Category: gender

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Green Man

My friend Lara (now infamous since she’s in the new book) sent me this story involving gender roles & green politics, written by No Impact Man – who is trying to live in such a way as to create no impact on the environment as a result of his living / breathing / consuming. Interestingly, in listing all the manual labor involved in doing such a thing, a woman wrote to him to make sure that if greens would embrace a ‘no impact’ life that the chores do not once again fall onto the women & not the men.

His response and musings on the question of gender roles & on manual labor in general are interesting, radical & green, but also smacking of male privilege: it’s one thing to do some manual labor as an experiment – & one for which he’s gaining a great deal of attention – & another to do it, day in & day out, for an entire lifetime, with little thanks or recognition. His situation is such that he already has the understanding & education to put his manual labor in context; it has a theoretical framework that instills value that your average housewife would not have to give her “perspective” while washing another 40 lbs. of family laundry. But still: he seems like a decent guy, & his blog is an ongoing interesting read for the kinds of values he’s examining.

It IS Earth Day today, so I moved this post to suit. What are you doing to lessen your impact?

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Just a Shy Young Woman

In an interesting review of the book College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now that appeared in the April 2007 Atlantic Monthly, reviewer Caitlin Flanagan paraphrases the author, Lynn Peril:

She arrived (at the University of Wisconsin, 25 years ago) with a butch haircut, a suitcase full of punk clothes mail-ordered from New York, and a ‘tough-chick persona.’ I suspected that she was romanticizing her past, but then she shows us her freshman ID card, and she really was a fright.

Ugh.

But then in the next paragraph:

Underneath, though, she was as timid as any 18-year-old girl plucked from home and set down on the campus of a huge university. Too shy to raise her hand in class, or even to order a pizza over the telephone, she was so rattled by a boy who flirted with her on the first day of French II that she promptly dropped the class.

Which strikes me as about right. The review is overall good but it’s the quoted bits that Peril wrote about herself that have my interest piqued; it’s not often I read something about women in college with shaved heads and punk wardrobes that mirrors my own experience at all.

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Homophobic Coach Resigns

Rene Portland, coach of the Lady Lions basketball team at Penn State, resigned – some say over allegations that she was anti-lesbian. A former player, Jennifer Harris, brought the charges after Portland kicked her off the team for not dressing in more feminine ways.

I have to say I find the whole situation kind of confusing: the idea of a women’s basketball coach being homophobic, I mean. In my experience, lesbians like & play sports at least as much, if not more, than heterosexual girls do. Barring half of your potential players from your team seems counterintuitive, though her record of course proves she is a good coach.

Talent, of course, is no excuse for shitty behavior, though I do find it interesting that this situation came to a head only now – after a couple of bad seasons for the team.

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Better Logic

The good news is that Louise Slaughter (D, NY) reintroduced the Prevention First Act:

“I am proud to reintroduce this bill which serves as an innovative and comprehensive approach to protecting women’s reproductive health, decreasing the spread of STDs, and reducing the number of unintended pregnancies,” Rep. Slaughter said of the bill in a Senate press release. “If we want to reduce the number of abortions in this country, the methodology is clear — empower women to prevent unintended pregnancies through education and access to contraception.”

Sounds reasonable, but considering yesterday’s news, I’m going to guess it won’t pass. There really are some people in this country who think the only answer is abstinence.

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What Logic

More good news during Women’s History Month: the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals just found that Union Pacific’s health insurance plan – which includes no contraception or pregnancy planning coverage – is not discrimination based on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on gender.

The logic was that the health insurance plan doesn’t cover condoms, either, so it’s not discriminatory not to cover anything for women.

But, duh, MEN CAN’T GET PREGNANT.

US Judge Kermit Bye, the lone dissenter, objected to this logic because Union Pacific’s contraception policy only affects preventative care for women. Because men cannot become pregnant, it makes sense that the health care plan does not cover pregnancy prevention for men. Therefore, Judge Bye found that while the policy might be “officially gender neutral,” it is still discriminatory, according to the Associated Press.

But here’s the real kicker: the Union Pacific plan does cover Rogaine and Viagra.

So the guys have health insurance for their full heads of hair and hard dicks, because you know, those are important and vital medical concerns, but the women of UP can’t take birth control to prevent pregnancy, because, you know, that’s a minor matter and hardly important to a woman who works for a living.

If this is Women’s History Month, then I suppose we all should have worn orange on St. Patrick’s Day.

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What a Real Woman Needs

Okay, for whatever reason, the recent set of Quiznos ads plays while a lot of my Law & Order (my stories!) is on TV, & I cringe every time the Prime Rib on Garlic Bread one comes on.

That woman, at the end, is like nails on a chalkboard to me. No lack of meat, just what a real woman needs. Ugh.

What this real woman needs is for them to stop running that damn commercial.

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A Little Rant

Sometimes a book gets inordinate attention, especially books that reaffirm & reify the gender binary. But there’s plenty of interesting books about gender out there. & Some days, when I see a review of the book The Female Brain in a cool magazine, I wonder why they bother. I mean, bad publicity is good publicity, ultimately: it just wins the author, who the reviewer (and many others, including myself) disagrees with, more airtime, while other books, which are more feminist in terms of their take on gender, don’t get covered at all.

& I’ve always wondered why magazines – especially indie, cool magazines that are mostly written by indie journalists & others like me who understand exactly how poor an industry publishing can be – give airtime to stuff they don’t like instead of giving airtime to stuff they do. Readers will buy a book that gets a bad review, just to see if they agree or not, & while I understand editors tend to think it’s Important, in a Fourth Estate kind of way, to rebut publicly some of the ideas coming from certain corners, it seems like it’d make more sense to help an interesting writer whose ideas they do like to sell a few books.

& Yes, in this case, I mean a book like mine, which nearly is a straight-up rebuttal of all the hogwash in The Female Brain.

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Female Bonding

Wow.

Donna sent me a link to an episode of “Real Housewives of Orange County” which is one of those shows that’s supposed to convince us that rich people have real problems, too. I’m really kind of astounded by it; as much as I wrote Chapter 2 of She’s Not the Man I Married with more of a theoretical shoe-buying bonding moment between women in mind, I didn’t expect to actually see something like this on TV, much less that the store these women go to happens to be a Jimmy Choos, since that’s one of the types of shoes I mentioned. (The other was Kenneth Cole.)

But, yeah. This kind of scene is enough to give me hives all over again, from all those years just trying to buy a pair of summer sandals that I didn’t hate. If this is “women” then I’m not of them.

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Thanks to Betty

I felt the need to publicly thank Betty for not only tolerating me but not mocking me while I watched PBS’ Great Performances of Sting’s Journeys & Labyrinths a few nights back. This one is by far the most pretentious of Sting’s projects, and despite the music being beautiful, the video was silly (& in parts kept reminding me of Monty Python). Sting and his lute-player, at one point, seem to be laughing to themselves over the silliness of watching two historians debate the finer points of religious politics of the 16th Century.

However, Sting is wearing a pair of boots in one scene that I swear must have been made from the skins of Calabrian shepherd boys and their pet goats. Of course Sting being Sting, he may be protesting his own boots in the near future.

The songs, though, are beautiful, and so is Sting’s voice even when it’s not best-suited to these songs. So yes, I still want to be Sting when I grow up. & Not just for the boots, but that he’s willing to be pretentious and experimental, & knows that doing this CD will get a ton of people – me included – to listen to music they might not otherwise listen to. Throw in the house, the organic farming, & the labyrinth garden, of course. But what I admire the most, to be honest, is his seeming surety, confidence, nearly arrogance: he knows he’s talented, he knows the world is his oyster, but also seems to take his power & privilege seriously, like some kind of Philosopher-Musician, or Musician-King, which only earns him more scorn from people who mock him.

& I keep meaning to write more about the whole idea of who aspires to be what as children; at the AMC wrap party, I had an interesting conversation with David Harrison about the idea, since he always wanted to be an actor (not an actress) receiving an Oscar as a child, despite being female-bodied. & It got me thinking about my own aspirations as a kid, the people who reflected what I wanted to be the most, how many of my role models were male & not female, & on top of all that, a friend noted, while reading SNTMIM, that she went into Religious Studies in order to be something like Indiana Jones, which reminded me this kind of cross-gender aspiring isn’t restricted to me, or to trans people, & may instead have something more to do with Jung’s animus idea, or the lack of women role models for certain ways of being.

Someone remind me to flesh that idea out, please.