Category Archives: Uncategorized
Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man’s Escape From the Crowd by Thomas Chatterton Williams (2010).
Thomas Chatterton Williams has written a memoir with a theme about losing his cool to be who he more honestly is. He had to give up some daunting style, break from peer pressure and brand named accessories. He had to give up hiding his talents. He came to realize he was living a media-induced style and he had taken it in hook, line, and sinker.
We all know the power of music and media. Consider the Sixties’ hippies grooving to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles. The Graduate and Easy Rider, trying to make sense of the Republicans and Democrats, the first Moon Walk and the Vietnam War.
Young people are still trying to makes sense of Republicans and Democrats, the Moon Walk is a dance move perfected by Michael Jackson (may he rest in peace), military personnel are entrenched in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hip hop lyrics too often shun, shame and disparage women and gay people. The lyrics idealize violence, staying high, and money. Lots and lots of money.
Williams describes his middle class New Jersey neighborhood, his educated and working parents whose bi-racial marriage has lasted, the basketball, his first love, the sex at his prom party. He talks about his peers who get pregnant, peers who are abusers of women, other friends who are hooked on drugs. He writes about the white kid who is beaten for attitude on the basketball court. He writes about the kids who decide they are too cool for school; he even blew his first year at Georgetown University because he was. One day he realizes the white kids are listening to the same music he has been listening to and they hear the great rhythms and the incredible verbal agility. He recognizes those kids hear irony when he has been hearing a code to live by. But so many of the youth of his neighborhood were in jail, pregnant, or cared more about drugs than living.
This is a young black man’s memoir. He is the child of a white working mother and black intellectual father, middle class, great at sports and school. He trades in his baggy pants and athletic clothes. His father buys him a suit, some shirts and ties. He finishes his undergraduate degree. The friend who studied with him and his father also graduated but no one else did. I hear the power of the media— black youth become caricatures of lyrics just as young women become anorexic embodiments of photo-shopped portraits of models. So much has been written about them—now we hear about the black kids who are equally bamboozled into buying into a self-defeating storyline.
Williams offers some powerful insight:
It is more accurate to say, however, that the mood of black culture doesn’t need to change into something wholly new so much as it must simply find a way to reclaim what it once had. One of the most fascinating paradoxes the student of black history ever observes, as well as a tremendous justification for black pride, is the extent to which this culture, against all likelihood, has customarily embodied a joyful, soulful, affirming approach to life and not a spiritually bankrupt or self-defeating one. It is only very recently–basically within my brother’s lifetime, which is to say, the three and a half decades of the hip-hop era or, roughly, the post-Civil Rights era–that this has, in the main, ceased to be the case. In other words, it is only after the tremendous civil-rights victories of the ’60s, only after desegregation, only after affirmative action that black America has become so militantly provincial and wildly nihilistic (214).
Williams found his way to freedom. We need to understand what he is saying, what he is daring to say, and get the word out to bring back beloved community and joy.
The Mistress’s Daughter by A. M. Homes (2007) and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeannette Winterson (2012)
Here are two memoirs by adopted women about searching for identity. They are both professional fiction writers. I was drawn to their books because I think we all seek to understand why we are as we are and we look to our childhood and of course to our parents for clues. We try to unfurl our context of geographic location, historic events before and during our lifetime, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, body size, shape and abilities or disabilities. You know, all the things that make us the same or different. Adoption adds an entire extra layer of mystery and surprise to this sense of self and integration of all the elements of who we are.
Until about twenty years ago adoption was secretive and birth records were sealed. Babies were “matched” to look like the adoptive parents and some kids were not told they were adopted. Social services opened the adoption procedures to provide more information for birth givers, adoptees and adoptive parents. The triad could be far healthier in the light of truth. Still, the daydreams of children about their birth parents continue to thrive. Many kids wonder, “When will my real parents come and get me?” A. M. Homes fantasized about being the daughter of Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. Her adoptive home was literary, artistic and progressive, and so too her imagination.
Jeannette Winterson grew up under the spell of the Pentecostal. She was left out on the stoop all night or beaten for being incorrigible, and she walked miles to church six nights a week. She was forbidden books, so learned to read swiftly in the outhouse or anywhere she could be out of Mrs. Winterson’s wrath. And wrath there seemed to be plenty of. Her childhood home in Manchester, England was cold—physically and emotionally. She left Mrs. Winterson behind and went to college, with her education she also got her freedom. She wanted to write of “experience andexperiment,” of “the observed and the imagined”(p.3) as men could. Her novels provoke and prod, defy gender (Written on the Body) and twist history and philosophy into lyrical dimensions (Passion and Sexing the Cherry). These novels are mystifying and erotically teasing. There are many more novels and essays; these three are the brightest in my memory.
Winterson reveals in an interview with Stuart Jefferies for The Guardian Books that she came upon records that revealed she had initially been with her birth giver for months before she was adopted. This information provoked her to realize that not knowing this detail of her adoption “leaked” into her fiction. She now sees some of her seductive scenes toward lovers as actually scenes of searching for her lost birth giver (Feb. 21, 2010).
A.M. Homes is a novelist and she has little patience for memoir, even distain (“I’m completely opposed to them,” she says in an interview for New York Magazine). Her heart is in her fiction, but she was convinced to write The Mistress’s Daughter. When she is thirty a message arrives via a lawyer that her birth giver would like to meet her. Homes had never been compelled to initiate a search but she is propelled after meeting her birth mother into several years of attending to her birth origins. She meets the alleged father as well. After publication of the memoir he denies the DNA test — the results of which he never shared, though he demanded the test — was positive. Homes becomes obsessed with genealogy—of all four of her parents—and spends hours and years researching, she even hires research assistants, trying to connect the dots of ancestry. Her birth and adoptive parental legacies become intertwined and she comes to understand their designs are within her.
Boris Kachka asks Homes, in the New York Magazine interview, “How much did you wonder what it would have been like to grow up with your birth parents?” Homes replies, “I don’t know that I would have survived growing up with my biological mother. She claimed my father wanted to adopt me, but I think it would have been like Cinderella, in that they’d never let me out of the kitchen” (April 1, 2007).
In a question that became the title of Winterson’s memoir, Mrs. Winterson asked Jeannette, “Why be happy when you could be normal?” And Jeannette comes to understand:
“Happy endings are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future.
My mother tried to throw me clear of her own wreckage and I landed in a place as unlikely as any she could have imagined for me” (p.225).
We raise our mothers (remember Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel), or do our mothers raise us? My own mother (biological) looked at my sister and me once, adults by then, and asked, “Where did you two come from?”
As an adoptive mom I find it utterly freeing to love my kids for just who they are, no ancestors to compare or contrast with. I hope to give them the opportunity to be fully who they can be. I get to open the doors—they must walk through them.
As any mother would if she could.
Oddly Normal: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality. A Memoir. John Schwartz (2012)
Some memoirs by journalists are eerily calm, kind of dispassionate and therefore credible for a wide audience. Schwartz writes for the big newsrooms: The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek. He used all his skills to interview and research, sort out fact from fiction, rumor from real about adolescent and gay identity development. But here, in memoir, the objective and fair professional writer has to contend with the real live emotional Dad that he is. It works, especially as we realize his wife, Jeanne, is on the ground raising their three kids while John is away covering national news. This book is packed with good information about growing up gay (or even maybe gay) as well as for all parents with kids who are just a bit more creative, insightful, impatient, or “squirrely” as Schwartz calls some of his son’s behavior. Those of us who grew up in the heteronormative (even though we didn’t know this word) world being ‘gay as a Christmas tree’ (who knew we were that cheerful and decorative!) without any support from teachers or bewildered parents, have to envy the possibilities for kids these days. Luckily, we’ve come a long way in a few decades.
The Schwartz family surround their son, Joe, with fabulous feather boas, marvelous Barbies, colorful clothing and a real positive accepting attitude toward his gender bending. The kid does well; he is a reader and a conversationalist until he bumps into inflexible teachers, especially the bullying kind. The stories of Jeanne, John and school staff and administrators negotiating safe learning spaces for a kid with idiosyncrasies, finally diagnosed as “Pervasive Developmental Disorder—Not Otherwise Specified” (p.171) make me “squirrely.”
The public school system the Schwartz family kids were in was really a good one. They work so hard to negotiate the political and economic networks of their public school, respectfully. Maybe the Schwartz team was too respectful and patient. I found myself yelling (in my head) “Walk AWAY! Get Him out of there! HOMESCHOOL THIS GUY!”
Despite all this love, attention, acceptance, facilitation of learning, psychological and learning support—teasing drove thirteen year old Joe to gather pills and prepare to cut his wrists.
Mom appeared just in time.
We know this story. Forty years ago my Southern cousin’s gun went off as he ascended the stairs to his room after his first days at college. His parents thought it an accident but he knew guns and we knew he had a secret. Talk about ghosts in the closet. Many of us have them. Many of us just escaped—as Joe did.
Schwartz covers gay history, sexology, learning differences, the autism spectrum, the debates about the spectrum, biology, out entertainers, psychology, and legal issues. In fact he covers just about everything I cover in my gender studies syllabus. He’s even got pages of resources.
The heartbreak here is that too many environments are divisive for youth, still treacherous for kids who are different or quirky. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” sings Kelly Clarkson. But why should middle school be so tumultuous? What does this say about our culture?
It’s hopeful that professionals in psychology and other fields, are declaring LGBT kids healthy, Glee, The Ellen Show, and other prime time television shows are offering glimpses of gay as happy rather than epically tragic. The 2012 elections voted in our first openly gay U. S. Senator. Tammy Baldwin stands on the shoulders of Harvey Milk and Barney Frank, also gay “firsts” in government.
And the final pages of Schwartz’s memoir are heartwarming. He describes an incident when Joe was being questioned about his choice of purple for his hair by a jock. Another jock intercedes and shouts, “He can dye his hair hot fucking pink if he wants!” The two boys walked out of the locker room, arguing with each other about Joe’s hair. Joseph turned to the boy he shared a locker with and said, “That was surreal” (p.225).
The new thinking we all must do is about teaching our boys the full spectrum of being men. I want to know why we teach our girls and women to protect themselves from rape and we teach our gay, lesbian and trans youth to protect themselves from homophobic verbal and physical violence? We teach victims to protect themselves, but we don’t do enough to stop the perpetrators in the first place. I want that jock who stood up for Joe to start the new curriculum and teach boys to be men who feel strong and secure in who they are so they respect and accept who others are.
Love isn’t enough to keep our kids strong and healthy. There are too many detractors, too many voices contradicting the love. “The haters are my motivators,” Ellen DeGeneres says about the Million Mom protest against her role as a JCPenny spokesperson (Feb 7, 2012, The Ellen Show). She finishes her five minute declaration with, “Here are the values I stand for: honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated and helping those in need. To me those are traditional values. That’s what I stand for.”
I never thought I’d advocate for traditional values, never has “normal” seemed anything but boring. After reading about Jeanne and John Schwartz’ advocacy for their son and reading Joe’s short story offered as the last chapter about a little boy who offers chocolate, flowers and a poem to a boy and is rejected, only to have another boy approach him with the same items, I have to admit, I’m feeling, well, oddly normal. How about you?
My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man’s Odyssey by Charles Rowan Beye (2012)
I usually find memoir more fascinating than fiction. My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man’s Odyssey is no exception. I heard a piece on NPR about this book and called the bookstore immediately; the number is in my cell’s emergency contacts. Some people order food-to-go—I call in for books.
Charles Rowan Beye, now in his eighties, writes about the innumerable friendships, fun and utter sexual pleasures of life. There are two other main branches of Beye’s tree of life (besides sex): family and teaching.
I have come to expect tragedy and angst, disaster and HIV diagnoses when reading memoir by gay men. Beye is a healthy, retired professor of Classical Greek. He writes of his emotional growth, turmoil, and development as a man, a father, and a husband (to two wives and a husband). He scrutinizes his experiences, acknowledges his failings and illustrates the power of memoir for the writer as he reveals understandings found in hindsight.
Beye’s professorial tone is evident in his slightly stilted sentence structure as well as in the details he selects about his life long coming of age. Everything he includes in this work has a purpose. There are moral, sexual, and educational points throughout. As a teenager he found that his gregarious nature, humor and fellatio thwarted danger, especially from town bullies. Beye discovered a deep longing in men for sexual satisfaction and expression, even in the smallest towns of Iowa where he spent his youth. Beye was endowed with money as well as an insatiable libido. He had public and boarding school experiences so he learned early on how to cross the economic and social borders. Despite my anxiety that some great harm would suddenly occur during encounters in cities or in bars deep in the depths of Iowan cornfields, none did. He led a charmed life because he is so charming.
The sexual content is a lot of fun and the writing about it is filled with intention. I’m not just being a voyeuristic when I say this. Well, maybe a little… Beye explains in the introduction, “I mention the sex act only because it reflects in some way on the psychology or life circumstances of one of the two people involved” (11).
Beye found sexual explorations with men engaging and exciting. He married women twice in efforts to fulfill the heteronormative social contract and establish a career as an academic. He and his second wife had four children before the Stonewall riots in June of 1969 made the general population aware that gay people were also seeking liberation from unjust harassment by police or the public. There was a national awakening: Blacks, Women, Vietnam and Queers wanted change.
But Beye wasn’t among the street kids and queens on Christopher Street those hot June nights. He didn’t care for Provincetown and the Castro in San Francisco was too much. His circle included Athens, Rome, Brookline, New York City and the home life he created for his kids wherever they were. He astounded the Greek and Italian women when he cooked and cleaned and got the kids to school during his sabbatical stays. No Nellie Queen nor Butch Bear he. He missed the protests because he was working, cooking, taking care of house and kids. He had to play the straight guy, the wonderful neighbor, the chair of the department.
I always wondered how my gay boy friends could have encounters and not get tangled up emotionally. I aspired to this behavior with no luck at all. I always felt a responsibility or found myself taunted by the puritan refrain “you made your bed now you have to lie in it.” I never figured out how to just leap out of hot sheets and start a new day without commitment. The joke, “What does a lesbian bring on the second date? A moving truck!” was too true among my peers. The fact that women are considered sluts or whores when having sex for fun didn’t necessarily hold me back. It was more a lack of time, creativity, and probably courage. I just couldn’t figure out how to slip a quickie in to my day so easily. To think I could have inspired Raunch Culture decades earlier than those Ariel Levy describes in Female Chauvinist Pigs—the gay girl version! Oh, I could have been a contender if I had lived in a city, had more to drink, gone off with more cutie-pies.
A lifetime is not too long to wait for one’s prince or princess. After his second wife and he filed for divorce, with the kids pretty well on their way, career established and retirement just ahead, Mr. Right arrives. There are only a few pages commenting on this bliss of his third marriage. They legally married after being together for eighteen years and one hundred and forty-four days. The book ends in this glow of contentment.
My eyes popped a few time during some particularly engaging sexual encounters and one could romp with Beye and call it a good book about growing up gay in the Midwest Forties and a queer in a long career in Greek Classicism. However, the theme I found equally, if not more, captivating was the professor learning from his students. Four such life-altering events anchor the narrative. Each epiphany involved particularly smart students and insight he discovered through coursework and each resulted in a book, which was terrific for tenure and new job opportunities. The final epiphany occurred while he was the Distinguished Professor of Classics at Lehman College, and as far as I can tell, resulted in this memoir rather than another academic tome. After a forty-year career in the classics Beye met the diverse youth of the Bronx: contemporary society in the epic tradition. Beye lost his verve for the classics as he worked with students struggling to construct meaningful lives in tragic surroundings. The glorification of war and the idealization of manipulation and devastation no longer held any glory. “The literature of antiquity is all seen from the perspective of the ruling class; its characters are exploiters, controllers, conquerors” (240), Beye concedes.
This Odyssey includes no super sexy superheroes (despite how handsome Beye’s photos). However, a teacher who is also a learner is a true hero to me. Beye learns constantly from his students and finally comes to see the wreckage of power and betrayal (true epic formula) in contemporary social dynamics among students and communities. This realization topples his love of the ancient perspective and heightens his awareness of his own fallacies and feats. Epic indeed.
Books by Charles Rowan Beye
- Odysseus: A Life
- The Iliad, the Odyssey and the Epic Tradition
- Ancient Greek Literature and Society
- Ancient Epic Poetry: Homer, Apollonius, Virgil
- La tragedia greca: guida storica e critica
- Ancient Greek society and literature
- My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man’s Odyssey
HOW TO BE A WOMAN by Caitlin Moran (2011)
HOW TO BE A WOMAN by Caitlin Moran (2011)
I’ve always found it befuddling to be a woman. So I am grateful British writer Caitlin Moran has finally explained it in How to Be A Woman. She is also a feminist, and even though she gives in to the request for a sound byte definition on television (see BBC, 5 Minutes with Caitlin Moran, May 4, 2012) she takes her time to fully illuminate the possibilities of living feminism in her memoir-manifesto.
There was a time when I blamed the patriarchy for everything –the economy, sexism, racism, gender rules and the incredible lack of imagination we have about how we act (being gendered, sexually oriented, and racialized.) Then my son arrived. I loved and adored this new male in the house. I was determined to raise my boy and my girl to change the world, and define their own selves rather than be defined by patriarchy. Or as author and activist bell hooks says all in one exhale, “the white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy.”
As I see it, the burst of women’s rights activism in the Seventies and the legal efforts of the Eighties led many women to think all was well for womanhood. Feminism has had a hard time gaining any momentum over the last few decades. Rush Limbaugh, the epitome of archaic patriarchy, condemns women who ask for justice as “FemiNazis.” His extremism, and the media misconstruing the efforts of a few zealous women using “hegemony” in every other sentence, turned off a lot of girls. The academy lassoed feminism into aloof theory, which only further alienated women on the ground.
In the US the extreme right males who dare to assume their authority in these matters have the topic of reproductive rights locked down. Sandra Fluke brought this to our attention when she tried to testify before the all male House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the need for insurance coverage for birth control. Limbaugh rushed to defile her (February 2012). Despite even these very immediate issues, few young women will embrace the F-ism word.
Moran wants a kick-ass Feminism for all humans. Her experiences of childhood poverty provide the foundation for this desire. She found her way out of deprivation through writing and pop culture. Her absolute chutzpa landed her a career as TV celebrity, music critic and columnist. I don’t know how she has time for so much sex and drinking (Reviewing Moran’s book in Slate in July 2012, Peggy Orenstein offered the subtitle: “The drunken, furious, delightful life of Caitlin Moran…”) but she sustains a loving marriage, motherhood, career, and much popularity.
Moran is at her most savvy and daring in the memoir entering the discourse on reproduction. She offers three chapters “Why You Should Have Children,” “Why You Shouldn’t Have Children” followed by “Role Models and What We Do with Them” before she presents “Abortion.” Moran’s party girl antics and the espresso martinis evaporate as she pulls her craft and insight together to write that chapter, which snaps every synapse discussing this complex, divisive, private, hot button topic. She offers her denial, her realization that she may indeed be pregnant, takes us to the doctor’s office, through the ultrasound, through the abortion procedure and through her clarity and precision regarding her decisions. Most of us have been on this journey with relatives, friends, or alone. “Abortion” offers a very refreshing mindset of a woman profoundly knowing what is best for her and her family.
As a reminder, in Why Have Kids? (see the 9/14 post in this blog) Jessica Valenti tells us that only a third of U.S. children are planned, and that the abuse of children in our country is higher than any industrialized nation. Why? Moran writes, “And the most important thing of all, of course, is to be wanted, desired, and cared for by a reasonably sane, stable mother.” This to me is the most clear and profound response to any antiabortion argument, and an answer to why so many children are abused.
Moran goes on,
“I cannot understand antiabortion arguments that center on the sanctity of life. As a species, we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain, and lifelong grinding poverty show us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred. I don’t understand, then, why, in the midst of all this, pregnant women—women trying to make rational decisions about their futures and, usually, those of their families, too—should be subject to more pressure about preserving life, than, say, Vladimir Putin, the World Bank, or the Catholic Church” (268-269).
This is a life-saving moral standard. Health care and the widest assortment of options for pregnant women would bring us a planet full of children who are wanted, who can be cared for by parents, and grow up to be creative and contribute rather than destructively unemployed and angry. This has got to become a global effort global effort in the face of the hate we see streamed across the Internet. That hate has no borders, and the consequences are dire. The energy that gets put into antiabortion efforts distracts from the real work at hand.
Moran, this luscious heterosexual, takes this on. She describes the details of birthing (sex, birth, breastfeeding, exhaustion and joy) two bouncing baby girls, and then deciding to have an abortion. It is a decision she and her husband make with utter respect and love for one another and their family.
I do have a confession to make here. Some women love being pregnant and they love the birth experience. I actually bless my blocked fallopian tube and have such gratitude for the birth giver of my children. I am so grateful she decided as she did, for the infants, for her and her future. I have learned more than I even know as a Mom. I wanted these kids, oh I wanted them so. I send her over a zillion thanks regularly. I thought I had to be pregnant to be a real woman. I’ve come to know that birthing a child doesn’t make you more of a woman or even a mother. Women having choices does.
From what I see in my undergraduate classrooms, most young women and men agree, and they wonder what the fuss is all about. Gay Marriage. Reproductive Rights. Interracial Couples. Women Executives. Most of the young people I meet think old people and old ways of thinking are just in the way. I want them to be right. Move over patriarchy, the next generation has you dismantled already.
Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness by Jessica Valenti (2012)
Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness by Jessica Valenti (2012)
“It is too late for us,” I announce to a small bevy of other mothers I bump into in front of Town Hall, “ but I love Valenti’s work so I really wanted to read this.” I offer them a peek of my brand new book. The crayoned question mark arches over the title. The mother of four adopted girls (now teens) from Vietnam wears a conical nón lá hat she found on a visit there with her kids. She considers the blurbs on the back of the book and hands it back wistfully. The mom with a sleeping toddler in a big-wheeled stroller nods as we talk of how quickly our young children morph into teenagers. She might be able to read again in a few years when her kid starts school. We all look a little tired around the edges but our eyes glow and we gurgle with pride at our status as mothers. “It’s exhausting, but exciting at the same time,” says one, as she waves and continues her day.
We come into parenthood intentionally or unintentionally, through marriage, mishap, adoption, or step parenting. I wonder why we have to have a license to drive, teach, practice therapy or medicine but we aren’t as insistently informed on how to parent. Still, so many persist in assuming everyone will parent and that it is bliss. Jessica Valenti looks at parenting with no illusions, even offers as an example the impact on nipples of pumping breast milk and “seeing every inch of the taffy that your former nipple has become” (36).
Ouch. As an adoptive mom, breastfeeding wasn’t an issue and I never got into the controversy over cloth or disposable diapers. The proponents of ‘elimination communication,’ who eschew diapers altogether, never got to me me. I was an older parent just trying to survive. Formula and disposable diapers were divine. And the idea of a family bed never crossed my mind; our infant preferred her calm and cozy bassinette to the tempest and chaos of covers on –and off–a menopausal mother.
As an adoptive parent all the righteousness about natural childbirth and breastfeeding Valenti describes just didn’t matter. I had no prerogative in those realms and my concerns were paying the adoption fees, getting the house renovated so no toddler would fall from the second story balcony, getting to the house across an icy driveway with infant and toddler in tow. Negotiating all this with the other parent can be a trial all by itself. No wonder 90 percent of relationships are unhappy when the baby arrives. Everyone is exhausted and no one has an equal part.
Valenti offers a crucial investigation of motherhood. The myths, the social construction that pits women against one another (breast is not always best), women against the workplace (flex time, privacy to pump), even women against their choices (What do you mean you aren’t having children? How come you have so many?). The decision to be or not to be a parent really ought to be left unquestioned, respected by anyone else. I chose motherhood via adoption after years of weighing the pros and cons. I had the astounding privilege of adopting a healthy infant (check boxes for what issues you won’t accept–cleft pallet, mother smoking or drinking, among many). I adopted her brother when a call came out of the blue about his arrival. I might not have had money or age on my side but I sure had plenty of love.
Valenti wonders about what some of the kids who have been tended to with such extreme good intentions and a certain fanatic focus will be like as they grow up. Polly Young-Eisendrath writes that kids of this heavily-scheduled, intense focus on perfect child-raising era just long to be ordinary. But they can’t handle getting a B. In the worst cases, suicide replaces resiliency. (See The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in the Age of Self-Importance (2008)
Valenti brings forth harsher truths than just the cloth vs. disposable diaper wars. I didn’t realize that of the industrialized nations, the USA has the highest maternity mortality rate and the highest number of child abuse fatalities. Only one third of all children born are intended. She opens a chapter titled ‘Giving up on Parenthood’ by describing how many children were dropped off in Nevada in 2008 when abandonment of children was decriminalized. Not just infants as the State had ianticipated, a whole family of nine kids was dropped off, people brought in children from other states until they tightened the legislation. Valenti is clear on this, “If policymakers and people who care about children want to reduce the number of abandoned kids, they need to address the systemic issues: poverty, maternity leave, access to resources, and health care” (106).
Not until page 136 are lesbians mentioned (I had just started to look for them) and I was quite surprised and delighted by this heading: “If You Want Happy Kids, Give Them Lesbian Parents.” According to a 2010 long-term study of lesbian families, zero percent of children raised in lesbian households report physical or sexual abuse.
Valenti writes clearly about the need for economic justice, compassion for different parenting styles, shared household tasks, reclaiming community and workplace flexibility. She has a vision of less anxiety and more joy in being a parent. Think how much happier the kids would be. Consider being the parent, relative, friend and neighbor of those kids. Our village needs Valenti’s kind of scrutiny about parenting and the generosity of spirit people will have living and loving the kids, the work they do, the choices they make.
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005) Ariel Levy
When my kids were in middle school, they loved to dance along with Beyonce’s videos, copying the moves as closely as they could. They knew I would lose my patience with degrading language, but I didn’t want to break it to them that many of the dances and lyrics they loved were double entendre. They are teenagers now, and they let me listen to their music as we drive to town. They often give fair warning and proclaim the value of the song despite despicable words.
I admire their critical thinking, but what happens when demeaning women is just blithely taken for granted, not only in the songs but in the culture I hear reflected in them? And not just by men, but by young women themselves? It’s not the explicit sex that concerns me, it’s the carelessness and callousness of it. Where are the stories sex for joy, intimacy and connection?
I worry about these things, and Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs affirms my concerns. Levy writes about conversations she had with beach babes happily, consciously showing more than cleavage just to win a prize hat, and with self-styled corporate killers who work hard to look like Barbie dolls, but have the knowledge and skills to turn corporations around.
Raunch culture, according to Levy — is beer, boobs and the hyper-sexualization of women. No longer does a perfect body suffice, now women feel they have to be bootylicious, too. The women Levy writes about defend their conscious participation in this culture as a path to power. This reminds me of my kids defending repetitive obnoxious lyrics with a great beat, as if the great beat somehow makes the humiliating lyrics okay. I don’t think so, and neither does Levy. She makes her case clear; raunch culture doesn’t add up to freedom and it sure does nothing to empower women.
This book is titillating and terrifying. Levy skips beyond mean girls and goes directly to girls and young women drinking, playing, and even tells us about the new fashion of bois, women dressing like young boys. This trend doesn’t seem to be so much about transcending gender (which I’d admire) but about just not growing up, modern day Peter Pans. It worries me. It seems to promote perpetual youth, pulling these young women away from thinking, creating — using their minds with as much energy as they use their bodies.
It is clear to Levy, and to me, that women focused on sexual conquests, good times, and spending money on surgery to enhance or remove body parts isn’t leading us to actual liberation. It is leading to an industry in a plastic surgery and porn industry. Maybe we can counter that by taxing those industries double, and put it all toward education and health care – sex education for sure.
And where is feminism in all this? My undergrad students declare ardently that they are not feminist, at least until mid-semester. Women have legal rights, they argue, so who needs feminism? To my students feminists have hairy legs and no sense of humor. Levy is deeply concerned about this kind of lack of greater world awareness. She tells us about the sexual conquests — like having thirty some lovers and striving for 100– of girls and young women who think that means they’re powerful, enlightened, successful. This is success? I shiver at the thought.
Despair? Not Levy. She is creative and insistent: teach teens the difference between sexual desire and the desire for attention. Teach them to conceive of sex as “something thrilling and interesting you engage in because you want to” (163). I particularly love this line: “Sex is one of the most interesting things we as humans have to play with, and we’ve reduced it to polyester underpants and implants. We are selling ourselves unbelievably short” (198).
Published in 2005, Female Chauvinist Pigs speaks to the issues women face in 2012. If anything, the current political debates about women’s rights suggest that more people need to read this book. Men and women alike could use the enlightenment and encouragement Levy offers. Raunch culture offers only small possibilities, sexual success defined by numbers and reconfigured body parts rather than greater focus on mindful action and great thinking. It lacks idealism, Levy argues, and I say it lacks imagination and creativity, even courage. And a little of all of that – Levy and I agree — could go a long way toward invigorating our world right now.
Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness
I just re-read Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons (1996) by Jane Lazarre.
Jane Lazarre is a white, Jewish woman married to a Black man. She writes of coming into a new identity and awareness as wife, mother, daughter-in-law, and sister-in-law in a welcoming African American family. She describes the terror a mother feels as her Black teenage sons walk out into city streets where she knows they are scrutinized and assumed dangerous. One son has the experience of sitting next to a woman with a concentration camp identification tattoo on her arm. The woman appears to move away from him as soon as she can. He wants to say to her as she goes, “I’m Jewish too!” but the moment is lost. His identity is foremost decided by the color of his skin.
Lazarre writes, “The whiteness of whiteness is the blindness of willful innocence” (p.49). When Trayvon Martin was murdered (February 26, 2012) I responded on the Change.org petition with a comment asking how is it possible that Emmitt Till’s death was in 1955, and here it is 2012? Till and Martin had each gone to a local store and died unarmed thereafter. Lazarre writes about her son’s response to learning about Till with a litany of contemporary young men (as of 1996): Yusef Hawkins, Michael Griffith, Philip Pennel, Michael Stewart (p. 78). I had not remembered all these young men of the Eighties and Nineties and I know there are many, many more. I am humbled by my persistent innocence.
Lazarre describes the patience and loving of her mother-in-law, the family gathered around her gay brother-in-law dying of AIDS, the joy both sets of grandparents express in loving their grandchildren. Children bring worlds kept apart by the long-held political and social systems together and Lazarre’s stories prove divisive walls can be breached. Lazarre writes of the challenges and the wonders of living life with her heightened vision and awareness as a Jewish woman with Black sons.
My own two children, a daughter and a son, are teenagers, adopted African American siblings. I first read Lazarre when I had a toddler and an infant, hoping for a road map, a guiding mentor. I wondered then at her relentless focus on raced experience. I was busy then with diapers, naps and the cuteness of teeny kids. I re-read her last month for a brush-up on negotiating the teen years and had a better appreciation for that very relentlessness! White parents of children of color cannot afford the luxury of “willful innocence.” We must teach our family, friends, and our children’s teachers the languages of identity, including their whiteness (try it: my White friend, my Black kids, my adopted White niece, ….). Our children are complex individuals in very complicated times.
We have come so far in the fifty-seven years since Emmitt Till’s death (for instance, White Lazarre is legally married to her Black husband). Yet the horror remains that mothers (and fathers) can’t trust their boys will get home safe with Skittles and tea in hand. How far have we come then?
Stephen Metcalf’s article in Slate: Not Here: If we’re truly serious about stopping massacres like Aurora, we need to cure our addiction to evil.
I’m captivated by Stephen Metcalf’s July 27, 2012 piece Not Here: If we’re truly serious about stopping massacres like Aurora, we need to cure our addiction to evil.
Metcalf reminds us that Superman was an imaginative response to fascism in 1939. Evil was just ramping up at the time to a proportion no one could imagine. That Holocaust is still an ultimate example of evil.
In 2012 we are searching for a sense of moral righteousness in a time of alienation (ironically, the solitude of social networks), in a nation where every hero has lost his luster. We are disappointed time and again by the people we want to solve the extremely complex issues that face us (the sordid alcohol, drug and sex lives of politicians and public personalities we don’t really want to even know about, the economy, the environment, the Middle East, the Euro…to name a few). Where is truth?
Metcalf offers a perspective on civil massacre (as contrasted to massacre in war) and the cultural phenomenon Captain Cook brought to us running amok as he described in 1770 the murderous behavior he found on the Malay archipelago. So the Malay came to stop such behavior just as more “civilized” people started. Men with the three identity issues of “narcissism, persecution, resentment” and an arsenal of weapons demonstrate the deadly times we are in.
Meanwhile, one truck crashes and kills an equal number of immigrants, kids are dying every day in urban warfare, and around the globe deadly weapons sales perpetuate violence and civil wars. Where are the superheroes to make those stories grab our imaginations?
Metcalf quotes Hannah Arendt, “Only the good has depth and can be radical.” Arendt found Eichmann to be a small man, an uninspiring man, banal. We want our evil to be magnificent when actually it is so easy with an automatic weapon or a truckload of fertilizer. Heroes are all of us working in our everyday lives to interrupt a racist joke, help kids to talk through emotions, invite a neighbor to dinner. We are the deep community members at the root of this society. We are the radical good.
Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow
Economics and politics are are daunting, and so entangled we can’t decipher one without the other. I picked up Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow (2012) hoping for some perspective. Okay, so I got this book because Maddow is so darn smart and, I’ll admit it, wicked handsome.
It took a while; I read To Kill a Mockingbird and Are You My Mother? in between Drift chapters, but I read every word.
I knew it, I just knew it! But I never had the evidence in one place and right in my hands as Maddow offers. We, the American public, allow politicians to slide, slip and slide, right over our rights and responsibilities as citizens. We just don’t know how to stop this tsunami of cheating, lying and disrespect. Mr. Reagan made a war on his own, and since then so has everyone else, defying constitutional structures and protocol. No one seems to know where the plans are for out-dated nuclear devices, no one knows how to keep the fungus off wings of stockpiled bombs. The private army hides the actual costs of wars.
Why have we become a warring nation? What happened to diplomacy and working for peace?
Do we have to wait until the Freedom of Information Act kicks in, too many years from now, to find out why so many trillions have gone out of the taxpayers’ pockets and disappeared into the ether of war so the taxpayer has no job, no health insurance, or emergency fund for disasters?
Maddow offers the research, the names and numbers to answer these questions. She takes the covers off the secrecy of the last thirty plus years of U.S. government and exposes the vast resources (money, faith in government, and our military personnel) we’ve lost to extreme abuses of power.
Maddow writes, “Republicans and Democrats alike have options to vote people into Congress who are determined to stop with the chickenshittery and assert the legislature’s constitutional prerogatives on war and peace. It would make a difference and help reel us back toward balance and normalcy” (p.252, italics mine).
We have to convince everyone to vote for the greatest good rather than individual fear. The other day I overheard a young man of twenty-something saying to his friend, “When the Apocalypse comes, I want to be ready.” Did he mean he’ll be buying an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, or preparing his gardens for year-round food for his family and neighbors? I wish I’d eavesdropped a little longer.
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vermilyanotes 