I started talking with my 8-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter about sexuality as soon as they started to ask questions like, “How are babies made?” From my point of view, books have all the answers, and I turned to It’s So Amazing: A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley as a starting point.
But recent news has me wondering how and when to initiate other, more difficult conversations about sexuality and power.
For example, my neighbor and I were talking over our 10-year-old daughters’ heads at the bus stop on Monday morning about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund who has been arrested and charged with sexually attacking a maid.
Our conversation went like this:
Neighbor: “Did you see the news about Dominique Strauss-Kahn?”
Me: “Yes, it really does show that incidents like that are about power.”
Neighbor: “That’s for sure.”
My daughter Maya hovered nearby, sensing that we were discussing something juicy, but not entirely understanding. She interrupted us with a question about school, and we changed the subject.
And then yesterday the news broke that Arnold Schwarzenegger fathered a child with one of his household employees.
I admit to turning the paper facedown on the kitchen table. I would have found a way to talk about the Schwarzenegger story, of course, but I wasn’t eager to have the conversation.
As someone who jumped in early with the “sex talk,” I wonder why I’m shying away from talking about sexuality and power. Maybe I want to protect my children from linking sexuality and violence when they still want to believe the best about people’s intentions. After reading Veronica Arreola’s great post, “Can We Whistle Stereotypes Away?” I think I might be doing a better service to my kids if I’m honest in acknowledging that some men abuse power over women.
GWP readers, what do you think? Is there a right time for the other sex talk? Do you have advice about how to navigate this topic?
Normally I would wait to read the actual book before writing a glowing post about it, but last week I was privileged to sit front row as Dr. ClaudeSteele gave a moving talk about his new book, Whistling Vivaldi, and his great contribution to understanding stereotypes. I was in the front row because I have lost count how many times my partner and I have cited Dr. Steele in grant proposals.
His biggest contribution to the field of women in science and engineering is the theory of “stereotype threat.” It describes the impact stereotypes have on our lives. It means that whether we are aware of it or not, we operate with the knowledge that there is a negative stereotype about us and that knowledge can hinder us. My favorite experiment on stereotype threat showed that if you remind a group of Asian-American women that they are women before a math test, they under-perform. But if you remind them of their Asian heritage, they kick butt. [1] There are various ways of “reminding” people to their identity. All those demographics you have to enter at the start of standardized tests? Best way to remind people to their location in society. Stereotype threat has been shown when asking African-American men to take IQ tests, white men to run a race, women taking a math test, on and on.
There is no group that doesn’t have a negative stereotype, and when that if that stereotype is relevant to them in an important set of situations, like the classroom or the workplace or the basketball court or something that they care about, then they’re going to feel this pressure. ~ Dr. Steele on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.
As Dr. Steele goes on to discuss and I believe is detailed in the book, we can stop stereotype threat by educating ourselves and others about it. There are ways that educators can minimize the effect during exams. Of course the trick is to figure out how to actually do it, because the thing is that the more you care about being X and doing well at Y, the higher the impact of stereotype threat. The more confidence one has, the more stereotype threat will make an impact. Kinda sucks huh?
One thing that Dr. Steele did say at the lecture was that avoiding talking about stereotypes in an effort to shield children from them does not work. Apparently the one thing that Condi Rice, Skip Gates and Steele have in common are parents who sat them down early in life and said, “Life isn’t fair. People will expect you to act/think/behave one way because you are Black.” I can’t recall how he said his parents that fortified him to go forth into the world and become as awesome as he is, but I do hope it is in the book!
Stereotype threat theory includes discussions of why critical mass is so important. In other words, why it is vital to have more than one woman in a room/on a panel/on the Supreme Court. Steele talks about Sandra Day O’Connor during the NPR interview, as he did at the lecture I attended.
I will be honest to say that while I have used his work for years and applied it to my work, attending his lecture made me reflect on how many times in my life I allowed stereotype threat to impact my life. How I struggled to get into graduate school out of undergrad and allowed that struggle to take me off track. And so many other times. Steele talked about how he still finds himself realizing that he is allowing stereotype threat to frame the world. HIM! That made me feel so much better.
I hope to bring you all an actual review of his book later in the summer. My classes are over and I’m eager to read something that I won’t be tested on. Even if in reality, this book is about the work I do day in and day out, so it’s actually more important than any test could ever measure.
The title of the book comes from a student who told Steele that in order to combat people’s stereotype of himself, as a young Black man, he would whistle Vivaldi while walking the streets of Hyde Park in Chicago. People stopped seeing him as a threatening Black man and, he believes, more as the University of Chicago student he was.
Nicholas Kristof urged readers to celebrate by “saving” a mother and in a separate essay, pointed out that investing in family planning worldwide would result in 94,000 fewer women dying in pregnancy each year. (Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of the rhetoric of “saving”—it’s something we spend a lot of time critiquing in my Transnational Feminism class—but I deeply appreciate how Kristof continues to remind everyone that women’s “issues” are indeed newsworthy.)
Also in The New York Times, Stephanie Coontz observed that “it’s too bad that nostalgia for a golden age of motherhood that never existed still clouds our thinking about what’s best for mothers, fathers and their children.” At Ms., Laura Paskus urged readers to honor all mamas—including “immigrants, single, young, queer and low-income” mothers—on Mother’s Day. And over at Strollerderby, Rebecca Odes drew attention to all the nannies who help mother children, and who should be a part of Mother’s Day as well!
In the spirit of infusing new meanings into Mother’s Day—and in keeping with the Mother’s Day Challenge I issued to myself and interested readers—I did two things. Right after eating brunch, and sending flowers to my mom (about whom I’ll write more later), and right before going on a family hike, I gave to two organizations:
Mothers’ Day Movement. Founded by six women who were “shocked to learn that $14 billion was spent in the US in 2010 on Mother’s Day celebrations including flowers, cards and meals,” they selected Shining Hope for Communities, a Wesleyan student-founded organization working in Kibera, Kenya, as the target of their 2011 fundraising efforts. (The co-founder and president of SHOFCO, Kennedy Odede, grew up in Kibera.) I am totally impressed that college students founded SHOFCO, and I remembered well the insightful opinion essay, “Slumdog Tourism,” written by Odede in The New York Times last August.
Save the Children: Every Mother Counts campaign. They have a midwifery training program in Afghanistan, which ranked as the worst place to be a mother in their Mothers’ Index. I like the emphasis on training.
I didn’t quite make it to writing any letters to my political representatives as I had planned… but I figure that Father’s Day is around the corner, and I’m planning on pitching a surprise to my husband after I serve up his brunch: co-authorship?
Just in time for Mother’s Day, Save the Children has published its twelfth annual State of the World’s Mothers Report. This report includes the Mothers’ Index, a ranked list of 164 countries around the world. Like last year, Norway tops the list for the best place to be a mother. Afghanistan is worst. The U.S. fell three places, to number 31 on the list.
In other words, the U.S. ranks closer to the bottom than the top of the 43 developed countries examined in the report.
Of course, as the report reminds us, the numbers don’t always tell the whole story—an individual mother’s situation can vary greatly within the same country. Nonetheless, national-level comparisons do suggest trends and provide overviews that can provide a valuable framework for digging deeper.
For those of us living in the U.S., these national numbers should give us pause. Why didn’t mothers in the U.S. fare better? And why are we falling in the rankings instead of improving? These startling numbers complicate the rosier picture of motherhood and family that many Americans tend to hold.
The first reason for our low ranking is our maternal mortality rate, an issue I wrote about last month for Girl w/Pen and Ms. As the State of the World’s Mothers Report points out, the U.S.’s rate for maternal mortality is 1 in 2,100—the highest of any industrialized nation. In other words, a woman in the U.S. is “more than 7 times as likely as a woman in Italy or Ireland to die from pregnancy-related causes and her risk of maternal death is 15-fold that of a woman in Greece.”
Other reasons for our low ranking include the under-five mortality rate (forty countries beat us on this one) and the percentage of children enrolled in preschool—only 58%, making us the fifth lowest country in the developed world for educating young kids.
Finally—surprise, surprise—our country lags in supporting working women with children, and in creating pathways for women to political office nationally:
The United States has the least generous maternity leave policy—both in terms of duration and percent of wages paid—of any wealthy nation.
The United States is also lagging behind with regard to the political status of women. Only 17 percent of congressional seats are held by women, compared to 45 percent in Sweden and 43 percent in Iceland.
This report made me feel a lot of different emotions about the state of motherhood in the U.S. as well as globally—shock, anger, outrage—not to mention gratitude. I’m fortunate enough to have healthy kids and privileged enough to be able to pay for things like health insurance and preschool. Given the state of things for many mothers, this is no small potatoes! And yet, the more I thought about this report and my reaction to it, the more I began to think about how important it is to use feelings to propel us to something more—understanding, wisdom, action, and working together.
This view of motherhood lies at the origins of Mother’s Day. Long before Hallmark made sentimentality synonymous with Mother’s Day and restaurants began the tradition of the Mother’s Day brunch (neither of which I plan to reject come Sunday!), Julia Ward Howe imagined a very different kind of occasion. In her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation, she called for a day when women could come together and work towards peace. In the aftermath of the violence and carnage of the U.S. Civil War, she called for women to
…meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
After grief, counsel. After sorrow, solidarity. After remembrance, action:
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
So here’s my Mother’s Day Challenge to myself this year: after enjoying whatever treats my family makes for me, and feeling lots of warm tenderness toward them (note to kids: you will be good), and making sure I have time to write in my journal, and calling my own mother on the phone—I’m going to do one thing, one action, toward addressing one of the issues raised by this report. I haven’t decided what, quite yet. But here are some ideas I scribbled down this afternoon, a personal list to start my brain juices flowing:
Write a letter to one of my representatives about some of the issues that really matter to mothers and families. (Education! Parental leave! Women’s health!)
Find out more about the campaigns to connect kids across the borders of class and geography—the UN’s Girl Up and Save the Children’s k2kUSA are ones I’ve recently run across. Think about how to plug my own family into these networks.
Find out more about efforts in my own backyard. (I could start by actually reading all those items in my church’s bulletin!) Ask someone how I and my family can get involved.
Make a donation to one of these campaigns, or one of the many organizations working for women’s rights and healthy families.
Write down in my calendar that I will bring up all these issues up again on Father’s Day.
I invite anyone and everyone to join me in this challenge. Share ideas and actions from your own list. (And be sure to watch the video about Julia Ward Howe below, released from Brave New Foundation in 2009, which includes an inspiring reading of her Mother’s Day Proclamation.) Happy Mother’s Day!
Guest poster and historian Bridgette Sheridan from Framingham State University weighs in on the magic of science. She posted at GWP last fall about dirty sex.
There’s another new book out about – you guessed it – sex. A Billion Wicked Thoughts, according to an article in the Daily Beast, “reveals some surprising facts about what turns us on—and what separates men and women’s desires.”
According to the Daily Beast, the authors used web searches, websites, personal ads, and porn, among other data, to discover that:
If you can imagine it, it exists (though most people desire a lot of the same stuff when it comes to sex)
Men are wired to objectify (though every so often they surprise us)
Women aren’t easy to figure out (though we do know that “Women need to feel comfortable and safe and desired as well as physically attracted.”)
All that research and these are the highlights? Perhaps this goes to show that we like to have “data” back up what we already believe to be true. Let me give you an example: in the 16th and 17th centuries, as scientists began to question ancient medical theory by experimentation and “seeing for themselves,” many of them found, in the body, what they’d known all along: that women were inherently inferior to men. They found it IN THE BODY. And it was scientific so it had to be true.
Do I think that scientific exploration has led to discoveries that have improved our lives? Yes. I benefit from them daily. Do I think that scientific outcomes can sometimes be shaped by cultural norms? Yes. Do I think the Daily Beast’s breathless reporting on this book is a case of that? Yes.
But what do I know? I’m just a historian. Maybe I should collect some data before I tell you what I think.
Last month, the CDC released a report that I’m going to pick on a little bit, though I’ve seen numerous researchers make similar faux pas in surveys I’ve taken and studies I’ve read. The report, Sexual Behavior, Sexual Attraction, and Sexual Identity in the United States, uses data from the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth to summarize findings on these topics. I’m just going to harp on a tiny bit of the survey design, because I think it’s illustrative of a broader point about how survey design can reflect and even shape attitudes about what is and isn’t a sex act, and what is and isn’t a sexual relationship.
Now, to be fair, the NSFG is primarily about addressing things like pregnancy, marriage, and STIs. The portion of the survey that focuses on sexual acts includes same-sex partners but it’s still geared towards things like STI risk, and thus focuses on sex acts that have a high STI risk like penetration and oral sex. But there’s still a big problem in the way it describes the possible sex acts for males and females.
Note: The portion below the cut may not be safe for work due to frank descriptions of sexual acts.
In honor of April being STD Awareness Month, I devote this month’s column to a topic that remains near and dear to my heart (and my cervix): HPV, human papillomavirus. So, it’s a great time to get yourself tested at your local STD testing location, or send an e-card to a loved one who could use a friendly reminder:
This month might have inspired some of you to consider vaccines that offer some protection against HPV: like Gardasil or Cervarix.* However, don’t get too excited about Gardasil if you happen to be 27 years old (or older) and live in the U.S. Earlier this month, the FDA decided against expanded the vaccine’s label use for ‘older’ women:
If I’m correct in inferring that Dr. Ferenczy’s use of the phrase “social status” refers to a woman’s sexual partner/sexual relationship status, then are we to assume that U.S. women between the ages of 27 and 45 are in more stable sexual relationships than their Canadian counterparts? I’ve yet to read a study that would support this conclusion.
So, as a U.S. woman who happens to be in this age group, I feel it only right to encourage my peers to ask their doctor about Gardasil, especially if they’re “changing their social status.”
However, once again, there appears to be possible age-discrimination: men over 26 years old, consider whether Gardasil might offer health benefits for you.
*Note to readers: I respect that many will decide that a vaccine is not right/healthy/safe for themselves or for their family members. I highlighted the recent news about Gardasil because I believe that everyone deserves access to vaccine updates. I’ll conclude by quoting myself:
I don’t know if the pro- and anti-vaccine folks will ever see eye to eye, but there’s absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain by being pro-HPV-education.
We were interested to read Pamela Paul’s list of academic blogs, “Big Blog on Campus,” in The New York Times Education Life section this last Sunday. We felt her list of seven blogs that have achieved “blogosphere fame” didn’t reflect the much wider diversity of academic voices that populate the blogosphere. In fact, with the exception of one female blogger and one collective blog, the rest on the list are penned by white men. In the spirit of expanding this list, we are starting a list of academic blogs (not just feminist blogs). This is very much a work-in-progress; please let us know about others in the comments!
A blog-friend (i.e. someone I know only because we read each other’s blogs) posted this last night, and I had a look. It’s a post about the fact that PBS News Hour has started a six-part series called “Autism Now,” and the series was at least partly inspired by the fact that host Robert MacNeils’s grandson Nick has autism.
After watching the first part of the series, I shared this with blogger Melissa:
Okay, so here’s a quick comment based on having watched only a tiny bit of the PBS clip. It troubles me a bit how autism is framed here as (mostly? entirely?) a medical condition–worse, as a medical problem. It strikes me as troubling, like Nicholas is now defined not as a person but as a used-to-be-person-now-tragedy.
The clip starts by explaining that they’re going to explore “how Nick was transformed from that healthy boy to Nick today.” Nick’s mom, Alison MacNeil, describes seeing a very young Nick exhibiting behavior that is often affiliated with autism. “I had this sinking feeling in my stomach,” she explains, “because I knew something was wrong.” At one point MacNeil interviews his granddaughter, Nick’s ten-year-old sister, and she shares with him, “I hope that [Nick] gets healed soon.”
MacNeil notes his own painful feelings at the challenges he has in connecting with Nick. He frames his relationship with Nick as strange, so different than his relationship with his children and other grandchildren. These are valid feelings for MacNeil himself to be grappling with, but the show seems to suggest that the pain results from Nick’s “abnormality,” not from MacNeil’s need to reframe his expectations for his grandson. Further, he describes his admiration for his daughter and son-in-law’s “patience and courage,” and he seems impressed that his son-in-law comes home from work every day and spends 90 minutes riding the bus with Nick. The show, then, seems to be characterizing autism in two ways: as an illness that must be understood by medicine and healed, and as a tragedy, a tragedy that makes the parents heroic. Nick isn’t okay as he is today. He’s not normal. He needs to be fixed. Thank goodness that Alison and Dave are so patient and courageous.
As I wrote to Melissa, I find this troubling. I don’t have a child with autism, so I can’t speak to that experience on a personal level, but this show strikes me as participating in the sort of dehumanizing rhetoric I often see in public discourses around children with cognitive disabilities.
As good timing would have it, I watched the first part of the series last night, after I got home from a graduate class in which we’d been talking about autism. We were discussing public representations of autism and the cultural work various representations are doing. We had a look at Ari Ne’eman, the first openly autistic Presidential appointee ever. In an interview with Wired magazine, he advocates neurodiversity, a framing of autism and other cognitive disabilities not as deficiencies, defects, or tragedies, but as different ways of being. He explains,
There’s a strange idea out there that neurodiversity advocates think that autistic life is all flowers and rainbows, but I don’t know anyone who thinks that way. Most of us have had deeply personal experiences of social isolation, bullying and abuse, lack of support, discrimination, and plenty of other problems. But it’s much more productive for us to focus on how we can improve people’s lives than to keep presenting people as pitiable burdens.
No more pity. It doesn’t help anybody.
Ne’eman has received a surprising number of hostile responses to his appointment to the National Council on Disability, responses that seem in part to be based on his perspective on autism. As one of the people in class last night observed, “Changing our culture to accommodate people with autism is much more immediate and pragmatic than all these efforts to find a cure for autism. Maybe that’s why it’s threatening: it’s saying that the mainstream culture has to change, rather than saying that people with autism have to be different, or disappear.”
I don’t mean this post in any way as an individualized critique of the MacNeil family. The family clearly loves Nick and advocates accommodations and support for him—and for them—and this show is certainly meant to raise awareness about autism. But the show itself strikes me as an example of how easily (even unintentionally) autism and other cognitive disabilities can be framed as tragedies to be mourned, and/or conditions that are unacceptable and need to be fixed. I’d rather see more public emphasis on neurodiversity, on changing our society so that we can accommodate and support as many different types of people as possible.
About Girl w/ Pen
Girl w/ Pen, founded by Deborah Siegel, publicly and passionately dispels modern myths concerning gender, encouraging other feminist scholars, writers, and thinkers to do the same.
The views expressed in posts are those of the columnists and do not represent Girl w/ Pen at large.
Normally I would wait to read the actual book before writing a glowing post about it, but last week I was privileged to sit front row as 
Just in time for Mother’s Day, Save the Children has published its twelfth annual 
Guest poster and 
