Category: This is Feminism

One of Us

On By BekkiIn This is FeminismLeave a comment

This is what misogyny looks like.

I’m watching the news this morning, and they mention that the winner of the Miss America pageant was a victim of domestic violence. The first thing that goes through my head is She can’t be a victim of domestic violence. She must be making it up.

The second thing that goes through my head is what is wrong with me for thinking that?

***

It’s insidious. Pernicious. The statistics say something like 1 in 3 women will be sexually assaulted. Why is it so hard for us to believe this is true?

***

I watched a man teaching his son to read on the subway one morning on my way to work. The kid, probably five or six, sat on his dad’s lap sounding out the words in an article.

On my way out of the train, I looked down, and saw a mostly naked woman on the page. The boy was learning to read on Penthouse.

***

I have thought numerous times during pregnancy and childbirth and breastfeeding that if men had to deal with this shit, we’d have a pill for it already.

***

My mother taught me when I was younger that you always lock car when you park, to make sure nobody gets into the backseat while you’re out. To park under a streetlight. To avoid dark areas.

Nobody teaches men these things.

***

This is what misogyny looks like.

#mommyfail

On By BekkiIn Pinned Posts, This is Feminism2 Comments

We started Z on formula today.  Part of me is relieved about this. It means that pumping will no longer be a nightmare measured in ounces. It means that I can stop desperately trying to stockpile three days worth of milk in the freezer for when I have to travel. It means that if a late afternoon meeting runs over, I don’t have to choose between getting home in time to bathe her and put her to sleep or staying at work to pump so that I have enough milk to feed her the next day.

Mostly, I feel like a failure.

I couldn’t make enough milk for my daughter. I wasn’t willing to work hard enough. To pump longer, or more often. I cared more about my own convenience than about her health. I’m worried that writing this down will make people think less of me.

My friends who post stories on Facebook about how breastfeeding is the best thing you can do for your baby. My friends and family who’ve had kids and breastfed all the through.

I could justify it. I could tell you how long I struggled with this decision. I could tell you I asked my husband to buy the formula, because I couldn’t do it myself. I could tell you I pump five times a day, starting at six and ending at midnight, and I still can’t always get enough milk. I could tell you I’m trying not to cry while I type this. I could tell you that we’re just supplementing, not switching over to all formula.

But none of that matters, because I still feel like I’ve failed.

The women of my mother’s generation fought so that their daughters could have it all. A career. A family.

The women of my generation need to fight so that our daughters have it right. Parental leave for both parents that’s long enough to get back to human. A culture that views parenting as work which is just as hard and important as any other job – and compensates parents for the time they spend raising their children. An understanding that if one partner in a relationship wants it “all”, the other will need to make sacrifices in equal proportion. A culture free of judgement, free of the mommy wars, focused instead on what works for each family.

#haveitright

Women Destroy Science Fiction (Space Opera Edition)

On By BekkiIn This is Feminism1 Comment

I grew up reading sci-fi and fantasy. The first adult novel my parents gave me was Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsong. I devoured the other Pern novels, then discovered Terry Pratchet, and Neil Gaiman, and Lois McMaster Bujold, and Mercedes Lackey, and Robert Heinlein, and Margaret Atwood and… You get the idea. The sci-fi/fantasy shelves are the first place I go in a bookstore. It’s the only genre where I find both comfort and challenge as a reader.

Which is why it’s always astounded me that I don’t write more in the genre. My stories and novels tend toward the contemporary rather than the imagined. I’ve been trying to rectify this, one short story at a time, on the theory that the best way be part of the community is to write in it.

Enter Lightspeed Magazine and the Women Destroy Science Fiction edition. I’ve followed some of the kerfluffel about women being harassed at cons, or being told they’re not geek enough, or their writing ruins entire genres. And while I haven’t experienced any of it, I think it’s high time this kind of nonsense stopped. As you can probably guess from the title, Lightspeed does too. They’re putting together a special edition of sci-fi written entirely by women, and they’re taking submissions from the slush pile to do it.

Awesome, I thought. I should submit something. Except that none of my stories are sci-fi.

Then, as sometimes happens, the first line of a story came to me:*

Sure, Rhyden was a backwater, but it was also home to Lady Evangelina Rhyssa, Ambassador-at-Large to the Galactic Council, three-time winner of the Andromeda Pageant, and certified sharp-shooter extraordinaire.

Suddenly, I had my protagonist, Cass O’Reilly. She’s scrappy, sarcastic, and the worst P.I. this side of Vega. For the first time, I understood what other authors meant when they talked about throwing their characters into bad situations for the sheet enjoyment of watching them battle their way out.

For $5 you can get yourself a copy of Women Destroy Science Fiction, as well as the companion destruction of horror and fantasy. And you never know, Cass just might end up in there.

___
*For the record, I’m a firm believer that the only way to write, and write well, is to apply ass to chair. But there’s undeniably a certain magic to the process, and my personal muse seems to have a habit of dropping first lines into my head and letting me work out the rest of the story from there. Who says I can’t have it both ways?

There’s No Such Thing As Gender Equality

On By BekkiIn This is FeminismLeave a comment

We dress our baby like a boy. It’s partly because the clothes were free, courtesy of her six-month old, male cousin. It’s partly because we like the clothes in the “boys”section better. (Monster suit, I’m looking at you!) But it’s mostly because, unless she’s in a dress or wearing neon pink (and sometimes not even then), people assume she’s a boy.

It’s not just other people. We do it too. When we put her in her first dress, for a party my mother in law had last weekend, I looked at my husband and said, “Wow, she looks like a girl.”

Babies are baby shaped. They don’t look male or female – they look like little balls of adorable. Any gender identification that we impose on babies comes from us. Including the default assumption that a baby is a boy until proven otherwise. This is at the root of our difficulties with gender, our need to dichotomize into girl/boy, male/female and all the baggage that goes along with that.

And there’s no way we can live in a world in which gender doesn’t come with a pre-packaged set of assumptions and norms, until we can let babies be babies. Without attaching a label.

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It seems that I’m not the only one thinking about gender norms and preconceptions today. Chuck Wendig has a great blog on the subject here, and Kat Howard’s thoughts are here.

Orange Tangerine Pearl*

On By BekkiIn This is FeminismLeave a comment

I’m writing this with a baby on my lap. My baby. She is a week old, and she’s perfect.**

I’m not going to go into all the labor details here, but there were a couple of things that happened during the birth that really interested me from an information processing point of view.

The first is that, according to my husband and our doula, I didn’t start talking about an epidural until after the anesthesiologist came in. My recollection is that I started talking epidural when the contractions became unbearable – query whether there’s any link between what I was experiencing before and after the hospital reminded me the epidural was available.

The second is that I wanted to do a natural childbirth because I thought it would lead to the best outcome for me and Zed. Everything I was reading and hearing pretty much said the less interventions you do, the better – less chance of a C-section, better breastfeeding, etc.

Suffice it to say, I ended up having two interventions – I got an epidural, and the OB broke my water. Both were exactly the right moves at the time, and both made the labor much shorter than it would have been otherwise.

The thing is, I was so focused on the potentially negative effects of interventions, that I hadn’t bothered to consider the positive. Although the teacher in my birthing class discussed pros and cons for everything, I didn’t really pay attention to the pros because my mind was already made up.

I didn’t do this consciously. In fact, I’ve always thought of myself as very open-minded. But when I was thinking about the way labor had gone post-birth, I realized that I hadn’t really factored in the potential benefits of interventions.

It made me wonder what other things I might have missed because I only paid attention to the information that supported my point of view. And I’m hoping, as A and I confront the myriad of choices and decisions that is child-rearing, I’ll remember to pay afternoon to all the information out there.

*The color of our new car. Also our code word for “I actually mean that I want the epidural now”.

**In case you’re wondering, you didn’t miss the pregnancy announcement. A and I decided that we’d like to keep little Zed off the internet for the most part. So I probably won’t be talking about her here very much.   Incidentally, Zed is also the reason I haven’t posted much – for some reason, pregnancy has been my main focus for the past nine months.

Also, if you’re doing the math, by the time this goes up Zed will be about 2 weeks old. We call this the newborn effect – everything takes twice as long as it does in normal time.