Eggmus: A world I would love to live in

Epsilon hates french toast. He hates it with the full force of his fickle three year old psyche. Unfortunately, that is what I made for breakfast Saturday morning. 

An hour of dithering and tantrums chase me from the dining room, leaving my partner at the mercy of the ritual meal time maelstorms. No longer outnumbered by adults, Epsilon turns on his father. "You are a bad Daddy."

"I am." My partner replies calmly.

"Other children at nursery have good Daddies."

"How are they good daddies?" This could be interesting.

"They stay at home and the mommies drop the children off to school." All parents learn lessions in not laughing at their children in the face of their ridiculous statements. My partner paid more attention than I did on the day they went over this detail in parent training school. He remains silent long enough for Epsilon to continue "The daddies clean the house. That is why our house is always dirty."

I would love to be a fly on a wall in the inside of my child's brain. I am not. A part of me would love to live in a world where men stayed at home to take care of the family's needs, and were reprimanded for being bad (dare I say, upity) for entering the work force. 

My partner points out that there is a reason that Epsilon's model of the universe looks like a woman's fantasy of reversed inequality. In Epsilon's world, when we are both in town, I work from my partner's office, so we both take him into nursery. If we are both in town, and only one of us takes him into nursery, it means the other person is working from home. This usually implies that some portion of the work breaks are spent cleaning the house. He observes that he comes home to a cleaner house on days that one of his parents stays at home. He observes that most of his friends parents live together most of the time. He observes that usually only the mothers drop his friends off at school. Our smart little modeler and scientist puts together the data at hand and forms a picture of the world.

I do live in a feminist fantasy. Thank you, Epsilon, for pointing this out.

Words

Early in the morning, a male in my bed announced that I was sexypoo. I did not kick him out. I asked him if he meant if nicely, which he did, so I gave him a hug.

Then he called me a sexy peebin. He had not meant that kindly, so we talked about it.

Sex, for Epsilon, right now, is a game played by people with armpit hair. It is a game people can play nicely, or it is a game people can play meanly. When it is played meanly, it is a REALLY bad thing. (Yes, I will get in serious trouble next time he sees one of his friends' mothers who shaves in a sleeveless shirt.) But Epsilon understands playing games nicely and meanly much better than he can understand rape or sexualizing women's bodies or sexual abuse in relationships. He understands armpit hair better than he understands puberty, and it is less vague than "big people" (he's big, why can't he play sex?)

Explaining sex is easy. Explaining sexy is hard. It is different from other bad words he picks up. Four letter words are scattered about our house with undone dishes and unpicked up toys. Fuck and shit are words that you say when you are really unhappy about something, never say them to a person, only to a situation, and not outside the house, as that will upset people-- a long set of rules, but clear. 

Stupid is not a word one says under any circumstance, even about oneself. Rascal is not nice, but a word we don't make a big deal about. After all, Puff the Magic Dragon is a rascal. One only uses that word nicely, not meanly.

We watched Peter Pan a while ago. His daycare had a pirates and mermaids themed week, the movie seemed appropriate. Ujan has started calling people savages as a result. Peter Pan said it all the time, it must be a good word. We had a long sad conversation about once upon a time people in the country we live in called people who look like us savages, and the depravation of liberties that entailed, and the people who died trying to fight that. So far, there has been a 48 hour reprieve in the use of the word in the household. It will come back. We will have another conversation, but he is starting to understand.

Sexy? What do I do with that word? It is not a bad word in its own right. It is even possible that when one of this classmates picked up the origial phrase "you're a sexy girlfriend" somewhere, the child heard it in a non-offensive context. The child probably repeated it, was told that it is not a nice thing to say, misunderstood the adults admonition, and brought it to daycare as a singsung tease. "You're a sexy girlfriend. You're a sexy peebin. You're a sexy dirty sock."

Like a bout of flu, or orange paint in his hair, Epsilon infected my house with it in all innocence. I never thought I would ever allow anyone to call me sexy, but motherhood has changed a lot of things I thought were immutable axioms in my life. Sexy is not the same as sex, even though it sounds like they should be related. How does one explain desire to someone who still thinks it is funny to fondle my breasts? Sexy is not the same thing as pretty, unless one is trying to give a zeroth level approximation of the word to a preschooler. I viscerally recoil from the idea of him calling one of his female class mates sexy, in order to tell them that they are pretty, while I do not have the same reaction at the thought of him saying that to a male. HE is not objectifying the girl, any more than he is racially motivated when he describes a new playmate at school as black, before he manages to mention that the playmate is male, and weeks before he can tell me his name. At the age of three, he is still truly describing the world as he sees it, in the order of what is apparent to him.

Still, sex and race are suh topics of power and abuse in this world, navigating this ground, teaching him to use the word sexy, fills me with unease.

Friday's Females: The marriage problem and other stories

The  Marriage Problem

If you are an economist, or computer scientist, or in a related field, you probably know this problem, possibly under the less loaded title of Stable Matching Problem. If you don't know this problem, and don't want to read the wikipedia articles linked, this is a problem of having two sets of n (possibly infinite) elements, that one wants to match. Each element in each set has a set of preferences of which element of the opposite set it is matched to. The problem is to find a matching that optimizes along the predefined preferences. In terms of marriage, one wants to find a way of marrying the people in the two sets off, so that there are no two people who would rather be married to each other than to the person they are married to, thus resulting in stable marriages with minimal risk of infidelity. The criterion for solutions to this problem existing is fairly well known at this point. Finding them efficiently, I understand, may still be tricky. In particular, I believe the problem becomes much easier if there is one element that is indifferent towards (or equally happy with) all the elements of the other set.

A friend of a friend of mine (yes, this story is being told third hand, sorry) was sitting in a class at University F where the marriage problem was being discussed in the local language. When the lecturer turned to the case of an element with an indifferent set of preferences, he described her as the bitch attracted to all the men, switching to English for the single word. In retrospect, I suppose it could have been worse.  He could have decided to call the element the slut. This got me thinking. If I put on my man-hating hat for a moment, and decide that this indifferent element is male, what would I call him? Mormon or Muslim come to mind, but I don't want to insult religions that allow for one-sided polygamy for the purposes of this exercise. Serial rapist, I suppose, but that is a classification of someone convicted (or at least accused) of a crime, not a casual insult. Don Juan has a positive connotation to it, as does player. I am again shocked at how surprisingly hard it is to condemn a man for the same sexual behavior that would easily get a woman labeled as slut or bitch, or worse. English just doesn't have the words. Any ideas?

The Loan Shark

The discussion of the marriage problem got me thinking about other contexts in which it may or may not be appropriate to bring up gender in a classroom. A friend asked his students a question about violent loan sharks (the knee cap breaking kind) and incentives for repayment of small loans. As the class was about microcredit, where most of the participants are female, and from a general cultural practice in this department to use the female pronoun for problems, my friend used she to refer to the lendee. Upon showing this problem to a colleague, the colleague suggested that my friend change the gender of the pronoun used, under the general principal that, as stated, the problem evoked violence against women in a way that was possibly distasteful. Since part of the point of this problem was to examine the societal benefits and detriments of the proposed loan shark situation, my friend let the wording stand. Unlike the previous situation, the use of gender in this context is not completely gratuitous. The reality of microcredit often is that women take on the responsibility and the associated risks of the loans they take out for their families, though the potential violence faced in microcredit is different than that of the loan shark situation described, who would probably have a mostly male clientele. It makes me wonder.

The New York Times

My partner found an interesting blog post attempting to study how men and women are treated in the New York Times. It looks at the relative frequency of words used in sentences about men versus women in the New York Times, during the week of Feb 27-Mar 6, 2013. (The full description of the methodology, as well as parts of the code used to do the analysis can be found in the post.) The results are fascinating disturbing unsurprising.

Male words
Ratio Male Female Word
11.2 72 02 prime
10.8 70 02 baseball
9.5 92 03 official
9.5 61 02 capital
9.5 61 02 governor
5.8 75 04 fans
5.3 120 07 minister
5.3 51 03 sequester
5.2 118 07 league
4.5 58 04 failed
4.4 57 04 cardinals
4.2 54 04 finance
4.0 78 06 reporters
3.9 50 04 winning
3.8 73 06 finally
3.6 116 10 players
3.5 56 05 acknowledged
3.5 67 06 address
3.4 66 06 attack
3.3 108 10 opposition
3.3 54 05 rest
3.3 53 05 camp
3.2 52 05 costs
3.1 91 09 goal
3.1 50 05 crowd
3.0 118 12 bank
2.9 57 06 referring
2.9 66 07 sports
2.9 56 06 surgery
2.9 56 06 missed
2.8 55 06 pressure
2.8 64 07 teammates
2.8 91 10 economy
2.8 54 06 release
2.7 123 14 pope
2.7 130 15 meeting
2.6 84 10 victory
2.6 58 07 veteran
2.5 226 28 political
2.5 104 13 spending
2.5 64 08 effect
2.5 56 07 spend
2.5 72 09 continue
2.5 95 12 foreign
2.4 71 09 injury
2.4 94 12 election
2.4 78 10 running
2.4 116 15 manager
2.4 54 07 elected
2.4 99 13 tax



Female words
Ratio Male Female Word
100.0 0 29 pregnant
100.0 0 17 husband's
51.6 1 16 suffrage
40.3 2 25 breast
12.9 4 16 gender
11.8 6 22 pregnancy
6.8 10 21 dresses
5.7 13 23 birth
5.5 13 22 memoir
4.8 25 37 baby
4.7 17 25 disease
4.6 14 20 interviewed
4.6 12 17 abortion
4.6 24 34 dress
4.5 23 32 married
4.3 12 16 activist
4.3 25 33 author
4.1 14 18 drama
3.9 30 36 hair
3.8 18 21 rape
3.6 24 27 dog
3.6 19 21 novel
3.5 99 108 children
3.4 16 17 statue
3.4 17 18 victim
3.4 51 53 cancer
3.3 41 42 violence
3.2 32 32 younger
3.2 20 20 festival
3.1 34 33 study
3.1 30 29 teacher
3.1 27 26 sex
3.1 43 41 fashion
3.1 20 19 opera
3.0 18 17 singing
3.0 62 57 child
2.8 23 20 wear
2.8 30 26 native
2.6 34 27 dance
2.6 29 23 graduated
2.5 33 26 writer
2.5 23 18 favor
2.5 41 32 eyes
2.5 22 17 becomes
2.5 47 36 kids
2.5 21 16 eat
2.4 29 22 domestic
2.4 29 22 traditional
2.4 77 58 parents
2.4 32 24 drug

The author sums it up best:

If your knowledge of men's and women's roles in society came just from reading last week's New York Times, you would think that men play sports and run the government. Women do feminine and domestic things.

As someone who used to read the NYTimes a lot, I'm not shocked by this revelation. Our brains (or at least my brain) pick up on these messages subconsciously. Our brains also pick up on a lot of subconscious messages that aren't actually there, or at least not supportable by the data. It's good to see this backed by numbers.

Two bits of Eggmus

Categories. Epsilon is really struggling with categories.

"Hot dog means sausage?"
"No, a hot dog is a type of sausage, but there are other types of sausage."

Epsilon, in his continued love of all things scary, is trying to figure out the difference between Dragons, and Demons and Giants and Monsters.

"Dragon means monster?"
"Giant means monster?"
"What's a monster?"

My partner, brilliant man that he is, pulled out our Monster Manuals, and pointed out different monsters and what they are called.

Epsilon, my sweet little boy, of course, wanted him to read ALL of it. They compromised on reading the "nice dragon book" for bedtime.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Whatever his confusion with categories, 3 year olds are really good at pattern recognition.

"Why do all the babies go out with their Mommies and not their Daddies?" Epsilon asked my partner when a string of women pushing baby carriages got onto the bus.

When my partner told me this, it struck me that I think I've seen one man pushing an under 2 in a stroller while not in the company of a woman in His Town. It's rare in My City, but not as shockingly rare. Biased sample, but it's what I have.

"Um, because sometimes they think they Daddies don't know how to be Daddies, so they go out with the Mommies instead," my partner stammered out.

Before this offends anyone, I should point out that "being a Daddy" in this context means what Epsilon knows his Daddy to be: The same as a mommy, but the nipples are harder to tweak. Also, Daddies are hairier and bigger.

As in the world of three year olds, questions tend to repeat themselves. We're trying to come up with a better answer for him next time he asks. We are open to suggestions.

Friday's Females

I was listening to This American Life this week. The first part of it involves comedian Tig Notaro's talking about her recent breast cancer diagnosis. Cancer's not funny, but in the hands of a skilled and introspective orator, it is an amazing and powerful story. She was scheduled to perform a few days after she was diagnosed, and, unsurprisingly, she didn't feel up to giving her prepared show. Instead, she gives an impromptu 30 minute performance, talking about her cancer. The full show is available at Louis CK's website for $5. About half of this performance is available for free on TAL's show. It's worth $5 for the extra 17 minutes of material.

Mathbabe linked to Effing Dykes recently. In particular, she linked to this post about women's bodies. If you don't know the original Whitman poem "I sing the body electric," spend some time with that poem. It is a beautiful declaration of love for the human form, done in, what now seems to be, a non titillating way, but was nonetheless  scandalous in the 1900's. When I first read it in college, it was amazing to me that somewhere, in the English language, there was a written document appreciating the human form without sexuallizing it, told, lovingly, from the point of view of a queer man. Effing Dykes does the same in her  post "The Body Electric," with a focus on women's bodies. I think it may be the most powerful statement I have read about bodies for a very long time.

To round out my Friday Fantasia on the female form, take a look at Jo(e)'s post. She has a series of naked photos of friends and colleagues, usually taken at conferences, though this is not. I love Jo(e)'s blog, and I love her (and her friends') frankness with their bodies.

One Billion Rising

I just heard about One Billion Rising, a new project by Eve Ensler, mother of the Vagina Monologues, and V-Day, if you don't know her by name. The first thing I thought was "Wow! Dance, Dance, Revolution! Literally!"

The second thing I thought was, I have to get the word out about this. The premise is that 1 in 3 women in the world being raped or sexually assaulted during their life time should be nothing short of a global atrocity. It is a call for a strike day on February 14, 2013, via dance. Find a friend, find a public place, leave work, and tell them why. Go dancing.

You'll probably hear more about this from me in the upcoming months. Spread the word.

A nice conversation

I was waiting in line with my fellow passengers at dawn, waiting for the plane to arrive. Mother of Teenagers, Traveling Businessman (male) and I, all being regular commuters on this route, were discussing different ways of getting to My City from His Town, and our favorite parts of each place, etc.

TB: Do you work in My City?
Me: Yes.
MoT: And your husband?
Me: He's a professor at University E. I'm a professor at University F, and get to fly back and forth each week.
MoT: That's a bit sexist!
TB: It is.
Me: Well, no. We've been living in this type of situation for a while, and we've tried a lot of combinations. We've found that he does better with single parenting, and I do better with traveling back and forth.
TB: Wow. What do teach?
Me: X
TB: I do safety and risk management. I don't need much X there.
MoT: My daughter studies X at University E.

The conversation went on. The fact that there are people out there in the world who will tell a woman when they think she is putting herself into a disadvantaged (if socially accepted) position in her family makes my week. The fact that a male was involved in pointing this out makes my month.

Things that make me sad

I know several professional women or female Phd candidates who keep making decisions to put their career behind that of their husband's, behind the perceived needs of the family. I don't think I can name a single case (in my small and biased sample) where the woman isn't convinced, or has eventually convinced herself that she is happy with her decision.

I can't sit easy with their comfort, because more women make the choice to prioritise their own career behind their partners and families than men do. Furthermore, fewer women make these choices in this country, where the last few decades has seen a lot of discussion about the importance of women not only in the workplace, but in highly demanding fields, than they did 50 years ago before this public discussion, or in other parts of the world where this discussion has yet to happen or take effect. I doubt there is anything fundamental about the womanness of my foremothers, nor of the womanness of my cohort abroad causing this difference.

It makes me think of the times when friends or family have been singled out by the police, or gotten rude service from a take out counter that is normally very good. It raises the question of whether the other person was having a bad day, or did they see something in the skin color? It is impossible to tell whether each interaction is a draw from the bad day distribution, or from the racist distribution. The only things that people who study these these things have been able to measure is that certain people get bad draws more often, and those people tend to belong to various minorities.

The public discussion about women's roles in the workplace has changed the underlying population distribution to less women being willing to sacrifice their careers for the needs of the family and to more men being willing to do the same. But the choice profiles for the two genders aren't even close. Each woman I know who leaves her professional job, or chooses not to finish her PhD, or makes decisions (with her family) that she should bear more of the burden for the family, is a draw from a distribution that isn't where I think it should be. I have no idea whether I can be truly happy for my friends' decisions, even if they seem happy with them, because I don't know where they stand in the distribution. This makes me sad.

This is what America looks like

I've been listening to selected speeches from the DNC off of Politico's website all day. It struck me that there seem to be an overwhelming number of women and minorities speaking. So I decided to count.

I took my list of speakers from here. Not counting the Presentation of Colors, Pledge of Allegiance, or the videos, and counting the Hispanic Caucus and the Women of the House of Representatives as one speaker each, I counted 54 separate speakers. Of which, 20 were female, 11 were African American, 13 were Asian, Hispanic or other, and 17 were white male.

So, actually, there were 37% female speakers (as opposed to 51% in the population), 20% African American (as opposed to 13 % nation wide), 24% Hispanic/Asian/Other (as opposed to 24.4% nationwide) and 31% white non-hispanic male (as opposed to 31.9% nation wide.) I'm not doing a count of gay speakers because that takes more effort than simple google searches of the names.

Wow. Okay, so women are a bit under represented and African Americans a bit over represented. But in general, this is what America looks like. A whole lot of women and minorities. Not so many white dudes. If every TV show and movie and book I read had a cast of characters that looked like this, I wouldn't feel like I somehow didn't belong in America. My darkness doesn't stand out in the crowd of speakers up there. Neither do my breasts.

This is not the Vagina Monologues. This is America. A representative sample. This is how (threateningly? joyously?) diverse we look like if we all stand up and get counted visibly. I feel like for the first time in my life I am actually seeing it in front of me. It makes me so happy, and almost proud.

I was going to write about the genderness of some of the speaches, and complain about why female speakers feel like they must identify with their roles as mothers/grandmothers/care-takers. On the flip side, I was going to laud Polis for opening with his role as a father. But you know... this realization has taken the wind out of whatever complaints I may have. I am going to bed a happy woman today.

Academia meets life... and stumbles

We are staying with a colleague of my partner and his family, while we wait for conference 3 to start next week. They are a lovely couple with a 2 (4?) body problem. He has been giving me some advice on how to fly in and out of the airport local to University E; she's been helping me deal with some Epsilon related errands in town. Their two kids love trains and princesses, which has been lovely for Epsilon, who has recently discovered the wonders of female singing Disney characters (he's loved trains for longer).

The kids are playing with the train tracks, while the adults chat over the final details of dinner preparation.

"So explain to me again your travel plans. When will you be settling into University E city," she asks.
I explain our complicated 5 country, 7 week tour. "We should be getting in around August 1, and then search for housing."
"And that's it then."
"Well, I leave for University F about a month later."
"And I assume Epsilon is going with you then?"

... Restate explanation. See last post. ... I must say, these two never question our decisions. In and of itself, this last question would pass without mention. But there is another person at the dinner table. A colleague of her's, in town for a conference. After a few unrelated exchanges, the conversation continues as follows:

"I hear you teach feminist theory. I'd like to ask your advice on a three week course segment," he says. The conversation continues with the three experts in the subject discussing course matter.

Bread and Roses

Today is International Women's Day. A day for "Take back the night" marches on college campuses across the US. This day always reminds me of my time with the women's movement when I lived abroad. Last month saw the passing of a friend and a leader of the movement there. She lived a long accomplished life, and had been ailing for several years. Her death is not unexpected. In fact, each of the last several times I went back to that country, I made it a point to see her. We both agreed that each visit was an unexpected gift given to both of us. She had a chance to meet my partner and Epsilon. For this I am very grateful.

This post will not be a tribute to her. My words cannot do her life justice. Instead, I mark this, my first International Women's Day without her with a few things that I think she would have enjoyed.

I start in song. ... Because you can't beat the Joan Baez/Mimi Farina combination for some things:

While you are listening, for your skimming pleasure, the history of this song in the Lawrence Textile Worker's Strike. While this happened after initial celebrations of a women's day of any sort had started in the US or world wide, its a historical touch point for the day, and what it means.

As with many women of her generation, my friend was educated as an afterthought. She wasn't enrolled in school until she was 7, and had to fight to go to college out of state. As an adult she was an influential columnist for a major newspaper. I think she would have been amused the following Peggy Seeger song.

I cannot think of today without dwelling on the contraception/abortion chaos of this election cycle. However, given my friend's generation and location, the thought of explaining the nuances of the "debate" to her is beyond me. However, if I step back from the details of it all, here's a message she would understand. (Source.)

Finally, and on a completely different note, the last time I saw her, as we were leaving, she commented on how much she would have loved to once experience leaves turning color, New England style. (Source: lokidude99)

You will be missed.

Wait, what's an issue again?

I've been trying all morning to compose a post about this new Catholic Contraception controversy. I'm tired (mostly for other reasons) and angry*, and failing to come up with something witty. So I'll just put up some links.


NPR had a nice piece on the history and legal issues surrounding women's right to the pill.

Rachel Maddow is, as usual, brilliant. Amish bus driver?

Obama's going to be announcing a change in his proposal in less than an hour. I don't understand the details of the change fully, but it'll be interesting.



*I'd taken it for granted that access to good contraception was a right won for me by my foremothers. I never thought this would actually be an issue again in my day, in the privileged parts of the country I live in.

Me: We have a lot of work to do.
Epsilon: No. Someone else work.

Long term impact

Once upon a time, a life-time ago, in land far far away, I wrote an op-ed piece about a local crime. It created a lot of hype and controversy because, among other things, being the bleeding heart that I am, I advocated a form of justice that took into account issues of class and opportunity when deciding a punishment.

Some feminist friends lauded me, others claimed I was soft hearted an hurt "the cause." I lost friendships over the article, which surprised me. Then the article was republished in a book, which surprised me even more. The years passed, and I moved onto my new life as a scientist.

Recently, two things happened that made me realize that while I've moved on, the op-ed is still part of the political conversation. One was a master's student contacting me for a copy of the article for a class essay. Another was a reference made by a friend who found out about the article in a political discussion with a group of people who are complete strangers to me.

I'm thrilled by these two little facts. I have hopes that I will write a scientific paper that will be relevant nearly 10 years after its first publication. But for something I wrote so long ago, as a non-expert in the relevant field, to still have impact... I almost don't care what is being said about the piece. The fact that it is still part of the conversation is enough.

To her credit

Okay, I can't resist.

Yes, that is Michele Bachman standing, and the other GOP candidates sitting.

The headline on Daily Kos?

"Republicans Pander to American Taliban"

Which is a bit extreme, but funny. Reminds me of my time with hard core communist comrades who would ask that I serve the food at meetings over a meal because "women are naturally better at these things."

Whatever else I have to say about her (none of which is nice) I have to give her credit for being able to function and put up with this shit at the same time.

Now I'm just confused

This came out of Herman Cain's mouth yesterday:

“I believe that life begins at conception and abortion, under no circumstances,” Cain told Morgan.  Pressed on if he would apply this same directive to his grandchildren, Cain candidly responded.

“It comes down to, it’s not the government’s role or anybody’s role to make that decision. Secondly, if you look at the statistical incidents, you’re not talking about that number. What I’m saying is it ultimately gets down to a choice that the family or that mother has to make. Not me as president, not some politician, not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decide. I shouldn’t have to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive issue.”

I'm sure he's not pro-choice. Or, if he is, he will remove it from his platform soon. But this was just hilarious. His summary of the pro-life movement's stand in this country is so spot on!

Update (10/21 12:20 pm):

ROFL!!!!!

CAIN: It would be an illegal abortion. Look, abortion should not be legal, that is clear, but if that family made a decision to break the law, that is that family’s decision, that’s all I’m trying to stay.

Messaging

The following is inspired by this post by I Blame the Patriarchy.

Unlike the discussion on the post, I make no claims as to all women being victims, and all men being oppressors. In fact, in the following story I have no desire to blame anyone, or more accurately, I have a desire to place blame on both parties (this concerns one man).

Both he and I were well aware of the risks of sex, and were both trying to be conscious of the messages we grew up with. Different messages tailored for our different 23rd chromosomes. And both of us tried and failed to overcome those messages.

Do the messages place one party at an advantage over the other? Yes. Does it hurt the billions of people who do not have the privilege or support to tackle this inequity? Yes. Does this make the majority of hetero sex rape? No. Is it reason for pause and to examine the meaning of consent? Yes. Can this new ideal of consent from equal positions be legislated or even morally mandated? I don't see a way to do so without treading on a host of other hard fought for rights.
At the end of the day, this has to be a personal journey for both parties to respect themselves and each other in a relationship. I realize that from an activist perspective, that is a cop-out stance. But I don't see another way.

-----

To every time I gave in a little
Because the condom was out of reach
Or my time of month was deemed safe.

To the discussion about using protection
In polyamorous love-making
That concluded in the negative,
Followed by the decision to doff my earings
Because they might poke someone.

I drink to your memory.

Shouldn't have gone there

There are some places in my history that I do not visit for reasons of my sanity. I went there last night, and I'm too exhausted now to think of anything else worth blogging about. The time with my family this weekend will do me good.

Do they haunt my dreams?

The poems of Suman,
The 10 ft by 10 ft squares of concrete,
the foundation for a family home.
Knowing those are the better abodes.

Taking my sister-in-law to an eviction site
to be fed chicken gristle, watching her realize
she's been given the better portions
according to the rules of hospitality.

And the faces of the girls I cannot write down:
trafficked or attempting suicide,
raped or running away.

Do they haunt my dreams?

The empowered woman - a professor -
who has to do all the child care and housework
though her husband earns less?

The white liberal raped in the southern US
by a black man. Should she bring charges?

The high school friend who runs away from home,
but really from the ghost of her mother's boyfriend,
the child molester.

Do they haunt my dreams?

For pity's sake! I'm a scientist now.
No.

Different enemies, same feminist

There's been a lot of talk recently about our post feminist world. See Skepchick, Isis , Emily Finke and others.

The crucial controversial comment is the following, made by Richard Dawkins

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

I hesitate to write this post. I'm afraid of offending women in the the two worlds I've lived in instead of being a bridge between the two experiences.

I spent > 2 years working with women like the stereotyped Muslima addressed by Mr. Dawkins. This week I read a story about a single mother in the city I used to work in who lived in such poverty that she would take home free samples of cough syrup from the local doctor's offices to flavor the staple starch she served her kids. She could afford no other ingredients other than this staple to feed them. Stories like this make me want to tear my heart out and give up on life.

I've lived the last several years in the US, where I've met a woman who've been propositioned by the man she was asking for a post doc position. Her advisor then tells her to calm down, "it's not as if she'd been raped." But if that's the standard, I have numerous family members and friends in this country who have been raped. If non-date rape is the only standard of "bad enough" you will accept, I can supply those as well. Not to mention having to call cops on abusive boyfriends of friends, being followed in cars while out walking at night with girlfriends. And don't even get me started on abortion. Before living for 2 years in a third world country, my experiences here made me despair about what progress feminism had made over the last several decades.

We have made progress. My struggle as a woman is not as hard as my mother's was. And I thank every woman who has fought and bled and died before me for this. But that does not mean that where we live now is a "post-feminist" world. My answer to Mr. Dawkins is that if he thinks that women in the developed world are not suffering violence like women in other parts of the world are, he has the wrong facts, and hasn't been reading the local newspapers. I can't, and won't argue with someone who has the wrong facts.

The irony of it all may be that I've had an easier time explaining to people in my parent's homeland that women are still oppressed in the west than to people in my homeland.

I started my work with the women's movement in my parent's homeland on the week that a major newspaper published an editorial about a new Barbie doll just released in the US. My colleagues wanted to know if women's movement in the US had been reduced to such triviality as arguing about the appropriateness of girl's dolls. I explained to them about the messages these dolls taught girls, that "math is hard, lets go shopping", and how this was the same issue as families in that country not wanting to educate their girl children. The message stuck.

The avatar of the violence and the brainwashing is different in the developing vs. the developed world. The extent is lower in the west, but only because my predecessors have worked so hard. And if we choose to lie back in comfort, pretending that they have won the battle for us, then we will do a great disservice to both the women in this country, and to those of the developing world. We will also make sure that our daughters will face a life harder than what our mothers faced.

City of Joy, and discussing penises

This is a wonderful interview I just heard about a women's support center being opened in DRC. It's being put together by V-Day, and other local organizations in the Congo. V-Day is an anti-Violence Against Women organization put together by Eve Ensler, the author of the Vagina Monologues. Something like this can never be successful without the help of the "other local organizations" but I don't have easy access to their websites, (if they exist), to give credit to them by name.

Domestic violence and rape activism was something I did in a pre-grad school incarnation. Stories like this warm my heart.

In my post entering graduate school life, Eve Ensler turned a lousy day into a great story.

There were a bunch of us sitting around after lunch in the lounge, trying to avoid grading, or our own homework, or whatever work we had lined up. Somehow the discussion turned to a public figure's pennis. (Don't ask me how.) The conversation bounced around the room, getting raunchier, as these conversations tend to, ... until I added to the discussion, at which point it screeched to a halt. I think everyone suddenly realized that there was a non-pennis wielding member of the department present, and I realized that I was the only such person in the room.

I went home feeling very dirty, and realizing that this was the first time in my career that I'd been made to feel unwelcome among my academic peers because of my gender. The obvious answer to my mental slump was to read the Vagina Monologues for the first time. When I later related my reaction to the incident to a friend who was at the discussion, I was met with a lack of understanding of why women needed a space to be able to talk about their sexual organs. After all, men don't need a separate space to talk about theirs. He wasn't able to explain the general discomfort in that room to my earlier comments either.

Did someone repeal Roe v. Wade without telling me?

I can't believe I'm writing this. I can't believe I've tagged this post "feminism." That degrades the issue. I can't believe this happened earlier this month. Indiana passed a law to ban federal money going non-hospital abortion providers. In simpler terms: Medicaid patients can't go to Planned Parenthood. Gah!

Instead of being as upset by this as I am, I can only think to give PP some money. I'd appreciate other ideas.

Okay, done being depressed. Rachel Maddow is much more clever about this than I can be. Watch this (esp. starting at about 1:30)