Archive: Oct 2010

My twins turned one last week. She Writes, the start-up I’ve been nurturing, turned 1.25. Needless to say, this is the year Halloween nearly blew me by.

I bah-humbugged it all the way to Tuesday. While shopping for diaper wipes online on Wednesday, a neon orange tagline from the crypt—“Last minute deals on Halloween costumes!”—caught my eye. Who in their right mind could resist images of cuddly babies in bear suits? I landed on a bee costume for Baby Girl (just $12!) and a dragon suit for Baby Boy ($18). The joy of these purchases? Priceless. And that’s how it hit me: At one year old, my babies were people. People who wouldn’t remember what they wore for their first real Halloween, but people who would newly experience the magic of disguise.

So what do the disguises I chose for these here babies say to them, to you, to me? Bees are busier and daintier than dragons, and they make honey, though let’s not forget: they sting. Dragons lope, and breathe fire. I thought about a ladybug for my son, to match my daughter’s bee, then vetoed it. He’s really more a dragon-y type of guy. And so it goes. Gendering—imposed by even the feminist among us—begins.

“Babies are born to parents who have a host of assumptions and expectations about gender, whether or not they consciously endorse those expectations. Studies have shown that parents have a tendency to see boys as more boyish and girls as more girlish than they actually are,” says Cordelia Fine, author of the new book Delusions of Gender, in a recent interview at Salon. Until they reach age two, my babies apparently won’t know which side of the gender divide they’re on. Gender, at this early stage, is what we heap on.

So why all this fuss around costumes and kids? Because eventually, it matters (and stay tuned, Penners, for Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter, coming soon!). Though my babies are only one, in an era when pre-packaged girl costumes are sluttier-than-thou and boy costumes are more violent than ever and make Freddy Krueger look quaint, masquerade is rarely the innocent thing it seemed in the days when my friends and I dressed as a bunch of grapes.

Dressing up—whether it unleashes a hidden identity or helps us try on a role—makes us feel, deepens our sense of play, enlargens our sense of who and what we are. And dressing up the way a sexist culture tells us to makes us small, current articles in defense of Slutoween aside.

To be sure, at this stage in my children’s life, this whole debate is a lot less about them and a lot more about me.  But here’s my question: at what age do new parents like me need to start to care?  At my babies’ pre-linguistic stage, can’t Halloween be just what it’s supposed to be…light and silly and fun?  Or are costumes–like gender, perhaps, itself–always already predetermined scripts, coded so heavily with trickery that we can’t enjoy the treat?

Can a dragon and a bee ever just be…a dragon and a bee?

***

(For a fellow traveler’s internal dilemma on it all, see Lynn Harris’ “Raising Girls in Princess Culture: Does it really affect girls’ gender roles?” over at Babble last week.)

I posted a partial version of this post on Friday at www.SheWrites.com, and used the photo of my twins to kick off a caption contest. Got a caption for it?  Do share by posting it there!

Yes, I’m still here!  The twins turned 1 last week and it’s time for me to re-enter.

A quick list of what’s been catching my attention of late:

Rita Aren’s blog, Surrender Dorothy (I’m way hooked)

Stephanie Coontz’s commentary, “Why Mad Men is TV’s Most Feminist Show”, in the Washington Post

The SPARK Summit and social media extravaganza, where I signed books sitting next to Jean Kilbourne, author most recently of So Sexy So Soon and one of my all-time feminist heroines, met her daughter the fabulous Claudia Lux (hire her, people!), and got to catch up with organizer Deb Tolman, who is a one-woman powerhouse herself

Robyn Silverman’s Good Girls Don’t Get Fat: How Weight Obsession is Messing Up Our Girls and How We can Help Them Thrive Despite It

Girls Write Now.  Always.

Responses to She Writes’ Domestic Violence Awareness Month writing prompt

What’s been catching yours?

Bridgette A. Sheridan is a historian of sexualities at Framingham State University. When Karen Owen’s PowerPoint became news–she’s the Duke student who sent her friends a faux presentation based on her “sex research” on a sample of men whom she’d slept with–Bridgette followed the story with curiosity and then dismay. I had a conversation with her today in her kitchen in Cambridge. Here’s what she said.

VR: So, tell me again what’s your problem with the Karen Owen/Duke Faux Thesis Controversy?

BAS: Yea, I don’t get it. Why is this news? A white woman at an elite college reports in a mildly witty way her sexual adventures—her “dirty sex.” The story gets attention because people are shocked! shocked! shocked! by this “role reversal.” They puzzle over whether this is “good” or “bad” and speculate about its value as a “feminist turning point.”

VR: So that’s not really news?

BAS: This is like stories we’ve been told for a long time, particularly about white middle class women and sexuality. It is an old story about gender, about sex, about race, about class. The story is that “these girls are dirty too.” And then much excitement, worry, and titillation follows. Even though being naughty has been a familiar part of the sexual landscape in America for a long time, we keep getting especially worked up about it when we hear about it from yuppy women.

VR: What is dirty sex?

BAS: Hmmm. For white elite girls it is sex without commitment. It is sex focused on her own pleasure, rather than on her emotions about the person with whom she was having sex. Blow jobs rather than intercourse. Talking dirty rather than keeping the lights out. Sexting rather than sending flowers.

I love the question “what is dirty sex” because it draws our attention to how much sex is coded through social class, not just gender.

When I first started reading about the Duke episode, what I thought of immediately was the Milton Academy sex scandal of a few years ago, and it even took me back to Katie Roiphe’s commentary on date rape in the early 1990s.

VR: What happened at Milton?

BAS: Through an expose (Restless Virgins [!]) published in 2007 by young women from Milton Academy we learned about the fabulous, terrible sexual underworld at Milton after news broke of a 15-year-old female student giving blow jobs to five male athletes in the locker room at Milton.  According to Time, the charge about the book was that it read more like soft porn than sociology.

I would argue that the shocking and fascinating part for most people was “this is happening at an elite institution” – “these girls have so much to live for.”

VR: What’s the Katie Roiphe link?

BAS: Way back in the 1990s Roiphe wrote a book, The Morning After, based on her experiences at Harvard and Princeton, and her skepticism about the “campus rape crisis.” She came to the conclusion that all the (then) new dialogue on campus about date rape was overhyped and that women were full, knowing participants in the sexual dramas that unfolded on campus.

Here’s the link: For Roiphe, the story was women are just like men; for Milton, the worry was sure boys will be boys but a sexual revolution might mean that girls are like boys too. And now with the Duke story the case is, again, something about (elite, privileged) women taking on the characteristics of men.

VR: Wait, you mean the double standard isn’t being violated in these stories?

BAS: This Duke story doesn’t indicate that the double standard has gone away, or that women have more sexual privilege than men. What I mean is, really, for this to be a story at all the double standard has to be in place! That is all it is about. While there is so-called positive commentary such as “Karen Owen reaches the inner feminist in me” … ultimately the kind of shock at and condemnation of Owen and what she has done is always present, and reconfirms our sense that men’s and women’s sexual experiences are fundamentally different, and that this difference is a valuable cultural resource that ought to be protected.

Let me walk you through this: when the story broke, ever so briefly there was concern about the fact that men’s names and images were used in her “sex survey”; the concern about the humanity of those subjects was eclipsed quickly by the interest in the “role reversal.” And how was the issue of men’s names and images resolved? The concern for the men focused on how this would make them seem callous toward women. They wouldn’t be gallant men. There was no fear that they would be slutty men, because the very idea of men being “put down” for their sexual desires is unheard of.

Some online comments from readers at various sites pointed to how, if Karen rated a guy highly that he would have benefited, and that it was only harmful if he didn’t receive high ratings. Do you see how that constitutes a double standard? If you don’t, then think about what it means when someone argues that when a sixth grade boy is seduced by his (woman) school teacher that maybe he is just “luckier” than all the other boys. This is another version of that kind of thinking. This is not feminism.

VR: If this isn’t one, then what would be a feminist turning point?

BAS: I think a feminist turning point would be when this wouldn’t be a story at all. Sexual freedom will exist when there is no such thing as “role reversal” — that is, when there wouldn’t be roles of privilege or statuses of disadvantage. Sounds nice, huh?

-Virginia Rutter

This month’s guest column is by Dr. Sheila Moeschen, an academic, writer, and Public Communications Consultant. For more of her writing, visit: www.citizendame.com. She currently resides in Boston.

The first time I saw the Gap ad for the skinny black pant starring the iconic Audrey Hepburn I was on a treadmill at the gym. The irony of the moment was not lost on my not-so-skinny thighs and me as we plodded along the motorized sidewalk to nowhere.   Released in the fall of 2006, the ad uses footage from her 1957 film Funny Face and shows Hepburn, decked out in a black turtleneck and black, form fitting chinos, rehearsing a modern dance number.  As the badass riffs of AC/DC’s “Back in Black” play, Hepburn kicks, minces, and twirls lithely across the screen.  For Gap, it marked the re-launch of their skinny pants, for the rest of us it announced a new era of fashion: skinny fashion.  The pants flattering Hepburn’s adorable, minx-like figure represented an unreachable brass ring to those of us carrying curves and the baggage of sugar binges gone by.  The notion of catering to a (excuse the pun) narrow population of individuals seemed additionally ludicrous. What woman in her right mind, I wondered, would subject herself to the same kind of physical, fashion bondage suffered by her corseted or foot-bound ancestors? Who would deliberately participate in the tyranny of skinny fashion?

The answer: a lot of women. Four years later the skinny fashion trend remains firmly entrenched in the racks of couture boutiques and mainstream outlets alike.  Gap’s skinny pant gave way to skinny jeans, which birthed skinny lyrca denim, known as “jeggings,” which helped to bring back stretchy, cotton leggings, the kind sported by late-80s teen sensations Debbie Gibson and Tiffany.  Though designers have created skinny clothing lines for men and women, it is women’s figures that manufacturers have in their crosshairs.  Correction, make that women’s and babies’ figures, as Gap recently released a line of skinny denim for its Baby Gap stores. It seems clear that skinny fashion constitutes another way manufacturers participate in colonizing women’s bodies.  By transforming a wardrobe staple—denim—to an unrealistic and even sadistic silhouette, designers systematically shift consumer perspective to the skinny line as both desirable and normal.

What is less clear is the way this fashion trend shapes ideas about more than just standards of idealized female physicality.  Feminist theatre historian Elizabeth Wilson writes about the ways in which fashion takes on political and ideological significance.  “Fashion,” Wilson states, “links the biological body to the social being, and public to private. This makes it uneasy territory, since it forces us to recognize that the human body is more than a biological entity. It is an organism in culture, a cultural artifact even, and its own boundaries are unclear.”

The popularity of skinny fashion belies another story about the current enculturation of the female body.  It is a narrative that speaks to women’s continued restriction and constraints during a historical period where women have made abundant economic, political, and social gains. Skinny fashion highlights the intersection of the biological and the cultural bodies as Wilson points out, ultimately presenting a depiction of women in crisis: they are asked to support a culture of thinness and health; they are sexually empowered but also subjects of sexual double standards; they wield tremendous power and influence on the world stage and yet must answer to charges about being “too feminine” or “not feminine enough.”  It is no wonder that women take some form of misplaced comfort in fashion that leaves nothing to the imagination, that puts the body in a clear delineation of terms: attractive or not attractive, fit or unfit, Hepburn-esque or everyone else.

The GWP collective seeks an additional blogger to add to our lineup who can also function as our webmaster.

The ideal candidate is organized, self-motivated, tech savvy, and familiar with WordPress; has a great idea for a monthly column to add to our column pool; is excited about feminism and media; and is ready to serve as a hub.  This is a unique opportunity for an emerging or established blogger to gain additional web/communication/organizational skills and work experience at the intersection of academia and the blogosphere as part of a highly visible (so we are told!) feminist blog.

Webmaster/blogger duties entail:

• responding to reader queries that come in through the “contact” form (the majority of which are either requests to be included on GWP’s blogroll, or press releases); forwarding relevant press releases to the relevant GWP blogger
• updating GWP’s blogroll
• letting an author or organization know when her/his book or study has been mentioned or reviewed and sending her/him the link to the post
• tweeting links to posts, posting on FB, Digg, other relevant social media and social bookmarking sites
• dealing with any tech issues that come up for GWP’s crew of 10 bloggers
• adding new books by GWP’s bloggers to the sidebar and the “Our Books” page
• serving as a point person for GWP bloggers for anything else that comes up
• recruiting a new regular blogger or two here and there when current bloggers rotate out; setting up said new blogger with a bio page and showing them the ropes

GWP is a collective.  We all do it for the love.  To continue to thrive, we need a substitute for me, at present, as its hub.  If interested in the position, please contact me at deborah@shewrites.com with a brief note about why you are the right fit, and a pitch for your column.  Candidates will be interviewed by phone by a current GWP blogger.  And please, if you know someone who you think would be a good match for this position, pass it on!

This month’s guest column* by Christine H. Morton, PhD, a research sociologist at the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative, draws on her research and publications on women’s reproductive experiences and maternity care advocacy roles, including the doula and childbirth educator. She is the founder of ReproNetwork.org, an online listserv for social scientists studying reproduction.

The ever-evolving history of the childbirth reform movement has new developments, which need to be incorporated into the older story which documents the shift from home to hospital birth; and the paradigm clash of midwifery and medical models of birth reflecting holistic and technocratic values, respectively. We need to incorporate the story of the doula, which I argue, is one of many efforts to bridge the divide – to provide, as Robbie Davis-Floyd has called it, humanistic care in birth, which is what most women desire.

History is happening now. In addition to the emergence of the doula in the past thirty years, more recently, we see efforts underway in maternal health policy (Childbirth Connections’ Transforming Maternity Care), among physician and nursing professionals (most especially around maternal quality measures, and maternity quality improvement) and resurgence among, for lack of a better word, ‘consumers’ or childbearing women, who seek greater access to vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC). What are the goals of each stakeholder; how do they intersect and overlap, and come into conflict with one another? This is a big story, and we need to tell it!

I take a small slice of this larger historical backdrop to consider the interconnected history of childbirth educators and doulas, which will be the subject of my research presentation at the Lamaze-ICEA Mega Conference in Milwaukee.

To back up a bit, when I embarked on my sociological investigation of the doula role, I was interested in many aspects of this innovative approach to childbirth advocacy and support. What strategies and mechanisms enabled women with no medical training to insert themselves at the site where medical care is delivered to a patient in a hospital, and enact their self-defined role? Why did women become doulas and what did the work mean for those who were able to sustain a regular practice over time? How were doulas utilizing and leveraging the corpus of evidence based research which suggested their impact was as great, if not greater, than that of the physician, the culture of the obstetric unit, or the labor and delivery nurse? Where did doulas come from? What, in the history of childbirth reform, or childbirth education, or labor/delivery nursing, could help me understand how doulas emerged at this point in time in U.S. history?

Later, after learning that there were limited histories of childbirth education (by non-childbirth educators), and little research on the history of obstetric nursing, I had to take a step back and consider these factors as well. Why was the work and perspectives of women who support other women during childbirth an overlooked piece of historical research? Why did histories of women’s health reform efforts largely exclude childbirth reform? Why had there been no history of the women who were involved in childbirth education; in labor and delivery nursing; in the mainstream arena of birth care in the US? So as not to be accused of ignoring the scholarship that does exist in this area, I acknowledge my debt to Margot Edwards and Mary Waldorf; to Judith Walzer Leavitt, to Barbara Katz Rothman, Robbie Davis-Floyd, Margarete Sandelowski, Deborah Sullivan and Rose Weitz, Judith Rooks and Richard and Dorothy Wertz (I can make my full bibliography available to those interested). I have been inspired by these histories, but they focused less on the women (childbirth educators) who were making history and more on the larger cultural shifts in beliefs about medicine, technology, women’s bodies and reproduction.

When childbirth education per se was a topic of inquiry, the research focus tended to be on the primary sources of the male physician champions – Grantly Dick-Read, whose work informed the natural birth movement, and Ferdinand Lamaze (and his US counterparts – Thank you Dr. Lamaze author Marjorie Karmel and Elisabeth Bing) who formulated a method for accomplishing unmedicated, awake and aware childbirth. However, most of this scholarship makes unsubstantiated generalizations about what particular childbirth educators (of various philosophies /organizations) believed, and how they taught. There is surprisingly little in the way of empirical research – few scholars interviewed childbirth educators or conducted systematic observation of their classes over time.

So after completing my dissertation on the emergence of the doula role, I had the great opportunity to continue with my research interest through a research grant from Lamaze International to conduct an ethnographic investigation of childbirth education, with my colleague, medical anthropologist Clarissa Hsu. We talked to educators, observed their classes and analyzed our data.

We found that educators who were actively practicing doulas drew heavily on their direct labor support experiences as authoritative resources for stories and examples that supplemented the material they taught. Actively practicing doulas also included more curricular content on early labor than educators without such experience. Having real births to draw upon provided doula-educators a different type of credibility and authority than educators without such current labor support experience. These educators relied on other mechanisms to establish their authority, such as knowledge of the latest research on birth and use of more authoritarian teaching styles.

We found that the intersection of doula practice and childbirth education has significantly affected how childbirth preparation classes are taught, and this new infusion of practice and ideology is worth exploring. I encourage you to explore this with us, and welcome your thoughts.

*Note: this column was originally posted on the Science & Sensibility blog.