So a week or so ago this post on gendered dimorphism in Disney characters popped up in my newsfeed: "Help! My eyeball is bigger than my wrist!" (http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/12/17/help-my-eyeball-is-bigger-than-my-wrist-gender-dimorphism-in-frozen/)

Then a couple days ago I was cleaning the playroom, sorting and organizing (and, yes, clandestinely tossing certain items) and in the process came across mostly dismembered Barbie and other doll heads, torsos and legs. And here's what I found:

This was a truly enormous head. For comparison, here's a Barbie head side-by-side:

So when I had matched up everything else I was left with this and my first thought was, well, this can't possibly be right!

But I tried it anyway. And I thought, whoa. This isn't "help my eyeball is bigger than my wrist," this is "help my eyes are bigger than my boobs and my whole torso could fit inside my hairdo."

Again, a comparison side-by-side with a good ol'fashioned wholesome Barbie: her head is bigger than Barbie's but her whole teeny body is about the length of Barbie's torso.

Bottom line: our culture gives us such increasingly unrealistic representations of women's bodies that at this point Barbie looks relatively normal! 

following up

So, I changed my Facebook gender to "male." Since then, here are some representative ads that keep popping up in my newsfeed:

Just to remind you, this is the ad that prompted me to this radical act:

Now that I'm a "man," Facebook and its advertisers can assume I have interests in 1) traveling, 2) playing violent video games, 3) staying warm, 4) living in a house, 5) playing poker. As a woman though, my interests were: lose weight and be sexy.

I am so glad that now that I'm a (hu)man, I can be interested in (hu)man things, and not just woman things.

Oh, and, now that I'm a (hu)man, Facebook and advertisers assume that I also probably have an interest in exploiting women! Oh, funtimes, Facebook, funtimes! Thanks for making this holiday season so special in such a mainstream, accepted, sexist and misogynist way. I'll be hitting on some single ladeez (despite my married status) right after I order some luxurious Princeton University knitwear crafted especially for alumni, despite the fact that I'm not a University alum, because I went to Princeton Seminary. 

today's reminder that women are supposed to feel fat and unsexy so that we can spam you successfully

So, it's just a normal day. My Facebook feed is full of status updates about snow and babies and complaints about grading. Facebook is predictable like that. And then there was this.

Why, Facebook? What is it about me that suggested to your algorithms that I needed an ad from some outfit called "Be Sexy" that wants to let me know that someone who can't spell success wants me to click on some spammy little url because "Lisa from Oregon" lost 60 lbs?

OH RIGHT. I'm a woman.

Just today's little technomicroaggressive reminder that, since I'm female, I probably feel bad about myself because I think I'm fat and unsexy, and might even feel bad enough about it that I might click on some spammy little website that will take advantage of me in other ways.

So, you know, when I report this for being sexist spam targeted at women, it'd be nice if the response wasn't "this doesn't violate our community standards."

Yeah, I know that sexist crap doesn't violate community standards. SUGGESTION: LET'S UPDATE OUR COMMUNITY STANDARDS.

Because I'm not lowering mine.

We should all be feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at TEDxEuston

The Traditional Christmas Repost: theological reflections on "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer"

theological reflections on "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer"

One of my favorite perennial Christmas classics is that edition of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeerwhere Burl Ives narrates as Sam the Talking Snowman and sings. You know, the one where the little figurines move around jerkily but endearingly. (For some interesting info about this classic, click here.)

My favorite character in this thing is Hermey, the Elf who wants to be a dentist. Hermey reveals this sick unnatural ambition in a conversation with the Elf Boss, who lectures him threateningly:

Hermey, miserably: Not happy in my work, I guess.
Head Elf: WHAT??!
Hermey: I just don't like to make toys.
Head Elf: Oh well if that's all...WHAT??!! You don't like to make toys?!
Hermey: No.
Head Elf, to others: Hermey doen't like to make toys!
Others: (repeat it down down the line) and in chorus: Shame on you!
Head Elf: Do you mind telling me what you DO wanna do?
Hermey: Well sir, someday, I'd like to be...a dentist.
Head Elf: A DENTIST? Good grief!
Hermey: We need one up here...I've been studying it, it's fascinating, you've no idea, molars and bicuspids and incisors--
Head Elf: Now, listen, you. You're an elf, and elves make toys. Now get to work!

The ontology undergirding the Head Elf's reprimand of Hermey leaves no room for consideration of an elf who deviates from his "nature" by not liking to make toys. It's simply inconceivable. Hermey's attempt to "fit in" is stymied when, engrossed in the task of providing teeth for some dolls, he misses elf practice and suffers another confrontation with the Head Elf, which concludes with the Head Elf's vicious assertion, "You'll NEVER fit in!" Miserable, Hermey jumps out the window in self-imposed exile, his only option to be true to himself.

Rudolph's situation is parallel. Born with the disgusting congenital deformity of a red glowing nose, his parents are horrified (even his own mother can only weakly offer, "we'll have to overlook it," while his father goes so far as to actually hide it by daubing mud on his son's face.) Later, at the "reindeer games," Rudolph outshines the other reindeer in skill, but when his prosthesis falls off, everyone gasps and his erstwhile playmates mock and shun. The authority figures echo this attitude: the Coach gathers everyone up and leads them away, saying loudly, "From now on, we won't let Rudolph join in any of our reindeer games!"

Santa's role throughout most of the cartoon is to legitimize the prejudices against the misfits already evident in lesser members of the Christmastown community. When Santa visits the newly birthed Rudolph, his unthinking prejudice becomes plain when he comments that Rudoplh had better grow out of it if he ever wants to be on his team of flying reindeer. Santa's behavior at the scene of the reindeer games is even more disturbing; like his pronouncement at Rudolph's birth, he says, "What a pity; he had a nice takeoff, too." For Santa, Rudolph's skill is less important than his nose, an arbitrary physical attribute. A distant and authoritarian figure, Santa is unaware of Hermey's plight (apparently the welfare of elves is beneath his notice) and condemning of Rudolph's gall in considering himself a reindeer of the same worth and dignity as the others.

Rudolph and Hermey get together, and a few lines of their "misfit theme song" are revealing:

"We're a couple of misfits, we're a couple of misfits--
What's the matter with misfits?
That's where we fit in.

We may be different from the rest...
But who decides the test
of what is really best?"

In "Christmastown," those who decide "the test of what is really best" seem to be the tyrannical and thoughtless majority, reinforced by authoritarian sanction by Santa, the pseudo-benevolent despot. Those who question the status quo--those who are already marginalized--are mocked, punished, and driven out of the community.

Over the years it's become apparent to me that this simple children's cartoon contains some real subversive elements: Hermey's misfit-ness is the result of apparent "choice," but the kind of choice where the alternatives are to be true or false to oneself. Rudolph's misfit-ness is the result of birth rather than choice. Change "dentist" to "gay" and "red nose" to "black skin." Now the subversive message is clear: Santa is racist, the Head Elf and the elf community is homophobic, and "Christmastown" is really "Whiteytown."

Given this subtext, the change of heart on the parts of Santa and the Head Elf at the end are more than just the formulaic ending to a well-known Christmas fable. Although it takes a prodigious feat of community service on both Hermey's and Rudolph's parts (each requiring skills peculiar to their misfit-ness) to bring the authorities and the community to repentance, repentance is indeed the note sounded in the conclusion. Everyone, including Santa, apologizes to the misfits. And in the end, difference is valorized rather than exiled.

Mama's Rules for Dressing Well

#feministheels

"One might say that the measure of women's liberation is any culture is at least partly indicated by whether or not they wear shoes that allow them to walk freely!" Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 176.

One might, but one probably ought not to go much beyond that, and certainly shouldn't suggest that a feminist in high heels is like Dawkins in a rosary.

I have some basic rules for dress for myself and my daughters, and they go pretty much like this:

1) Anything you wear shouldn't hurt any part of your body.
2) What you wear should keep you warm (or cool) enough.
3) What you wear should let you do what you plan to do in it (that is, be functional and appropriate to the specific occasion).
4) You should feel good about what you're wearing.

These rules are a work in progress. As my bright-shining brilliant, beautiful oldest continues to, well, get older (dang it!) I keep revisiting these basic guidelines--gauging whether or not she is following them…and whether I am, too. She's great at it--as, I think, most kids would be, if we encouraged them to think of dress and clothing in these ways. Me, not so much; I have some unlearning to do, still, especially about #4. (Not too long ago, I recall, I went on a brief FB rant about the evils of pleated pants, because I wasn't #4ing very well that day.)

But I'm getting better, and it's pretty awesome to have a 7-year-old role model to learn from.

But none of these rules mean I won't be wearing my incredible hand-knitted (yes: this is me, bragging about my knitting skillz) lace stockings and vintage heels.

The last time I put on a pair of heels for a fancy dinner out, my husband teased me about it. Then Clare, hypocrisy radar bleeping, joined in: "you shouldn't be wearing ouchie shoes!"

Yes, I get it. I worked for a few years in an orthopedic shoe store and I am a proponent of comfy shoes. I tell people all the time that putting the investment in for really good shoes is worth it. And day in, day out, I still wear the shoes that I bought years ago on employee discount from my fabulous boss at the Princeton Foot Solutions store (hi Linda! muah!).

I don't put anything on that hurts. If I can't walk in it or dance in it, what's the point? You can't look fancy or feel fabulous if you're hobbling across a room wondering why the hell your table is in the farthest corner.

But most often, I wear heels for a couple hours at a time in a context where there's more sitting than walking, and when the point is to be extravagantly, flagrantly fabulous. Maybe even (gasp!) sexy…which for me, like a lot of women brought up in the kind of purity/modesty culture of American conservative Christianity, is a reclamation of our bodies and their goodness.

My anniversary comes up in a few days and you can bet I'll be rocking some #feministheels and showing my daughter that Mama can be fancy as well as sensible, sexy as well as grubby, fun as well as hardworking. And that when it comes to Dressing Well, it's about feeling good in your body, and accomplishing what you set out to accomplish--be that dazzling your students with a philosophy lecture or dazzling your spouse at an anniversary dinner.

today's new mommy song

Oooooooh,
manufactured crises are the best ones to have
that's why we make them up all the time

You lost the pencil you just had in your hand?
Well that's a manufactured crisis right there!

Cooooooooon--
gratulations because manufactured crises are the best ones to have
that's why we make them up all the time

You still need a pencil to do your homework?
Well there's lots of pencils in this house
When you manufacture problems you can make solutions too
Go look for a pencil right now!

Oooooooooh.\,
manufactured crises are the best ones to have
because we can manufacture fixes for them too.

Sexism and schism: a response to Tony Jones

Tony's recent post on Theoblogy has--as Tony's posts often do--kicked off a discussion that free ranges across denominational lines and ideologies. Links to and discussions of It's Time for a Schism appeared in multiple places in my information pipeline, expected (my twitter feed, Facebook newsfeed) and unexpected (in an online support group I participate in, on a discussion thread on a Church of Christ preacher's blog series I'm following). It's these unexpected places that prompt me to respond here because, clearly, Tony's post has contributed to furthering the conversation  about gender justice in Churches of Christ, a conversation I'm very much invested in.

My first response to Tony's post can be found here on Theoblogy, but I'll repost my comment here as well:

JTB 

• 4 days ago

• −

hi Tony,
I appreciate your passion on this. As a woman, a theologian, and life long CofCer (that's Churcha-Christer, verbalized) I want to affirm your anger and the need for justice. And, also to defend why I "stay" within a church denomination that (typically) refuses not only to allow women into leadership and (paid) ministry positions, but to allow women's voices to be heard and women's bodies to occupy space "up front" during corporate worship.

First I want to say that I don't counsel other people to do what I'm attempting to do. The "stay or go" question is vexing and complicated and there's no one size fits all answer, I think. But I don't encourage people to stay in a church environment that has become toxic to them (my husband left years ago and is now happy being an Episcopal priest).
So, since I don't counsel other people to stay put as a more righteous or effective response to this injustice, why do I? Because I can, and because at the moment I think I can do more good by staying rather than leaving. It's a unique possibility given my location and resources and education and network, and so I'm doing my best to utilize these things well. 
But I engage the work, not because I want to reform the institution or change the Church of Christ, per se. I engage in this work because I care deeply about the women sitting in the pews for whom leaving is still an unimaginable possibility, and the little girls who grow up hearing things that make them feel like, and I quote, "Jesus only died for the boys." There are so many of them. And for those who find the courage to leave, hallelujah: be free in Christ to serve and glorify God with all that you are. For those who are still stuck, I'll stick around.

For anyone who's connected with the CofC and is interested in working toward gender justice in the CofC, gal328.org is still around and thriving. :)

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I want to be clear about what I affirm, and what I challenge, about Tony's call for schism as I understand it (and in this phrasing I acknowledge that of course I may be interpreting some things wrong, and welcome dialogue on any errors as this is always helpful). 

First, Tony's post is being heard by at least some in Churches of Christ who may be unaware that the kind of schism he calls for--a principled individual severance with an oppressive system--has been happening in our churches over this very issue over the last few decades, in increasing numbers. People have left over what we have learned to label "women's roles in the church," and are continuing to leave. Many are of course women gifted for forms of service and ministry restricted to them; many are those who leave in solidarity with those women. But typically, this schism has been a slow, diachronic, quiet one, more of an exodus of people who aren't interested in making it hard for those they leave behind, whom they love as brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers in Christ. They leave as Ursula K. LeGuin describes those who walk away from Omelas: one day, they simply go.

And so it's easy for those who aren't looking for the missing ones to continue without ever realizing who is missing. Part of what we in Churches of Christ need to realize is, then, that these of our number are missing. This is the reason gal328.org hosts a wiki named "Exodus," a collaborative project aimed at shining a spotlight on those who have left and pursued ministry elsewhere. This is a list of people who have courageously moved, like Abraham, from the familiarity of home to the unknown land of Ur on the strength of faith in God alone. They ought not be forgotten.

I believe Tony's post and the discussion around it may be calling some attention to this, and that is indeed a result for which I am grateful.

The main thing I find most helpful about Tony's posts on this is that he is issuing a call for effective action. Tony is tired of talking. And here once again I want to affirm, for I am also rather tired of talking. We've been talking a long time, we in the Churches of Christ, and precious little has changed. Talk, after all, is cheap.

So here is where I return to my first response, and aim to perhaps clarify some of my comment, and also pose a genuine question.

While validating this call to effective action, I don't think that schism, either in the classic sense or in the individual severance sense, is a strategy for effecting systemic change. 

This is tricky territory here on the "stay or go" question; it's a question I've been asked many times in friendly and unfriendly ways, and a question ever CofCer concerned with gender justice wrestles with at some point. It's tricky territory because it's hard to hear someone's explanation of the reasons they "stay" without feeling like some judgment is thereby passed on those who "leave." So I want to be clear in stating: I consider those who leave courageous. I know what kind of guts it takes to leave. Many who have "left" are among my private canon of personal saints, and you people know who you are. I praise God for your lives and witness.

So when I say, again, that leaving is not a strategy for systemic change, that is no judgment on those who have left. It is an observation that Omelas doesn't disappear when those who walk away, walk away.

So I want to construct a way of staying which is faithful to the call to effective action I hear at the heart of Tony's post, because what we disagree on here is not urgency or necessity or justice but what, in the end, effective action is. Schism leaves unjust systems intact--and untroubled.

This brings me (finally!) to my question, which is, simply, is it really schism you're calling for? Or is it that, like me, and so very many others, the call is to effective action, and the challenge is to imagine adequate models for it?

*a technical note: I am blogging via phone while sick in my hotel bed after a very full AAR and I promise to link everything properly later! Apologies in the meantime.

Overheard on the way to NWSA

First Man: "Did anyone see Stephanie get on the plane?"

Second Man: "She's not coming. I just got an email saying 'I'm counting on you.'"

First Man: "She's not COMING? ...I can't BELIEVE her."

Second Man: "I just got the email."

First Man: "She is such a FLAKE. She scheduled this meeting and now she's not even here. She is so SCATTERBRAINED. I just can't stand her."

Third Man with a pic of his toddler as his laptop wallpaper: "I don't really know her at all, so..."

First Man: "...Wants to be in charge, doesn't want to do any of the work."

unscientific survey

A few days ago, I found myself trying to adequately convey to a class of 30 undergrads what I meant by the phrase "unmarked identity" (ostensibly, we were discussing Rawls and his "original position" behind the "veil of ignorance") and why it's problematic.

So, on the spot, I tried this: "Okay. Girls. Answer this: do you ever walk into a room full of people without being consciously aware of the fact that you are a woman?" A pretty much unanimous "no." Then I asked the boys. "Do you ever enter a room full of people feeling conscious of the fact that you are a man?" Blank stares like the question didn't even make sense. No, of course not.

This, y'all. This is why "unmarked" equals "privilege."

a break

"I need a break…I need a break…I need a break…I need a break…"

As mantras go, it's not that edifying.

But these are the words that I found pouring out of me this past weekend. And not just words. I found myself crooning them, like a blues singer, in a melody I've not heard before and that I didn't plan. And it just didn't stop. All the anxiety and exhaustion and inadequacy and anger and longing and sadness flowed into this spontaneous song as I held Z in my arms and she hugged me because she could tell that whatever Mommy was singing, it was sad.

It was also peaceful and beautiful in a way I've rarely experienced. It was confession and prayer in a way that took me by surprise.

When it ended, I carried Z into the kitchen to get her the snack she had asked for, the thing that had pushed me over the edge into that surreal moment of prayerful confession, and did what I needed to. No less tired, no less lonely, no less anxious and sad, but less angry.

I don't know what it all means. But I do know that, whatever that was, it helped. It didn't solve anything and it didn't change anything, but it helped.

today

Today the internet told me,

"In Genesis, Eve wanted to become equal to God. Thus, that women want to be equal,
considered the same as men, is to be expected....So God assigning men to teach and to lead in their congregations and in their families is a way to remind women that they are
human and therefore not above instruction and correction."

TecnaMonsterFairyTaleHigh and the Future of the Female Body

In chapter 3 of Cyborg Selves I offer a detailed analysis of the way gender and human sexuality is envisioned in two distinct posthuman discourses. One, of course, is the feminist cyborg discourse begun by Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," and the other is the analysis of gender and human sexuality offered by James Hughes and George Dvorsky in their Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies white paper entitled, "Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary."

I won't recap everything here, but suffice to say, I find these two discourses on gender and sexuality to be in opposition to each other in important ways, and the contrasts between the two ultimately rest on their divergent views of the human body, and in this instance, the female body particularly. [If you want to know more, well hey, take that $100 you've got lying around just waiting to be spent and click the link on the sidebar and get yourself a copy of the book! :)]

One of the assumptions in Hughes and Dvorsky's analysis of transhumanism and gender is that technological interventions on the human body are the ultimate means of addressing the social injustices  surrounding gender. They anticipate a future where, by means of various technologies, people will be able to consciously select certain "gendered" traits, according to personal preference, thus dismantling the "gender binary" that we have (presumably) inherited from our unaltered biology. The vision is one of liberation from that restrictive binary by altering our bodies at will.

There are a lot of things here to take issue with, from my point of view, but again--read the book.

What I want to focus on here is a new wrinkle of worry about this approach to gender and biotechnology and the posthuman future, prompted by my latest brush with the rampant sexualization and body distortion and stereotyping and reduction and limitation in children's media and the toy industry.

This past week Clare asked me to please rethink my ban on Winx Club. The girls at her school play "Winx" at recess, and while she joins in, she always feels a bit lost because she doesn't watch the show and has to figure out who is who and what is happening. I get that. And she was super thoughtful about asking me to rethink, and suggested I watch an episode. And promised that if I did let her watch it she would ignore all the inappropriate stuff (oh how I wish it worked that way). Of course it also turns out that she had been illicitly bingewatching on the iPad after Netflix put temptation right in front of her face. Sigh. #parentfail.

So, I watched an episode. And it basically made my brain explode and dribble out my ears. It was beyond the horrible I had braced myself for.

Then I saw the newest toy to come down the corporate pike for my daughter: Fairy Tale High.

Great! They're like Bratz, only not Bratz because they're, like, fairy-tale-ish. They're like Monster High, only not, 'cuz they're fairy-tale-ish. They're like Winx and _____ and _____ and ______ only not, 'cuz they're fairy tale princesses in their secret life instead of fairies and _____ and ______. Wow! That's what we call OPTIONS!

Pigtail Pals member Bailey Shoemaker Richards says it:

I mean, just look at them. You literally cannot tell these things apart.

What does the above picture have to do with transhumanist aspirations to postgenderism, I bet you're wondering.

That's great, because I'm about to tell you.

First, there's the basic question that Melissa Atkins Wardy at Pigtail Pals puts to us, which is, what are our girls (and boys!) learning from these distorted representations of the female body, and limited, frivolous representations of girlhood?

Yes, that's rhetorical. We know what they're learning, and it is false, and it is harmful.

My question is, what happens when these internalized false and harmful notions of what girls and women's bodies are supposed to look like collide with the ever-more-inventive technologies we use on those bodies?

Will we get the transhumanist utopian vision of technologically mediated gender equity, and human bodies that, again via technological mediation, defy the presumed biological gender binary?

Or will we get women who seek to sculpt their bodies into the distorted representations we've been handing them as the ideal and norm ever since they were born, and men who expect that?

the smoke alarm epiphany

I was sitting in the office at home, diligently struggling along on my dissertation, when I started hearing it. A high pitched, annoying, repetitive beep that echoed along the hallway and was eerily hard to pinpoint. And it kept happening. Again. And again. And again.

Every time it happened, I was shaken out of my compositional reverie, lost focus, and had to recover my train of thought before plunging back into my text.

I told Brent about it that night and he said, yeah, the smoke alarm probably needs a battery change.

The next day: beepbeepbeep. Beepbeepbeep. Beepbeepbeep.

I was hacked. I was mad. I was righteously indignant. I yelled into the otherwise quiet empty house: why didn't he FIX this? doesn't he KNOW I'm trying to work here? Didn't I TELL him I couldn't concentrate with this godforsaken noise? WHY didn't he take care of this for me?!

Then I realized.

I can change a battery.

So I did.

dear netflix.

Dear netflix.com,

Unless you make it possible for me, as a concerned and responsible parent, to block certain suggested viewing options daughters' personal viewing profiles, I will be discontinuing the use of your service.

I was under the false impression that setting up profiles would take care of the issue of my daughters potentially encountering inappropriate viewing material.

But here is a screenshot of the current suggested items for my little girl.

My daughter loves Daniel Tiger. And Finn the Human Boy and Jake the Magic Dog. And George the monkey. And squeaky voiced Elmo. And the Powah-gulls. And Justin and Squidgy. And Mona the Vampire. And that's great, because she's 2.

But she does not need tiny-waisted sexy Bratz fairies with anorexic limbs and boyfriends in her life. Or Barbie. Frankly, none of us do. So please, dear netflix.com powers-that-be, stop suggesting to her that she ought to be watching them instead of Daniel Tiger.

mugga mugga,

Clare and Zadie's mom

***update: I've had two informative chats with the online help at netflix.com, and here's the result. You can exercise some measure of control over this, but it's not intuitive. When you set up profiles there's a box to check or uncheck that says "kids under 12." So, when Brent set up the profiles, he clicked that Clare and Z's were kid profiles by clicking that box. Because that seems easy-peasy and all. However, Netflix actually has four different age-related ratings, Little Kids, Older Kids, Teens, and Adults. You can find that when you go to your account settings, but it doesn't give age ranges and also, if you've already clicked the box on the individual profiles for "kid under 12," it doesn't let you change the parental control setting to "little kid." You have to go unclick the box on the profile, and then it will give you the option to set the profile to "little kid."

That's the good news.

The bad news is, despite having rated 100+ kids movies and clicked on "not interested" for Barbie, Winx Club, etc., they remain in full view on both my daughters' profiles in the top category of suggestions, "popular on Netflix." I can't get them to go away. So, Winx Club remains, literally, the first thing my daughter will see on her home page. Presumably it will eventually disappear because she won't be watching it, and it will get replaced with suggestions only from the "little kid" category, but I don't know when that will happen.

The bigger problem I see in all this is, as a parent, I have no surefire way to block content, and what I do have is non-intuitive and labor-intensive. At 7 Clare is aging out of little kid territory pretty soon. Parental control is not content-based, at least not directly, but age-category based, and someone other than me is making decisions about what content is appropriate for what age--and in general, what content is appropriate, period. Or worse, and more accurately, they're not making any judgments about appropriate content, because that's not really their job--which means that at, as soon as I click "older kids" for Clare, we're in Winx Club territory no matter what. So, fine, that's not actually their job--it's mine, because I'm the parent. But I need a better way to do my job. I can't blame Netflix for the larger issues of structural sexism and the early childhood sexualization of girls that is rampant in media--but given that this is a huge problem, I think a big fat red VETO button for any cartoon that will teach my daughter false and harmful things about her gender and sexuality is necessary.

loudmouth

"Mom, is it bad to be a loudmouth?"

"Nope."

spooky crappy unhappy meals.

I know this is an old, and very familiar complaint. There's all sorts of things wrong with Happy Meals and fast food and the use of free plastic gimmicks to further entice our young ones into addiction, as if french fries (or, as Z calls them, "Fry-days!") weren't by themselves enough.

And so, first, yeah, a big ol' mea culpa, mea maxima culpa for giving up and feeding my precious ones crap because I'm sick and on my own while my spouse is out late at a Vestry meeting. Tonight we'll eat Vegetable Korma, I promise.

But honestly. It gets me every single time. The Question: "boy or girl?"

This time, the plastic gimmicks were Halloween buckets--not a bad idea. The choices were between Star Wars themed Angry Birds buckets and, yep you guessed it, Monster High.

I never answer the question "boy or girl" with either "boy" or "girl." I tell them which toy I prefer. This unfortunately did not translate well last night. The Question came back: "but, boy or girl?"

Finally I said, exasperated, "I have two girls who would prefer the Star Wars Angry Birds toys."

I mean, is there something unclear about saying "give us this one?" Is there some sort of McDonalds policy in place to never deviate from parceling out your plastic gimmicks according to rigid gender stereotypes? Is this why your Question is "boy or girl" and not "which toy would you like?"

And let's just not even get into the issues of handing my 2- and 7-year-olds Monster High. Really? I mean, really?

Yes, I know, none of this is at all surprising. And that, friends, is a measure of the dimension of this problem.

anthropomorphizing indeed.

Through the magic of the Internet I came across this fantastic piece today. The part that will explode a tiny piece of your brain (one which I hope you didn't need after all) is this list:

Reel Girl commenter, Nebbie, keeps a list of male characters in animation who, in the “real” world, would be female: 

1) Barnyard movie and video game, Back and the Barnyard: male cattle with udders
2) The Madagascar movies and specials, The Penguins of Madagascar: Joey the male kangaroo with a pouch, male hornets with stings, King Julien the dominant male ring tailed lemur (Only female kangaroos have a pouch, ring tailed lemurs are matriarchal.)
3)Bee Movie: male worker bees, male bees with stings, Mooseblood the male bloodsucking mosquito (Only female bees, wasps, including hornets, and some ants have a sting because the sting is a modified oviposito)
4)Turbo: male snails, Burn the one female snail (Garden snails are hermaphrodites)
5) A Bugs Life, The Ant Bully, and Antz: male worker ants (Worker ants, bees, and wasps are all sterile females, the males are drones and they die soon after they mate with the queen– fertile female– ant, bee, or wasp.)
6) The Jungle Book: male elephant herd and leader (elephants are matriarchal)
7) Fantasia: female ostriches with male black and white plumage
8) Puss in Boots: The Three Diablos: Gonzalo the male tortoiseshell kitten (Most tortoiseshell cats are female. A male cat can only be tortoiseshell if it has Klinefelter’s Syndrome– XXY, usually sterile– has chimerism, or has mosaicism.)
9) Finding Nemo: Marlin the clownfish stays male after his wife died (Clownfish are protoandrous hermaphrodites; they are born male and the the most dominant male turns female when the dominant female is removed from the group.) 

What’s so creepy about this is how often what is “natural” is used to justify sexism. 

I knew about the Nemo thing; but the rest are new to me. I think my favorite is (1). Male cows with udders. If that were intentional, I'd love it. I mean, if we were intentionally teaching our kids the differences between biological embodiments and gender, and calling into question gender stereotypes instead upholding them by reverse-engineering the representations of other animals' bodies to fit within our rigid gender stereotypes, then this would be BRILLIANT! Alas, I doubt the intention was to represent biologically female cows who identify as male.

When Clare was about 3, we had a conversation in which I utterly failed to convince her that boys have eyelashes. I've never forgotten it. Brent has lovely eyelashes and at one point I said, "Brent, take your glasses off. Clare, go look at your daddy's eyes. See his eyelashes." She did. And it still failed to convince her. Why? You know why. Because every single boy character in every type of media she'd been inundated with her entire little life had no eyelashes, and every single girl character did. Eyelashes=girl was a constant feature of her world, and empirical evidence of Daddy's eyelashes was simply not enough to counter that constant given.

The good news is, Clare (now 7) is embroiled in a long-standing dispute with a friend at school (a boy) who claimed that girls don't have biceps. Scornfully she replied, "My mom has great big biceps! And just look at my arm! I'm just as strong as YOU! Look at that muscle!"

hands free.

It's been two years and some.

For two years, every task--domestic or academic--has been performed with a baby on my hip or at my breast, or a toddler on the floor (or on my hip or at my breast) interrupting adorably every couple of minutes. I've written blog posts, presentations, class lectures and finished revisions of my book with one hand awkwardly crooked around a nursing child while the laptop on my knees started to overheat. I've cooked dinner one-handed while my arm holding an increasingly heavy child on my hip started to ache because otherwise she'd just sit in the middle of the filthy kitchen floor and wail at me through the whole process. I've washed dishes with Z on my back in the mei tai. I've toted her up and down 2 flights of stairs perched on top of the dirty laundry in the basket.

I've been frustrated and impatient and grumpy grouchy and longing for this day for a long time.

Mama is hands free.

Let's get some stuff done.

Beelzeboob, Booby Traps, and Artificial Wombs

Beelzeboob

When I was pregnant with Clare (my first), my husband and I had a conversation that went something like this:

"Oh, I'm definitely breastfeeding."
"I'm a little jealous."
"That you'll have to share them?"
"No...I kinda wish I could do it, too."

Just this morning, Clare (now 7), sat next to me on the couch while Zadie (2), was latched on and nursing happily.

"Hey Zadie. Try sissy's mammies instead!"
Zadie looks up, still latched, sees the sparkle in Clare's eye, and decides to play along. "Okay!"
She lets go, bends her head towards Clare's chest, and makes pretend suckling noises, and then looks up and giggles. "Milk! Mmmmm!"

Apparently, we are all possessed by the spirit of Beelzeboob around here.

Like any other nursing mom, there are times when I cherish the intimacy and the snuggling, and times when, like now, I wish that I could type out a sentence without having my elbow awkwardly positioned around the opportunistic toddler who believes that anytime I'm seated and still is an invitation to latch on. There's something sweet and also something exhausting and frustrating about being The Only One with the mammies. Sometimes I fantasize about making them detachable, so I could just hand one off to my incredibly devoted nursling--"Here you go kid, enjoy. Just don't lose it." Sometimes I fantasize about a Meet-the-Parents style man-boob harness. Or magic milk-making pills that I could supply to others so they could lactate and we could share in an equal division of labor and an equal dividend of joy. Or that I lived in a commune with my sisters and we could just trade off nursing duty...(that's not too weird, right?)

There's something similar to this in the way that Karla Erickson analyzes the burdens and blessings of breastfeeding, and the biological reality that only certain bodies lactate. But--as is obvious from my opening paragraphs--my experience of the unequally distributed burdens and blessings of breastfeeding my first did not result in my deciding, as she has, to give up breastfeeding:

Next time I won’t breastfeed because it sets up a gendered division of who does what early into parenting. It provides an infrastructure for an unequal distribution of the work (and rewards) of parenting.

It's not that what she describes here isn't true in my experience--it is. And I appreciate her willingness to name it, analyze it, and take action in response. And, there's something fair-minded and noble about being willing to give up the blessings if you can't share them--as well as something honest about wishing the burdens were distributed more equally.

I just don't think that opting out of breastfeeding is the only possible, or the best, response to the issue.

Though I think Erickson's absolutely right in noting that "gender is reproduced in intimate spaces," our intimate spaces themselves are constructed within larger determinative contexts, and those contexts matter. If you want to breastfeed but you're not one of those women with the privilege of choosing SAHMing as your temporary or permanent vocation (in other words, most women), then you're faced with a real dilemma--one in which a breast pump is necessary but insufficient in itself to address. And this is, in my opinion, the very worst of all the "booby traps" lying in wait for mothers who choose to breastfeed--far worse than the mixed messages we receive from our health care industry where "breast is best but here's some free formula to take home with you" or all the public scandals of cover-up-or-else-we'll-kick-you-off-our-airplane. I can toss the formula. I can match the modesty police glare for glare. But I can't singlehandedly change the policies and expectations in place that make it impossible to make certain parenting choices and still keep a job.

What this means is, in short, is that bodies with wombs and lactating breasts are still treated as a deviation from the basic human bodily norm--moreover, a deviation we're unwilling, as a society, to do much to accommodate.

And this is why, despite the truth of Erickson's observation about the way human bodies become so particularly salient in the process of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding, I can't agree that the solution is to "tuck away those breasts and reach for a bottle instead." Again--on an individual level, I find her reasons for this as a personal choice very poignant. But on a systemic level--if we all followed her lead--what would such collective action signify?

Erickson writes, "sometimes we have to do a runaround our bodies to ensure equity." But I want to ask, why? Why would having a certain sort of body be problematic? And what sort of equity is it, if we have to act like our bodies are different than they actually are to achieve it?

I believe Erickson locates the source of the problem in the wrong place. The problem isn't our female bodies. The problem isn't with having breasts that lactate, or breasts that don't. The problem is that we've left lactation, and all sorts of other parental and familial realities, out of bounds in terms of the kinds of bodily and social realities we're willing to recognize and accommodate as a society. The problem isn't biological. It's social.

Human embodiments are so much more interesting, and multiple, and fluid, and capable, than we've collectively agreed to define them to be--the paradigmatic able-bodied default male person, autonomous and self-sufficient and completely available at all times to his employer with no pesky familial obligations to interfere.

(I don't actually know anyone like that. Do you?)

Which bodies are being called upon to conform, in this prescription to tuck the breasts away and reach for the bottle? And conform to what? Any solution pretending to "equity" which requires bodies with wombs and vaginas and lactating breasts to perform more like bodies without those things is a reinscription of male normativity.

We might as well sign up now for those artificial wombs the transhumanists are so nuts about, so we can opt out of acknowledging female embodiments entirely. With technology's help, we can be just like men! And--bonus!--our boobs will no longer lactate and will simply be sexual objects for the male gaze, like God intended!

I'd much rather invest in researching some universal lactation pills, or a man-boob.