym and answer my questions for three hours. Deep down in my heart, I know that just like other unpopular things that have been fought for in the past; civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, that eventually what is just and compassionate will win out. I just hope I live long enough to see it…

Wake Up America

The following is my final paper for my graduate class in Urban Education. The assignment was to define problems and solutions in urban education. I decided to write it blog style, cuz that’s how I roll.

Our schools are racist. America’s educational system is not a meritocracy where success is open to all who work hard, it is a factory attempting to crank out one size fits all education that ignores the individual talents, needs and backgrounds of our students. Our students are not mechanical cogs, they’re people and when we deem them deficient, or “failing” we’re leaving them behind, doing the exact opposite of what all this educational reform is supposed to do. Think I’m just some ranty liberal bringing in the Bush administration on trumped up charges? Think again. Test fraud, creative number crunching and ignoring the children who need help the most (as well as allowing our most talented children to languish) in favor of pushing the “bubble” kids to pass the test is well documented. No Child Left Behind is not working. Even Fox News agrees with me on this one.

96% of our nation’s teachers are white. The overwhelming majority of us went into our profession with the desire to do good and educate children from all walks of life. We’re not white supremacists who enter the classroom with a desire to subjugate those who are different from us in fact, many of us take offense to the idea that our schools and our teaching styles are based on racist assumptions. 

Whether or not our schools and teachers purposely support educational policies that are harmful to students of color, we are a part of a complex, invisible web that tells us “white is right” and that an individual’s ticket to success in life is dependent on her ability to acclimate to the white middle class world. The widespread misconception that white middle class culture is the ideal to aspire to is not isolated to the school system. This invisible web is all around us, in our school systems, our political systems, our job market, entertainment, the arts, everywhere imaginable. Yet for those of us who grew up white and middle class, it goes largely unnoticed and undiscussed. It is accepted that the end goal of all who are not like us is to be more like us. We may even feel passionately that it is our job as educators to help our students to gain access to this world so that they may live in prosperity. There are so few examples of successful people who have retained their  non-white cultural identity that we assume that a non-white cultural identity is a hinderance to success that must be shed. Very few people living in this invisible web of privilege see the fact that it isn’t the individual that’s the problem, it’s the system. Even if educators can see the problem, we feel very little power to be a part of the solution. How are we supposed to be effective teachers of minority children in a political climate where we can be sent to jail for speaking a child’s native language to them?

The biggest hinderance to today’s educational system is that educators are not in control of our educational system, politicians are and they rely on knee jerk reactionist rhetoric to rally their bases and get re-elected. Think racism isn’t an implicit norm in our culture? Check out the new these days. Consider the following clip of Pat Buchanan on Rachel Maddow blasting Sotomayor for “learning English by reading children’s books” as if it disqualifies her from her supreme court nomination and talking about how America was “built by white men” so therefor white men deserve a larger slice of the power and privilege pie (check out Maddow’s eloquent response to his douchebaggery here):

Um, Pat? Did you forget the millions of African slaves who helped build this country? (including the white house!) Or how about the Chinese who aided western expansion by building America’s railroad? Or the leigons of Eastern European immigrants who became the workforce of the Industrial Revolution? What about the farm workers from South and Central America who keep our plates full today? Their work is feeding the people of our country, keeping our factories humming, building our roads and our bridges. I would say that counts as “building America”. According to Pat, they don’t deserve a slice of the pie. Because people of color and those who speak English as a second language aren’t “real” Americans, “real” Americans are white guys in suits with corporate jobs. Yeah, just like Bernie Madoff or those guys from Enron. They were doing a service for the American people, right? In a world where these types of racist assumptions often go unquestioned how can we build an equitable education system? 

What’s the solution to this problem? Number one: Put educators in charge of education, not politicians. This is not an easy task. For the best of our nation’s teachers, the classroom is where the heart is. They’d rather be in the trenches with their students every day despite this broken system, than battling it out on Beacon Hill.  Well my fellow teachers, we’re just going to have to go outside our comfort zone. It is unacceptable that a businessman like Ron K. Unz, could help get a law against bilingual education passed that was not based on any research about how the human brain aquires language and develops fluency. This law has seriously impacted the job that we teachers do in the classroom every day and we were powerless to stop it or give input on how we believe bilingual students should be taught in the first place. This has to change. 

 More teachers need to run for school committees, city council and local and state government. We need to be there when the decisions are being made. As teachers, we need to see ourselves as vital in the shaping of policy, not simply as civil servants or people who are not in the place to decide what’s best for “other people’s children”. We need to view our profession with pride. Teaching is an art and a science and we must approach it at as such. Our level of training and education qualifies us to call the shots, not special interest groups. Until we feel entitled to shape policy and take steps to do so very little will change. 

I would like to see a grassroots organization that uses technology to help activate a base of teachers, students and concerned citizens to take action on issues that are relevant to our schools. Sort of like a moveon.org for education reform. With this as a tool it would be simple to attend meetings of like minded people, circulate petitions, start letter writing campaigns to our elected officials and attend rallies. Teachers and their allies need to be empowered to take action together on matters of importance and we need a structure to do this in. Web based technology moves fast, is cheap to set up and maintain, and makes it easy to get a message out to a large group of people instantaneously. In addition, teachers need to network with other teachers of like mind. We need to set up an online resource that helps us disseminate best practices in urban education, share lesson plans, and visit each other’s classrooms. We should take inspiration in this from the Obama campaign, the first political campaign that motivated it’s base primarily through online tools such as facebook, twitter, text messaging, email, etc. 

Additionally, in order to make school systems more equitable for children of color, we need to change the face of teaching. It is unacceptable that 96% of our nation’s teachers are white. Universities with established education programs need to do a better job of recruiting and retaining teachers of color. If a traditional four years of college plus a master’s degree and an unpaid student teaching internship is not financially realistic for a future teacher of color we need to develop alternative paths to degrees and certification that do not bar people who need to work for a living from higher education. 

 Teacher certification programs should be set up in colleges that are close to high need areas so that aspiring teachers do not have to relocate from their communities to get certified. Teacher colleges should develop courses, concentrations and certification tracks that specifically address the unique challenges of urban education. Every student majoring in education should have to take at least an introductory course in multicultural education. 

In my Master’s of Education program the needs of urban students and the realities of working in urban classrooms that are often overcrowded, saturated with high need students and bereft of what most teachers consider basic resources (even things like books, paper and pencils), was not discussed. We were taught to teach under the ideal circumstances, not real circumstances. As a result, my first year teaching ended up to be a crash course in urban education. Receiving little support or training, I often felt frustrated and discouraged. Half of urban teachers quit within 5 years. After my own experiences I believe this is because we do not feel empowered to be the best teachers we can be in this crumbling and defunct system that turns schools into holding pens for society’s “undesireables”. When there is no heat in your classroom, the principal keeps ignoring your counseling referral for the troubled student who spends class repeatedly running full force into a brick wall and you are trying to protect that child from bodily harm while simultaneously teaching 22 other students with no books, no papers and no pencils (true story!), the outlook can seem pretty bleak. How are we supposed to attract the most talented, driven and intelligent people to teaching when we throw them into these situations to sink or swim on their own? 

 In The Dreamkeepers, Sucessful Teachers of African American Children, Gloria Ladson-Billings asserts the need for special support for urban educators in the form of team teaching, longer internships and mentoring connections that actually help new teachers develop effective skills. Knowing that I wasn’t alone would have done measures to make my first year teaching more productive. Instead, I decided that I couldn’t in good conscience be part of a system that was allowing students in need to languish, so I left hoping to find another school system that was actively helping their neediest students, not just detaining them. In my leap between my first job in the poorest city in our state and my next job in a large, well funded urban district I saw a big difference. The kids weren’t all that different, I was still working with a large proportion of immigrants and students of color but just about everything else was different. What did my new school district have have that my first school district lacked? In a word, money. This brings me to my final point of education reform.

Money. It’s an ugly word. People don’t go into teaching for the money. Maybe that’s part of the problem, as teachers we are uncomfortable in the money-getting world so we don’t know how to  best advocate for more resources being allocated to us. There is that tired old adage that it will be a great day when schools have all the money they need and the government needs to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. Call me airy-fairy, but I agree. The city I teach in was bashed by my old pal Mitt Romney (affectionately known as Mitler) for spending more per student than any other district but still having low to middling MCAS scores. Despite this fact, we’ve still been lauded as having one of the best public high schools in the state. Part of this is because we spend money on our schools and our students. Teachers here have more money available for professional development than any other school district I’ve ever heard of. Our classroom sizes are small and I know if I had a student as emotionally disturbed as my wall-thrower at my first job he would be able to access services immediately. Because of the resources and environment here, I am more than just a warden keeping my students in line, I am an educator. People can talk about test scores all they want but educators know that what makes a real difference is smaller classroom sizes so that teachers can get to know their students individually and more access to better teacher training and support, not just a “teacher proof” curriculum. If we want to hire more (and better trained) teachers to keep our classroom size down and move to a “small school” model where every student matters, we need money, plain and simple. 

If we had more teachers out there on the front lines of the decision making, we could get our voices heard and have money and resources allocated to educational approaches that have the best interests of our students at heart. If we had a grassroots network of activists, teachers, parents and concerned citizens we could vote with our feet on political issues and make our voices heard. We don’t have to accept this broken system as reality. We can mobilize. The changes can be small ones we make in our classrooms, and large ones that are made on a national agenda. The push has got to come from both directions, in the little things we do each day, and the big things such as how we vote and where we spend our money. The road is long and frustrating but we can do it. In the immortal words of Clash frontman Joe Strummer calling youth to rally against the status quo in the song, “Working for the Clampdown“, “Anger can be power d’y know that you can use it?” 

 Let’s mobilize. 

 

For Further Reading:

The Real Ebonics Debate, Power, Language and the Education of African American Children 

The Dreamkeepers, Successful Teaching of African American Children

English Only Doesn’t Work

 What Is Bilingual Education?

 

 

Is Love Dead?

There is a fascinating conversation going on right now over at NPR’s On Point about the current status of Romantic love. Writer, essayist and critic Cristina Nehring claims that for modern people passionate love has become not an ideal to celebrate and strive for but a source of embarrassment and vulnerability.

Who’s to blame? Well there are the usual culprits, i.e feminism and the “hook up culture” (yawn) but thankfully Nehring goes beyond the tired scapegoating of feminism for the unravelling of  everything good and decent in our society and probes at the truth beyond the hype. 

Modern people live such chaotic and hectic lives that finding true love seems sort of frivolous in the face of trying to gain those status symbols that show we’re living worthy lives. Whether it’s a doctorate, a six figure job, or a chance at fame, taking time to cultivate romance seems like an unnecessary detour on our paths to achievement. After all, love may be fleeting, but that Fullbright Scholarship is forever. Heck, now they even write books about the dangers of marrying for love! 

 I see a lot of myself in Nehring’s description of the intellectual woman who feels the need to apologize for  or hide her passionate feelings as if they are somehow a handicap, something that makes her less strong, intelligent and credible. According to Nehring I’m in good company. In her research she found that great women from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Margaret Fuller and Simone de Beauvoir all had precarious relationships between their intellectual and love lives. 

As a young woman I was repeatedly warned away from getting over involved in my relationships or letting my love life distract from what my mom used to call, “the big picture.” At some times in my life I really did allow my goals to fall by the wayside in pursuit of several (doomed) relationships. After that I vowed to put my own goals first and for the most part I have. But how do you balance the single minded pursuit of your own happiness and still allow yourself to fall in love? 

For ambitious women the lurking fear that romantic love will turn us into doting and subservient partners focused on catering to our significant other’s needs instead of our own is a very real one. We fear that the lure of partnership and family will steer us away from our goals, so the solution is to avoid romantic attachments altogether. The result of this very real and justified fear says Nehring, is a culture where we’ve compartmentalized love and sex. We have no problem talking about our one night stands, our favorite methods of birth control, even fertility. But love? Forget it. 

She’s right. I feel totally free to dish about my favorite brand of lube over cocktails in mixed company, but talk about how much I love my boyfriend? I wouldn’t dare. I know it would clear the room in under five seconds. And I’d feel like a total goober for even mentioning it in the first place.

So does this sound familiar to you, gentile readers? Would you rather give yourself a fleet enema than talk about your crush in public? Is romance dead? Ridiculous? Something created to sell Hallmark cards? Did it ever exist in the first place?

What’s your take on modern love?

Etsy: Tool of the Patriarchy

So I think I might be just a teensy, tiny little bit obsessed with Etsy, the magical place on the interweb that brings you spiffy handmade goods from independent sellers all over the globe. I know I’m I’m not alone in my DIY shopping zeal. The Etsy obsessed may number in the thousands these days. There’s even a guy who keeps a blog about about being an Etsy widower, the phenomenon that occurs when your significant other becomes so Etsy-absorbed that she forsakes all other things in the name of craftiness. Dude, you and my boyfriend should totally start a support group, I’ll give you his phone number.

Some people are so into Etsy that there’s a whole website about planning your wedding with it. I used to make fun of people who had their nuptials devised before there was even a proposal but  I’ve gone through the website and bookmarked every invitation, feathered bridal fascinator and crocheted wedding bouquet I liked. I said it was for a friend who’s getting married this summer, but no, it was all for me and my future awesome totally DIY wedding that is taking place, oh I don’t know, somewhere between now and 2085. I’ll send you a handmade letterpress save the date printed on recycled bamboo with soy based inks when I get around to it.

Shopping on Etsy just makes me feel warm and fuzzy. I like that I’m keeping my dollars out of the big box stores and supporting independent businesses. They even have a search feature that allows you to buy locally. I like that many Etsy sellers use recycled, upcycled or eco-friendly materials and I like that when I buy something from Etsy I’m buying something unique that everyone else in the world won’t have. So what ruined my feminist wet dream? Listen in, oh daughters of the revolution! According to Double X,  Etsy is peddling a false feminist fantasy.

That’s right, every time you buy an all natural yoga mat carrier, handmade set of stripper pasties or pouch for your menstrual cup you are contributing to the system of oppression that is keeping women down. Why? Because Etsy was founded by men. And we all know know everything that men are in charge of is inherently corrupt and evil. And also, did you know that it’s difficult to get rich running a business on Etsy?  Yeah, and making it on your own as an artisan, renting gallery space and touring to craft shows all over hell and creation is a really lucrative business model, much more lucrative (and environmentally sustainable) than working from home. And did you know, the majority of people who sell goods on Etsy are female!? Obviously, this makes Etsy bad because if it was really so great, men would be selling their stuff on Etsy too, right?

The writer continues on to bash the typical Etsy family, who reportedly has an average household income of $62K, well above the national average,  This, she theorizes is because the male partner is out working his high paying corporate job enabling the woman to stay home, chained to her knitting needles creating low cost goods all while being duped into believing that she’s living a feminist fantasy.

That last bit is where I really start to to take umbrage. I am so sick and tired of being told that I’ve allowed my pretty little head to be tricked into thinking that oppressive things are feminist. Fuck you, I’ll decide for myself  what’s oppressive with my own well educated, independent, feminist little head thank you very much. Wake up Double X, there is a whole network of independent businesswomen on the web. Most of the savvier ones use Etsy as a vehicle to sell their crafts in tandem with several other on-line venues. Etsy is just one of many ways for a small business owner to get her product out there, not some kind of monopolizing sweat shop. I fail to see how providing a low cost platform to start a business and get your product some exposure is a model of oppression. If anything it is exactly the opposite, allowing more women independence by providing a way to build a business with very little start-up money or experience. 

Second of all, this post touches on my absolute least favorite subtext in some feminist writings, the idea that we’ll never be truly equal until women live their lives exactly like men do. I’ve never understood why being more like a man was supposed to make me a better woman or a better feminist. 

The problem with the “old” feminism is that it leaves out 50% of the population. As long as we are solely focused on women’s rights in the narrowest sense of the word (gaining the right to take on stereotypically male occupations) we will fail to create a world where all people can live free from the rigidity of traditional gender roles. We need to move the debate beyond the same old arguments. If we focus on creating a world that is more equitable to all people, where the concerns of those from all walks of life are being addressed as equally important, we will see a world where gender disparities are lessened.

Do I want to live in a culture where having a child won’t be career suicide for a woman? Absolutely. But I don’t think we’re ever going to achieve that until men can take paternity leave without facing criticism for it. I’m sure that some of those so called “Etsy Husbands” would love to focus on being partners, parents and artisans but we haven’t yet created a system where that is a very acceptable choice for men. Of course, this whole argument can be viewed as cyclical too. We may hope for the time when more men can be stay at home dads, but until women are given equal pay, it will be difficult to make that dream come to fruition. That 100% pay gap between working moms and child-free women isn’t exactly helping things either. 

Even though the women of Etsy may not be getting rich, I still believe their business model can be in line with feminist ideals. To me it doesn’t have to be all about who’s making the most money. It is also about spending my money in places I feel good about. Etsy gives ethical consumers alternatives. Now I have the ability to buy things that fall in lines with my social and environmental ethics, support small businesses and keep my money out of the pockets of big companies that hurt women. Did you ever think of that, Double X?

I believe that DIY mentality of companies like Etsy can only have a positive impact on society. I don’t need no stinkin’ hammer to smash the patriarchy. We crafty women will take it down one knitting needle at a time.

Weekend Update: Rage Edition

Most of the time I don’t mind the political wing nuts who protest in Harvard Square. Usually they are pretty harmless. Free Tibet? Why not? Stop global warming, don’t mind if I do! Sure, they can be annoying and self-righteous at times, but they’re political groups, that’s what they’re supposed to be like. I never found any of them offensive, until today. 

This afternoon as I was walking through the square I passed a group of protesters carrying a giant sign that said: STOP OBAMA’S NAZI HEALTHCARE PLAN.

Because apparently trying to make sure every American has health insurance is somehow comparable to the systematic slaughter of six million Jews.

Usually I like to live and let live, but in this case I stopped and gave the people holding that asinine sign the finger, which was a lot nicer than what would have happened if I’d allowed myself to open my mouth. In that case I would have let loose a torrent of obscenity, nay, I might have exploded in rage. They’d be scraping bits of me off Bartley’s Burger Cottage for weeks. I think in that situation, giving the finger was the politest thing I could have possibly done. Those groups may have freedom of speech but so do I and I have a right to let them know that I might tolerate  their overblown, ignorant, offensive and extremist opinions in my neighborhood, but I sure as hell don’t agree with it. Not just because I’m one of those commie liberal types that thinks every person deserves access to affordable health care, but also because I find the appropriation of the Holocaust to support a political cause to be absolutely unconscionable. 

I am sick to fucking death of people comparing everything they don’t like to Nazism. What’s next, the kid at Berryline doesn’t put enough granola on your fro-yo and he’s Hitler? Come on people. And while we’re at it, I’d like to give everyone who compares Obama’s political agenda to communism, fascism and socialism (booga booga!) a fucking dictionary so they can look up the meaning of the words because they have absolutely no clue in hell what they mean. If they did, they would realize that the analogies they are trying to draw make no fucking sense. Those are just big, scary words that somebody wagged in front of their faces and told them they were supposed to be frightened of. Wake up people, for the last eight years we were practically a fascist country under the Bush administration, and you people ate it up. If socialism means putting my tax dollars to work for something that will actually benefit myself and others (health care reform) instead of just using them to  fund a 2.5 trillion dollar vanity war then sign me up!

I can’t believe that so many people in this country have been duped into believing that helping those less fortunate than ourselves by making healthcare a basic human right somehow degenerates our society or makes us less free. You know what makes me feel less free? Slaving away at a job that offers me no benefits, not having the right to demand those benefits, and being robbed of my dignity by being unable to take care of myself when I’m sick. To me, that’s the essence of an unjust society.

I know I shouldn’t get so worked up about this. In all likelihood the people I ran into in Harvard Square today are the type of people who just need something to proselytize about on a Saturday, they probably didn’t even bother to really think through how offensive their words were. Obama’s health plan will probably pass, all of those people will realize that the sky isn’t going to fall in if their neighbor who just lost her job can actually go see a doctor when she’s sick, and they will move on to protest the next fashionable cause. In the mean time, I’ve got my work cut out for me trying not to end up rage-splattered all over Bartley’s.

Love Me, Love My TV

Growing up I wasn’t allowed to watch very much television. My parents gave me the familiar spiel about how TV rots your brain and how I’d be better off reading a book or playing outside. However as an adult who has done more than her fair share of child-care for somebody that doesn’t actually have kids of her own I have realized that half the reason had to have been because most children’s programing is really effing annoying. I mean, have you ever seen Sponge Bob!? Some people love it, to me watching that show is like having a bad acid trip while locked in a room with a bunch of hyenas hell bent on clawing the flesh off your bones.

All those years that I thought my parent were being strict, loving, compassionate people who valued my intellectual curiosity and development so deeply that they didn’t want my childhood marred by advertising and junk culture, but in reality they probably just wanted my sister and I to turn off the tube so they could get some damn peace and quiet.

The moral of the story is that Kid Sister and I didn’t get to watch much TV so what we did get to watch we really had to make count. Although I probably only watched about an hour of TV a week as a kid, the shows I grew up on really did influence me. So here we go kids, the top TV shows that made little Fever who she is today:

Fashion Sense:

Clarissa Explains It All

Oh how I shamelessly ripped off Clarissa’s fashion sense as a pre-teen. I remember watching the premiere and going straight up to my room to desperately try and reconstruct my unfortunate mid-90s wardrobe of over-sized flowered palazzo pants and puffy poet blouses into something cooler.

Clarissa’s life was everything a young Sassy reader like myself could possibly covet. She was an aspiring journalist (I soon after published “zines” with my friends that were xeroxed off of notebook paper and sent around via the mail. Back in the days of dial-up before every teen with an opinion had a blog with which to broadcast her every inner desire this was how we rolled, biotches!), with a hip, floppy haired best guy friend (OK, so at that age I made fun of any boy who approached me until he rolled up crying in an emasculated ball which is probably why I didn’t date much as a teen, but a girl could dream), and an awesomely decorated room (that boys were allowed in!) with a real life giant Swatch watch hanging on the wall. (Only the coolest of the cool kids had those giant Swatch watches, and I could never convince my parents to get me one.) What more could a child of the 90s ask for?

Sense of the Bizzare:

The X-Files

Just listening to the theme music on my shitty computer speakers makes my stomach churn deliciously in horror. It’s Friday night, circa 1997. My parent are out of town. What are my sister and I doing? We’re not hosting a kegger or sneaking boys into the house, we’re curled up in the dark in our suburban living room under grandma’s afghan watching the X Files and scaring the ever loving shit out of ourselves.

Pop Culture:

The Adventures of Pete & Pete

Most people’s first exposure to Godfather of Punk Iggy Pop might have been through a mix tape or a local college radio station. Mine was because of The Adventures of Pete and Pete, where he played Nona’s dad.

There were a million great cameos on Pete & Pete; Luscious Jackson played the school dance, Michael Stipe guest-starred as an ennui-ridden Popsicle man (let me know if I’m missing any others) but to me the real beauty of this show was it’s spot on portrayal of sibling relationships, first love, and the simple joys of growing up in the burbs.

Sick Sense of Humor:

Ren & Stimpy

When my sister was little I remember her kindergarten teacher telling my mom that bathroom humor was only a passing phase. Oh, how I know my mom wishes that were true. To this day I still can’t resist a good fart joke. I have no idea how such a demure woman gave birth to two such twisted individuals. Perhaps we were irrevocably warped by watching a show with a character called “Powdered Toast Man” who entreated his subjects to “cling tenaciously to his buttocks”. And of course, who could forget log?

Propensity for Loving Doomed Cult TV Shows:

Eerie Indiana

Remember Eerie Indiana? Neither do most people. It was like a kiddie X-Files with a little Twilight Zone thrown in there for good measure. My sister and I couldn’t get enough of it which means of course it got cancelled after like two episodes. Fortunately, the show’s creators don’t seem too worried about copyright infringement, as there are plenty of full episodes up on You Tube.

Budding Liberal Idealist:

The Wonder Years

Is it just me, or is there very little the Baby Boomer generation loves more than reflecting back on itself? This might explain why The Wonder Years was one of the few shows my family watched together, even my relentlessly channel surfing dad was transfixed.

Aging hippies love regaling their punk ass kids with how tough ‘Nam really was and how groovy that Jefferson Airplane concert was. The Wonder Years gave the ‘rents a chance to re-live those times without my sister and I stomping off to our rooms, slamming the doors and blasting Pearl Jam.

The ironic thing was that as I followed Fred Savage’s character throughout that series I actually felt like I grew up with him, losing a bit of my innocence along the way. For those of us who grew up in the gay 90s when the future was bright and the culture wars of our parent’s time seemed archaic, The Wonder Years was eerily prophetic of the times to come. Just like Kevin Arnold, we watched our parents behave like hypocrites, screwed up our first real relationships and lost faith in our government. I don’t think our parents ever dreamed that we would inherit a world that would become just as tumultuous as it was in the 1960′s but here we are, arguably worse off than we were a generation ago. It’s enough to make a person want to protest. Or grow their hair real long, or quit their job and travel the country in a VW Bus. Except these days we’re getting fired from our jobs, everybody’s way too freaked out about the economy to notice that we’re losing a war and gas is too damn expensive to facilitate any epic road trip/life altering experiences. Thanks George Bush!

So there you have it, my top handful of influential programming. It’s not a bad lot, if I do say so myself. Maybe it’s even a good thing that I drew so much inspiration from TV instead of all the books I read. After all, it could have been worse. Thank Maude I never went through a Little House on the Prarie fashion phase.

The Story of (My) Stuff

The latest internet video to go viral in my neck of the woods is The Story of Stuff , conceived and put together by “unapologetic activist” Annie Leonard. The website bills the video as a, ” Fast paced fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns.” To the delight of many and the chagrin of some the video is already being used as a teaching tool in schools across the nation. Why do I give a crap? In my other life (you know, the one where I’m not a wildly popular feminist blogger with a razor sharp wit and a slew of commenting minions) I am an educator. Peel back the noxious layer of sarcasm and you’ll find that I actually care deeply about young people. I care about nurturing their intellectual growth and curiosity, I care about their developing sense of self and I care about how they form their opinions and their outlook on the world.

In general I think the video is great. In this age of global warming denial teachers have scant resources to provide their students with a balanced scientific approach. However I do see the point that some parents are making that it is a bit much. Not because as one parent complained, “it doesn’t say anything positive about capitalism”. As if the media, their textbooks and the entire culture around today’s kids isn’t pro-capitalism enough! Besides, to me the image of a cartoon U.S government shining corporate America’s shoes is the least disturbing image in the twenty minute video. In fact, compared to the image of skulls and crossbones over a nursing woman’s chest to depict the toxins found in breast milk, that image is downright cheerful. What gives me pause is the fact that I’m not a big fan of dumping large amounts of overwhelmingly negative facts on kids (OMG YOUR MOM’S BOOBS ARE FULL OF POISON AND YOUR PILLOW COULD KILL YOU!!!!!!!1) Without balancing it out with at least as much emphasis on and here’s what you can do about it. In the entire twenty minute video Leonard spends seventeen minutes painting a brutal portrait of how our innocent little trips to the Big Box stores contribute to the rape of our planet and only three minutes talking about solutions. If not framed appropriately by a skilled adult, it could be enough to overwhelm a viewer and make them feel hopeless. The problem is just too big. However I guess skilled adult is the key word here. Think of all the amazing conversations a video like this could facilitate. Think of all the fake town hall style debates, alternative waste treatment plans drafted by students, the haikus written to a felled tree! You could have a regular interdisciplinary education smorgasbord going on here. OK, I’m done with the teacher geek out now.

The real reason why I’m writing about this today is because the Story of Stuff really got me thinking about all of my stuff. After all, my love affair with Target is well documented. I’ve always been so darn proud of the fact that once a year or so I go through my wardrobe and skim off at least two full garbage bags of clothes I don’t wear anymore to give to charity, as if that somehow makes me Mother Effing Theresa. I never stopped to ponder the reasons why my closet is a revolving door of useless crap in the first place. Impulse buying? Guilty as charged. Inability to resist a barrage of shiny and cheaply priced goods? Check. But why is my attitude toward stuff  like that in the first place? Is it more than just too much disposable income and a lack of self control? Does it also have to do with the fact that some post WWII Don Draper type was sitting in an office 50 years ago trying to think of a way to jump start the economy and decided that manufacturing goods to purposely wear out was a part of it?

Stuff wears out. Stuff goes out of style. Stuff has to be replaced. All of this time I’ve just taken that idea for granted. Looking further into it I realize that’s not always the case. I think of the Patagonia long underwear I’ve had since 7th grade, it still looks like new and I still wear it every winter. I think of the Doc Martins I wore every day for about six years (even backpacked across Europe in them and wore them to summer camp) before they finally fell apart. Then I think of all the shirts from H&M that unravelled on my body or sat crumpled on my bedroom floor for months after one wear.

Does having all this stuff make me any happier? I always think so when I snatch it off the shelf at a retailer. But it never does. I hate finding places to put it all in my tiny cramped apartment. I hate dragging it down three flights of stairs to the laundromat. And I really, really hate folding it, putting it away and packing it up in boxes every damn time I have to move.

So kids, you are my witness, this self admitted clothes horse (I’ve always hated that expression, horses don’t wear any damn clothes in the first place!) is cleaning up her act. I’ve purged my closet this season but this time I’m not replacing with abandon. I’m trying to consider quality and usefulness over price, and I’m trying to do with less. So far, it’s working. You’d be amazed how much easier it is to get dressed in the morning when you don’t have 8,000 shirts that all look bad with the pants you’re wearing. Having fewer choices actually makes it easier to get dressed. And I’m curbing those trips to Target, I swear. What I’ve got is good enough.

So what’s the story of your stuff? Are you purging, re-arranging or re-thinking your consumption habits these days? Any tips for a career stuff-hoarder?

Can You Afford to Have a Kid?

Remember about a year ago when that hideous Lori Gottleib article came out? I did a lot of outrageous ranting about fertility, and about why I feel that the reason why people in my generation aren’t settling down en masse isn’t because we are a bunch of spoiled, immature brats with perpetual Peter Pan complexes, but partly because we just can’t afford to settle down. I mean damn, have you checked out how much marriage and kids cost these days?

Well it turns out, I have numbers to back me up now. Do you have the bucks to squirt one out? Take this quiz and find out:

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/alpha-consumer/2009/1/26/can-you-afford-a-baby.html

Forward your answers to your family members next time they give you a hard time about giving them grandkids.

I scored a 2.