Archive: Apr 2009

Miley Cyrus is all grown up.  Yes, I am going to squeeze Simone de Beauvoir and Miley Cyrus into the same sentence.  If you’re following Miley’s career these days, you’ll know that she’s “becoming a woman” in the media and entertainment worlds.  Simone de Beauvoir definitely had it right, and rarely do we see so clearly exactly how someone “becomes” a woman.  But really, this is her “adult,” womanly roll-out, and just to be sure we get it the media coverage makes clear that Miley is all “grown up” now.  She’s on the cover of Glamour magazine this month, hit the American Idol stage this week in a sexy strapless gown, and has a movie in theatres nationally.  With a career like that she definitely has adult responsibilities, I’m sure.

But just ask my daughter—Miley is sixteen, which does not seem especially grown up to me, particularly as the parent of an 8-year-old (So my daughter is halfway to adulthood?? I hope not!).  Here are my questions: what does it mean for a sixteen-year-old (or her handlers) to be reinventing herself as a “woman” in media terms?  Can we expect her to shed the squeaky-clean image and angle for meatier (read: sexier) parts?  And what does it mean for her tween fan base to witness this transformation?  Finally, you tell me: when do girls become women?  What marks that transformation in your mind?

Becoming a man.  Judith Warner has a thoughtful column this week, “Dude, You’ve got Problems,” about the use of “gay” as an epithet.  She writes, “It’s weird, isn’t it, that in an age in which the definition of acceptable girlhood has expanded, so that desirable femininity now encompasses school success and athleticism, the bounds of boyhood have remained so tightly constrained?”  I’m not so sure, however, that I agree with Warner’s assertion that being called a “fag” has “almost nothing to do with being gay.”  Instead, she argues, “fag” is used to deride weakness or femininity.  Well, yes, and that’s what I call homophobia, which certainly does go hand in hand with sexism.

Is Women’s Studies the next Sex and the City?  Let’s hope HBO can do for women’s studies what it has already done for big city career girls, mobsters, undertakers, and polygamists.  The cable network apparently has a show in development about a former “feminist It Girl” who is now turned to being a professor at a small liberal arts college.  Will such a show poke fun at women’s studies?  Sure, this field offers plenty of material for laugh lines, but if we also wind up as the next hit series everyone is talking about, then the HBO line on my cable bill will have been money well spent.

–Allison Kimmich

I’m supershort on battery so may only get through part of this next session, but here we go…

Jeremy Adam Smith, creator of the blog Daddy Dialectic and author of the book The Daddy Shift, is introducing the panel by talking about the difference in attitudes about fatherhood among his grandfather, his father, and himself.

Panelists are:

Reeve Vanneman (he’ll be talking about The End of Gender Revolution?)
Oriel Sullivan (on Slow but Steady-ish Change)
Josh Coleman (speaking on The Ghost of Traditional Marraige in Contemporary Ones)
Mignon Moore (talking about Is Convergence Moot in Same Sex Copules?)
Amy and Marc Vachon, bloggers at Equally Shared Parenting and coauthors of a forthcoming book on the subject (on that)

Reeve Vanneman is up first:  There was a big shift in the 1990s, he notes, a stalling in gender revolution. But the question is, why?  Three possible reasons:

1. End of feminist protest: in the mid-1990s, media coverage of feminism declined…

2. Economics: in the mid-1990s, for the first time in a long time, men’s earnings increased.  They had stagnated in the 1970s, but during the early Clinton years, there were fairly broad-based increases in men’s earnings.

3. Culture: gender attitudes shifted (ie, when surveys asked questions like “do you agree that a working mother can have a warm relationship with her children?” the answer “yes” trended upward from the 1970s, then leveled off in the 1990s; other questions tracked were questions like “do you believe that men make better politicians”? etc)

In sum, we have evidence that there was a stalling of gender revolution in the mid-1990s. But we don’t fully know WHY.

ARGH! Hate to leave ya’ll hanging, but I’m running out of battery here…

We’re in the first panel, organized by Kathleen Gerson.  Panelists are Bob Drago, Shirley Hill, Jennifer Glass, and Erin Kelly.

For a blow by blow of who’s saying what in real time, check out Veronica (who is sitting right in front of me!) over at Viva la Feminista.  She’s using this very cool software called Cover It Live.  (Man, that lady teaches me EVERYTHING!)

Josh Coleman steps up to the mike and frames the conference by starting with how the women’s movement has made life better not only for women but for men.  Yet at the same time, and especially in this moment of recession, where men are being laid off in droves, women’s increased power is in some way a challenge to men’s identity.  The traditional markers of male identity–protector, provider–have been eroded.  As Michael Kimmel says, men are left with all of the empowerment and none of the power.  [??!!]  So there’s a crisis in masculinity out there.  (Ok, yes, reality check: women earn 80% what men do, etc etc.)

Questions the conference will ask:

How will recession affect relationships between men and women?

Will men express their masculinity by doing even less?

Is the gender revolution dead, or still evolving?

What’s going on with gender convergence in families and intimate relationships?

What’s going on with gender in the next generation?

Is our culture of individualism make marriages today more happy and resilient or more fragile?

What kind of work/family policies make families more resilient and what makes them more stressed?

What does the recent election tell about gender today?

Stay tuned….

Hiya from the Council on Contemporary Families conference in my hometown Chicago.  It’s 70 degrees and sunny, and only a gathering like this one could keep me inside.

This morning Virginia Rutter, Stephanie Coontz, and I offered a media workshop, where I heard some of the best ever rationale for why “popping it up” (meaning, learning to write/communicate your complex and researched ideas for a broader audience) is not “dumbing it down”:

Barbara Risman: “If your idea is truly smart, it can be conveyed without jargon.  It’s laziness to think otherwise.”

Josh Coleman: “Reducing a complex idea to a soundbyte is a form of wisdom in itself.”

Stephanie Coontz: “It’s not a compromise to your intellectual integrity.  If you can’t reduce your complex idea to one or two sentences, it may be because there’s a hole in your argument.  It’s not merely a matter of laziness but intellectual self-deception.”

Virginia Rutter: “If you can’t boil it down, maybe media isn’t the medium for you.  Maybe it’s meant for a smaller discussion.”

!!!

I’m heading to Chicago today for the Council on Contemporary Families conference today and guess who wants to come with me.  Tula, you’re staying home with your human father.  Awesome program posted here.  See some of ya’ll there!

Lisa Belkin, ever on top of the nuances and foibles of dating, mating and family making in our time, points in a recent Sunday New York Times magazine section to a new study that is sure to make (at least some) men squirm and women, as she puts it, “chortle” with delight, although the news is, for anyone who thinks about having kids, actually sobering.

Women often bear excruciating pressures around choosing when to have a child, from all angles, while men are told their biology is limitless, hence their chance at fatherhood is as well.  Not so anymore.  Throughout the past few years more and more evidence is coming to light linking a father’s age at conception to schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder, as she points out (while the mother’s age at conception shows no such correlation).  Two years ago the New York Times also ran a piece entitled “It Seems the Fertility Clock Ticks for Men, Too.” Now, Belkin highlights an Australian study that shows that children born to “older fathers have, on average, lower scores on tests of intelligence than those born to younger dads.”

There are those who will take issue with the research, claim there’s no adjustment for environment, individual father’s IQ, parental involvement and more.  But here are the two lines that made me want to sit up and shout “so there!”: “French researchers reported last year that the chance of a couple conceiving begins to fall when the man is older than 35 and falls sharply if he is older than 40.”  Later in the article Belkin quotes Dr. Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center who says, it turns out the optimal age for being a mother is the same as the optimal age for being a father.  Ha! I wanted to shout at the screen as I was reading.

Really, what I wanted was to do was shout this to all the 50something men who, when I was 35 and entering into the online dating world, contacted me, ignoring their agemates, specifically because they felt they were “finally ready” to get around to starting a family.  Most were utterly unapologetic that part of what they were seeking was a woman they perceived to be still fertile enough to incubate their suddenly desired offspring.  My response that being contacted in part so I could incubate a legacy child for them was insulting often fell on deaf ears.

But what Belkin gets to at the end of her article — and what I think bears far more exploration — is how scientific evidence that men too have a ticking biological clock could undermine what is a commonly socially accepted timeline  women, shelf life and expiration date with fertility is fixed, men, well, they can always Tony Randall it, and procreate as he did in his 77th year.  (Nevermind that in this New York Times article, “He’s Not My Grandpa. He’s My Dad,” Randall’s widow, left with two children under age 10, questions if her own long-range planning was all that wise and admits she’d tell her daughter not to marry an “older man.”

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A dear friend and colleague of mine–and fellow blogger!–Shari Cohen is leading a fabulous workshop here in NYC for anyone currently looking to jumpstart their career.  Looking to make a move from an unsatisfying position to something more meaningful?  Or between jobs and searching for what’s next?  Then you seriously might want to check this out.

Shari’s Career Action Group is a 4-week career transition workshop starting on May 5. She’s doing it in partnership with Next Step Partners, a firm that is launching similar groups across the country, including in Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area.  Why is this workshop different from all other career workshops?  Shari has an intense background in leadership development work, and she’s awesome at helping people figure out ways to contribute their talent and creativity in new directions.  I should know.  I’ve worked with her myself.

Here’s the formal bio:

Shari Cohen, Ph.D., a senior consultant with Next Step Partners, focuses on leadership development.  She has been working for over ten years to help leaders in international development, health, philanthropy, advocacy, market research, technology and publishing, to access their potential, build their confidence and expand their creativity.  She has consulted for the World Bank, Carnegie Corporation, Bain, Demos and Doctors without Borders.  Previous experience includes senior management positions at two non-profits where she built leadership programs.  She also served as a professor of international relations at Wellesley College.  Shari holds a Ph.D. in political sociology from University of California, Berkeley, and a BA from Cornell University.  She has a certificate in organizational and executive coaching from NYU.

For more info about the Career Action Group, go here.  But whether you’re career-shifting or not, definitely check out Shari’s blog, Unstuck Future, where she’s been writing lately about thinking about your career from the inside out, and her own career transition, as well.  Like me, and like many GWP readers I know, Shari is a postacademic, so her insights really resonate, if you know what I mean.

SO EXCITED bout this: Girls Write Now will be featured some time this week on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams reported by national correspondent Amy Robach.  Tune in or set your DVRs to see some familiar faces! And please spread the word!

NBC Nightly News airs daily at 6:30 PM Eastern/Pacific, 5:30 PM Central. Check out your state’s local listings.

For a great summary of last week’s panel, Women’s Economic Equality: The Next Frontier in Women’s Rights, hosted by Legal Momentum (and starring Heather Boushey, Linda Hirshman, Mimi Abramowitz, and Irasema Garza), check out Kyla Bender-Baird over at The REAL Deal.