Jul 20 2012
culture

quick hit: an open letter to victim-blamers

Victim Blaming

(one of many responses to today’s news of a mass killing in an Aurora, CO movie theater)

Victim blaming. Anytime anything terrible happens these kinds of attitudes emerge in social media, the mainstream media, and conversations with family and friends. Depending on our personal circumstances we experience this insensitive, ignorant, and ultimately fear-based commentary in a variety of ways. Sometimes we agree and parrot this kind of ish. Sometimes we wave off the absurdity.  Sometimes we are personally stung and feel ill-at-ease, without being able to put our finger on Why. Sometimes we are absolutely devastated, re-injured after what was already painful news (or, if it happened to us, perhaps the most terrifying or hurtful experience of our lives). We turn off our computer and our emotions overwhelm us – and for a time, we can’t cope, can’t make sense of the world.

Victim blaming. Perhaps we experience these types of statements as grandiose and absurd – for instance, when a zealot cites a frightening natural disaster as just deserts for a partial history of an entire people, or when a cultural mythos diagnoses AIDS as a “gay disease” meant to smite sodomites. Sometimes these attitudes are deeply painful and endemic, reminding us of a larger culture that oppresses and wounds in the most personal of ways. Sometimes these attitudes emerge in the most highly-charged social and political atmosphere while concerning a profoundly grieving family; we remember Geraldo Rivera’s “hoodie” comments after Trayvon Martin’s violent death. Maybe most painful, but at least a bit easier to personally respond to, for me: sometimes we see these attitudes in the actual people living in our community. Case in point – in my county three years ago a young girl was abducted, and is still missing today – and I have personally, I’m sad to say, heard people in my community placing this young woman’s mother as at-fault for such a horrible, devastating ordeal (demonstrating the same insensitivity and ignorance as the abovementioned Aurora, CO tweet and others like it).

I am not going to write an angry screed in response to victim blaming statements and ideologies, no matter how horrific they may be; all of these examples, by the way, are off the top of my head this morning, as I sip coffee and await my children’s wake-up.

I’m going to write to those who say or think these kind of things, and tell you there’s hope to rehabilitate your mind. Because I believe people victim-blame for a number of reasons, and I relate to all of them, even if I no longer condone these strategies nor perpetrate this mindset.

So here goes.

I don’t know you personally, but I have some guesses at why you say things like this, because I’ve been there. Maybe you can’t grasp the nature of horrible things that happen. Perhaps you are angry at God when terrible things happen, and so you need a story. Maybe you love God, and need a story. Perhaps you don’t believe in a God and you’ve put your security in principalities – you want to believe the world of Man can through laws, public shaming, and rage-fueled invective, somehow make people behave and put down the guns, or stop eating so much junk food, or stop using drugs and doing inhumane things while on drugs. Maybe you want to believe certain preventative measures will ensure nothing bad happens to people who are smart enough, or not overwhelmed, or not sick, or not poor, or not socially-marginalized, or whatever (and that “someone” will be – you! Lucky!). Perhaps you believe if you just don’t make certain kinds of mistakes – like say, enjoying a movie with your family – nothing horrific will happen to you.

Perhaps it is more insidious, whether you are faith-based or no. Perhaps you are simply frightened for your own skin. Not only do you not want to be raped, or shot, or terrorized, or get a disease – you actually don’t want to deal with learning how to support or even comprehend someone who’s going through something you haven’t gone through. Concomitant: perhaps you are sometimes responding to something you DID go through, or think you did, and thus believe you can diagnose other peoples’ thoughts, feelings, and responsibilities in said scenario. If so, congratulations (she said, dubiously). Your life experiences have transformed you and not in a good way, ultimately eroding the empathy naturally granted your average three year old.

Here are a few problems with victim blaming. Besides the gross insensitivity and ignorance that attitudes like these demonstrate, they also perpetrate them in the most egregious fashion, creating an atmosphere where fewer people are safe – not more – and fewer people are empowered to trust themselves. Victim-blaming does not result in an environment of perfect vigilance that somehow keeps bad things from happening to guarded people (as if!). For example, and in brief: how many young women grow up believing if they act, dress, or behave a certain way, they essentially invite and deserve sexual assault? (raises hand). With this kind of pervasive social, cultural, and often familial indoctrination, what are the chances these young women will be imbued with any sense of personal worth and personal boundaries - qualities essential to grooming the very intuition that will help them navigate a dangerous world? And with such cultural lore, what are we doing for perpetrators or potential perpetrators? Where does that leave the issue of sexual assault? Culturally-sanctioned and enforced, mythologized, and poorly socially-managed. (I know a lot of people don’t “get” this about sexual assault. Go ahead and read like, hundreds of excellent web resources and books. You’ll get there eventually.)

Here’s another problem with victim blaming; it promotes a false sense of security. Let’s take another common example. You may think if you were a parent you wouldn’t let your kid do X, Y, or Z, or participate in A, B, or C (or: exist in a movie theater). And before you actually become a parent, such a simplified and narrowminded perspective can feel very safe (superficially); I can at least tell you it is rather typical. Problem is, these untested incipient strategies deaden you to compassion and mute your intelligence, so you won’t learn much before you have kids (if you do). And when you become a parent – if you do – such judgments will terrorize you, haunt you, nip at your heels, and maybe even keep you up at night. Worse still, if you don’t grow a bit more compassion and intelligence you risk passing such attitudes on to your kids in the most entrenched and spiritually-damaging ways; you will forbid your children a thousand freedoms and teach them they cannot trust themselves, leaving them an incredibly fearful adult underqualified to manage their life’s challenges. All in the name of false security; your fragile belief you can somehow manage things so bad stuff doesn’t happen to you, or those you love.

Victim blaming automatically turns off our ears, our minds, and our hearts to those who suffer. It automatically keeps us from growing. Smugly (which is to say, fearfully) looking at the man suffering health problems at the clinic, assigning blame and making diagnoses you’re underqualified for (He smokes and he’s fat! He “deserves” his problems, of which you’ve guessed at just by looking!), is not only profoundly ignorant but represents the lowest denominator of human strategy.

Victim blaming wrongs those who’ve been hurt, or sick, or assaulted, or devastated. It is the single most insulting thing we can do, barring perpetrating the original act (which we, in effect, are ensuring for future sufferers). Victim blaming says: “Your suffering is inconvenient to me, please go away.”

Because, ultimately, victim blaming keeps us self-obsessed and self-absorbed. It feels safe, but it’s deep-down a terrifying place to be. When I victim-blame, I keep myself preoccupied by making little checklists and pretending they will protect me, or my kids, or whomever. Well I would never let myself A, B, or C – so that means I’ll never have to deal with X, Y, or Z.  I’ll eat all organic vegan food so I’ll never get cancer. People that get cancer deserve it and I don’t and I won’t. I’d never marry a man who ended up unfaithful. I’ll never struggle with mental illness nor am I required to learn more about it, because it scares me.

The list goes on and on.

I know – from experience! – that such strategies of false security do not work. In my case, they kept me less humane, less perceptive, less compassionate, and less supportive for those who suffer – including myself. They kept me petrified from speaking out with tact, directness, and intelligence when a wrong was being committed. They kept me saying horribly insensitive things, and hurting God-knows how many people. They kept me in my own head and unable to be present, unable to deeply listen to someone who suffers – I was partially occupied in being glad it wasn’t ME and having a TOTAL PLAN how it would NEVER be me.

And then when it happened to me? It hurt worse than you can imagine.

***

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” - Fred Rogers

And you know what is beautiful? You can be a helper. But being a victim-blamer significantly erodes this ability. You get to choose. Good luck!

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Jun 11 2012
film revue

Film Feministe: Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?

It's racially refreshing!

Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? (1967) . spoilers.

A plot synopsis: Old-line liberals Matt and Christina Drayton (Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) have raised their daughter Joey (Katharine Houghton) to think for herself and not blindly conform to the conventional. Still, they aren’t prepared for the shock when she returns home from a vacation with a new fiancé: African-American doctor John Prentice (Sidney Poitier). While they come to grips with whatever prejudices they might still harbor, the younger folks must also contend with John’s parents (Roy Glenn Sr. and Beah Richards), who are dead-set against the union.

I was born in 1977, ten years after this film debuted. Interracial marriage has been legal, if not necessarily sanctioned or socially-accepted, my entire lifetime. I am white and I have lived on the West Coast my entire life, in mostly white environs (tempered a bit with Latino and Native American non-white families). I was raised by a soi disant “progressive” family and the subtle (and less subtle) internalized racist, patriarchal, heterosexist, and adultist attitudes typical in these kinds of families. While not relating entirely to the social class of the Drayton family – “self-made” upper class – I could relate to the “old-line liberal” family values they were imbued with.

Besides my family environs, I was raised in a so-called “post-racial” America. I was taught in school that racial issues were mostly a thing of the past. You could look up these troubles in a book, then shut the book and you didn’t have to think about it any more. I was taught not only a colorblind approach to solving problems, but also a colorblind way of looking at the world (I’ve written a tiny bit about that before). I was taught being called a “racist” was shockingly hurtful, hurtful enough we defensively denied any such charge rather than approaching it with openness and curiosity. Our own white privilege required that other people were “racists”. Any suggestion we might have these attitudes was met with staunch (or angry) defensiveness. I was raised in an era where people sneered at the concept of “political correctness”, a backlash that, curious enough, continues today.

It wasn’t pretty, but it’s where I came from. And for a few minutes, I want to talk about the film a little bit.

Popular film critic Roger Ebert says a lot of good things about the work, and I agree with much he said. (My advice? Stop reading, watch the film, read his review, then read mine.) Like Ebert I also didn’t find the contrived deadline all that contrived, given the framework and usual limitations of cinematic storytelling (although I could have used at least one character pointing out that, indeed, everyone involved had been given ample time to make their mind up about the issue at hand, i.e. their lifetimes leading up to this evening). I didn’t mind the “perfect” Poitier character although I think roles like this deserve some examination within our cultural context.

Along with the contrived plot “deadline” comes the contrived grouping, within the course of the evening, of several duos and trios of all the involved individuals – the domestic worker, the family’s spiritual counselor, both sets of parents, and the intended bride and groom. The movie moved through several of these conversations as each character stated his or her case – in formal language or the most familiar private talk – to one another. Again, this contrivance irritated me far less than what, as it came to pass, it left out (more in a minute).

Now unlike Ebert, I found the study scene between Jr. and Sr. Prentice not only unobjectionable, but absolutely beautiful. I grant the validity of Ebert’s points that within the film one father (the black one) is framed as “lesser” than the other (the white one). However, it is the moment between parent and child that moved me. To me this scene captured the boldness and heartbreak at the moment a child deliberately turns aside from the values of a dearly-loved parent, to make his own future. As both a grown child and a parent myself, this scene – the one my brother cited to me the other day, inspiring me to view the film – hit me in the gut. I’ll transcribe a bit of it here, where Prentice (the son) speaks in refutation to Prentice (the father’s) stated – and very real – sacrifices:

“Listen to me. You say you don’t want to tell me how to live my life? What do you think you’ve been doing?

“You tell me what rights I’ve got or haven’t got… and what I owe to you for what you’ve done for me.

“Let me tell you something.

“I owe you nothing.

“If you carried that [mail] bag a million miles, you did what you were supposed to do, because you brought me into this world, and from that day you owed me everything you could ever do for me. Like I will owe my son, if I ever have another.”

Now if only - if only – the film had managed a similarly spirited conversation where (white) daughter Joey puts her (white) father – the lynchpin in the romance – in his place.

The film generally contained a lot of incredibly human moments – and some wonderfully frank conversations. The performances were at turns subtle and lovely, then dramatic and heavy-handed. Hepburn was, of course, beautiful and glamorous, and her campy but rapier-like sendoff of a rude coworker was a bit of gooey deliciousness.

However, there was something that bothered me about the film, and that was the capital-P patriarchy, which is not challenged by the work – except in the abovementioned father and son impassioned talk, where a black father is chastized – one iota. For one thing, despite the above plot synopsis’ error, both the daughter and the two mothers are for the marriage. They are the voices of gentleness, passion, and optimism, but at the same time, the film lets us know it is not their voices that are going to count.

And along this line, every single character’s opinions, feelings, and interactions brings us to the film denoument, except one crucial interaction – the father Drayton, put in the position of deciding his daughter’s future happiness – and his daughter herself. And at the end of the film we have a speech: the Old White Dude that gets to decide everything, and gets to bless everything (or not), and sums up everyone’s feelings and dresses down every individual there (including telling his daughter to “shut up”), going on at lengths as to how he’s been insulted. Finally (and predictably) he gives his twinkly-eyed pedantic blessing, everyone sighs in happiness at this wonderful wonderful man, and he shouts at the black domestic worker to get dinner served. This is, literally, how the film ends.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed much of the film. I thought it refreshing and funny (the daughter’s early line, “He thinks you’re gonna faint because he’s a Negro” made me laugh aloud), human and sweet. But in a film meant to be socially significant, loving, and even a bit sappy, we’re still firmly reminded of who sanctions, and should sanction, our future, progressive or no: big white daddy.

So tell me. Is that how things really are?

I welcome feedback; email me your responses if you’d like them published them here. kelly AT hogaboom DOT org.

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May 18 2012
film revue

quick hit: this is why i can’t have nice noir

Drive (2011). Spoilers.

Thinking about picking up a case of Armor-All

Yeah real quick? So I just watched the 2011 action crime thriller Drive. If you have any pop culture sensibility you probably know this is a recent-to-Netflix offering about a stunt driver who falls in love with a Good Girl and, oh-so-reluctantly-yet-heroically, gets tangled up in scary criminal activity because the Good Girl is all haplessly involved with Bad People. (I was gonna image-link to the phrase “damsel in distress” but there was far too much sexually-violent content associated with that phrase. Boo.) Things abruptly go from sweet and ethereal to really grisly and revenge-y. Think Man on Wire or The Professional, except we’ve replaced a sexualized little girl with a sanctified and sweet single mom.

Here’s what I liked about Drive. A lot, really. It was stylish, artsy-fartsy in a distinctly Michael Mann way, boasting a perfect New Wave-y score and a tasteful blend of millennial and eighties production design (although the title character’s muscle car is a seventies model). It showcased sexy cars and sexy driving and sexy cinematography and a sexy locale. We had the obligatory beautiful people. Ryan Gosling wore a cute jacket and a cute little t-shirt and was pretty cute, when he wasn’t stomping someone’s head in (I’ll get to that in a minute). The film took its time to develop a real romantic flair, if the romance itself was rather regressive. And the most fun for me, many of the actors looked like they had a good time making it. Maybe I’m just thinking Gosling and Albert Brooks. They looked like they were enjoying themselves. The latter was pretty good at being a sonofabitch. Last time I watched him I think he was Nemo’s dad.

Here’s what I didn’t like about Drive. By way of illustration: a couple photos of the two ladies in the film. That’s right, there were two. Just two. Who’s surprised? Not me.

First:

Carey Mulligan in Drive

And then.

We can probably guess a lot about who was who, and what happened to whom. Femme Fatale there (as played by Christina Hendricks) is only in the film a couple minutes. But she meets her boilerplate grisly noir demise, expect this is neo-noir so it’s really graphic. However, in traditional-noir fashion, the good guy gets to slap her around first. Yay! And let’s see, before that… yeah, she struts around being very sexilicious and pouty, and then she does a bit of hysterical screaming and crying. Before getting beaten then dispatched. As per her ilk, countless Treacherous Slut tropes who preceded her.

The Angel-Single-Mom (Carey Mulligan) is also great. If by “great” you mean, EXACTLY WHAT WE’VE COME TO EXPECT in this sort of thing. She’s perfect. Virginal, beautiful, childlike. White and blonde of course. A lot of honor and all that. We see her pluckily slap someone for offending her. She’s a nice mom. I assume. We don’t really see her “momming” so much, because her kid is kind of like a cute accessory and less like a child. When the Driver first meets her she’s somehow supporting herself and her son with no muss and no fuss, Strawberry-Shortcake-adorable in a waitressing outfit which inexplicably affords her a cute, spacious, shabby-chic apartment that’s never messy. Her kid is perfectly behaved and mostly exists to be quiet or sleeping or both. You know, like kids in film. Alternatively convenient versus being pawns in peril.

Virgin Mom-Supermodel is also subtly or not-so-subtly at the root of our eponymous Driver’s problems. She’s the Eve, introducing the snake into the heretofore undisturbed Driver’s existence. Nothing new there, either.

Still, when it got down to the thuggery I was a little surprised at the gore and coldblooded killing carried out by our hero. But then, as in so many other films, this is all done in the name of the Great White Male’s Justified Reproductive Rage. How many times at the supermarket have I glanced up and seen another DVD sleeve, showcasing a hulking star in the foreground (Costner or Neeson or Gibson or some such) gripping a shotgun as he protects a blonde white woman and a couple frightened little kids huddling against the doorway. The film’s tagline demands of us, “How Far Will A Man Go To Protect The Ones He Loves?”

You know what? I already know. Pretty far. Like by the end of the film I’m going to see some people getting stabbed in the neck, heads getting twisted off and all that.

So we get an eyeful of that stuff, and you know how that all goes too.

Drive was fun, but I really like noir despite its historical trappings that exclude my ladyness from being the Action, as opposed to the Object. I wish they could change the formula a teensy bit besides just upping the exploitation from the old days, you know showing actual bare breasts and then heads juicily exploding. Heck, maybe even some noir where, in the words of Danny Trejo’s bartender in Anchorman, “Lady’s can do stuff now!”

One can always hope.

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Mar 15 2012
culture

posted without comment, re: Salon. OK. Maybe a TINY bit of comment.

2 Chocolate Milks

Chocolate Milk!

I was cited in an article on Salon today discussing home education (“Home-schooled and illiterate” by Kristin Rawls, Salon.com March 15, 2012). In the interests of informing any advocates or interested parties regarding unschooling, homeschooling, alternative education, parenting, etc. – as well as friends and readers – here is the entireity of the exchange between myself and the author.
 
I received this email on March 2nd 2012, which was I believe mostly copied and pasted:
 
So, thanks for agreeing to talk to me.  I only know fundamentalists who homeschool, and I’m willing to admit that, for that reason, I’m a bit biased against it. I would do it myself in certain cases if I had children, but I’m skeptical of homeschooling or unschooling as a “movement.” I’ve only spoken with Christian fundamentalist or former fundamentalists who were homeschooled in Quiverfull families. They tell me that their parents had an extreme fear of any government oversight whatsoever, and now think their parents’ fears were overblown and gave them a warped view of the world outside their small communities. This article is about what kinds of regulation homeschoolers actually have to deal with, notwithstanding the paranoia about it on the Christian Right.
 
1. Could you tell me a bit about the type of state oversight that you have experienced as an unschooling parent? What were the requirements? Did you have to do portfolios or list a curriculum? What about standardized tests?
 
2. Do you feel that the oversight was overly intrusive in any way? If so, how? Was it merely annoying bureaucracy? Or did you experience it as more ominous than that?
 
3. In brief, why did you decide to homeschool?
 
4. In hindsight, what do you view as some of your successes and/or mistakes as a homeschooling/unschooling parent? And what kind of impact did these have on your kids’ education?
 
5. Some homeschooling parents neglect their kids’ education. I’ve heard horror stories from the Christian homeschooling movement over the past few days. One girl was functionally illiterate when she entered the public school system at 16, and there were no disabilities that made learning difficult for her. She was just fine once she got into a rigorous educational program and caught up. One woman tells me that there was very little emphasis on education at all since homemaking skills were viewed as the most important education for girls. She never got past pre-algebra, which I remember doing in the sixth grade. So I’m very curious – have you seen any of this kind of neglect happen in the secular homeschooling world? If not, do you think it could happen in the wake of new stressors (moving around, illness in the family, etc.)? How do you guard against getting overwhelmed by life and letting education go?
 
6. Given the kind of neglect that many in the Christian homeschooling world experience, what kinds of regulations do you think should to be in place? Should a home educator have a college degree? A teaching degree? What kind of education or training is needed? Should curriculum be more strictly regulated so that, for example, young earth creationism doesn’t replace science? And that Bible-reading and home economics don’t take the place of academics?
 
7. Have you ever been investigated by the legal system for truancy? I’ve heard of a few cases of this involving Christian homeschoolers, but I wonder if it happens to other homeschoolers as well? Have you ever known anyone who was arrested or jailed for neglect involving homeschooling? Christian/secular? How do you feel about the current state laws in place to investigate neglect? And do you think conservative Christians’ fears of investigation are valid or not?
 
8. Have you ever had anything to do with the Homeschool Legal Defense Association? Does this organization serve non-Christian homeschoolers in any capacity?
 
9. LOGISTICS: What state(s) have you lived in while homeschooling? How many years did you homeschool, and through what grades? I assume it’s okay to quote you by name since you write under your real name?

Here’s my response:
 
Hi Kristin,
 
Wow, what a complex and multifaceted topic! This would be best discussed in person over coffee. But, you know, you’re in NC and I’m in rainy PNw, so there’s that!
 
I’m going to decline participation in the questionnaire, but thank you for emailing me. I do have a few things to add which you may or may not find useful.
 
First, homeschooling and unschooling mean vastly different things to different families who self-identify as such. Those of us in the so-called alternative education world are used to being treated with a broad-brush, unfortunately. It’s always my hope a more nuanced piece might emerge in the MSM, but so far that’s been rare.
 
Like yourself, I too had not only anti-homeschooling bias but a deep fear of religious fundamentalism and an erroneous belief state institutions could and should stamp it out. And, ha, I also remember the revulsion I first felt when I read the term “unschooling” (as in, I remember the room I was in and everything – years and years ago!). Myself, college-educated (chemical engineering) and a straight-A student who would’ve said I enjoyed school had you asked, “unschooling” sounded like dirty hippie neglect (I’m not trying to be offensive… I had an unkind mind at the time. Also, I was raised by hippies. In a bus with planets painted on the side, and everything.). Hee. I was also under the erroneous impression that unschooling (or life learning, or autodidacticism, or whatever label is most fun to use) was a “movement” or a new trend; it’s not.
 
So I can relate to a lot of where many people come from, when they write me.
 
Secondly, the 2010 Swidler article I referenced in my article (“a blueprint for courage”, which you seem to have read at least parts of) - http://www.naturallifemagazine.com/1002/unschoolers_re-imagine_schools.htm - addresses some of the concerns you sent my way via Twitter, and also fields typical objections self-labeled progressives/liberals have to home education. Swidler’s article also cites some of the culturally-popular myths in the US – specifically that alternatives to compulsory schooling are primarily religious families (and religious home ed families are, of course, the Boogeyman), and that those who do not send their own children to institutions have therefore turned their back on schooled children and schooling families. Like I said, the topic is complex, and Swidler’s is one piece that’s kind of a go-to seminal piece for those new to secular/progressive home ed.
 
Additionally, I found a few authors tremendously helpful in overcoming my own anti-homeschooling/anti-unschooling bias. Idzie Desmarais’ blog, http://yes-i-can-write.blogspot.com/, and Wendy Priesnitz’ work (easily available online) are two of my favorites; today I have the privilege of working with these women. I’ve written for their publications as well as a few others, full disclosure, although I am not paid to do so.
 
If you are serious about learning more, there are so many resources on the internet. My advice is, don’t sell yourself short, and read the best of the bunch! :-)
 
If you’re interested, I am @kellyhogaboom on Twitter, and @underbellie as well (more social wellbeing stuff than personal tweets). My kids are on Twitter as well – you can always write my daughter @phoenixhogaboom – who turns 10 today, yay! – if you have any questions as to her experiences! I get a laugh how many grownups enjoy talking amongst themselves about what’s best for children. :-)
 
I saw your tweets on Rush [Limbaugh, re: Sandra Fluke]… and a few others alluding to his latest public comments. Do I even want to KNOW what he’s said this time? #assery *headdesk*
 
Good luck in writing your article! :-)
 
Kelly
 
***
 
No personal communication thereafter.
 
***
 
Ms. Rawls got two things wrong about me in the Alternet/Salon piece. One, that I was “irritated” by the exchange (I wasn’t). Two, that Underbellie is a “popular home-schooling blog” (it’s neither a popular blog nor a home-schooling one!).
 
And finally, anecdotally, obviously I am not addressing the Salon article’s content here, for a variety of reasons. What’s funny is, a few minutes ago the kids and I were at Homeschooling Sports at the Y – populated almost entirely by religious home educators, and tons of kids laughing and playing – and I was really amazed at all the curriculum-talk there. Kinda funny in juxtaposition to the Salon piece.
 
Hello new readers! I actually haven’t written much here at Underbellie regarding homeschooling and/or autodidactic education and/or unschooling, but I write about our day-to-day lives quite a bit on my own blog – kelly.hogaboom.org.
 
Toodles, my lovely readers!

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Mar 09 2012
culture, film revue

Film Feministe: Room With A View OF HELL!, Or How Sometimes I Just Want To Watch An Orc Split In Half, In Peace

Like all reviews in The Film Feministe, I strive to reveal a brief synopses of a film or television series as well as an analysis. Occasionally my reviews include plot spoilers.

“Game of Thrones” (HBO, 2011)

marriage

Ask Rape what it can do for your marriage!

In a rare coup where Kelly Hogaboom occasionally gets caught up with pop culture hits, I just finished the first and currently only season of HBO’s grim fantasy work, “Game of Thrones” (see: one hundred other popular shows I haven’t managed to get around to: ”Sex And The City”, “Big Love”, “True Blood”, “Six Feet Under”, “The L Word”, “Mad Men”, “The Walking Dead”, “Breaking Bad”, etc.). Yeah, so. Obviously I’m no television, pop culture, or fantasy/sci-fi expert and you shouldn’t expect an in-depth analysis here; just a few impressions.

I figured I was none too smart to jump into HBO again, knowing what I do about the intense levels of violence heaped upon women and children, concomitant to insultingly minor and narratively-neglectful roles afforded them. Sure enough, as I tweet within a few minutes of starting the pilot: “we have ‘babies on spikes’ – and now tits in 3, 2, 1…”  Yes, this episode’s first dramatic image depicts a gored child and the last dramatic image is that of a ten year old thrown out a window to die. These bookend, by the way, lots of prostitutes giving blowjobs and a big ol’ rape narrative of a young lady virgin – several scenes of screen time leading up to the rapey payoff. Oh this is gonna be fun.

Robb

So another white-dude "gritty" epic then? Cool, brah.

The show is sprinkled with the usual and typical varieties of kyriarchy. Eating my lunch: race-fail (almost everyone’s white, except horse lords who are vaguely dark and “ethnic”, speak Klingon, are very animalistic, don’t understand how the ocean works, and don’t have a phrase for “Thank You”. I’m not kidding!), oppositional sexism, misogyny (more in a minute), and adultism. As for non hetero- or cis-normative character development, the offerings are grim. The show has several instances of “lady kisses” – that is, pseudo-lesbian sexual behavior showcased only as exploitative sexual fodder and primarily designed for straight males – and one gay male couple, depicted for about three minutes. The season also offers one eunuch, and they have to mention all the time he’s a eunuch, and he’s mocked for not having the beans and/or frank, because that means he’s less of a man and therefore (in the show’s construct) less of a person (he at least, unlike the ladies and kids, is written as an interesting character).

So yeah, it’s the misogyny that really gets me. Like eye-rubbing-really?-they-gonna-go-with-that? levels of lady-hate. Ah misogyny, how do I count the ways? Sure, none of the characters in “Thrones” are particularly subtly written, but the women and children are considerably less so; in the case of women, they are all varieties of girlfriend, mom, daughter, or whore (mostly whore). We have the seductress, the harpy, the mother (either naive and overly-emotional or vengeful sociopaths), and in one particularly irritating depiction of breastfeeding-as-creepy, the batshit-fanatic.

Naked women are aplenty (hey – it’s HBO, after all!), as the show depicts prostitution by the bucketful of young, (mostly) white, nubile, and giggly prostitutes. Many scenes do that particularly chafing thing where these pretty women’s bodies, sexual moans of ecstasy, and nudity are staged in the background while some dude is going on at length about his power/political strategy (see: almost every strip club scene in a gangster movie, ever). You know, to show how GRITTY stuff is. And how women are primarily commodities. And how all prostitutes are young and beautiful and having a great time. No downside, they’re like bowls of tasty Werther’s Caramels on the coffee table.

There’s more. Misogyny, I mean. In general, the few female “players” of the show have a morally developed and fairly monogamous sexual construct, prone to jealousy (natch!); while in general the men happily take advantage of aforementioned gaggle of willing prostitutes. Children are alternatively conveniently out of site, then put in peril repeatedly (hitting maternal viewers where they live). Of course, birth is really scary, sudden-onset, and makes perfectly strong women faint. Birth, unlike death, isn’t shown onscreen which is probably a mercy as usually in these sorts of things we’ve got blood squirting everywhere when it is (again, implicitly threatening women vis-a-vis their sex). Women revenge themselves only in relation to their boyfriends or children; men revenge themselves according to a number of personal agendas. Women are raped helplessly, and men are prone to rape and/or revenging themselves for the rape of the women they believe they “own”.

And the rape. Man, the show is so pro-rape I was thinking they should byline it: “Rape, There’s Literally No Downside”. When they aren’t raping away they’re making intensive rape and anti-woman analogies. You could make a pretty good drinking game.

"Give me ten good men and some climbing spikes. I'll impregnate the bitch."? Aw shit. Again? I'm gettin so wasted.

OK, so, those are a few impressions of the show, and parts that are tiresome, even as familiar as they are.

Now here’s the deal: I want, just like everyone else, to enjoy huge sweeping cinematography and beautifully bleak or lush locales, detailed costumes and fantastic sets, plot intrigue, zombies and supernatural shenanigans, lovable and/or sinister characters, and your occasional grisly beheading coupled with juicy foley-work. Just because I’m say, really really tired of seeing the same old crap on the screen doesn’t mean I don’t want to be entertained like everyone else.

I’m aware if you raise an objection to a portrayals of (Hollywood) Business As Usual you get labeled a killjoy. This”hands off!” admonishment is ironic, coming as often does from fans who spend hours editing the Wiki. As Pablo K points out in “Race, Gender and Nation in ‘Game Of Thrones’ (2011)”:

There are two standard responses to these kind of criticisms: that it’s only a story and that these tropes only reflect reality (either because their portrayal of difference is true or because their portrayal of attitudes to purported difference is true). [...] But fiction is an important stage for ideas about war, diplomacy, sex and race, not least because we’re freed to engage in a more fulsome emotional investment precisely because it’s not real.

It’s no accident such offerings reinforce typical mainstream white supremacist and patriarchal narratives (like White People Are Who’s Important To Talk About, Kids are Boring/Subhuman, and Women Get Raped A Lot-That’s Just How It Goes) whilst simultaneously employing liberal doses of creative license, millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours spent in inventing detailed histories and entire languages, and throwing in freakin’ zombies and dragons and giant spiders. Yeah, we can spend all this time imagining a fantasy universe in all its minutia, but we’re still gonna invest in and reify the oppressive and violent strategies that re-victimize, offend, or (worse yet) socialize viewers in the same harmful ways. If we keep telling the story that way we can evo-psyche ourselves into believing misogyny, racism, disablism, etc. are universal (and alternate-universal) truths and not only shouldn’t be messed with, but shouldn’t even be rebuked, let alone examined, in a meaningful way.

After all, in drawing up a different world why imagine, let alone engage in, a truly different world? It’s just too much work.

Meanwhile let me get back to drawing away on this really really detailed map and sketching lots of different kinds of sigils for armor. Toodles!

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Feb 24 2012
culture, family

a blueprint for courage

ed. note – I receive no compensation in any form for links provided here or at my journal, kelly.hogaboom.org.

Phoenix + Harris = Lurve

We are only a few days away from moving from our two bedroom rental into a larger one. The new home features lower rent, a reduced utilities bill, and sits next door to my mother’s house. My husband, children and I are happily painting, cleaning, and preparing for our new circumstances. That said, I have a fondness for the house we are leaving. I am enjoying its relatively serene space all the more as I come home after an evening painting, scrubbing, and trying not to over-think, over-plan, or over-worry.

It was in my early days in this current home I first found the motherlode of support for raising children in the autodidactic tradition (or as I shall shorthand the practice here, “unschooling” or “life learning”). And as we pack up the place, those memories are exhilarating in the recall – but now comfort-worn by my years’ experience, and my gratitude to the many individuals who’ve helped, and continue to help, along the way.

My husband and I started our children early in the tradition of institutional education. We’d taken part in playschools since the kids were nine months and two weeks, respectively. We were one of those, “give your kids every advantage” families – like most parents or carers are, regardless of what particular strategies they employ –  so we continued in the tradition I was raised in, believing academic success and so-called “socialization” to be the two brass rings of Good Parenting. We also believed it was our civic duty to participate in public schooling. After all, I’d had a pleasant enough experience in school, and I had the straight-As and the engineering degree to support my “success” story.

Playschool was fun for most everyone in the family, but by the time I was volunteering twice-weekly in my daughter’s kindergarten classroom (as it happened, I was the only parent who did) my views on institutionalized and compulsory education were changing. I perceived many hazards and shortfalls and, increasingly, I intuited fewer advantages. As for tangible, culturally-supported motivations – such as a second income to say, pay our bills and/or have running cars, let alone provide me with Social Security – even these did not outweigh my increasing desire for a different life for our little family. It would actually be an overlong article were I to list the many things I found lacking in (first) the public school, and then, as I investigated further, any compulsory schooling model within our reach (let alone the lifestyle required, which I could write pages on). Ultimately I came to a mindset of, YOU make your case to ME as to why I should require my kids to school. So far I’ve not heard a compelling answer nor experience an unmet need, and I’ve listened intently to many arguments over the years.

So in 2008 we stepped out of the relatively comfortable, and culturally-supported, public school experience. At first it was a bit harrowing as, since I’m the Mommy, I was tasked with TEACHING MY OWN CHILDREN, horrors. I had binders full of lesson plans and a Google Calendar set up with subjects we’d cover. Most people left me alone about the venture or even praised me, figuring I was, basically, smart enough to go about it (I only footnote here my culturally-afforded privilege as a white, working-class, college-educated cisgender married woman with a university degree, a home, and no visible disability). With my husband’s enthusiastic support and participation we dove into the “brave” world of homeschooling.

At this point I’d been exposed to the concept of “unschooling”, but it still sounded like a craven mess to my ignorant yet somehow biased thought-life. However as the kids and I did our thing, I became less and less satisfied with the very school-y model I knew how to employ to instruct my children. As I see it, the model I knew is typical and two-fold. First, we tell our children what to think, believe, and parrot (within a narrow range of “acceptable” beliefs and thoughts, all the while giving lipservice to freedom and “critical thinking”). Second, we motivate them using praise and its counterpart, emotional pain – in other words, “you can’t eat your pudding if you don’t have your meat!” (it’s true, if you look deep enough into what is really happening). Initially as a homeschooler I wasn’t doing much different than the enterprise I’d removed our children from, even if the environs were a lot healthier in most ways.

It was at this time I found, somehow, Wendy Priesntiz’s publications Life Learning Magazine and Natural Life Magazine* and began reading there – as well as many authors and blogs referenced, and the books, articles and blogs tangentially-linked to those. At the time, specifically with regards to Priesnitz’s pieces, I found validation of truths I’d felt deep inside since I was a child. To wit: that “absorb, regurgitate, & be graded” methods of education were superficial and ineffective. To wit, that children shouldn’t be treated as cattle nor capitalist fodder for the United States’ edifices of consumerism and consumption (forces I like to jokingly reference as Jack Handey’s monster: “trampling and eating everything it sees”). To wit, my suspicion that what  many adults wanted a great deal from children was to be able to control their movements and especially their behaviors and especially their thoughts and beliefs. Deep-down I knew it wasn’t possible nor intelligent to demand “respectful” behavior from children while we robbed them of their agency and basic human rights (these demands for “respect” yield spoiled fruit; I’m reflecting on last year’s bullycides and the many angry and frightening responses from grownups; also the recent public cheers when a father publicly destroyed his “disrespectful” daughter’s laptop with a firearm). The fact adults scream – and hit – for “respect” from children is something I occasionally feel a sense of deep embarrassment-by-proxy about.

All of these things – things I “knew in my knowing place” – were given voice by someone thousands of miles away, with decades more experience. I can’t fully express the excitement and possibility that began to open up for me those few days. Those experiences were a cornerstone as I continued to read and relate with other authors, professionals, parents, carers, teachers, and adults with an avocation and passion for our children.

The exercised right to raise one’s children without putting them in an institution continues to draw fire, myriad subtle or blatant slings and arrows. Most of these arguments, primarily, reduce down to our culturally-indoctrinated reflexive desire to control children’s lives, emotions, thoughts and expressions, and physical movements. The latest anti-homeschooling piece referenced in my tweetstream comes from Slate (“Liberals, Don’t Homeschool Your Kids”, February 16, 2012), trotting out the “if you’re progressive you owe it to society to put your kids in the public school system” argument. And you know, this was a view I once held myself not so long ago, so I relate. In my case, Eva Swidler’s piece in 2010 was seminal in articulating the fallacies inherent in the argument that participating in the system with your child’s fulltime lived reality is the only ethical thing to do (after all, there are many ways to support schooled kids, even if you do not have children or your children do not attend school – and Swidler’s eloquence, I might add, addresses this beautifully). Other good refutions have emerged recently, specifically challenging the popular concept that compulsory state-run schooling is a major ameliorating force fighting socioeconomic disparities and systemic oppressions.

The expectation of, and massive mainstream pressure to, institutionalize children is a new experiment in terms of humanity. But from the beginning I’ll bet you’d find this argument of civic duty: “You owe it to _____ agenda to participate [in this exact way]!” Personally I think many who frame forced school attendance for children as the only way to be civic-minded and ethical are merely, if they were to examine their root feelings, scared. Arguing that home educating parents are cloistering their children and telling their children who exactly to trust is not only a logic fail in one way (as if sending them to school without right of veto isn’t telling them who to trust), but also fails on an even deeper level – because children actually decide who to trust, as much as some people don’t want to admit this (I trusted School, by the way… the problems I later had are the subject of another article). Many won’t entertain the concept children have the capacity and the right to have a regarded and significant voice in their own daily lives. And dare I say, those most fearful are likely those of us with a series of gold stars attached to our name by virtue of the educational system.

My children’s forty hours a week times thirteen+ years is pretty important to me – and to them. When I find the institutional proponent who speaks of children as anything other than chattel (or cattle), subhumans (check out popular language describing teenagers if you’ve the stomach for it), requisite products and/or extensions of our own values, or capitalist investments, I’ll listen all the more intently. Most proponents operate from the perspective children are second-class citizens, that we know what’s best for them, and they couldn’t possibly learn if we stopped relying on desks, tests, and doled-out potty-breaks.

I provide my children, and the schooled children who frequent my home, with safety, emotional and physical nourishment, and a great deal of autonomy. And the practice grows up some pretty good kids.

Look, my theories that articles such as the latest on Slate, or examples like the vitriolic and lengthy tirade “HOMESCHOOLING IS CHILD ABUSE” (actual title from a self-identified college professor), are primarily fear-based? I could be incorrect. What I can say with confidence is I was a school-achiever and school-believer – and I was fearful at first. I was scared to commit to the supposed “huge” responsibility of educating my children. Scared of relinquishing (the illusion of) control by exploring, by merely entertaining the idea of, autodidactic family life. I was scared of not playing the “more income=more happiness” game, even though my logical mind told me we had a roof over our head and enough coal to burn. I was scared of doing something different than the herd and having my family life interfered with by the State (that’s a founded fear, by the way). I was scared of being told I wasn’t doing what “everyone else” thought I should (again, a founded fear, also reinforced by school, incidentally).

Mostly I was scared of giving up (the illusion of and) the practice of Control.

I look as deeply as I can into articles regarding children’s education and parenting, and those are the fears I see.

I live in gratitude for those who went before me and mapped out a blueprint for courage. As we pack up this home to move to another, the memories are pretty sweet.

***

“Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.” – Benjamin Franklin

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” – Audre Lorde

A Free Service
Coffee Date w/Emily

***

* both helmed by Wendy and Rolf Priesnitz, with over thirty years’ experience in the fields of life learning, writing, social activism, and publishing. Full disclosure; I’ve written a few pieces for these publications, including one published here – “the conversation t hat never happens”.

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Jan 19 2012
culture, everything else, family

more guest posting :-)

Are you just dying to hear the petty complaints of an fringe alternative ed adherent? Well anyway, Idzie Desmarais let me guest post, if you ever change your mind on that account!

Meanwhile. Fancy chocolate drinks at a new deli:

Closeup
Jan 02 2012
culture, everything else

quick hit: I write elsewhere too!

Elizabeth from My Milk Spilt was kind enough to publish me at her site; my piece “Missing the Mark” went live today. If nothing else, Michelle Allison’s linked-to piece is a go-to for some sense and sensibility regarding the USian (and AUian, at very least) “War on obesity”, etc.

Meanwhile, here’s a picture of a BLT with homemade bread and lovely summer tomatoes.

Closeup
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Jan 02 2012
culture, film revue

Film Feministe: Mindless Teen Drama Edition. Well, Specifically Teen Wolf

Like all reviews in The Film Feministe, I strive to reveal a brief synopses of a film or television series as well as an analysis. Occasionally my reviews include plot spoilers; caveat emptor.

My nine year old daughter and I have a penchant for pleasantly creepy, supernatural television and film. We usually end up watching a lot of documentaries involving cryptozoology or ghost-hunting. In the realm of self-identified fiction it can be quite tricky to find programs that aren’t predominately heaping lumps of horror and violence, often with sexual overtones, on young women and children. So in answer to a question no one asked – No, I won’t be watching the latest gore-fest with cut-up babies delivered to doorsteps or women getting raped (by demons or humans), tortured, murdered, et cetera (P.S. please watch this).

On that note and without further ado… I give thee Film Feministe: Adolescent Lycanthropy!

“Teen Wolf” (TV, 2011)

Tyler Posey, Posing

Grrr.

You know what, I have no business writing this review for a few discrete reasons. One, I grew up in a house without television, so it’s not as if I had the typical vast body of pop culture innundation. Two, I hardly watch any television now, and I certainly do not afford myself the time consuming, synthesizing, and analyzing the vast, sticky-gooey wads of it available. If a program is lucky I’ll watch through a few seasons, but usually things jump the shark big time and I move on.

So as mentioned, the oldest child and I stumbled on last year’s “Teen Wolf”, just ending its first season this summer, and last night we finished the last episode via Netflix instant. Apparently this is from MTV? Can anyone remind me of any other MTV offerings, besides the vintage “Ren & Stimpy”? I’m not sure how much MTV television programming I’ve seen.

You could guess at the story and be about right. Nerdy/shy young man is unwittingly attacked by a werewolf and transformed: now he has a secret to keep while living life as a “normal teenage boy”. What does that mean? I wonder. Anyhoo there is of course the hero’s buddy, a love interest, conniving characters out to expose the Big Wolfy Secret, and a plot involving a family who’s been werewolf hunting (on the DL, natch) for centuries.

Let’s meet our cast of characters. We have first the Wolf Boy himself (there are other wolves but, they are mostly boring), played by Tyler Posey. I think the character’s name is Scott. Anyway, he’s pretty cute. And he’s a nice guy. He takes his shirt off a bit, and no one complains.

Pose-Down

I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods, but never come across one of these.

Then there’s Stiles. He’s Scott’s best friend. He has almost literally no life except helping Scott and running around trying to fix stuff.

Stiles, Agape

“I respond to situations by hanging my mouth open alot. I deliver 50% heart and 50% *BOOOIIIING* comedy.”

Stiles drives a really cool vintage Jeep, but the show calls it a “piece of crap”, because another young man improbably drives a Porsche Cayman (pick one up used if you can’t afford new), and that would be:

“Hi, I’m really handsome, but don’t worry, the script will keep reminding you of this so you won’t forget. I am your basic soap opera good-guy-or-am-I-a-really-a-villian? character.”

Jackson. He’s the guy that we’re supposed to wonder, is he a Good Guy or a Bad Guy? I don’t really wonder, because I know each episode the show will just change it around for convenience. One thing I like about Jackson is he has freckles. You don’t see guys-cast-as-hunks with freckles often. h/t Paul Bettany.

I almost forgot to mention. The love interest. But of course, ladies do come far down the list here. They’re still mostly girlfriends and moms. Twelve-ish hours of the show and it barely passes The Bechdel Test, I mean it really really barely squeaks by on that. So anyway here’s the main ladyness:

Damsel To Be Rescued

“I spend most time doing a really good job on my hair and makeup and being alternatively misled by everyone, menaced, and then rescued. Toward the end of the season I get marginally competent, but don’t worry, my subplot is only predicated on the hero’s.”

There are several other characters of course, good guys, bad guys, people who are confused, a few who get eaten.

So, everyone is really really handsome. Moms, dads, kids. Everyone is really really good-looking. Maybe it’s because I watch a lot of British television, foreign indie films, and your occasional HBO – I’m used to seeing people onscreen who look like the people you see day-to-day. Anyway, I’m sure this Good Lookingness business is typical in television, still, it just kind of makes me laugh.

I forgot to mention, there’s one subplot character who looks to be more important in season two, played by the talented and, surprise, really really handsome:

Seth Gilliam

“Hey, I’m pretty sure this picture of me is from ‘The Wire’, because in ‘Teen Wolf’ I no longer have the ‘stache… I’m rockin’ an extended soul patch/chinstrap combo. Anyway I’ll be playing your rather unconvincing vet/perhaps-witch-doctor type.”

So yeah, most everyone in the show is white as the driven snow*… a few exceptions in lead actor Posey, abovementioned Seth Gilliam, and minor character Danny as played by Keahu Kahuanui, a Hawaiian actor who interestingly (but not really that interestingly) stands in as the show’s only gay character. You know, kind of a nicely, unobtrusively gay character, used occasionally as foil for the comedic antics of our main hero set, Stiles and Scott.

There are wolfy and a few human murders, but the show is light on the gore by today’s standards, and there’s about four hundred percent less virginal-maiden-killing than I’d expect with a werewolf plotline.

A notable device I liked, besides the light drama and entertaining running-around-at-night hijinx, is the sweetness by which the high school romance is developed. Scott and Allison (that is the love interest’s name, BTW) have to do their courting while being bitched at and bossed around by parents and teachers, in a way I remember from my own adolescence. When it comes to romance, interestingly it is Allison who is the more adventuresome and sexually frank, while Scott is developed as a very sweet high school boy as interested in sex as she. This is a subtle but pretty welcome change from the teen dramas I remember seeing on my friends’ tellys: girls were allowed to be sexed but not allowed to be sexual (unless they were Sluts).Whatever desire they operated is to this day not shown onscreen, whereas the expression of male libido is dumbed down and practically lampooned – well, you know how it is.  In “Teen Wolf”, Allison is open and playful about sex, and Scott is reserved and romantic (but hardly platonic).

So in Casa del Hogaboom, will “Teen Wolf” get our second season fidelity? I don’t know. On the one hand instead of piling up like a bajillion secrets-upon-secrets and double-triple-betrayals (as USian television shows often do, to my dismay), the end of season one solved a few mysteries and united a few factions. On the other, as far as I can tell the show is just typical television, dialing down on the sex and gore in favor of a more tender storyline. If things stay that way we’ll probably enjoy popping the popcorn and settling in for another season.

***

* Ed. update summer 2012: race drama re: “Teen Wolf”; creator’s response, flounce, etc.

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Mar 23 2011
culture, family, feminism

breastfeeding: not just ladybusiness

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mamiscl/4968830387/This piece is featured in Squat! Birth Journal‘s Spring Issue. I encourage an exploration and/or support of this lovely zine (available in paper or digital form); certainly a great gift for an expecting family-to-be! It’s a wonderful publication.

Over my twitterstream my friend Wendy links to a piece of, once again, sex discrimination against a woman feeding her child1). We’ve all heard it before. A woman is feeding her baby in a shop or a library or wherever, when an employee approaches and tells the woman she must leave, often invoking (their fallacious understanding of) the law and – at least in North America – usually in violation of protected rights. And certainly counter to common sense, compassion, and an understanding of public health.

It’s too bad more people don’t seem to see it that way.

Breastfeeding discussion is continually ignored and/or marginalized by the mainstream, made into a fringe issue although it concerns us all – our progress toward an egalitarian society, our support of families, our stewardship of the environment, and our county’s medical costs and spiritual, emotional, and physical well-being. Even movements self-identified as pro-woman often pick and choose which reproductive rights they support and advocate for, ignoring the societal edifices concerning birth, babies, and fulltime care of children – which necessarily ignores the women involved. If you Google “breastfeeding and feminism” you will see communities concerning the former subject discussing the latter, but rarely the reciprocal; mainstream pro-feminist discussions in general do not concern themselves with breastfeeding even though something like eighty percent of USian women do become parents at some point.

Keeping breastfeeding peripheral to social justice discussion contributes to extremely low breastfeeding rates in the so-called developed world (which are lower still in marginalized groups such as black mothers, teen mothers, and native or indigenous mothers, etc.). After all, anyone remedially-versed in the experiences of infant care and feeding understand that support, or lack thereof, is a major if not the major factor in aggregate breastfeeding success rates.

While some without children, or some with older children, or some men believe they can continue to ignore the health and well-being implications of poor breastfeeding rates and the compounded lack of choice afforded to already-stressed marginalized populations, such a luxury is not experienced for the child nor the child’s carer. These peoples’ daily realities are put under additional stressors. Thus when an individual receives repeated shaming messages or policing language and repressive strategies against her, she is most likely to experience discouragement, uncertainty, and isolation; she is at a very real disadvantage. Or as the author of “A tired hungry baby” writes:

I knew the law. I knew my rights. But I was still upset. And not the angry, self-important, righteous kind of upset. The teary, scared, “they”‘re going to kick me out of the store”, “I”‘m here with my kids” type of upset. It was clear I was about to be thrown out, and I was pretty sure that if I was going to be forced to justify feeding my baby, I was going to cry. And I felt truly alone.

This experience and this sentiment could have been written by so many of my friends – and many of these are “educated” women with class, hetero-, cis-, and racial privilege. Which puts the question: at what point does our mainstream dithering about “public decency” get real, and admit the costs we are requiring so many others to pay? “Gross, I shouldn’t have to see that!” seems incredibly trite and inhumane when considering our socioeconomically-classist culture, to put it frankly, requires black, brown, poor and working-class mamas and families pay multifaceted costs – and by heaping on body-shaming and gender-policing we’re just making it harder. “Gross, I shouldn’t have to see that!” tweeted by a white Portland hipster without children is such a disheartening and ignorant response when I consider, for instance, the lived reality of a child up all night screaming from a painful ear infection (and the work/sleep missed by carers and the stress for all involved). To get a little 101, ear infections, which account for thirty million trips to the doctor each year and are experienced by an estimated 75% of babies, is a risk decimated by a factor of at least two for a breastfed child2. And that’s just one real-life health issue and one potential pragmatism for parents, and it makes me irritated enough to knock that Stumptown out of said urbanite’s hand.

“Gross, I shouldn’t have to see that!” hurts real-life families, real-life people.

“Gross, I shouldn’t have to see that!” is something that should have been eliminated from our public discourse a long, long time ago.

This is why it is key that those who are not at this moment stuffing a nipple into a baby’s face – including men, including formula-feeders, and including those without children – support breastfeeding and stand up for families’ rights and for mothers to young children. When the mainstream frames breastfeeding an issue that the individual mothers should be fighting, all on their own, it throws the game (especially considering the corporate power and cultural reach held by formula producers: phdinparenting.com has some great information on this). Concomitantly, framing infant feeding as solely individualistic and “choice”-based is also at heart of those who shame individual formula feeding families (moms) for “not trying/caring hard enough”, too (sadly, there are many of these voices, although for the purposes of this piece I should note bottle feeding mothers are generally not asked to leave public spaces based only on their method of feeding).

So while there are many breastfeeding mothers who stand up to pressure and have a generally positive feeding career, the vast majority of breastfeeding mothers have been pressured to stop feeding and most have been shamed explicitly or implicitly while others stand silently by or dismiss the topic as a “women’s issue” (because, you know, those aren’t important).

This means often, as in the above-cited author’s case, at the point an episode of discrimination is most acute and immediate, she is likely extremely disadvantaged in her response. Consider also that mothers who breastfeed:

* are expending 300 – 500 extra calories a day per breastfeeding child (yes, some women are breastfeeding more than one child), and those are just the calories required to produce milk, not those needed to care for, comfort and nurture, clean for, etc. anyone else in the family.

* are often severely sleep-deprived (personally, I cannot overstate this effect on my life when I had infants).

* are usually dealing with hormonal and physical changes while they:

* are also under endemic body-policing and -shaming pressures including scrutiny of their weight, the state of their skin or hair, and their changed or changing body shape.

* are often under cultural policing as well; this is levied at mothers of color, those without class privilege, those outside the heteronormative spectrum, those with multiple children, etc.

* are usually constantly segregated and policed in subtle and not-so-subtle ways by virtue of having children, by our adultist and child-unfriendly cultural norms.

* are often under-supported by their family, friends, neighbors – and, too-often, their partners (even well-intentioned ones), if they have one.

* are in the throes of what many would identify as one of the most life-changing experiences they’ve had - the twentyfour-seven care and responsibility for another human being, and an incredibly vulnerable one at that.

It is my position that any restriction of breastfeeding should be taken as sex discrimination - whether legally promoted or de facto by policy, societal attitudes, etc. As such, I haven’t yet heard a compelling argument to support it. A disdain for a function of women’s bodies doesn’t seem meritorious enough to warrant prescriptive measures.

It’s time for others to adopt that standard as well.

Because in North America, fighting for the unrecognized humanity of these women, babies, and families, often seems a never-ending job against a seemingly bottomless pit of ignorance and oppression. Today, as I finish this piece, a blogreader sends me an article from The Root, in which a woman nursing in the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. was hounded twice by security and told she must enter the bathroom and sit on the toilet to feed her child3.

So, yeah. “Gross, I shouldn’t have to see that!” needs to go.

* Photo credit: 3º Lugar – 2º Concurso Fotogra¡fico Regional “Fotografiando la Lactancia”. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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