Two amazing young gender and sexualities scholars stepped up to offer a column this month on what I have dubbed “the real BDSM.” Heidi Rademacher and Suzan Walters are PhD students in sociology at Stony Brook University. Heidi has an MA from Brandeis in sociology and women & gender studies; Suzan has an MA from St. John’s University. They are working on a longer critique of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy that explores women’s experiences with BDSM, and offer this preview. Now to Heidi and Suzan on BDSM:

Are you, like many women, completely in awe of the incredibly sexy, powerful and accomplished Christian Grey?  Are you contemplating how to bring that orgasmic sex into your bedroom as illustrated throughout the bestselling trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey? If so, let us tell you what you really need to know before you strap up and get your whip on!

Fifty Shades of Grey has captured the imagination of women worldwide. The trilogy tells the “unconventional” love story between Christian Grey (closeted BDSM practitioner) and the young and innocent Anastasia Steele, who falls in love with him and his sexual prowess.

Within the first six weeks of sales in the US, over ten million copies were sold. As of September 2 , 2012, E. L. James’ controversial books are still holding strong at the top of the New York Times Best Seller list for fiction. The first two books of the trilogy (Fifty Shades of Grey and Fifty Shades Darker) have held the top two spots for 25 consecutive weeks. The third book, Fifty Shades Freed, has been ranked third for 24 weeks.

This trilogy brings this alternative sexual life style into public consciousness in perhaps a way no other mainstream book has. But, how well does it illustrate the real BDSM world? A few clarifications will help you decide.

The first thing you need to know is that unlike Grey’s practice, people involved in BDSM often form communities. In Staci Newmahr’s book Playing on the Edge we learn that these communities are generally local groups that are tied (no pun intended) to larger organizations located throughout the US and the world.

People gather in clubs or dungeons because these spaces provide the equipment that we read about in Grey’s playroom (the average non-billionaire BDSM practitioner cannot afford in-home playrooms). But also, such locations provide a space where people share experiences, form networks and take on roles.

Some members of the community serve as educators and provide workshops to teach others how to perform sexual acts and how to be a member of the community. They eat meals together, talk online, have private and public gatherings, etc. What is important to know is that BDSM rarely happens in isolation. As you may gather from this short explanation, communities serve a much larger purpose than just providing playrooms.

Second, the unequal power relations between BDSM partners are generally confined to a scene. A scene is an individual BDSM act. This might be surprising if your only exposure to BDSM is through this trilogy. When Grey (the dominant) proposes the BDSM contract to Ana (the submissive) we read that she is supposed to obey him always and in everything because she is to be his property. She must have at least seven hours of sleep each night, wear certain attire, always be clean shaven and/or waxed, go to beauty salons chosen by Grey. She is not allowed to masturbate unless permitted by Grey. She has to eat a diet that he has constructed, be on a strict exercise regimen, and never look Grey in the eyes unless it is at his request.

This is not common practice in the BDSM community. Instead, according to research conducted by Dr. Charles Moser at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, there is a very small population of BDSM participants who engage in what is called 24/7 relationships and Total Power Exchanges (TPE)—the arrangement Grey initially proposes to Ana in the  Fifty Shades series. In a 24/7 relationship the dominant and submissive both consent to maintain their roles in all aspects of their everyday activities, both sexual and non-sexual. In these relationships there is a TPE, which provides the dominant with complete authority over the submissive’s actions, behaviors and decisions. While 24/7 relationships and TPE are part of the BDSM spectrum, they represent a very small number of practitioners and are even somewhat stigmatized and taboo within the larger BDSM community.

We suspect that TPE and 24/7 relationships are not all they are hyped up to be. In fact, we think ways in which BDSM is portrayed in the Fifty Shades trilogy is suspect. In a recent NY Post article we learn of a real life banker who leads the double life that Grey does. But this story does not end with love, marriage and a baby carriage like the trilogy. Instead, it ends in a heart-shattering break up and violence.

Thus, what we read in Fifty Shades of Grey is even more fictional than we might have originally thought. For now, we’ve given you some of what we’d like you to know about BDSM. What we want to know is why is the low-base rate TPE so popular–in fiction?

–Heidi Rademacher and Suzan Walters

Today, August 26th, is Women’s Equality Day.  For many not actively engaged in women’s issues, it’s merely another in a long list of little known ‘days’.  But this election year’s escalating anti woman rhetoric is crazy making. I feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole into the land of the absurd. When ‘rape’ and ‘legitimate’ can be used in the same breath and women and men of reason are called upon to counter medieval constructs of female biology, I need the lessons of Women’s Equality Day. Maybe others do, too.

Women’s Equality Day originated in 1971. New York Congresswoman  Bella Abzug proposed August 26th be so designated in honor of the 1920 ratification of the Woman’s Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.   The designation reflected the renewed energy of the ‘second wave’ of the feminist movement. It was an attempt to reclaim lost history.

By the 1960‘s, the struggles preceding the final ratification the 19th amendment had been largely forgotten. If school books mentioned women’s rights at all, a single sentence:  ‘Women were given the vote in 1920‘ usually sufficed. The 70 year battle for women’s suffrage was not considered a significant part of our national history.

Beginning at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and continuing until 1920 when the Tennessee legislature became the 36th state required for a two thirds majority, women battled for a Constitutional  amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. They organized, lobbied, protested and picketed. Their efforts were mocked and ridiculed. Protesters were arrested, jailed and force fed though tubes shoved down their throats. Leaders did not always agree on tactics. But women persisted. Far from being ‘given’ the right to vote, women fought hard to win it.

Some of the rights women worked for and achieved over the years have remained controversial. There are many battles still to be fought and refought. The right to vote and to run for office is not one of these. It stands unquestioned.

But a key result the women and men who fought for suffrage expected, equal representation of women in elected office, remains elusive.   Ninety two years after women won the right to vote, women are barely 17% of the US Congress. This percentage  leaves us tied for 78th place with Turkmenistan in global rankings of national elected representatives.

At the state level it’s not much better. Women hold 23.4% of statewide executive offices and 23.8% of the seats in state legislatures this year.

Although I find it hard to believe given our current national discussions, I realize that some may still ask, “why does it matter?”

Of course, neither women nor men march in lock step, or agree on every issue. Certainly many men support women friendly legislation; and there are women who vote for anti woman initiatives. But studies repeatedly show that women, no matter what political party they represent, tend to sponsor and vote for legislation and programs that support women and families in larger percentages than do their male colleagues.

Women do not “mis-speak” about rape and its consequences. Women will not fall in line with  statements or policies that imply that women are governed by our bodies, rather than our minds.

Todd Akin and his fellow travelers may be the last gasp of a crumbling patriarchy; I for one certainly hope so. Or they may be better described as part of a larger set of global fundamentalist efforts–of various origins–attempting to control women and their bodies. Maybe it’s some of both. But ‘last gaspers‘  and  fundamentalists can be equally dangerous and destructive.  We cannot turn away in disgust. We cannot fool ourselves that lies and pseudo science will fade away.

Our strongest weapon in the battles ahead may be the one our foremothers won for us.  The 20th century began with women winning the right to vote.  The 21st century is the time to fulfill the promise inherent in that victory. More women need to run for office. And  RIGHT NOW we ALL need to canvass, phone bank, donate and vote for candidates who will fight for women’s equality.  It won’t happen any other way.

Recent events inspired this guest post authored by sociologist Michael Kimmel, author of Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, The Guy’s Guide to Feminism, and Manhood in America. Kimmel teaches sociology at SUNY Stony Brook and is one of the most influential researchers and writers on topics of men and masculinities . Reprinted with Kimmel’s permission from today’s Huffington Post, the author calls out not only Todd Akin but also Daniel Tosh for their recent misogynistic actions, as well as offers readers a larger critique of how rape is discussed in our culture.

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You have to pinch yourself sometimes to remind yourself that it’s 2012 and we still don’t know how to talk about rape in this country. Who would have thought that after half a century of feminist activism — and millennia of trying to understand the horrifying personal trauma of rape — we’d be discussing it as if we hadn’t a clue.

Okay, that’s a not quite true. When I say “we” — as in “we haven’t a clue” — that’s a little vague. So let me clarify. When I say “we,” I mean the half of the population to which I happen to belong. My gender. Men. Just consider the gender of each of these recent examples:

• In recent days, we’ve had a U.S. Congressman candidate draw distinctions that are so mind-numbingly wrongheaded and so politically reprehensible that even his own party is calling for him to drop out of his U.S. Senate race (where he is leading);

• In recent weeks, we’ve had one of the more curious debates about whether rape jokes can be funny;

• And over the past couple of years, the word “rape” has entered our vocabulary as a metaphor.

Each one reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about the singular horror of rape.

Todd Akin and “legitimate rape”

In trying to explain his opposition to abortion — even in cases of rape — Rep. Todd Akin observed that victims of “legitimate rape” cannot get pregnant because their bodies will shut down and prevent the sperm from fertilizing her egg. That is, he seems to believe that women’s bodies have a kind of magical, or God-given, ability to distinguish lovers’ sperm from rapists’ sperm, and to “know” which ones should be allowed to fertilize the egg.

Of course, this reveals a spectacular ignorance of women’s bodies — but what else did you expect from a right-wing anti-woman legislator? (The fertility rate for rape victims is exactly the same 5 percent that it is for women who have consensual sex.) But what is so offensive is less what he says about women’s bodies, and more what it implies about rape in the first place. By drawing attention to “legitimate” rape, Akin implies that “other” rapes are not legitimate — i.e., not rapes at all. Legitimate rapes are the equivalent of what others call “real” rape — a stranger, using force, preferably with a weapon, surprises the victim. All “other” rapes — like date rape, marital rape, acquaintance rape, child rape, systematic rape by soldiers, rape as a form of ethnic cleansing (where the actual purpose is to impregnate) — aren’t really rapes at all. This would exclude, what, about 95 percent of all rapes worldwide?

By linking the criteria for labeling some assault as rape to the possibility of pregnancy, Akin in effect blames impregnated women’s bodies for failing to slam that cervix door shut on those illegitimate sperm. Their bodies having failed them, why, then, he asks, should the state sanction a “murder” (abortion) that their own bodies didn’t sanction? This isn’t just lunacy on the scale ofMonty Python’s famous inquiry into the identity of witches, it’s a consistent ideological position against women’s conscious and deliberate ability to make conscious decisions about her body. The body speaks; women’s voices are silenced.

Rape as Humor

Last month, the comedian Daniel Tosh attempted to silence a heckler at the Laugh Factory, saying, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now?” This has been a standard theme at comedy clubs for a while now. Hordes of fellow comedians jumped in to defend Tosh. Comedy, they argued, is designed to push the envelope, to make really tragic and horrible things funny.

Such claims are, of course, disingenuous. Have you heard the German comedian’s “Two Jews walk into a bar” joke? Neither have I. How about the racist comedian joke about lynching? Only on White Supremacist websites (and never in a public club). The question isn’t whether or not rape jokes “push the envelope.” It’s which envelope it’s pushing, and in which direction.

Humor has often been a weapon of the weak, a way for those who are marginalized to get even with those who are in power. This is the standard explanation for the large number of Jewish and black comedians. And their takedowns of the rich, white, Christian are seen as evening the score: “they” get all the power and wealth, and we get to make fun of them.

But when the powerful make fun of the less powerful, the tables are not turned; inequality is magnified. While it’s still not acceptable for white comedians to use racist humor (and when they do, they are instantly sanctioned, as was Michael Richards), but it’s suddenly open season on women and gay people. Ask Tracy Morgan.

In a sense, though, Tosh’s casual misogyny offered a rare glimpse inside the male-supremacist mind. Tosh doesn’t defend rape as just a “date gone wrong” or a “girl who changed her mind afterwards,” equally vile and pernicious framings. No, he is clear: rape is punishment. Punishment for what? For heckling him. That is: for having a voice.

Rape as Metaphor

Recently, my adolescent son told me he’s started hearing the word “rape: as a synonym for defeating your opponent badly in sports, or besting them in a rap competition. As in, “The Yankees raped the Red Sox” or, “Dude, that guy totally raped you” in the high school debate.

Using rape as a metaphor dilutes its power, distracts us from the specificity of the actual act. You got raped? Me too! I totally got raped in that math quiz.

In an interview some years ago, Elie Wiesel cringed at the use of the word “Holocaust” as a metaphor for hatred, or for murder in general. This was not hatred, not just murder, Wiesel argues.

“Hate means a pogrom, it’s an explosion, but during the War it was scientific, it was a kind of industry. They had industries and all they produced was death. Had there been hate, the laboratories would have exploded.”

Wiesel made clear that it’s not a metaphor: it is in its specificity that its power resides.

Rape is not a verbal put-down; it’s a corporeal invasion. It’s not an athletic defeat; it’s the violation of a body’s integrity, the death of a self. All equivalences are false equivalences.

It’s not a metaphor, it’s not a joke, and it’s not to be parsed as legitimate. It’s an individual act of violence. To believe that you can change the meaning of a word by turning it into a metaphor or a joke is the essence of male entitlement. It is an act of silencing, both the individual and all women. The arrogance of turning it into a metaphor, making it a joke — this is how that silencing happens.

And the good news — if any is to be taken here — is, of course, that it hasn’t worked. Women have responded, noisily and angrily, to these efforts at silencing.

Maybe “we” ought to shut up and just listen?

It is my pleasure to introduce Solange M. Lopes, who contacted me last month about contributing a post. Here it is! Solange is a 33-year old native of Senegal, West Africa, wife and mother of two residing in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. A writer at heart, her writing experience includes creating and editing the “Kawraal” student magazine at Suffolk University Dakar Campus and serving as student journalist for the Suffolk Journal in Boston from 2001 through 2004. She is the chief editor of her own blog at keurawa.com and is currently working on a collection of short stories.

A Lighter Shade of Woman

“Pretty for a dark-skinned girl”: since I was a little girl in pigtails, this has single-handedly been the one so-called compliment that’s always left me puzzled as to whether I should be flattered or offended by it. Or maybe a bit of both?

According to statistics by the World Health Organization for 2012, 77% of men and women in Nigeria alone regularly give in to the widely popular practice of skin bleaching. The report also cites other African nations such as Togo with 59 per cent of skin bleaching product users; South Africa, 35 per cent; and Mali, 25 per cent.

These statistics are not only proprietary to Africa. Per an article published by BBC News Africa in June 2012, “for centuries Indian women have been raised to believe that fairness is beauty, and this has given rise to a vast and ever-growing skin-whitening industry – which is now encouraging women to bleach far beyond their hands and face.” The phenomenon extends to Cubans, black Americans, Jamaicans, Japanese and Arabic women as well, largely in cultures which appear to vastly favor fairer skin tones.

Some of the worst components of skin lightening creams include, but are not limited to, topical steroids, hydroquinone and derivatives of mercury. As stated in the World Health Organization June 2012 Information Sheet, “many skin lightening creams and soaps contain some form of mercury as an active agent. But mercury is dangerous. It can cause kidney damage and may also cause skin rashes, skin discoloration and scarring, as well as a reduction in the skin’s resistance to bacterial and fungal infections.”  Unfortunately, the incidence of skin cancer, neuropathy, skin atrophy and pigment disorders, as well as neurotoxic problems, to cite a few, has not halted the devastating progress of this lethal practice.

All in all, skin bleaching, or “skin lightening” as it is often mildly put, represents a serious disease affecting not only the body at large, but also detrimentally endangering the mental health and social well-being of its advocates.

As numerous and alarming the consequences of skin bleaching, even more varied and dire are their root causes. So many reasons have been cited to attempt to explain, or maybe justify this practice, from the disastrous post-slavery and colonial effects, to the argument around debasingly low levels of self-esteem in women using lightening products, to the now most prevalent phenomenon of socio-economic and media pressure.

However, after so many centuries of theorizing the why’s and how’s of this phenomemon, it has become obvious that the conversation needs to be modified, if not redirected in an entirely new direction altogether. Dwelling on obscure questions and tentative answers to explain the occurrence of this rampant social plague only perpetuates the problem by pitting real or imagined offenders, be it slavery, society or the media, against enabled victims who have no intention of curbing their destructive habit. The conversation, therefore, needs to focus around working to proactively put a stop to this calamity through education, self-empowerment, and self-acceptance.

The truth is, directly or indirectly, closely or remotely, we as human beings and especially as global women and creatures of change and advancement, are victims. Victims of the lack of education around the practice itself. Victims of disempowered societies in which the woman’s appearance is viewed as her main means of survival through fruitful marriage contracts and unions of monetary convenience. Victims of deconstructed families in which mothers teach little girls and boys to erase the original versions of themselves from the blackboard of Experience, just as they would unfinished infantile drawings. Victims of the loss of our women, our authentic, strong, beautiful women, the ones to lift up our men, carry and bring up our children, feed our families, plant trees and open new paths.

Victims because we fail to see and call attention to what’s inside, so we can go on and teach other women to see and call attention to what’s inside. Victims because so many times, we remain silent instead of speaking up, because just ignoring the issue is an issue in itself.

– Solange M. Lopes

The end of the baby boom years is identified variously as 1960 all the way to 1964. This means that while the lead-end of baby boomers are hitting 65 around now, at the tail, where I am, I’m flooded with fiftieth birthday events. Aging, anyone?

So I talked a little bit with Ashton Applewhite about aging. Ashton, who just turned 60, has been working on aging and ageism for over 5 years. She blogs about her research at stayingvertical.com, and her newest online project is yoisthisageist.com. Read it! It’s funny and informative.

NW: Yo is this ageist? seems to aim at what people expect from older people, whom you call “olders.” What do people want from olders, anyway?

AA: People want olders to quit fumbling for their change at the supermarket and holding up the line. The trick is to become what I call an “old person in training” – to acknowledge that if you’re lucky that person in line will be you some day. It makes room for empathy, which changes everything. And it enables us to envision and work towards the kind of late life we want.

NW: The top entry yesterday on Yo This is Ageist was a joke: Four yentas go to lunch at the Fountainebleu and the waiter says, “Welcome ladies! Is anything alright?” You confirm on your blog that, yes, this is ageist and anti-semitic. Also sexist, right? Seems like age and gender are two sneaky sources of inequality: what’s your favorite sneaky source of ageism?

AA: Our own prejudices, the ageist values that we internalize without even realizing it. Today a question came in from a reader who’s the same age her mother was when she was born, “but when I talk about having kids, she seems to freak out. She seems to be clinging on to the idea of being young by avoiding impending grandmother-hood, senior discounts, etc.”

I’m lucky enough to have two grandchildren, and they’re a source of extraordinary joy. Yet this woman’s internalized ageism is so powerful that she’s stiff-arming the prospect and alienating her daughter lest it make her “seem old.” When we talk about women “having it all,” we mean having to choose between raising kids and building a career. How about extending the argument and the time frame, so that older women don’t have to choose between being hot and being grandmothers?

NW: It seems pretty clear men get judged as they age differently from how women get judged as they age; both groups are subject to bias, but about different things. So what would be a sign of reducing the gender bias in aging bias, if you know what I mean?

AA: Many older women living alone end up in poverty for the first time in their lives. In retirement, forty percent have to make ends meet on Social Security alone. How about closing the wage gap and reforming Social Security so that it’s not geared towards married, single-earner families and women aren’t penalized for their years out of the workforce caring for others?

NW: Oh gosh, make the younger world less sexist and heteronormative and that will translate up the age scale. Nice work, no?

AA: I’d like that. One thing that’s struck me is that despite the fact that gender is overwhelmingly binary (almost everyone identifies as male or female), the concept of gender as a spectrum has gained widespread acceptance. If gender can be conceived of fluidly, why not age? It’s obviously a spectrum: we’re all younger than some people and older than others. Yet we unthinkingly accept a young/old binary — or more accurately a young/no-longer-young binary — that frames two thirds of our lives as decline. That’s grotesque. We made enormous progress against sexism and racism and homophobia in the 20^th century, and I’d like to see the same kind of consciousness-raising and mobilization against ageism now.

NW: What are some of your favorite examples of successful aging for women?

AA: All aging is successful, because otherwise you’re dead: living means aging. There’s no “best” or “right” way to age; each of us will make different accommodations and find different meanings. It’s great to hear about nonagenarians skydiving or Betty White, but it would be nuts to measure ourselves against these outliers. I think women have an intrinsic advantage when it comes to aging because most of us have had to adapt to circumstances – motherhood, a partner’s career changes, discriminatory workplaces, menopause – and getting older just puts another set of curves in the road.

ps. For fun, read Virginia’s question at yoisthisagist and Ashton’s answer. “But you don’t look…[your awkwardly high age]….”

-Virginia Rutter

I’m happy to bring you this guest post co-authored by two researchers at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation: Chloe E. Bird, senior sociologist and co-author of Gender and Health: The Effects of Constrained Choices and Social Policies (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Tamara Dubowitz, policy researcher. In this post they discuss recent studies which examine the impact of neighborhood environments on health and health disparities.

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If you had good options about what to eat but made bad choices and became obese, then the fault would be yours. But, what happens when you don’t have good options?

That’s the problem in America today – being overweight is not all your fault. You don’t make the decisions to put transfats, high-fructose corn syrup and excess salt in your food, or unhealthy snacks in the vending machine at work. You don’t dictate that the equivalent of 54 sugar cubes get put into an extra-large soda. These are so-called constrained choices – ones you don’t get to make. Yet, you live with the consequences.

We believe it is time to consider who determines the options for us and what can be done to put better ones on the table. We can’t all afford to buy only organic foods or even have access to them. And, we probably don’t make it a pastime to follow the latest research on nutrition. But, we can take a moment to think before we order a second soda.

And, we can choose to call on those who determine the options to shoulder part of the responsibility for America’s obesity epidemic and to stop the name-calling – like labeling medical researchers “food nannies” when they ask restaurants to deliver sensible portions, priced right. We need to hold vending-machine companies and their managers to account if they stock only junk food in those little compartments.

Consider a few statistics. The latest figures indicate that two of three adults and one of three children and adolescents in the United States are overweight or obese. The impending health and economic consequences are staggering. According to the Institute of Medicine, the medical costs alone of obesity-related diseases and disabilities exceed $190 billion a year. These costs comprise more than 20 percent of national health care spending. The number keeps rising. Want your health care costs to spike further? Then, keep eating the constrained choices that are not healthy.

RAND research, using data from the Women’s Health Initiative study, found that living where there is a higher density of fast food outlets is associated with higher blood pressure and risk of obesity; while, a greater density of grocery stores is associated with lower blood pressure and lower risk of obesity. These relationships hold even after taking into account women’s characteristics and socioeconomic status of their residential neighborhoods.  In other words, where you live can affect your weight and your health.

Moreover, another recent RAND study found that 96% of main entrées at all restaurants studied—including delivery, family style, upscale, fast food, buffet, and fast casual—exceed the daily limits for calories, fat, saturated fat, and sodium recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Policy approaches to reduce obesity are not magic bullets. If we want to reverse the obesity epidemic, then we need environments which assure that we have good food options and the opportunity to choose them.

We will be more successful at stemming the growing tide of obesity and improving our own health if everyone accepts their share of responsibility for the obesity epidemic. We need to ask our favorite restaurants, the food vendors near where we work, even grocery stores to give us better options. We can always ignore them, if we wish, but then that’s our choice. Right now, too many bad choices are being made for us.

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Cross-posted on RAND’s blog

I’ve been thinking about Mona Simpson’s beautifully written essay and Michele Asselin’s exquisite photographs since they appeared in The New York Times Magazine last weekend. Asselin’s portrait series, accompanied by interviews, is called “Full Time Preferred: Portraits of Love, Work and Dependence.” Her photographs feature nannies with their charges—their employers’ children—in intimate moments of caregiving. The women and children are beautiful and content, bathed in radiant luminescence and surrounded by darkness. Most of the children are babies or toddlers, ages when showering them with love comes easily, more often than not.

Simpson writes with nuance and honesty about the complexities of relationships based on paid caregiving. She accurately describes Asselin’s photographs as

…moments of private contentment, with the serenity and depth borrowed from the portraiture legacy of the Madonna and child…

By placing nannies in this visual legacy, the photographs deliberately elevate caregivers who aren’t valued in our society. Asselin’s impulse is to make paid caregivers visible, to bring them out of the shadows and into the center. In her essay, Simpson observes that nannies have confided to her that their employers “crop them out of photographs of their children.” These portraits, the interviews with them, and Simpson’s essay all work against a society that still prefers to keep caregiving and domestic work invisible.

The online slideshow allows viewers to play a series of recorded interviews with nannies and their employers. I prefer this to the excerpts in the magazine because more individuality and complexity emerge among and between the different women. For the same reason, I’d love to see more photographs from Asselin—ones that leave behind the vein of Madonna-and-child. I’ve love to see photographs that not only lift paid caregivers out of their private, “unseen” world but also allow a fuller register of lived experience to emerge. With these children, yes, but also with their own children. Their own friends, partners, parents, relatives. And in all the public places we see paid caregivers, with others or by themselves: at the playground. At the store. At school. At the bank. At the airport. At the mall. And at daycare. (Because most children aren’t cared for by nannies or au pairs, and most paid caregivers don’t work in private homes.)

Just as biological and adoptive mothers have worked hard to break out of the impossible expectations placed on them by the ideologies of motherhood associated with the Madonna—everlasting patience, self-sacrifice, martyrdom, perfection—these “other mothers” deserve to be seen as being fully human, too.

I’d also love to see some portraits of male caregivers. There used to be a male au pair in my neighborhood. This was unusual, so all the kids at the playground knew him. But they’re out there. Just like fathers.

At its core, caring for others is not exclusively women’s work. It’s at the core of what it means to be human.

Visual imagery can’t convey the truly invisible structures of global inequality, sexism, and racism that underlie these relationships. But they can expand how we see the world—and how we imagine what’s possible. For this reason, I’d love for Asselin to continue to create images that ask us to re-imagine family in the broadest and most expansive ways.

Introducing our newest blogger: Susan McGee Bailey, Ph.D. Susan served as Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) and as a Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Education at Wellesley College for 25 years. Welcome, Susan! -Girl w/Penners

“House Passes Gutted Version of  Violence Against Women Act”: the headline hits me like one more punch in an already bloody nose. But I am a 40 year veteran of the gender wars. For 25 of those years I directed the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW), one of the nation’s largest and most influential gender focused research and action organizations. Despite the disheartening direction of current policy debates and the frequency of misogynist remarks, I have learned not to succumb to the paralysis of discouragement.

In the 1960s “careers” for young college women were in the “‘type, teach or ‘care for’” range.  Without a degree the options were even more restricted. Every summer I earned money for college by working as a waitress. I learned about things we had no name for then:

Dottie arriving in dark glasses that she kept on all day, “They cover the bruises, honey. It’s hard for Jack to be home with the kids. He gets upset with me.”  Linda, a single mom, calling in sick; we all knew it met she had no one to stay with baby Sammy. Both women were supporting their families.

In those days women’s employment options were limited, not by the economy, but by society.  Some of us insisted on a different path. We forced major changes. Female construction workers, TV newscasters, and corporate managers were a rarity five decades ago. Today’s graduates confront a dismal economy, but can take for granted a wide range of career choices.

In fact, choice is assumed not simply in employment and the ability to seek legal protection from gender violence, but in our right to control our own sexuality and reproductive health. At a time when birth control pills were newly invented, domestic violence invisible and abortion a crime, women lacked  control over our bodies in ways sometimes hard for today’s young women and men to grasp.

Suddenly this spring ignorant anti-woman statements, strident voices and proposals on contraception and reproductive health that would turn the clock back a half century again surround us. Some protest that talk of an anti-woman agenda is being promoted simply as a distraction from ‘truly important’ policy issues. Nothing reminds me more of the 1960s than this classic dismissal of women and our concerns.

But there is also widespread outrage, and nuanced rebuttal. The reality that women are individuals who make a range of different choices for themselves is widely proclaimed by tweeters and  bloggers from both left and right.

Ten years ago such analyses came almost exclusively from feminists struggling to be heard.

Not that the ‘war’ over. Each day brings new and outrageous policy proposes that threaten the well being of women and children.  Still, awareness has grown. There is a good chance that key issues related to women’s health, sexuality and employment will remain on the public agenda throughout the election cycle. This is positive. Keeping these concerns in the forefront of public debate where the absurdities can be exposed and countered, is the upside of the demeaning negativity. There is no time for anything but hope and the energy it provides.

Happy Fourth of July!

And what I’m actually writing about here is that I now have a monthly column in Charleston’s City Paper, our local indie publication.  The first one came out today:  “Society Makes It Nearly Impossible for Women to Have It All.”

Let me know what you think!

(Cross-posted at Baxter Sez, another place where I do a lot of writing.)

What to do when I read a study that so appeals to my worldview that I want to shout it out? Should I just kinda act cool, not let on that I wanna say, I knew it! See? SEE?!!!! That is how it is. We all have biases and preferences and a worldview that shape how we process information. And we all have choices about what to do with them. And that brings me to a study about how dudes in traditional marriages have traditional views that influence their judgments at work, too.

In a new working paper called “Marriage Structure and Resistance to the Gender Revolution in the Workplace” (.pdf), three business school professors investigate why, despite notable progress, the gender revolution appears to have “petered out.”  (An accessible overview of just this puzzle from the Council on Contemporary Families is in Gender Revolution? Or Not So Much.)

The new paper is novel: it asked, is it is possible that there are well-placed pockets of resistance in the workplace that help account for impeded progress? The authors hypothesized that, perhaps, men in cross-sex marriages with stay-at-home wives might have a different view of women in the workplace than married men with full-time working wives.

They hypothesized correctly. In particular, they found that (1) men in traditional marriages (MITM) had more negative attitudes towards working women (controlling for selection!); (2) MITM perceived the workplace as running less smoothly when more women worked there; (3) MITM also found more gender-egalitarian organizations less attractive; and (4) MITM, when asked to rate the quality of workers who were exactly equivalent, rated women lower than men. They controlled for selection (or the way it might be that sexist guys at work choose traditional marriages rather than guys being influenced by their traditional marriages to have traditional views at work) and for education (more educated guys espouse more ostensibly feminist views).

The study excited me because it provided support for that sinking feeling that some of us can have when working with guys who lead traditional private lives. At work, it can seem, they just don’t “get it.” Hard to put one’s finger on it. But they keep doing stuff like thanking their wives for all they do at home, thinking that this shows their respect for women.

The study also excited me because it was an example of the kind of research that I was talking about when I wrote about the neglect of men as focal points for research on gender, and my suspicion that the neglect stems from a sneaky sensibility that men’s vantage point is natural and therefore can go without examination. But without investigating the impact traditional marriages on work practices (instead of the more common investigation of egalitarian marriages on home practices), we are at risk of naturalizing “traditional” just as we naturalize “men.” To understand how gender operates, it helps to look at men at the center of power not just those at the margins. And this study did so.

Perhaps now you see the irony that I felt when I noticed my enthusiasm. The study shows how worldview lines up with personal life. This might influence your judgment at work. Back in the day, feminists said the personal is political. Thing is, the personal is political for everyone, including those who follow conventions. Even for those who don’t believe in this stuff. That means the personal is political, too, for MITM (the M is silent, by the way).

-Virginia Rutter