Le Conflit

Why not read about Conflict: The Woman and the Mother for a cursory, NYT synopsis of what I suspect this text actually contains. I definitely like the idea of a critique based on ecology, ethology and essentialism -- especially the latter since it is, from where I sit, the bane of popular feminism today. More on this once I actually lay my eyes on a translation of the text.

Anyway, I am happy enough with Badinter's closing quote, whatever The Times was trying to communicate with it. It's not often you hear such sentiments from feminists today:

"I’m a mediocre mother like the vast majority of women, because I’m human."

You're a Feminist, Boy!

Yesterday when I arrived for pick up of The Kid from his after school program, he wasn't in his usual spot in the library. Instead, I found him sitting quietly doing his homework in another classroom, supervised by an infamously strict male teacher and surrounded by other boys.

So, somewhat reflexively I asked, "Why are you all in here...did you guys get into trouble?"

"No," says he, "Joanna sent us away because she was having a talk with the girls... ONLY."

"Oh... sex ed?" I asked, confidently.

"No," he replied, "feminism."

Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit

Last year, some anonymous person cruelly sent me a gift subscription to perhaps one of the most trashy magazines in circulation. Priding myself in not being a huge consumer of pop culture, I now, weekly, have to fight the demon known as US magazine. And, sometimes, I am weak. For example, this week I learned that Gisele Bündchen not only didn't have to wear maternity clothes during pregnancy, she also didn't have any pain in childbirth. I think the exact quote is, "It didn't hurt a bit. Not in the slightest." What kind of cruel joke is this?

After two months as an L&D nurse, I can safely report that this representation is one for the books: as in, a non-reality... and just one more reason why the confusion of pop culture and feminism makes me squirm. 99.9% of woman have been officially alienated. Thanks, ladies.

p.s. I totally forgot about orgasmic birth. Though, a couple of weeks back, a patient's husband did mention it to me when she was in transition. That was, perhaps, the worst decision of that man's young life.

"Paid As Any Other Sickness"

That's right, institutional insurance plan for students, scholars, researchers and dependents. Yes, it is, in fact, a medical school. Read it and weep.

WE CARE Solar

If you want to take a position on child birth, consider this. If you want to talk about injustice and what it means to work for women, imagine. If you want to take on a women's rights issue, this is it:

"Maternal mortality worldwide accounts for more than half a million deaths a year...that's the same as one woman dying every minute of every day, and that's an outrage. That should never be happening."
Laura E. Stachel MD, MPH, Founder of WE CARE Solar.

WE CARE Solar "reduces maternal mortality in developing regions by providing health workers with reliable lighting, blood bank refrigeration and mobile communication using solar electricity."

This organization needs, and deserves, your support.

Dweebs and Assholes

Yesterday, after a very pleasant telephone conversation with my former PI (read:boss) who happens to be a successful MD, I related part of our conversation to The Partner.

"So, the Doc said to me, 'I don't like to hang out with other docs. They're all dweebs and assholes'."

After having sat through a very painful weekly Ob/Gyn Grand Rounds that very morning, lead by a particularly unbearable female doc, I remarked, "It's true. Even the women are assholes." The Partner smartly decided that this would be the title of my upcoming tome on feminism:

"Even the Women Are Assholes: The Unthinkable Thoughts of a Feminist."

Illustration credit, obviously, goes to the late, great Kurt Vonnegut.

Kandahar Treasure

"I heard a mother had lost her son due to a suicide bomber, and she got up to speak, and she said a beautiful thing. She said, “Whether it’s a Talib who’s being killed, an Afghan policeman who’s being killed, or an international army military person who is being killed, he leaves behind a mother, a sister or a daughter and/or a wife who mourns for him.”

So that saying was quite powerful in saying that women have this inclusive idea of security and owning peace. Stopping the killing for all... is reason enough for them to wage peace. You know, mothers feel the pain of human beings, and they’re calling for and they want this killing to stop." Rangina Hamidi. ~ Kandahar Treasure

The Feminist Conundrum

"So do you have men in other rooms studyin' about theirselves?"

"Not necessary. Men are already studied in every kind of study. Women have been forced to study great men ---"

"Maybe that's the problem... Ditch great people! Erase the bastards... from books and stuff. Just do folks - regular ones - the failures." Snowman (1999)

The Feminist's Son

The Kid asked if I wanted to hear a little ditty some boys at school had created.
"Sure," I said.
"Well," says he, "It goes, I'll give you a nickle to tickle my pickle."
"Oh, that's not right..."
"I know," he replied, "I think it would be more like a hundred dollars."

Princess Leia: Post-Feminist Icon.

This review of Carrie Fisher's new book has perhaps the funniest quote I've read in a long time: "In a book full of weirdos, he [George Lucas] emerges as possibly the strangest of all. He wouldn’t let Ms. Fisher wear a bra under her Princess Leia shift because, as he patiently explained to her, there is no underwear in space: according to Lucas-physics, if you were to wear a bra in a weightless environment, your bra would strangle you." Fisher also claims that Lucas ruined her life.

Psssst...Do Something!

Lately You're Forgotten Here

"There was something so valuable about what happened when one became a mother. For me it was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me. . . . Liberating because the demands that children make are not the demands of a normal ‘other.’ The children’s demands on me were things that nobody ever asked me to do. To be a good manager. To have a sense of humor. To deliver something that somebody could use. And they were not interested in all the things that other people were interested in, like what I was wearing or if I were sensual. . . . Somehow all of the baggage that I had accumulated as a person about what was valuable just fell away. I could not only be me -– whatever that was -– but somebody actually needed me to be that.

. . . If you listen to your children, somehow you are able to free yourself from baggage and vanity and all sorts of things, and deliver a better self, one that you like. The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want." - Toni Morrison.

More from mothers because they are heroic.

Synchronicity

We spent the other night watching some of The Olympics with The Kid. Archery, table tennis, track and field, BMX racing, and a little synchronized swimming. "Boys don't do this sport, do they?" he asked. Then, thoughtfully, "I don't mean it as an insult...I think it's just because girls are more agreeable." ? ? ?

Contraception as Abortion

Interesting. I'm not totally sure what exactly what HHS-45-CFR* entails. From my reading we're dealing with the federal government withholding funding from any organization that "discriminates" against a healthcare professional that refuses to administer an abortificant. The part that's causing bristling is that HHS has expanded the latter terminology to include emergency contraception (bka "the morning after pill"). Most of us know that EC does nothing but provide, ahem, emergency contraception (imagine that) with higher doses of the same hormones (estrogens and/or progestins) found in typical contraceptives. Taken after unprotected sex, high hormonal doses can prevent pregnancy. But, basically, they're powerless against pregnancy that has already occurred. So, that's disturbing -- using an umbrella to define abortion in order to make it inclusive of contraception. It's also disturbing that there are funds out there potentially withheld from important reproductive services, impinging on certain critical women's rights.

With our broad lens, it looks to be a way to protect individuals with certain moral positions on abortion from discrimination; namely those with personal or religious stances against it. This puts the rest of us in a pretty tricky position -- because fighting for the right is exactly the same ideological battle. Do we think that those individuals who have an ethical stance against abortion should not be allowed to work in clinics where abortions are performed? (Remember, this could also very easily be the very clinic where babies are born.) I don't think so. It would be the same as saying we can't work in L&D because we support and are willing to participate in termination or for that matter, contraception. We don't want such divisions.

I want to acknowledge that defining abortion by conscience absolutely sets a dangerous precedent for policy: when we start defining "life" as implantation, there are some very real consequences that darken our horizon. It's a slippery slope, for sure. I just worry about accepting all of the hullabaloo caused by commentary without going back to the source and making critical and thoughtful statements of our own. We need to remember that sometimes "critical" commentary isn't critical (as in thinking outside of the box), but critical, (as in reactionary). I encourage everyone to read the HHS statement before running off, pitchforks raised, for the lynching.

~ If you want a really straight-forward women's right issue to be pissed about, look at this.
Thanks to slight of hand by Senator David Vitter (R-La.) the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, initially meant to provide "new programs, improved facilities and funding for the Indian Health Services system which serves about 1.9 million people nationwide," now explicitly restricts abortions under IHS programs. That's a huge problem. Apparently, Vitter's handiwork is nothing more than a reiteration of the Hyde Amendment which has been under scrutiny and re-evaluated and fiddled with practically every year for the past thirty + years. (That's the one that bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortions for low-income women.)

*Thanks to fellow MEPN, the lovely and brilliant Nicole, for alerting CN to this development.

Wetlands

This book is garnering a lot of attention. Based upon the scatological component, it is of no great surprise that Germans* have become fascinated by it. In any event, for some odd reason, it’s being billed as a seminal literary moment for modern feminism. In Monday’s NYT, the book and its author, Charlotte Roche, received front page billing, calling Wetlands a “cri de coeur against the oppression of a waxed, shaved, douched and otherwise sanitized women’s world.”

Perhaps the most striking notion about the book and its candid detail of the 18 year-old heroine’s sexuality, is that the graphic discussion of overt - and apparently, in this case, unhygienic sex practices - is being incorporated into the modern playbook of feminist principles. (A comparable example of this "frankness" being the box office success of Sex in the City.) Apparently Feuchtgebiete includes discussions of douching - or not - hemorrhoids, anal sex, and avocado pits as a tool of female gratification.

It's troubling, the lack of consideration of the largely vacuous nature of these pieces being sold as empowering to women -- and the potential consequence of such characterizations. But at least The Times article looks to German writer and feminist Ingrid Kolb to sum up the intense interest in the book: “When a woman breaks a taboo, it is automatically incorporated into the feminism debate, whether it really belongs there or not.” Touché.

*Don’t blame me for that stereotype; blame that late, great Alan Dundes, or at least thank him for documenting it.

Making a Mother

The documentary The Business of Being Born (Rikki Lake & Abby Epstein) has been made available for viewing online. That's nice. What's not so nice is the message. I wanted to like this movie, I really did. But as my partner and I sat down to watch, it was pretty clear within the first two minutes that all of the positive popular press this movie has received has been seriously undeserved, and worse, uncritical. (A crucial exception is this Slate piece.) Not only did I not like this movie for its dubious historical, epidemiological and professional commentary on birth in the United States, I also didn't like that it was horribly elitist, classist and, yes, racist. This in all of the worst ways that information packaged for general consumption can be: coercively.

The underlying message of the film is that the right birth is a normal birth (the film’s term, not mine) and a normal birth is one that happens at home, unmedicated and without any intervention. There was absolutely no call to concern for women with no access to insurance or perinatal care, women with pre-existing conditions, women of advanced age or with high risk pregnancies, teen moms, et al. Basically, anyone that didn’t fit the bill of perfect health and fall into the category of upper-middle class American woman, was bound for the label of “bad mother”. That is shameful.

My partner referred to it as the NY/LA “boutique” image of the perfect childbirth. Of course, we all want women to have this intervention-free option. But for some of us, there may not be the luxury of an uncomplicated pregnancy and childbirth. And that can make us feel like we've lost control. It became pretty clear by Rikki's third hat change and overly dramatic forward-leaning, finger chapelling attentiveness, that this movie was primarily about women trying to either regain or maintain that control. Not until I was 1 hour and 9 minutes into the movie did I realize that it was not about control of one’s own childbirth experience, as the film lauds, but about control of other women and their experience. Sadly, 'expert' clinicians are also used to meet this end. At one point in the film, Dr. Michel Odent (the OB who also believes men should not be present at childbirth) makes the claim that when a woman gives birth by “caesarean section she does not release [the natural] flow of "love hormones" [oxitocin], so she is a different woman than if she had given birth naturally...and the first contact between mother and baby is different.” Here Odent compares women to monkeys who will reject their babies if delivered by c-section. Upon hearing this, I quite astonished myself and my poor partner, by bursting into tears.

Childbirth is a wonderful, moving, emotional, life-changing event for every woman; the amazing birth footage in this documentary attests to that. What is worrisome, however, is the shocking amount of misinformation the film conveys about childbirth, accompanied by a self-affirming (and often righteous) adamance about the importance of the “right” birth and becoming the “right” kind of mother. This is interspersed with an extreme lack of criticality in regard to the 'big picture' of various practices by those interviewed, including women, social scientists and health care providers. (I should say here that there was a striking absence of L&D nurses in this movie. Not one was interviewed!). Neither was there even a smattering of sympathy for women who have births that don’t go as planned. As a twenty-five year-old first time mom, I had a complicated pregnancy and The Kid was, in the end - thankfully - delivered safely to my arms by cesarean section. But I have known women who have had horrifically complicated pregnancies necessitating close monitoring of both mom and baby; mothers who have had perfectly normal pregnancies and lost their babies in what seemed to begin as an uncomplicated birth; husbands and children who have lost their wives and mothers because of unforeseen problems.

The empowerment of women is not as simple as demedicalizing childbirth. But it is as simple as avoiding shaming women into taking chances for fear of being a “bad mother.” Empowering women doesn't mean demanding we all make the same choices and become the same kinds of mothers; it means allowing us to empower ourselves to become the mothers we choose to be.

Two thank-yous: First, to the nurse midwife Cara Muhlhahn who in the movie describes her own difficult first childbirth, and of whom we get to see footage as she goes into the pain-induced dementia of despising everyone around her. It’s the best footage in the entire movie. And to all of the good docs and nurses out there who have blogged more accurate information about childbirth practices in the United States, inclusive - and even encouraging - of home birth.

Va-va-varoom!

I have a pretty great partner. Monday, he got me this hard to find Palace record. Tuesday he rented another classic film noir which was the most far-out movie experience I've had in a while. Today, aware of my interest in chronicling feminism, he sent me this piece by Rebecca Walker, estranged daughter of Alice, with the accompanying message: Hi Sweets, here is the article about Alice Walker's daughter that I was mentioning to you....It is sad article overall, but there are some interesting asides about the ideological struggle to keep feminism pure despite real world issues like motherhood, etc. Am I lucky or what? What better than a man who understands the contradictions of feminism?

~ Postscript: On her blog, Walker had link to this piece, which once again demonstrates the contradictions.

No, You Are Not Fat

Can we just get this straight? There is a cultural obsession with body image and I am convinced it goes hand-in-hand with the feminism problem. And I don't mean that feminism can solve it, I mean that modern expectations of/for women exacerbate it. Women around me lately seem totally obsessed. I, too, am guilty of said preoccupation from time to time.

Granted, circus girls look a lot like this, which is to say circus bodies are not traditionally feminine nor particularly skinny. And that's a big change for some. But other women around me seem even more singularly-minded. Today alone (it's noon) I've heard one woman, weighing maybe 90 pounds soaking wet, say she was having a "juice" for lunch "because I have to watch my calories" (?) while another of similar proportion told me, "All I do is eat. Look at me." I wanted to say, "I can hardly see you."

Unless you are suffering from morbid obesity, which is an entirely different physiological problem, don't even ask me, because no, I don't think you are fat and, no, I don't want to argue with you all of your dissatisfactions with your body.

To be frank, that kind of discussion is incredibly punishing to all of the other women around you.

~ Postscript: the picture above is of Laverie Vallee née Cooper, bka Charmion (1875-1949), an American vaudeville trapeze artist and strongwoman, best known for her act during which she disrobed on the static trapeze (down to her leotard). You can see the act here, in a short film made by Thomas Edison (1901).

ART Goes to Hollywood

I suppose the time has come to weigh in on all of the hype over the new, weirdly successful, movie Baby Mama. I must be missing something. I have even seen this movie billed as the ultimate in Hollywood feminism. Is that perspective some kind of joke or has feminism gone so far astray that having a successful movie with two female leads has become a coup, despite the male screen writer and wickedly misogynistic content? Clearly, the feminism question is worthy of its own attention, so let’s just have a very brief go at the movie.

The title. Reproductive technologies are available, largely, to white, upper-class Americans. The idea of co-opting traditionally disparaging terminology from another social and ethnic group to whom that technology is generally not available in order to nab the appropriate “blue collar” (read: white trash) portrayal of one of the leads is something of a pc nightmare.

And more generally, does the idea of a middle-aged, single, career-oriented woman looking for another woman - younger, dumber, poorer - to act as a surrogate in order that the successful woman have the pinnacle female trophy -- a child -- sound any alarms? It should.

When feminism starts recognizing the dilemma it has created for women to see either maternity or modernity as a trap -- maybe it will be able to reconcile the two rather than insist that we accept both.

~Postscript: I'm not the only one. When Chick Flicks Get Knocked-Up, Alissa Quart.