i wonder if she knows

I know I've been absent from here for a while. I started this post to write about how I was negotiating the world, but specifically, my marriage as a feminist. Although I no longer have that marriage, I'm still negotiating the world as a feminist, but things feel enormously different. I feel like I've become Feminist 2.0, my new understanding of who I am and how I should enteract with the rest of the world in order to achieve the results I want.

Let's start here. Nearly all of my feminist beliefs, at one point, could be boiled down to this point made by Simone De Beauvoir in The Second Sex.

"To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist to him also; mutually recognizing each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other."

A little more briefly, my main claim to feminism was this. There are men, there are women and there are variations that are in between, both or neither of those things. With little or no need to categorize or define gender or sex, also meaning little or no need to compare them to each other or to create one standard by which the other was judged, then we could all flourish and lead our most productive and happiest non-oppressed lives.

However, at some point a few months ago, I had a revelation. The issue, in my view, wasn't that we were categorizing, defining and comparing men and women, but that we as a society were fixated on trying to draw a line between masculinity, men and the male gender as well as feminity, women and the female gender.

I've discovered that I believe, among all the things I believe about God and the universe and our purpose in the world, that there is a cosmic balance between the masculine and the feminine, not a cosmic balance between men and women. All of us, regardless of sex, gender, orientation or age are composed of some parts feminine, some parts masculine. For many of us, we might find that we are far more one than the other, but I cannot see that one could exist without traits of both. The union of masculine and feminine is the resolution of cosmic unrest. We balance this within ourselves, we balance it with others in our romantic relationships, in our friendships, in our relationships with our family, with our goals and desires, our very being.

Okay, I know this all sounds kind of yin yang-y. But what I'm trying to say was that I found a lot of difficulty in arguing that we should stop worrying about the gender binary. And for the most part, we should. But it's not the gender binary that is the problem, it's the insistence that men are masculine and women are feminine. It's an inability to let people be people without holding them to these defined standards.

...to have independent existence.

Crap. I'm back where I started. I'm not very good at blogging about feminism. Maybe I should get a hobby and blog about that.

I guess the issue isn't so much that I don't believe what I did before, rather that I have a fuller understanding of it. And that I've come to appreciate the masculine and feminine within myself, and the masculine and feminine in others. And I'm learning to love the things about myself that I no longer view as contradictions, but part of a beautiful balance that makes up who I am.

Also. New "about me". (scroll down)

lullaby

Tomorrow I'm going to a baby shower, and I am NOT going to be TFTF. I'm going to be super functional. I am not going to roll my eyes if someone makes a comment about the fetus's sports ability. (I think for my sake it's better she's having a boy and not a girl.) I'm going to be on my best behavior. I skipped out on any of the gendered gifts on the registry and went for baby bottles, pacifiers and breastmilk bags. I feel confident that I will make it through finger sandwiches and blue m&m's. I know I can do it.

But my anxiety right now is still high from my trip to Babies R Us. Between my anxiety over gender stereotypes to my dropped jaw at the overwhelming amount of stuff babies "need", my chest tightened and I suppressed the urge to run over almost a dozen children with my cart. I mean, I understand why people want to have babies. But I also think that's a personal choice and if I want to glare at your child because she won't move out of the way of my cart, that should be okay too.

gender socialization

The true reason as to why I can’t have kids is because I’m scared shitless about gender socialization. I always have been, and whenever I express my concerns to parents I respect, they laugh at how wound up I am about it. I know lots of people are scared about things like birth defects, diseases, vaccinations, or the unthinkable loss of a child. But I’m scared of talking to my (not-yet-conceived) children about gender. I’m scared to let them loose in the world without being by them every step to deconstruct what they learn. I feel confident to talk to them about race, religion, and sexuality. But even thinking about having a conversation about gender with a kid makes my heart beat really fast. What will I do if my daughter comes home begging for a princess dress? What will I do the first time I see my son being destructive or overly competitive? I literally lie awake at night sometimes wondering. I’m so afraid I’ll do it wrong.

Now, before anyone get’s all excited about the following video, keep in mind that the idea isn’t that girls are being told ”No, you can’t play with Tonka trucks”, so don't get all up in my face about how you're a girl and didn't play with Barbies or didn't watch "a lot" of TV. Gender socialization comes from many sources and toys and toy advertising is just one of them.  The reality is that the media is oversaturated with gendered messages. And we wonder why boys are more likely to incite violence on animals as kids, and more likely to commit violent crimes such as armed robbery, rape or murder as adults. We wonder girls are grossly underrepresented in math and science and even far less represented in the armed forces, not to mention way more likely to suffer from an eating disorder. Maybe it's because we've bombarded them for 18 years straight with the message that girls and boys are to act and think differently from each other.

Children are incredibly impressionable. Growing minds take in information like a sponge, even information that they are not yet capable of processing. What if I screw up this delicate information gathering process? What if my kids are getting gendered material and I’m not there to tell them about it? What if they in turn don’t have the words to stand up to their peers and to other adults about these issues? It’s not really like teaching other things where you can teach by example, like the way you would teach them acceptance instead of hate, or to be kind to others, it’s the kind of thing that takes genuine and thoughtful conversation, and I don’t want to have kids until I’m prepared for that. The only serious conversation I ever have with my cat is about how much kibble he's allowed to have.

I seriously need some pre-parenting counseling.

someday my prince will come

Disney princesses: Possibly the most hated female figures of feminists everywhere. I know this picture isn’t new, it’s been floating around the interwebs for a while, but it’s always worth a repost.

Honestly though, my issue with Disney princesses goes deeper than their worship of beauty and heterosexism. I feel like there is an argument to be made for the fact that in most of these Disney stories (note: I have not seen “The Little Mermaid” or “Sleeping Beauty”) the princesses are strong-willed women who are interesting characters for actually challenging the status quo (“Beauty and the Beast”, “Aladdin”, “Cinderella”…). My issue stems with society’s need to develop female role models for girls and male role models for boys. Hey, here’s an idea: let’s develop good role models for children. Do we really need to reinforce the notion that girls must act like princesses and boys act like princes?

I actually feel like I had a pretty gender-neutral upbringing despite being born in the 80’s and raised in the 90’s, in a time where the children’s gender binary was exploding. Yes, I had Barbies and I was nuts about them, but I also had plenty of “boy toys”, loved being outdoors, hated baby dolls, and due to my parents’ insistence on my creative development spent much of my time with crayons and drawing paper. I never liked pink, but I started wearing make-up at 10. Basically, I was a kid, and not reduced to the confines of being “just a girl”. Most parents like to argue that they haven’t confined their kids to any gender roles and that whatever their kid is active in is of their own free will, and I agree with them. But what is everyone else teaching your kids? Hello, you are not the sole influence over your children. What are you doing additional to combat other influences of gender stereotyping in your child’s life? When your daughter insists on wearing a Disney princess outfit, do you take that opportunity to discuss these issues in a way she can understand? Does your daughter recognize equally the values of both male and female role models?

I don’t mean to give parenting advice. I only have a cat. My cat doesn’t even have balls and can’t tell a Disney princess from a rolled up sock.  And I know I can’t reverse hundreds of years of learned gender roles in child-rearing. But when is there going to be some sort of national re-evaluation of what we’re teaching our children in terms of gendered behavior and attitudes?