[Elsewhere being Alas, specifically. I'd wondered about making a post about the whole Palin circus, leaned towards 'no' simply because I believe that Bristol Palin, though she is breathing for two, is not a valid recipient of media oxygen other than when the McCain campaign decides to start lighting matches, which I am sure it will. But then Mandolin posted that roundup about privacy and its connection (or lack thereof) to reproductive rights, and I found it a good topic for some thinking out loud.]
One thing I’d say is that Bristol Palin’s privacy is not a reproductive rights issue; she deserves privacy because she’s a young woman who has never asked for the world’s media to be on her doorstep. She deserves privacy for the exact same reason all the other candidates’ children deserve privacy. We do not need to interrogate Bristol Palin, ever. Whenever the McCain campaign makes propaganda use of her, talks about what a wonderful choice she made, we need to interrogate the McCain campaign and slam them for their hypocrisy and their inhuman anti-choice values.
It is interesting to see who gets the privacy and who does not, though. The Obama daughters have been regularly paraded on stage because so many people in the media, and allegedly in the US at large, had a nervy, perverse fascination with the idea of a black first family, and the Obama campaign felt forced to respond to that. Because America is a racially unequal society those young black girls don’t get the right to privacy.
And now there’s a young mother-to-be in the spotlight; I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard the name of her fiancé, nor read anything related to him. I also don’t know the names of any male children of anyone involved in this election. That Obama and Clinton don’t have any skews that, I’m sure - but I don’t even know if McCain, or Edwards, or most of the VP-possibles have children at all. The only people whose children have been talked about are Obama, Palin, and (to a much lesser extent) single father Biden (and there’s Chelsea Clinton, who was known to us from her father’s time in office. Quick, Britons, what’s the fastest rail route between Bristol and Chelsea?). I haven’t heard the names of Biden’s children. I don’t know anything about McCain’s children, not even how many he has, other than that he has at least one adopted child.
In other words, if you’re a white guy, your family gets more privacy. (Barring extremely odd circumstances like Biden’s - and if I may make an aside, I feel that the single father family I grew up in got too much privacy rather than too little; as Amanda wrote, privacy can be a shield for abuse, and also just for plain poor parenting. Single father families are far interrogated far less than single mother families, even given that they outnumber us by 10 to 1).
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Does Equality Pay Its Bills?
Big question. When you pass by equality trainwrecks on the internets, you sometimes see a blind faith in the free market to solve all our problems. I mean, the free market (which exists, honest) being the bastion of efficiency it is, if a problem still exists it must be because there's an economic upside to it, right? If action films with female leads were profitable, there'd be tons of them, but there aren't because it's just not profitable. If women's work was really as valuable as men's work, employers wouldn't discriminate against women, would they?
This faith seems to underlie a lot of the outright disbelief you sometimes meet when you talk to people about equal pay or media sexism. It's basically saying that the desire to make a profit is so great it must override the desire to be sexist, so sexism can't be occurring at the expense of profit, and any further attempts to fight sexism will cause economic harm.
FSF recently linked to a series of articles by Jennifer Kesler about how this blind faith applies wrt the Bechdel Test. One of these directly asks Why Discriminate If It Doesn't Profit?
Looking at the inflation-adjusted all-time box office, many of the top names are films that had a specific appeal to female audiences; Gone With The Wind, Titanic, The Sound Of Music, Doctor Zhivago. Three of these four were made a rather long time ago.
I'm not sold on Kelsey's reasoning simply because it relies on pathologising individuals; see her earlier post, Why Film Schools Teach Screenwriters Not To Pass The Bechdel Test:
I find it hard to believe that mere individuals can keep that shit running as long as they do, but does anyone have a better theory? It's important, this. Because the phenomenon goes beyond Hollywood and infests the real world.
Last year, Slate's Ray Fishman declared 'It Takes a Village...to fail to thank its female leader, no matter how good she is':
It's like Hollywood; however well the women perform, it doesn't register with the people who care. (Except that US cinema audiences seem to approve plenty). This really is sexism as a quantifiable pathology, and it merrily flies in the face of any desire for material gain; women suck, no matter how much they've improved your local governance.
Then there's a straightforward headline from workforce.com: Firms With More Women on Boards Perform Better Than Those That Don’t.
I strongly doubt that either this or the India survey demonstrate any female superiority when it comes to governance; rather, they represent the replacing of mediocre men with brilliant women who in other circumstances are locked out of high places. But the question's still there - if female board members have such a marked effect on profits, why are there so few of them?
If hiring women is basically a way of getting free money, why are so many companies scared of the idea?
When talking about the pay gap, I tend to link to this: the story of the UK's largest ever equal pay settlement:
My suspicion is that the fear of equal pay claims - as in Hollywood - is entirely real; equal pay for equal work means that men will have to take home less, one way or another. Councils in the UK - who finally implemented their equal pay agreements in 2006 - complained that they need central government assistance in order to pay women what their work was really worth. Boo fucking hoo; progressive taxation (as if that existed) passes money from wealthier men to poorer women, cry me a river. Hollywood? Would probably get more money overall if it stopped failing so often. But less of it would go to men. And that would somehow be so threatening it's worth paying to make it go away.
How far does the threat go? Well, the NYT is calling bullshit on the different ways we frame men at home vs. women at home here:
It goes back to families and parenting. It usually does.
This faith seems to underlie a lot of the outright disbelief you sometimes meet when you talk to people about equal pay or media sexism. It's basically saying that the desire to make a profit is so great it must override the desire to be sexist, so sexism can't be occurring at the expense of profit, and any further attempts to fight sexism will cause economic harm.
FSF recently linked to a series of articles by Jennifer Kesler about how this blind faith applies wrt the Bechdel Test. One of these directly asks Why Discriminate If It Doesn't Profit?
What tipped me off was that whenever film students pointed out how movies/shows for, by or about women had indeed profited, film professionals wouldn’t hear it. Those movies/shows were exceptions! Or it was really the alien/Terminator/Hannibal Lechter people wanted to see, not Ripley, Connor or Starling. Etc. It couldn’t be that people were actually happy to see movies/shows for, by or about women, because that was impossible - end of argument.
...people who claim to worship profit above all else sometimes actually worship what they want to believe is profitable.
Looking at the inflation-adjusted all-time box office, many of the top names are films that had a specific appeal to female audiences; Gone With The Wind, Titanic, The Sound Of Music, Doctor Zhivago. Three of these four were made a rather long time ago.
I'm not sold on Kelsey's reasoning simply because it relies on pathologising individuals; see her earlier post, Why Film Schools Teach Screenwriters Not To Pass The Bechdel Test:
I concluded Hollywood was was dominated by perpetual pre-adolescent boys making the movies they wanted to see, and using the “target audience” - a construct based on partial truths and twisted math - to perpetuate their own desires.
I find it hard to believe that mere individuals can keep that shit running as long as they do, but does anyone have a better theory? It's important, this. Because the phenomenon goes beyond Hollywood and infests the real world.
Last year, Slate's Ray Fishman declared 'It Takes a Village...to fail to thank its female leader, no matter how good she is':
Rural Indians are learning firsthand what it's like to live under female leadership as a result of a 1991 law that restricted one-third of village council elections to female candidates. The villagers' experiences are analyzed by economists Esther Duflo and Petia Topalova in a recent unpublished study. Using opinion surveys and data on local "public goods"—like schools, roads, and water pumps—Duflo and Topalova find that the villages headed by women invested in more services that benefited the entire community than did those with gender-neutral elections, nearly all of which were won by men. But as the opinion polls showed, for all their effectiveness, the women's governance was literally a thankless effort, with the new leaders getting lower approval ratings than their male counterparts.
[...] They were also less corrupt—villagers with female-headed councils were 25 percent less likely to report having to pay bribes to access basic services like getting ration cards or receiving medical attention.
It's like Hollywood; however well the women perform, it doesn't register with the people who care. (Except that US cinema audiences seem to approve plenty). This really is sexism as a quantifiable pathology, and it merrily flies in the face of any desire for material gain; women suck, no matter how much they've improved your local governance.
Then there's a straightforward headline from workforce.com: Firms With More Women on Boards Perform Better Than Those That Don’t.
During the four-year span of the reporting for the study, Fortune 500 companies with the highest percentage of women on their boards saw equity returns that were 53 percent higher than those companies with the fewest number of women on their boards.
I strongly doubt that either this or the India survey demonstrate any female superiority when it comes to governance; rather, they represent the replacing of mediocre men with brilliant women who in other circumstances are locked out of high places. But the question's still there - if female board members have such a marked effect on profits, why are there so few of them?
If hiring women is basically a way of getting free money, why are so many companies scared of the idea?
When talking about the pay gap, I tend to link to this: the story of the UK's largest ever equal pay settlement:
Early last year, 1,600 women, all of them health workers at two Cumbrian hospitals, won the biggest ever equal pay deal: a total of £300m. At a time when the pay gap between men and women is actually growing, the settlement should have sparked a clamour for equality. Instead, there has since been an eerie silence. The story of how the women, underpaid for years, spurned an offer of £1.5m compensation and achieved £300m, all from one health authority, has been mysteriously buried, as if it were an embarrassment. They sense a fear of "mutually assured destruction" wafting around the headquarters of their union, Unison, which represents more than a million public service workers: a feeling that the settlement was too huge, and the ramifications of it just too enormous - what would happen if it triggered equal pay claims across the whole of the public sector?
[...] The claim was possible because of "equal value", a concept contained in a European directive announced during a late sitting in the Commons 20 years ago by a reluctant, and drunk, employment minister, Alan Clark. It allows different jobs to be compared for skill, complexity and responsibility; it focuses on the work, not the job. In detail, the claim translated the gothic arithmetic and arcane patois of industrial relations into the everyday life of men and women: everything, from bonus, to pension, to the length of the working week, to a working life. "It took a while to convince some of them that what they did was not only of equal value to a man, but more important," says Doyle.
A job evaluation expert, Sue Hastings, assessed the Cumbria dossier and reported that the cases were a golden equal pay opportunity for "exactly the people who ought to get it" - nurses who had been undergraded for decades, cleaners, telephonists and sterile services staff, who prepare instruments for surgery and who had been stuck on the same grade as washers-up since the health service was founded. Doyle had found men willing to stand as comparators: a wall-washer earning £3,000 a year more - and working 104 fewer hours a year - than a seamstress and sterile services staff; a plumber earning more than a nurse; a specialised nurse on a cancer ward, at the top of her scale, earning £8,000 a year less than a plant maintenance man; a nurse on £9,000 less than an engineer.
My suspicion is that the fear of equal pay claims - as in Hollywood - is entirely real; equal pay for equal work means that men will have to take home less, one way or another. Councils in the UK - who finally implemented their equal pay agreements in 2006 - complained that they need central government assistance in order to pay women what their work was really worth. Boo fucking hoo; progressive taxation (as if that existed) passes money from wealthier men to poorer women, cry me a river. Hollywood? Would probably get more money overall if it stopped failing so often. But less of it would go to men. And that would somehow be so threatening it's worth paying to make it go away.
How far does the threat go? Well, the NYT is calling bullshit on the different ways we frame men at home vs. women at home here:
But when men in their prime working years drop out of the workforce we don’t say they’ve gone home to be with their kids.
We say they’re unemployed.
It goes back to families and parenting. It usually does.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
the devil in the details
From Churches unhappy over father figures: sadly the Beeb doesn't say exactly who or what they're quoting - I would have liked to know the name of this person, to better say that they're a moran.
So:
-single parents=single mothers. No exceptions.
-no father at time of gestation=single parent. No exceptions.
-this law says 'fathers don't matter' but saying 'parent' when you specifically mean 'mother' is not a sign that you believe fathers don't matter. (If fathers mattered to you, 'mother' and 'parent' would not be synonyms).
Well fucking done.
*cheers new law*
But the Church of England has reserved its greatest ire for the decision of MPs to allow single women and lesbian couples to seek IVF treatment without having to consider the need for a father for their children.
Its verdict is stark.
"This vote sends a signal that fathers don't matter," it said.
[...]
The Church of England focuses on how children end up without a father.
"There is a huge difference between a child who finds themselves in a single-parent family through bereavement or breakdown of parental relationship, and those who find themselves in this situation by design, for which this bill allows."
So:
-single parents=single mothers. No exceptions.
-no father at time of gestation=single parent. No exceptions.
-this law says 'fathers don't matter' but saying 'parent' when you specifically mean 'mother' is not a sign that you believe fathers don't matter. (If fathers mattered to you, 'mother' and 'parent' would not be synonyms).
Well fucking done.
*cheers new law*
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Screw. You.
[this is me thinking aloud about drinking, living, and Somebody Else's Problems.]
Yey.
I love this. I'm glad I found it right when I was trying to line up all this stuff in my head. It is Christmas and I have, as recently mentioned, living space issues, I have family issues, and I have, to be specific, other people's alcohol issues. For Christmas I get a special bumper pack of issues tied with a big red ribbon. I am hoping, almost expecting, that this is the last time I will spend Christmas with my father. We don't go to his house - he comes to ours, and he brings his way of life with him (folded up in a suitcase. and he came much sooner than usual, this year, because he is recovering from brain surgery). I hope it's the last time he's ever in the same living space as me, and that's a liberating concept; it means I no longer have to be cold, or cruel, or kind, to this half-infirm old man. He will be in the hands of another soon enough. The success of the surgery has made him happy. I can let that make life easier.
He moved the corkscrew.
The corkscrew lives in the kitchen, because nothing containing alcohol would ever get opened outside the kitchen, unless it's somebody's birthday or the green fairy is here. A corkscrew on the living-room table is bad. It's someone living in a hurtful way, in my house. You know how it is when you can't even stand the smell of someone? When finding their laundry mixed in with yours is just hateful, when you can only feel at home by pretending they're not in your house - preferably by pretending they don't exist?
Alcohol isn't even the most potent part of this mix. It's money. I have seen him drink more money in the last week than I like to spend in a month, on everything. And sometimes money isn't even more potent than symbols. It's a corkscrew, just a corkscrew - a folding one with penknife on the back and a bottle-opening tool on the end. It's not mine. It's like the tin opener or the pastry brush. It's not for getting mashed with and it shouldn't be outside the kitchen drawer.
I've contemplated many improv homicides over the years, with tube lights and pestles and fire, but corkscrew through eyeball has been a favourite mental image since June 2004. The Corkscrew (not the one that lives in the kitchen, the one that lives in my head) looks kinda like this; I've never owned an athame, or particularly wanted to, but if I did.... So my hand starts curling as I walk about the house, imagining horn ridges and a twist of iron that, fortunately, is not there.
And then he said it. Right after I'd got done whining on the phone to the blue person about it all. He'd brought spirits into the house for the first time in a year, literally replacing almost-empty bottles purchased last December; I made some cocoa and added a dash of cointreau, because it was there, commenting that I'd not had any in about three years. And he just said, in the amicable way that many things have been said lately; "I drink too much."
Never happened before, that one. Not outside that couplet, you know the one-
"You drink too much."
"That's your fault - you drive me to it."
-that every kid who ever had an addict in their family knows about. This time, he just said it. (The green one and I got talking a while ago how, in his age group, alcohol abuse is pretty normalised).
I was probably meant to say something kind. Something gentle of the we-love-you-and-want-you-to-get-better type. What I said, and I said it amicably, was was 'Yes, we know, we knew ten years ago, back when we had no one else in the world, but it's different now, we've got our own lives and...' I stopped before the 'and it's not our problem any more, so I. Don't. Care.' Maybe I have a heart after all. Maybe I'm not done untangling 'I care' from 'This is fucking hurtful to me'. Maybe I expect my siblings will be mired in this even after I'm gone - I tend to be the appointed communicator in this failed excuse for a family unit, as she gets too down and he gets too angry when they try to communicate with him. I am half telephone, half human shield. I am the reason she does not have to deal with the reason she's scared of answering the (real) phone. When our father actually asked why the youngest never calls him and does his best to make it impossible for him to be called, I was the one who didn't say 'Why didn't you worry about that five years ago?', and got on with playing intermediary instead.
He said it a couple of days ago, went out to buy more of it yesterday, and nothing more has been said about it.
I haven't drunk alcohol in around 17 years, but I do remember how it goes - and now it's just so much fun to watch Brits self-medicating. Especially at this very special time of year - holly, migraines, in-laws, that bloody partridge up a gum tree, spewing its ring. We work hideously long hours, our weather is getting worse, our savings may be worthless by next Tuesday and our individual debt repayments would each sustain a Latin American state, we are distantly, hopelessly at war, we're tired of God but confused about praying to Dawkins - of course we find it tricky to relax. So we medicate with prescribed medication, we medicate with illegal medication and we chug down a licensed drug that makes the government millions every month. (Lucky coincidence, here - after all, would we ever vote for any of them, if we weren't either mashed or hung over?)
Yey.
I love this. I'm glad I found it right when I was trying to line up all this stuff in my head. It is Christmas and I have, as recently mentioned, living space issues, I have family issues, and I have, to be specific, other people's alcohol issues. For Christmas I get a special bumper pack of issues tied with a big red ribbon. I am hoping, almost expecting, that this is the last time I will spend Christmas with my father. We don't go to his house - he comes to ours, and he brings his way of life with him (folded up in a suitcase. and he came much sooner than usual, this year, because he is recovering from brain surgery). I hope it's the last time he's ever in the same living space as me, and that's a liberating concept; it means I no longer have to be cold, or cruel, or kind, to this half-infirm old man. He will be in the hands of another soon enough. The success of the surgery has made him happy. I can let that make life easier.
He moved the corkscrew.
The corkscrew lives in the kitchen, because nothing containing alcohol would ever get opened outside the kitchen, unless it's somebody's birthday or the green fairy is here. A corkscrew on the living-room table is bad. It's someone living in a hurtful way, in my house. You know how it is when you can't even stand the smell of someone? When finding their laundry mixed in with yours is just hateful, when you can only feel at home by pretending they're not in your house - preferably by pretending they don't exist?
Alcohol isn't even the most potent part of this mix. It's money. I have seen him drink more money in the last week than I like to spend in a month, on everything. And sometimes money isn't even more potent than symbols. It's a corkscrew, just a corkscrew - a folding one with penknife on the back and a bottle-opening tool on the end. It's not mine. It's like the tin opener or the pastry brush. It's not for getting mashed with and it shouldn't be outside the kitchen drawer.
I've contemplated many improv homicides over the years, with tube lights and pestles and fire, but corkscrew through eyeball has been a favourite mental image since June 2004. The Corkscrew (not the one that lives in the kitchen, the one that lives in my head) looks kinda like this; I've never owned an athame, or particularly wanted to, but if I did.... So my hand starts curling as I walk about the house, imagining horn ridges and a twist of iron that, fortunately, is not there.
And then he said it. Right after I'd got done whining on the phone to the blue person about it all. He'd brought spirits into the house for the first time in a year, literally replacing almost-empty bottles purchased last December; I made some cocoa and added a dash of cointreau, because it was there, commenting that I'd not had any in about three years. And he just said, in the amicable way that many things have been said lately; "I drink too much."
Never happened before, that one. Not outside that couplet, you know the one-
"You drink too much."
"That's your fault - you drive me to it."
-that every kid who ever had an addict in their family knows about. This time, he just said it. (The green one and I got talking a while ago how, in his age group, alcohol abuse is pretty normalised).
I was probably meant to say something kind. Something gentle of the we-love-you-and-want-you-to-get-better type. What I said, and I said it amicably, was was 'Yes, we know, we knew ten years ago, back when we had no one else in the world, but it's different now, we've got our own lives and...' I stopped before the 'and it's not our problem any more, so I. Don't. Care.' Maybe I have a heart after all. Maybe I'm not done untangling 'I care' from 'This is fucking hurtful to me'. Maybe I expect my siblings will be mired in this even after I'm gone - I tend to be the appointed communicator in this failed excuse for a family unit, as she gets too down and he gets too angry when they try to communicate with him. I am half telephone, half human shield. I am the reason she does not have to deal with the reason she's scared of answering the (real) phone. When our father actually asked why the youngest never calls him and does his best to make it impossible for him to be called, I was the one who didn't say 'Why didn't you worry about that five years ago?', and got on with playing intermediary instead.
He said it a couple of days ago, went out to buy more of it yesterday, and nothing more has been said about it.
Friday, December 07, 2007
where the heart.
The ABC ladies are poking my head; Kyraninse on how comfort levels are for wet blankets: and V on faith, works, etc. The former reminds me that there is value in going over the things I'm finding hard to go over, harder still to articulate, even if it's only of use to myself; the latter - I could pretend she reminds me that there's no bloody point to writing anyway, but that's not true, the truth is that I agree with everything she said and I got there on a road I don't like, barefoot, but I am like Posy and can learn with my feet.
Speaking of, I made a Sex Pixie:
I believe that wisdom is in the body - wisdom, joy, sadness, truth, there's a physical accompaniment to all of it, and I often find it easier to connect to that than to the rest of it. I get distracted by the abstracts and dream-reals easily; I think that's how the world is, that if you're engaged with one thing you're inevitably drawn to its opposite. A foot on the ground is a head in a cloud, no disjunct.
Verte told me a while ago of a sweet group exercise in which people were asked to point to the body part in which their 'self' resided. Most went to the head; she to her heart; her sparkliness has said such things about hands; my More Pretentiouser Than Thou Pseudo-pagan self would've gestured to the spinal cord, but here in the real world life seems to come from my feet.
And where are my feet, lately? In limbo.
My new US visa arrived by courier on Monday - it is in a giant yellow envelope I am not allowed to open, that will not be opened until I reach the border; it came with an inevitable feeling of carefully treading in Orpheus's footprints. I run circles around my neighbourhood in old, broken shoes; I'm trapped, waiting for January, and ashamed of it. I really am. That shame is why a lot of things are hard to say - it's like navigating around a great pit, always worrying if I'll fall, if I'll be pushed -
I've been wanting to talk about what V said, about neighbours. I could call it something I learned from early-life Christianity - I mean, it's right there in Matthew 25 -
- but really, I think I feel that way because I learned it with my feet.
Those of you who've been reading a while will know that my adolescence was needlessly chaotic, that I was never a teenager like other teenagers, that I was sore and stupid about it the whole time - but that wasn't the start of the crazy by any means. It started with a house. The one my parents should've built, but didn't.
They met in London, where the eldest and I were born, but both had grown up in the same general area of the Pennines - I don't know why they moved back there, maybe for family, who died, or out of nostalgia. Maybe anywhere they settled would've been as much of a disaster. It was a quarter-acre plot of land with an old barn on it, in the middle of a village (a village of the 25-houses-1-pub-1-church model, with a river running through it and roads that led to three others like it, though I'm told that many decades ago it had a butcher and a baker). It was meant to be something - house, extension, garden, hearth and home; what it became was shame, stray cats, petty fights over never-enough hot water, a coal fire to huddle by, always a mess, never my space, never happy. Where it worked, it was beautiful. I sometimes made spaces, took the well-lit never-used upstairs living room, cleared it and turned cartwheels there, had a folding table and an inherited dining chair. It got good after midnight, or when I was skipping school, but in the evenings you could hear the television blaring through the thin wood floorboards, hear my father speaking to it as if he were trying to cow some petty demon. It didn't work. The house did not work.
When I whined about The Cement Garden, that was part of why; the physical isolation was a real force in my life back then, almost as real as death itself. The 'garden' was vast, untended, and full of the rubbish of construction - a bit of an adventure to a child, turning offcuts of wood into flimsy treehouses and playing with cats in the long grass - but to a motherless adolescent with a younger child to fail to care for, a household to slipshodly run, a thwarted want to eke out some kind of life in that grey place? Every stone was its weight in shame. Alchemilla molis overran the flower patch - I planted salvias, but the slugs took them within days, and any upkeep my mother had done was lost, though there were still roses. Compassions. I cut their withered heads off when necessary.
I remember walking to the river that Saturday night, taking off my shoes and putting my bare feet in the water, talking to the half-moon, trying to make myself and my life over in response to the crisis in my mind; if I'm back there any time soon, as I sadly think I must be, I am going to do that again.
I remember breaking a toe on the pitch-pine stairs that snaked all around the hallway.
It was too wrecked and shameful for friends - I rarely asked them back. My gamers came, but strange-smelling ruins are cool for PnP. I never felt I could just say 'this is my space, I want to share it with you' to anyone - it wasn't anyone's space, it was a monster. Once I wanted to share my place with a friend badly enough that instead of asking him there, I asked him to my sister's home in London, 250 miles south. (Thus began the unholy triumvirate, a merry thing that violates all your nuclear-family logic, but is another story, and not really mine to tell).
I didn't have many people anyway - I was difficult, angry, had nothing positive to offer but dreams, so there's no one to blame for that. One of the few who was consistently kind and welcoming to me, who noticed when I was sad and such, turned out to be a complete and crazy prick to everyone else in the world, and is still being hurtful to others I knew then, six years later; what am I to make of that, that he terrorised good people who, themselves, wouldn't've given me the time of day?
Did I mention my sister's home is the same one my parents used to have? It's a small place (well, it's dandy for us, even when all three of us are here, but didn't do for parents with three young children), and the lease was controlled, and they made their own house so had no mortgage, and our father talked his company into making use of it sometimes and paying some of the rent - they didn't want to let it go. Now we live here, behind a mountain of unsolicited mail from Foxtons begging us to move the hell out. I'd planned to move in the day after I finished sixth-form; what happened is that a month before that, a rooftop fire destroyed the attic above these four rooms and the burned-out roofspace fell through into two of them.
It was a trauma, especially after all the other living-space issues we'd had, but I confess that I am glad we had that one clean break from the past; I remember standing in the soot and broken tiles, on a treasure hunt a few weeks after the fire, and seeing a shard of that aggravatingly low glass light fitting, the one he was forever banging his head into, and laughing. I'm glad I got to see the sky inside this place, got to know how insubstantial home is. I don't know about the rest of us, but to me that was worth the cost - in fact, the cost was worth the cost, if you get me. Home shunted from place to place during 2003, and somewhere in the middle it slid into the space-between-spaces that swallowed the bulk of that year, but that is a story for another day, or maybe never.
Having a place to live in, to me, means having a place to share. Dignity is an uncluttered floor with a rug on it; a kitchen I can cope with being in; spare blankets for my friends. I've a craving to give and to care and to shelter friends from the cold - and that does not make me a good person by any account, abstract arguments about true altruism aside, because it's too satisfying and it too easily makes up for something I formerly couldn't have. So I give - sure, sometimes I have to come up with dinner for seven on the fly, and I never know where to keep all the duvets, but to be prepared to love, to have such tools and raw materials at hand and to keep a tidy workshop for the craft of loving, is not my gift to you. It's your gift to me. It's proof that I escaped and that I can do better now.
Speaking of, I made a Sex Pixie:
I believe that wisdom is in the body - wisdom, joy, sadness, truth, there's a physical accompaniment to all of it, and I often find it easier to connect to that than to the rest of it. I get distracted by the abstracts and dream-reals easily; I think that's how the world is, that if you're engaged with one thing you're inevitably drawn to its opposite. A foot on the ground is a head in a cloud, no disjunct.
Verte told me a while ago of a sweet group exercise in which people were asked to point to the body part in which their 'self' resided. Most went to the head; she to her heart; her sparkliness has said such things about hands; my More Pretentiouser Than Thou Pseudo-pagan self would've gestured to the spinal cord, but here in the real world life seems to come from my feet.
And where are my feet, lately? In limbo.
My new US visa arrived by courier on Monday - it is in a giant yellow envelope I am not allowed to open, that will not be opened until I reach the border; it came with an inevitable feeling of carefully treading in Orpheus's footprints. I run circles around my neighbourhood in old, broken shoes; I'm trapped, waiting for January, and ashamed of it. I really am. That shame is why a lot of things are hard to say - it's like navigating around a great pit, always worrying if I'll fall, if I'll be pushed -
I've been wanting to talk about what V said, about neighbours. I could call it something I learned from early-life Christianity - I mean, it's right there in Matthew 25 -
"Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take for your heritage the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you made me welcome; naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me." Then the virtuous will say to him in reply, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you; or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and make you welcome; naked and clothe you; sick or in prison and go to see you?" And the King will answer, "I tell you solemnly, in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me."
- but really, I think I feel that way because I learned it with my feet.
Those of you who've been reading a while will know that my adolescence was needlessly chaotic, that I was never a teenager like other teenagers, that I was sore and stupid about it the whole time - but that wasn't the start of the crazy by any means. It started with a house. The one my parents should've built, but didn't.
They met in London, where the eldest and I were born, but both had grown up in the same general area of the Pennines - I don't know why they moved back there, maybe for family, who died, or out of nostalgia. Maybe anywhere they settled would've been as much of a disaster. It was a quarter-acre plot of land with an old barn on it, in the middle of a village (a village of the 25-houses-1-pub-1-church model, with a river running through it and roads that led to three others like it, though I'm told that many decades ago it had a butcher and a baker). It was meant to be something - house, extension, garden, hearth and home; what it became was shame, stray cats, petty fights over never-enough hot water, a coal fire to huddle by, always a mess, never my space, never happy. Where it worked, it was beautiful. I sometimes made spaces, took the well-lit never-used upstairs living room, cleared it and turned cartwheels there, had a folding table and an inherited dining chair. It got good after midnight, or when I was skipping school, but in the evenings you could hear the television blaring through the thin wood floorboards, hear my father speaking to it as if he were trying to cow some petty demon. It didn't work. The house did not work.
When I whined about The Cement Garden, that was part of why; the physical isolation was a real force in my life back then, almost as real as death itself. The 'garden' was vast, untended, and full of the rubbish of construction - a bit of an adventure to a child, turning offcuts of wood into flimsy treehouses and playing with cats in the long grass - but to a motherless adolescent with a younger child to fail to care for, a household to slipshodly run, a thwarted want to eke out some kind of life in that grey place? Every stone was its weight in shame. Alchemilla molis overran the flower patch - I planted salvias, but the slugs took them within days, and any upkeep my mother had done was lost, though there were still roses. Compassions. I cut their withered heads off when necessary.
I remember walking to the river that Saturday night, taking off my shoes and putting my bare feet in the water, talking to the half-moon, trying to make myself and my life over in response to the crisis in my mind; if I'm back there any time soon, as I sadly think I must be, I am going to do that again.
I remember breaking a toe on the pitch-pine stairs that snaked all around the hallway.
It was too wrecked and shameful for friends - I rarely asked them back. My gamers came, but strange-smelling ruins are cool for PnP. I never felt I could just say 'this is my space, I want to share it with you' to anyone - it wasn't anyone's space, it was a monster. Once I wanted to share my place with a friend badly enough that instead of asking him there, I asked him to my sister's home in London, 250 miles south. (Thus began the unholy triumvirate, a merry thing that violates all your nuclear-family logic, but is another story, and not really mine to tell).
I didn't have many people anyway - I was difficult, angry, had nothing positive to offer but dreams, so there's no one to blame for that. One of the few who was consistently kind and welcoming to me, who noticed when I was sad and such, turned out to be a complete and crazy prick to everyone else in the world, and is still being hurtful to others I knew then, six years later; what am I to make of that, that he terrorised good people who, themselves, wouldn't've given me the time of day?
Did I mention my sister's home is the same one my parents used to have? It's a small place (well, it's dandy for us, even when all three of us are here, but didn't do for parents with three young children), and the lease was controlled, and they made their own house so had no mortgage, and our father talked his company into making use of it sometimes and paying some of the rent - they didn't want to let it go. Now we live here, behind a mountain of unsolicited mail from Foxtons begging us to move the hell out. I'd planned to move in the day after I finished sixth-form; what happened is that a month before that, a rooftop fire destroyed the attic above these four rooms and the burned-out roofspace fell through into two of them.
It was a trauma, especially after all the other living-space issues we'd had, but I confess that I am glad we had that one clean break from the past; I remember standing in the soot and broken tiles, on a treasure hunt a few weeks after the fire, and seeing a shard of that aggravatingly low glass light fitting, the one he was forever banging his head into, and laughing. I'm glad I got to see the sky inside this place, got to know how insubstantial home is. I don't know about the rest of us, but to me that was worth the cost - in fact, the cost was worth the cost, if you get me. Home shunted from place to place during 2003, and somewhere in the middle it slid into the space-between-spaces that swallowed the bulk of that year, but that is a story for another day, or maybe never.
Having a place to live in, to me, means having a place to share. Dignity is an uncluttered floor with a rug on it; a kitchen I can cope with being in; spare blankets for my friends. I've a craving to give and to care and to shelter friends from the cold - and that does not make me a good person by any account, abstract arguments about true altruism aside, because it's too satisfying and it too easily makes up for something I formerly couldn't have. So I give - sure, sometimes I have to come up with dinner for seven on the fly, and I never know where to keep all the duvets, but to be prepared to love, to have such tools and raw materials at hand and to keep a tidy workshop for the craft of loving, is not my gift to you. It's your gift to me. It's proof that I escaped and that I can do better now.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Micah Is My Hero/a roundup of curiosities.
I'm just keeping up with Heroes on BBC2 - ie, only halfway through season 1, not nearly far enough to do a complete Heroes/gender lambast, but I do want to say that oh dear god do I love Micah this evening. Because he won't let single-daddy off the hook. Micah is a small boy who used to live with single-mummy, Niki, and now lives with single-daddy, DL (which I am still disappointed is not spelt properly, ie Dalziel, but hey). Transcript stolen from Shadow Anthology:
DL: It's not my fault you can't keep track of your own stuff.
MICAH: Mom always put my lunch in my backpack every single morning.
DL: Well, I'm not your mom.
MICAH: Yeah, that's for sure.
DL: Micah, this isn't easy.
MICAH: Well, it wasn't easy for Mom either.
Next, some extremely old news I only just stumbled across; an FAC complaint about the practically Aristotelian approach the BBFC has toward the female body. (Text-only, but NSFW). Censorship; it means that if you want to know something about a woman's sex life, you have to ask the BBFC, because women aren't allowed to make films about how it really is. It's a familar story.
I keep meaning to say a few words about a completely different thing that also has to do with governments not giving a shit about women's experiences; Form DS-157 (link is an evil, vile PDF). It should be familiar to anyone who's ever applied for a US work visa. It's included in every batch of paperwork the embassies send out for such ends; it asks if you've ever been in a combat zone, and if you've ever been a victim of war. It asks if you have specialised training in the use of firearms or explosives. This form is given to all applicants, but completed versions are only accepted from men. While I'm aware this is all weed-out-the-terrorists stuff, it's beyond odd to be asked such questions then, twice now, told 'nope, don't give a shit, you're a chick'; I'd imagine it would be odder if I had any 'yes' answers to offer, as many female applicants must.
If you didn't read The Monkeysphere the first time around, the Wong has relaunched it elsewhere. I've not a fucking clue how well it fits with Proper Primatology, but it's a concept I sometimes like to bear in mind; I think it does seem helpful to assume that one can only really be aware of 150 other human souls. Sendalin (the imaginary enemy/shadow side whatsit) says one should keep it to 149 at most, so there's always a clear place in your awareness for that someone you might meet on the highroad. (Sendalin also says that being sensible about love is like being turquoise about puppies, and that he likes his coffee desperate with two spoons of melodrama, so how much stock to put in his ideas is up to you.)
My last-but-one post lied, btw; the green person has told me she reads Marie Claire sometimes! I FAIL .__. But I can still find it creepy & misogynistic that Mr Moran says it's 'reassuring' that Suu Kyi reads it, right?
And the only thing worth reading that has ever been printed about Madeline McCann, ever.
DL: It's not my fault you can't keep track of your own stuff.
MICAH: Mom always put my lunch in my backpack every single morning.
DL: Well, I'm not your mom.
MICAH: Yeah, that's for sure.
DL: Micah, this isn't easy.
MICAH: Well, it wasn't easy for Mom either.
Next, some extremely old news I only just stumbled across; an FAC complaint about the practically Aristotelian approach the BBFC has toward the female body. (Text-only, but NSFW). Censorship; it means that if you want to know something about a woman's sex life, you have to ask the BBFC, because women aren't allowed to make films about how it really is. It's a familar story.
I keep meaning to say a few words about a completely different thing that also has to do with governments not giving a shit about women's experiences; Form DS-157 (link is an evil, vile PDF). It should be familiar to anyone who's ever applied for a US work visa. It's included in every batch of paperwork the embassies send out for such ends; it asks if you've ever been in a combat zone, and if you've ever been a victim of war. It asks if you have specialised training in the use of firearms or explosives. This form is given to all applicants, but completed versions are only accepted from men. While I'm aware this is all weed-out-the-terrorists stuff, it's beyond odd to be asked such questions then, twice now, told 'nope, don't give a shit, you're a chick'; I'd imagine it would be odder if I had any 'yes' answers to offer, as many female applicants must.
If you didn't read The Monkeysphere the first time around, the Wong has relaunched it elsewhere. I've not a fucking clue how well it fits with Proper Primatology, but it's a concept I sometimes like to bear in mind; I think it does seem helpful to assume that one can only really be aware of 150 other human souls. Sendalin (the imaginary enemy/shadow side whatsit) says one should keep it to 149 at most, so there's always a clear place in your awareness for that someone you might meet on the highroad. (Sendalin also says that being sensible about love is like being turquoise about puppies, and that he likes his coffee desperate with two spoons of melodrama, so how much stock to put in his ideas is up to you.)
My last-but-one post lied, btw; the green person has told me she reads Marie Claire sometimes! I FAIL .__. But I can still find it creepy & misogynistic that Mr Moran says it's 'reassuring' that Suu Kyi reads it, right?
And the only thing worth reading that has ever been printed about Madeline McCann, ever.
Monday, October 01, 2007
point. laugh. *try* not to cry.
It's Ann Coulter, so I guess those are the only possible options. This was linked on a comment thread at Bitchy's place because of her hate-comments about SMers and their bodies, so don't follow the link if that would ruin your day. The bit that ruined my day was this bit of omg-who's-to-BLAME-for-this-DEBAUCHERY;
COULTER: Most of all the culture of children raised without two married parents.
GIBSON: You're blaming this on divorce?
COULTER: Well, let's take a poll of the members of that club and see how many of the girls in that club grew up sleeping in the same house as their father.
ewgpheagperg[34awy93qwAAAGHAAAGHAAAGH.
so, if married parents =/= 2, a divorce has occurred and the daughter now has no live-in daddy.
Yeah, all single-parent families are the same, all of them, and they're all so wrong and naughty.
COULTER: Most of all the culture of children raised without two married parents.
GIBSON: You're blaming this on divorce?
COULTER: Well, let's take a poll of the members of that club and see how many of the girls in that club grew up sleeping in the same house as their father.
ewgpheagperg[34awy93qwAAAGHAAAGHAAAGH.
so, if married parents =/= 2, a divorce has occurred and the daughter now has no live-in daddy.
Yeah, all single-parent families are the same, all of them, and they're all so wrong and naughty.
Friday, September 07, 2007
terminology creep:
I have insomnia. If I didn't, I might not be bothering with this, but tea+biscuits+ranting on the internet is my way of dealing with 2.30am, and that pernicious terminology creep just sidled up over here.
I don't much like pointing out these things, because it makes me feel like I am being Issues, and I'd kinda like to be a brain and a voice and stuff rather than just a wangsty backstory. It's not just on the internet - I've been in this position at the London Socialist Feminists discussion group too. I either speak up and feel like a whiny little discussion-derailer or let it pass and have my head esplode of logic failure and unexpected invisibility. So please, say it with me:
single parents =/= single mothers.
All Bs are A, but not all As are B. You follow?
It is true that the vast majority (I've heard it quoted as 90%) of single parents are women. This is not a good reason to use the terms as if they were interchangeable. Firstly it renders single fathers and their children invisible and conceals the places where their needs differ from the needs of single mothers. Secondly, it's pure fucking misogyny. Yeah, it's just reflecting the misogyny that generally exists in family structures - the bulk of single parent families are formed from the breakdown of two-[heterosexual]-parent families, and of course mummy always has to keep the kids, because human beings are just designed that way, so calling single mother families 'single parent families' is just the natural way of things, m?
It's using a neutral word to cover up an un-neutral problem. It's saying that we don't have to question why mummy takes the kids. It cuts both ways; she has to have that parental responsibility, while he cannot have it. Or alternatively; she is permitted to hog that position, while he is permitted to neglect.
It disguises the differences between single mother families and single father families. I'm not made of bullshit statistics, but every single father family I've known of is the result of either bereavement or imprisonment; the absolute imperative for mummy to take the kids means that the place where daddy takes the kids is a pretty confined and inaccessible terrain. On the other hand there's this whole jumble of problems many single mother families experience - getting child support, coping with the emotional fallout of family breakdown, access (sometimes referred to as 'pay-per-view parenting', by which we mean 'pay-per-view paternity'), and dealing with the lousy stereotypes (foolish, pathetic welfare mum and incapable, irresponsible deadbeat dad. I don't know any single father family stereotypes. Maybe they wouldn't work so well on TV or something.) There's always going to be some overlaps and some reversals of the norm, but on the whole assuming that a single parent family is a single mother family means assuming that some problems are everyone's problems (and that my problems were/are not really there).
I'd like to live in a world where there were parents. It's a role I wouldn't run away screaming from myself. In that world the term 'single parent' would have substance. I just haven't personally experienced this world - I've seen only single mothers and single fathers, and conflating the gender roles that prescribe their fates into a nice, neutral term is not a great idea.
I don't much like pointing out these things, because it makes me feel like I am being Issues, and I'd kinda like to be a brain and a voice and stuff rather than just a wangsty backstory. It's not just on the internet - I've been in this position at the London Socialist Feminists discussion group too. I either speak up and feel like a whiny little discussion-derailer or let it pass and have my head esplode of logic failure and unexpected invisibility. So please, say it with me:
single parents =/= single mothers.
All Bs are A, but not all As are B. You follow?
It is true that the vast majority (I've heard it quoted as 90%) of single parents are women. This is not a good reason to use the terms as if they were interchangeable. Firstly it renders single fathers and their children invisible and conceals the places where their needs differ from the needs of single mothers. Secondly, it's pure fucking misogyny. Yeah, it's just reflecting the misogyny that generally exists in family structures - the bulk of single parent families are formed from the breakdown of two-[heterosexual]-parent families, and of course mummy always has to keep the kids, because human beings are just designed that way, so calling single mother families 'single parent families' is just the natural way of things, m?
It's using a neutral word to cover up an un-neutral problem. It's saying that we don't have to question why mummy takes the kids. It cuts both ways; she has to have that parental responsibility, while he cannot have it. Or alternatively; she is permitted to hog that position, while he is permitted to neglect.
It disguises the differences between single mother families and single father families. I'm not made of bullshit statistics, but every single father family I've known of is the result of either bereavement or imprisonment; the absolute imperative for mummy to take the kids means that the place where daddy takes the kids is a pretty confined and inaccessible terrain. On the other hand there's this whole jumble of problems many single mother families experience - getting child support, coping with the emotional fallout of family breakdown, access (sometimes referred to as 'pay-per-view parenting', by which we mean 'pay-per-view paternity'), and dealing with the lousy stereotypes (foolish, pathetic welfare mum and incapable, irresponsible deadbeat dad. I don't know any single father family stereotypes. Maybe they wouldn't work so well on TV or something.) There's always going to be some overlaps and some reversals of the norm, but on the whole assuming that a single parent family is a single mother family means assuming that some problems are everyone's problems (and that my problems were/are not really there).
I'd like to live in a world where there were parents. It's a role I wouldn't run away screaming from myself. In that world the term 'single parent' would have substance. I just haven't personally experienced this world - I've seen only single mothers and single fathers, and conflating the gender roles that prescribe their fates into a nice, neutral term is not a great idea.
Friday, June 01, 2007
small outbreaks of sanity
[I am sleep-deprived and waffling]
Related to the whole Livejournal malarkey; The New Witch Hunt. My sister and I wound up talking about this while watching the news earlier; we suspected the negative tone of said news was fuelled by pure DailyMaleitis. (Oh, and this is months old, but god, PA, +PA news). I can't help but wonder who benefits from the witch-hunt, and who suffers. It seems like another of those attempts to divide the entire world into 'trusted friends' and 'monstrous strangers'. Most child molesters are in the former group, so why pretend that crazy freaks on Livejournal are that scary? (There's no line there, just many overlapping waves; I first heard about the whole Strikethrough mess from a friend who's both an abuse survivor and a cheerful shipper of incest, twincest and jailbait-slash.)
On women-only spaces; I blogged about this on Deadjournal in relation to Ladyfest. My personal inclination is generally that there are good ethoses of communication and bad ethoses of communication, rather than good or bad gendered spaces. I loved this line and may come back to it later; "Important point to note, that one - feeling aggravated, annoyed, pissed off etc is not the same as feeling physically threatened."
Whole other questions about family structures. This is a family issue I have verry little experience of, as my relatives have this habit of dying young, but I think I feel its currents; vicious cycles of noncommunication, generations sitting in separate rooms, unsure how to interact. (I'm sure it's just me who's altogether confused about what blood ties mean anyway, so I'll avoid projecting that onto the world at large.)
Reading this was a great saving in time and effort, because if I hadn't, I would have had to write it myself. Like anorexia, it's a subject that warrants consideration in a way that doesn't assume all the victims are female.
Related to the whole Livejournal malarkey; The New Witch Hunt. My sister and I wound up talking about this while watching the news earlier; we suspected the negative tone of said news was fuelled by pure DailyMaleitis. (Oh, and this is months old, but god, PA, +PA news). I can't help but wonder who benefits from the witch-hunt, and who suffers. It seems like another of those attempts to divide the entire world into 'trusted friends' and 'monstrous strangers'. Most child molesters are in the former group, so why pretend that crazy freaks on Livejournal are that scary? (There's no line there, just many overlapping waves; I first heard about the whole Strikethrough mess from a friend who's both an abuse survivor and a cheerful shipper of incest, twincest and jailbait-slash.)
On women-only spaces; I blogged about this on Deadjournal in relation to Ladyfest. My personal inclination is generally that there are good ethoses of communication and bad ethoses of communication, rather than good or bad gendered spaces. I loved this line and may come back to it later; "Important point to note, that one - feeling aggravated, annoyed, pissed off etc is not the same as feeling physically threatened."
Whole other questions about family structures. This is a family issue I have verry little experience of, as my relatives have this habit of dying young, but I think I feel its currents; vicious cycles of noncommunication, generations sitting in separate rooms, unsure how to interact. (I'm sure it's just me who's altogether confused about what blood ties mean anyway, so I'll avoid projecting that onto the world at large.)
Reading this was a great saving in time and effort, because if I hadn't, I would have had to write it myself. Like anorexia, it's a subject that warrants consideration in a way that doesn't assume all the victims are female.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
on surnames;
This was originally an LJ comment; a friend had posted a poll on the matter of surnames, and much conversation ensued. My original rant (which seems more bitter than I had intended);
I've been seriously thinking about this lately because I'm getting married sometime this autumn/winter. It's not a momentous occasion; we're very much in love, and as neither of us have much regard for marriage customs, we're not getting too worked up about it. We're getting married for our own reasons, and we're not too phased by the decision. But the surname has been a problem. On the one hand, I regard the custom of wives taking their husbands name as barbaric; on the other, the surname I have now is my father's, and I despise my father and would like to have as little to do with him as possible. I've seriously considered adopting my mother's maiden name, or even my mother's mother or my mother's mother's mother's maiden name, but however far you go back, you still just get names that belong to men. The great-grandmother's maiden name is quite fetching, and my mother's is both fetching and Scottish, but still.
I love my partner, and his name is pleasing in sound, metre, meaning and stature...but to make things even more of a mess, it's an Arabic name, and I seriously worry if lily-white me would be exposed to racial profiling if I took it. (He's been known to get it in the neck at airports, and he's barely swarthier than I am.) One other issue is that his name is very rare in the USA and far more common in the UK...and in the UK it's pronounced differently to the way his family say it, so I can't stop myself pronouncing it differently to how they do (none of his living relatives have any connections to Lebanon any more, so I'd maybe bet on me being 'right' :P)
So I've still not settled on an answer. I've considered hybrids of both my father's name and his, and my mother's name and his, but none of roll off the tongue. A hyphenated surname would have five syllables; urgh. He's absolutely willing to take my name if I wish it, but I dislike both the name and the man I got it off, so what on earth would that accomplish? Really, I'd be 100% keen on taking his name, were it not for the political context of that decision. I don't believe that women are just torchbearers for masculinity (you speak of a name that 'connects them to the rest of their family', but I'd question whether the 'family' is an institution worth supporting in that manner. I personally feel no ties to any of my family members excepting my two siblings, one of whom has also toyed with a name-change). I think most people who know me would be very surprised that I'm inclined to abandon my name, but I am. I'd rather choose the name of someone I care for than keep the name of someone who never cared for me.
Really, I feel like it's a messy decision because I'm starting from a total shipwreck. I have no name of my own, just a father's father's father's name that I never wanted in the first place. There's no level playing field here.
Soon after writing that rant, I came across a Grauniad article on the same topic, which applied a lovely description to a woman's surname; 'temporary label'. It's a knotty one. I doubt there's a non-sexist surname option other than making up an entirely new name. (I do know one couple - very new-age - who did just that, but I don't know if gender played any part in that decision).
The OP (Kelbesque) went further, and questioned whether we really need surnames at all; Surnames exist entirely to convey origination information. If that information is important, neither spouse should need to give that up; and yet their children should have that in their names; and if it isn't, then what the hell are we doing with surnames? ... I have to be honest, I feel surnames are a pretty stupid conduit for origination data anyway. They reflect an ancient and idiotic tradition that has been abandoned for long stretches of history without issue. I would as soon be [first name] [middle name] and not [first name] [middle name] [surname] were it not for the fact that a surname is legally required of me.
Here we seem to come up against changing demographics; in even the recent past, single-person households and even childless couples were considerably rarer than they are now, and the extended family was far stronger. I once heard it said (on Radio 4, no less) that the bicycle was most important development in human evolution in the last thousand years; before bicycles, almost all reproductive partnerships necessarily involved two people born less than 20 miles apart; the faster we've learned to move, the more the family disintegrates. The surname, which would once have likely indicated a discrete geographical and cultural origin, no longer carries enough data to be relevant.
So, origination is bunk. Why surnames, then? I'm inclined to regard them as indicators not of origin, but of a shared responsibility; a united group of creators and created that have a burden of care towards each other. Not necessary, but a snappy way to indicate who's responsible for caring for Baby, (or for Granny, who, unlike Baby, has been pushed to the outer shell of the nuclear family and is expected to form an ionic bond elsewhere). It's making an identity out of care. Can we do that without mindlessly replicating a sexist tradition?
I've been seriously thinking about this lately because I'm getting married sometime this autumn/winter. It's not a momentous occasion; we're very much in love, and as neither of us have much regard for marriage customs, we're not getting too worked up about it. We're getting married for our own reasons, and we're not too phased by the decision. But the surname has been a problem. On the one hand, I regard the custom of wives taking their husbands name as barbaric; on the other, the surname I have now is my father's, and I despise my father and would like to have as little to do with him as possible. I've seriously considered adopting my mother's maiden name, or even my mother's mother or my mother's mother's mother's maiden name, but however far you go back, you still just get names that belong to men. The great-grandmother's maiden name is quite fetching, and my mother's is both fetching and Scottish, but still.
I love my partner, and his name is pleasing in sound, metre, meaning and stature...but to make things even more of a mess, it's an Arabic name, and I seriously worry if lily-white me would be exposed to racial profiling if I took it. (He's been known to get it in the neck at airports, and he's barely swarthier than I am.) One other issue is that his name is very rare in the USA and far more common in the UK...and in the UK it's pronounced differently to the way his family say it, so I can't stop myself pronouncing it differently to how they do (none of his living relatives have any connections to Lebanon any more, so I'd maybe bet on me being 'right' :P)
So I've still not settled on an answer. I've considered hybrids of both my father's name and his, and my mother's name and his, but none of roll off the tongue. A hyphenated surname would have five syllables; urgh. He's absolutely willing to take my name if I wish it, but I dislike both the name and the man I got it off, so what on earth would that accomplish? Really, I'd be 100% keen on taking his name, were it not for the political context of that decision. I don't believe that women are just torchbearers for masculinity (you speak of a name that 'connects them to the rest of their family', but I'd question whether the 'family' is an institution worth supporting in that manner. I personally feel no ties to any of my family members excepting my two siblings, one of whom has also toyed with a name-change). I think most people who know me would be very surprised that I'm inclined to abandon my name, but I am. I'd rather choose the name of someone I care for than keep the name of someone who never cared for me.
Really, I feel like it's a messy decision because I'm starting from a total shipwreck. I have no name of my own, just a father's father's father's name that I never wanted in the first place. There's no level playing field here.
Soon after writing that rant, I came across a Grauniad article on the same topic, which applied a lovely description to a woman's surname; 'temporary label'. It's a knotty one. I doubt there's a non-sexist surname option other than making up an entirely new name. (I do know one couple - very new-age - who did just that, but I don't know if gender played any part in that decision).
The OP (Kelbesque) went further, and questioned whether we really need surnames at all; Surnames exist entirely to convey origination information. If that information is important, neither spouse should need to give that up; and yet their children should have that in their names; and if it isn't, then what the hell are we doing with surnames? ... I have to be honest, I feel surnames are a pretty stupid conduit for origination data anyway. They reflect an ancient and idiotic tradition that has been abandoned for long stretches of history without issue. I would as soon be [first name] [middle name] and not [first name] [middle name] [surname] were it not for the fact that a surname is legally required of me.
Here we seem to come up against changing demographics; in even the recent past, single-person households and even childless couples were considerably rarer than they are now, and the extended family was far stronger. I once heard it said (on Radio 4, no less) that the bicycle was most important development in human evolution in the last thousand years; before bicycles, almost all reproductive partnerships necessarily involved two people born less than 20 miles apart; the faster we've learned to move, the more the family disintegrates. The surname, which would once have likely indicated a discrete geographical and cultural origin, no longer carries enough data to be relevant.
So, origination is bunk. Why surnames, then? I'm inclined to regard them as indicators not of origin, but of a shared responsibility; a united group of creators and created that have a burden of care towards each other. Not necessary, but a snappy way to indicate who's responsible for caring for Baby, (or for Granny, who, unlike Baby, has been pushed to the outer shell of the nuclear family and is expected to form an ionic bond elsewhere). It's making an identity out of care. Can we do that without mindlessly replicating a sexist tradition?
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Destroying The Family.
The Mother's War, which I saw when it was MSTed by Punkass Blog.
Now, I read this new PWOT about atheists and Christians a couple of days ago; being neither, it was more amusing than enlightening for me, but it made the very sensible point that focusing on negative examples makes you stupid. He was speaking of a considerably fouler extremist, Fred Phelps, but I think the point stands;
Smearing all Christians with Phelps' bile is a cheap shot, like saying all atheist schoolkids are potential Columbine shooters. At worst, that kind of stereotyping is dehumanizing and divisive. At best, it's a recipe for mediocrity. I compare myself to the worst so that I don't have to try to be the best. I can spend all day on my sofa, playing Wii Boxing and helping no one, and I'll still be a better man than Phelps. But I think we've got to shoot higher here.
So yes, Vox Day is an extremist, and I won't seek to compare all those who abuse the word 'family' for political purposes to him. However, he is trying to compare all his enemies to me. That traditional nuclear family thing he's talking about, the thing all we foul Europeans (wtf?) hate so very much? I hate it. I don't want to be part of one ever again, and reading such praises of the system made me quite upset. Not because I think it's got some nebulous potential to do harm, but because I know it does harm; it neglects me, excludes me, silences me and forces me to fend for myself. What he says - that children without mothers exist outside civilisation - is hurtful not because it's outright false, but because it's generally true and it's fucking unnecessary and, contrary to his characterisation of things, this championing of the status quo, the wonderful ever-caring mother, causes deep harm to certain children, of which I am one.
Even - I recall this quite distinctly - the evening it happened, I was aware that losing your mother was an extreme anomaly - something that got fetishised in storybooks, not something that actually happened to real children, not something that a family has to be prepared to adapt to, to get on with. I didn't truly believe it for most of the next week; no one had told me that she wasn't getting better, that her immune problems were terminal and she only had at most a couple of years before leukaemia set in anyway. It was a Friday, and I went back to school on Tuesday, where my form tutor told me he was surprised to see me back so soon; I remember telling two older acquaintances who had not heard the news - the way their mouths opened, the tones of voice. I was internalising other people's expressions of horror; my own feelings were a silent clamouring that I didn't know what to do with, no matter how many people tried to offer me a shoulder. (Someone - a friend of my parents' - even gave me a notebook specially, but I wrote stories in it instead, because that was emotionally safer.)
That's not important, that - just me wallowing, which isn't something I do often but reading all this Mother's Day claptrap kinda invites it. Up til then, I'm sure our family would have made Vox Day proud; a mother who ran the household, a father who worked long hours far from home and didn't involve himself other than in providing money and laying down the law, and three pretty well looked-after kids. Is it just me, or is there something inherently unstable about this structure?
I recently (awful timing, the thing had been sitting about waiting to be read for months) read The Cement Garden by Iain McEwan. It's a story about four children who lose their mother, and then enter a dreamlike lifestyle of little responsibility, much secrecy and lots of incest.
Like Vox Day, he gets just enough right to be hurtful without being in the least productive.
-The sheer banality; the fact that the important questions are about who's going to put food on the table, who cares for the youngest, who cleans up after everyone. The fact that 'mother' is such an ingrained answer to this question that when that option is not available, what you get instead is passive-aggressive confusion. I remember the first time our father cooked a meal for us - he became furious at our differing tastes, and has only cooked for us a handful of times since. He didn't dump every chore on his daughters; he did the laundry and some of the washing up, but when you're fixing buttons on your father's shirts when you're behind on your GCSE coursework, and cooking nine meals a week, you get resentful about the things your mother used to do. And you really can wind up aggressively not caring about caring about yourself.
-truancy. Losing someone who's absolutely central to your life crushes every thought you ever had about the future - the places she said she'd take you, the wanting to succeed and to celebrate success with her, even her hoping aloud that she'd have grandchildren one day. You don't just lose what you've got, you lose your future. Why not skip school, especially if you're still getting straight As? What's to lose? That said, we three were occasionally skipping from soon after she began her last hospital stay, about three months before she died. But even then we seemed to feel accountable - we'd tell her, even if we'd avoided letting our father know. After she died there was no stopping us; our father didn't know, or care, so long as we kept pulling the grades. He was always furious when he found out, but that was just another thing to hide from, so it merely fuelled the trend. And my school? It was one of those 'good' state schools, which means they hushed up, did their best to avoid letting it get on the records (straight As kids who go to 'good' schools do not play truant, everyone knows that), asked all the wrong questions, tried to make me scared. Children that rely solely on a mother's care very easily sidestep responsibilities without her; there's no reason not to slide down the path of least resistance. And now? I'm in London, halfheartedly jobhunting, and I feel like a truant again.
-the power struggles and blame games. A father who's always left the family in the hands of his wife while he does more important things has no authority over you, but an awful lot of power. He doesn't know you, and you're not accountable to him - he's just judge, jury and executioner, and every so often he gets drunk and tells you that he never wanted a family anyway, that that 'Let's have another baby!' thing Vox Day harps on about is just woman stuff. I honestly tried to relate to him, to be fond of him, for a while. I can't say he ever returned the gesture. And now he's old and infirm and polite to me, and I feel all kinds of cruel for disliking him so much, but ultimately, I remember why I do. Nemesis and Mnemosyne, m? Anyway; McEwan's grotty kitchen hit a nerve, as did the arguments about whose word was law, the arguments about money and material objects (our mother had always been over-generous with random presents, while our father never offered such kindnesses at all). Our clothes wore out; we never had pocket money, but if we asked infrequently enough, we'd get given spending money for more. We lived in a small village in the Pennines, so accessing anything we needed, material or human, was an awkward process that had to be mediated by our father. I won't live outside cities now.
-the fear of outsiders. My father once, drunkenly, told me his madcap story about how social services wanted to take me and my younger brother away (my sister was too old for that) because they'd noticed the truancy; I've no doubt that this was 99% conspiracy theorising on his part; perhaps it was due to his paranoia that we never received any practical or mental health help over it all, which goes to show what a responsible head of household a non-carer father can be. But the process happens; someone clumsily reaches out, you find reason to push them away. Too-perfect relatives, well-meaning schoolteachers, the church... They make you self-conscious. They make you feel like your problems are the wrong problems, and your feelings and wants are the wrong feelings and wants. Besides, they assume you get over it, which in a limited fashion is true; after a year or so, the crushing grey feeling in your chest fades away, and I think most people know that so they forget to keep being kind. But the other part of it, the having no mother part, is still happening, day in day out. It's there when you're hitchhiking to exams because the public transport is shit and there's no one you dare ask for a lift. It's there when you give up your hobby, don't do your coursework, when you get on a train to Scotland, alone, because you want to see your sister and it doesn't matter if you don't get there in one piece. Strangers are easy compared to acquaintances; being alone is even easier. So you push the outside world away.
So yes, McEwan managed to get in a lot of things that touched on my feelings, but I still felt distinctly uneasy about his writing. I felt exploited, though I had no right to; I felt like someone was digging into lives like mine for salacious details that would sell lots of books, making up the perviest bits out of whole cloth, ignoring the meat and bones of it all. It did get me down that he let his family structure dissolve into incest, because there's a real radical distortion of the family happening there, and it's like he's saying it's not juicy enough to interest him and he'd rather use this opportunity for airing unpleasant truths to talk about sexual oddities instead. (He also demonstrated the traditional literary disdain for the resilience and strong identity of small boys; I don't doubt my brother will find he has troubles to trip over, but he's by far the most emotionally and socially healthy of the three of us, and seems to be more mature and stable than the majority of his peers. Look, writerguys, you can poke at my screwiness as much as you like, but call my kid brother a freak and I'll deck you.)
Now, I have huge issues about family life. I already said, I hate - hate, you know, the cold but irrational stuff that you just cannot put up with? - family structures that place a unique burden on a female caregiver. I hate seeing women referred to as somehow having more responsibility to their families than men do. My relationships are a domestic minefield; I once dumped a boy partly because I made dinner for him and he thanked me in a way I disliked. And god, I feel utterly out of my depth around other people's parents anyway, and with SO's parents I'm even more confused. I don't know what parents are for, why they're necessary for people my age, and I'm dismissive in some ways, jealous in others. I know several people much older than me who have parents, and that just mystifies me entirely...but at the same time, I'm keenly aware that it's me who's the weird one. (I even get told so from time to time, though not by anyone worth speaking to). I probably shouldn't have children myself, if I do, it may well be an unpleasant experience for both me and them.
So I have issues about relationships, huge ones; I also have a bond with my siblings that I believe is unusual, but the paperback writers do not want to know. I felt exploited. Now, I've no right to feel like that; if I want books to reflect my experiences I ought to go write them myself, which I am I'm kinda sorta every-so-often trying in roundabout ways to actually do, but I still felt like this McEwan guy was calling me a freak in order to make himself a large stack of money. I'm sure it's not like that for him really. (Vox Day, however, really is paid for telling children without mothers that they're barbarous and futureless, so I feel justified in pointing and laughing at him and describing the sort of family his good Christian stay-at-home mums are actually creating.).
My sister and I both write (she a lot, I a little) and we both seem to dig into family matters a fair bit; she writes about close but dysfunctional extended clans, people for whom family ties are often painful but ultimately matter. The majority of my characters have no regular family structures at all, and those who do tend to be very distant from them. I don't know what that difference says about us. She's almost five years older than me, and perhaps has a better set of memories. We never talk about it, never talk about our mother at all; the only person I talk about my mother to is my 'aunt' (her best friend). In fact, I think I just decided to not tell the sister about this blog, because I am a coward. I want to talk about it, hence why I just wrote a couple of thousand words about it, but I do not feel able to talk about it with her.
I've never written on the subject at such length before, so it's not much wonder that my original point is getting drowned in a puddle of wangst. (It's been a little over ten years, which is a long time in stored-up whining). I believe I was attempting to say that tilting a burden of responsibility entirely onto only one parent is not a safe way to bring up children, and idolising such a model without discussing its attrition rate is an incitement to neglect. I don't think you need to be one of us evil European feminists to see that (but oh, the badge!) I'd genuinely like to know what Vox Day would say ought to happen to motherless children whose father does not seek to remarry. Iain McEwan was a bit more clear on the point of where he expects uncared-for children to wind up.
Now, I read this new PWOT about atheists and Christians a couple of days ago; being neither, it was more amusing than enlightening for me, but it made the very sensible point that focusing on negative examples makes you stupid. He was speaking of a considerably fouler extremist, Fred Phelps, but I think the point stands;
Smearing all Christians with Phelps' bile is a cheap shot, like saying all atheist schoolkids are potential Columbine shooters. At worst, that kind of stereotyping is dehumanizing and divisive. At best, it's a recipe for mediocrity. I compare myself to the worst so that I don't have to try to be the best. I can spend all day on my sofa, playing Wii Boxing and helping no one, and I'll still be a better man than Phelps. But I think we've got to shoot higher here.
So yes, Vox Day is an extremist, and I won't seek to compare all those who abuse the word 'family' for political purposes to him. However, he is trying to compare all his enemies to me. That traditional nuclear family thing he's talking about, the thing all we foul Europeans (wtf?) hate so very much? I hate it. I don't want to be part of one ever again, and reading such praises of the system made me quite upset. Not because I think it's got some nebulous potential to do harm, but because I know it does harm; it neglects me, excludes me, silences me and forces me to fend for myself. What he says - that children without mothers exist outside civilisation - is hurtful not because it's outright false, but because it's generally true and it's fucking unnecessary and, contrary to his characterisation of things, this championing of the status quo, the wonderful ever-caring mother, causes deep harm to certain children, of which I am one.
Even - I recall this quite distinctly - the evening it happened, I was aware that losing your mother was an extreme anomaly - something that got fetishised in storybooks, not something that actually happened to real children, not something that a family has to be prepared to adapt to, to get on with. I didn't truly believe it for most of the next week; no one had told me that she wasn't getting better, that her immune problems were terminal and she only had at most a couple of years before leukaemia set in anyway. It was a Friday, and I went back to school on Tuesday, where my form tutor told me he was surprised to see me back so soon; I remember telling two older acquaintances who had not heard the news - the way their mouths opened, the tones of voice. I was internalising other people's expressions of horror; my own feelings were a silent clamouring that I didn't know what to do with, no matter how many people tried to offer me a shoulder. (Someone - a friend of my parents' - even gave me a notebook specially, but I wrote stories in it instead, because that was emotionally safer.)
That's not important, that - just me wallowing, which isn't something I do often but reading all this Mother's Day claptrap kinda invites it. Up til then, I'm sure our family would have made Vox Day proud; a mother who ran the household, a father who worked long hours far from home and didn't involve himself other than in providing money and laying down the law, and three pretty well looked-after kids. Is it just me, or is there something inherently unstable about this structure?
I recently (awful timing, the thing had been sitting about waiting to be read for months) read The Cement Garden by Iain McEwan. It's a story about four children who lose their mother, and then enter a dreamlike lifestyle of little responsibility, much secrecy and lots of incest.
Like Vox Day, he gets just enough right to be hurtful without being in the least productive.
-The sheer banality; the fact that the important questions are about who's going to put food on the table, who cares for the youngest, who cleans up after everyone. The fact that 'mother' is such an ingrained answer to this question that when that option is not available, what you get instead is passive-aggressive confusion. I remember the first time our father cooked a meal for us - he became furious at our differing tastes, and has only cooked for us a handful of times since. He didn't dump every chore on his daughters; he did the laundry and some of the washing up, but when you're fixing buttons on your father's shirts when you're behind on your GCSE coursework, and cooking nine meals a week, you get resentful about the things your mother used to do. And you really can wind up aggressively not caring about caring about yourself.
-truancy. Losing someone who's absolutely central to your life crushes every thought you ever had about the future - the places she said she'd take you, the wanting to succeed and to celebrate success with her, even her hoping aloud that she'd have grandchildren one day. You don't just lose what you've got, you lose your future. Why not skip school, especially if you're still getting straight As? What's to lose? That said, we three were occasionally skipping from soon after she began her last hospital stay, about three months before she died. But even then we seemed to feel accountable - we'd tell her, even if we'd avoided letting our father know. After she died there was no stopping us; our father didn't know, or care, so long as we kept pulling the grades. He was always furious when he found out, but that was just another thing to hide from, so it merely fuelled the trend. And my school? It was one of those 'good' state schools, which means they hushed up, did their best to avoid letting it get on the records (straight As kids who go to 'good' schools do not play truant, everyone knows that), asked all the wrong questions, tried to make me scared. Children that rely solely on a mother's care very easily sidestep responsibilities without her; there's no reason not to slide down the path of least resistance. And now? I'm in London, halfheartedly jobhunting, and I feel like a truant again.
-the power struggles and blame games. A father who's always left the family in the hands of his wife while he does more important things has no authority over you, but an awful lot of power. He doesn't know you, and you're not accountable to him - he's just judge, jury and executioner, and every so often he gets drunk and tells you that he never wanted a family anyway, that that 'Let's have another baby!' thing Vox Day harps on about is just woman stuff. I honestly tried to relate to him, to be fond of him, for a while. I can't say he ever returned the gesture. And now he's old and infirm and polite to me, and I feel all kinds of cruel for disliking him so much, but ultimately, I remember why I do. Nemesis and Mnemosyne, m? Anyway; McEwan's grotty kitchen hit a nerve, as did the arguments about whose word was law, the arguments about money and material objects (our mother had always been over-generous with random presents, while our father never offered such kindnesses at all). Our clothes wore out; we never had pocket money, but if we asked infrequently enough, we'd get given spending money for more. We lived in a small village in the Pennines, so accessing anything we needed, material or human, was an awkward process that had to be mediated by our father. I won't live outside cities now.
-the fear of outsiders. My father once, drunkenly, told me his madcap story about how social services wanted to take me and my younger brother away (my sister was too old for that) because they'd noticed the truancy; I've no doubt that this was 99% conspiracy theorising on his part; perhaps it was due to his paranoia that we never received any practical or mental health help over it all, which goes to show what a responsible head of household a non-carer father can be. But the process happens; someone clumsily reaches out, you find reason to push them away. Too-perfect relatives, well-meaning schoolteachers, the church... They make you self-conscious. They make you feel like your problems are the wrong problems, and your feelings and wants are the wrong feelings and wants. Besides, they assume you get over it, which in a limited fashion is true; after a year or so, the crushing grey feeling in your chest fades away, and I think most people know that so they forget to keep being kind. But the other part of it, the having no mother part, is still happening, day in day out. It's there when you're hitchhiking to exams because the public transport is shit and there's no one you dare ask for a lift. It's there when you give up your hobby, don't do your coursework, when you get on a train to Scotland, alone, because you want to see your sister and it doesn't matter if you don't get there in one piece. Strangers are easy compared to acquaintances; being alone is even easier. So you push the outside world away.
So yes, McEwan managed to get in a lot of things that touched on my feelings, but I still felt distinctly uneasy about his writing. I felt exploited, though I had no right to; I felt like someone was digging into lives like mine for salacious details that would sell lots of books, making up the perviest bits out of whole cloth, ignoring the meat and bones of it all. It did get me down that he let his family structure dissolve into incest, because there's a real radical distortion of the family happening there, and it's like he's saying it's not juicy enough to interest him and he'd rather use this opportunity for airing unpleasant truths to talk about sexual oddities instead. (He also demonstrated the traditional literary disdain for the resilience and strong identity of small boys; I don't doubt my brother will find he has troubles to trip over, but he's by far the most emotionally and socially healthy of the three of us, and seems to be more mature and stable than the majority of his peers. Look, writerguys, you can poke at my screwiness as much as you like, but call my kid brother a freak and I'll deck you.)
Now, I have huge issues about family life. I already said, I hate - hate, you know, the cold but irrational stuff that you just cannot put up with? - family structures that place a unique burden on a female caregiver. I hate seeing women referred to as somehow having more responsibility to their families than men do. My relationships are a domestic minefield; I once dumped a boy partly because I made dinner for him and he thanked me in a way I disliked. And god, I feel utterly out of my depth around other people's parents anyway, and with SO's parents I'm even more confused. I don't know what parents are for, why they're necessary for people my age, and I'm dismissive in some ways, jealous in others. I know several people much older than me who have parents, and that just mystifies me entirely...but at the same time, I'm keenly aware that it's me who's the weird one. (I even get told so from time to time, though not by anyone worth speaking to). I probably shouldn't have children myself, if I do, it may well be an unpleasant experience for both me and them.
So I have issues about relationships, huge ones; I also have a bond with my siblings that I believe is unusual, but the paperback writers do not want to know. I felt exploited. Now, I've no right to feel like that; if I want books to reflect my experiences I ought to go write them myself, which I am I'm kinda sorta every-so-often trying in roundabout ways to actually do, but I still felt like this McEwan guy was calling me a freak in order to make himself a large stack of money. I'm sure it's not like that for him really. (Vox Day, however, really is paid for telling children without mothers that they're barbarous and futureless, so I feel justified in pointing and laughing at him and describing the sort of family his good Christian stay-at-home mums are actually creating.).
My sister and I both write (she a lot, I a little) and we both seem to dig into family matters a fair bit; she writes about close but dysfunctional extended clans, people for whom family ties are often painful but ultimately matter. The majority of my characters have no regular family structures at all, and those who do tend to be very distant from them. I don't know what that difference says about us. She's almost five years older than me, and perhaps has a better set of memories. We never talk about it, never talk about our mother at all; the only person I talk about my mother to is my 'aunt' (her best friend). In fact, I think I just decided to not tell the sister about this blog, because I am a coward. I want to talk about it, hence why I just wrote a couple of thousand words about it, but I do not feel able to talk about it with her.
I've never written on the subject at such length before, so it's not much wonder that my original point is getting drowned in a puddle of wangst. (It's been a little over ten years, which is a long time in stored-up whining). I believe I was attempting to say that tilting a burden of responsibility entirely onto only one parent is not a safe way to bring up children, and idolising such a model without discussing its attrition rate is an incitement to neglect. I don't think you need to be one of us evil European feminists to see that (but oh, the badge!) I'd genuinely like to know what Vox Day would say ought to happen to motherless children whose father does not seek to remarry. Iain McEwan was a bit more clear on the point of where he expects uncared-for children to wind up.
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