Sitting in the waiting area, topless but for a little robe, waiting to get my annual g-ddam mammogram last Friday, I listened to two women talking earnestly about Tiger Woods’ press conference as it blared on the t.v. “Nobody’s business”-lady debated with “sometimes it matters”-woman. They shared, it seemed, some common sense notion that having sex with another person outside of your marriage is always a problem of the worst kind.

As I later reflected on the topic, I did a Google search on infidelity and saw the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy’s infidelity consumer update that starts with the words…”After the devastating disclosure of infidelity….” Made me remember: eighteen years ago my boss at the time–a family therapist–made the point to me that there are a lot worse things than infidelity. She wasn’t saying that because she was casual about formal commitments or marriage, or about, say, the impact of divorce on children. What she was saying is that, well, there are a lot worse things that happen in relationships than infidelity. You can make your own list–I have mine.

Now my uncle–also a family therapist–would disagree; or at least would pipe in with more detail. But what he would be likely to say is that it isn’t the sex or the affair that is the problem nearly so much as the lying, the betrayal. Whether you are having an affair or discover or suspect your partner is having an affair, the stuff that is painful is the stuff about toying with reality, toying with truth, toying with your life and the lives of others while holding all the cards. He would say it is no way to work on your marriage–or yourself.

But the betrayal thing is complicated, which takes us back to “what’s worse than infidelity?” There are lots of betrayals. “You weren’t supposed to be like this, you were supposed to be like that” … “I thought you knew me” … “I thought you liked me” … “I thought we had similar values” … these are generalities: but I bet you have your own particular stories you think of when I list those. The betrayals against a shared reality accumulate, alongside those everyday resentments about housework and money. When couples lose touch with each other and don’t face up to the minor betrayals, the mountain of betrayal looks big and painful. Screwing around is the least of it. But we get kind of sex obsessed when we hear about this one particular kind of betrayal. Instead of a novel, the sex-tinged drama becomes a cartoon.

I’m not saying that any of the affairs we’ve been served up as dark comedy this past year–John Edwards, Governor Sanford, Tiger Woods–are okay, or are not okay. I’m not saying that the affair you are having, or your colleague is having, or that you heard about, is trivial, or not trivial. But all the histrionics about the “devastating impact” of infidelity actually does marriage, or any other kind of intimate union, a disservice. It turns it into a one-dimensional experience about “ownership” and “entitlement.” Moreover, seen through this lens, marriage takes on all the righteousness of the homemaker/provider arrangement between the sexes. There is this massive imagery of the “wronged woman” full of traditional virtues.

Tiger is a puzzle. But in his press conference Friday, he was responding in part to the dehumanizing (and sometimes simple-minded) way we get worked up about infidelity. Tiger’s case lets us notice that our freak-outs about infidelity are also moments to check on what our own values and taken-for-granted ideas are doing to our relationships.

–Virginia Rutter

It’s my pleasure to introduce guest columnist: Valerie A. Young. Valerie is Advocacy Coordinator for the National Association of Mothers’ Centers (NAMC) and the MOTHERS Initiative. She blogs at Your (Wo)Man in Washington Blog. Welcome, Valerie!

Gender-Responsive Aid in Haiti

The push continues to get food to the people of Haiti. Distribution efforts are often hampered by unrest and chaos when thousands of starving people compete to get their hands on something to eat. The Washington Post reports that local authorities are now implementing a coupon system, directed to women and girls, who demonstrate less aggression and are more likely to share the food with others, including the young, elderly, or disabled, instead of selling it. As the primary caregivers for family members, women are particularly well situated to get more food to more people in their homes and neighborhoods, in less time and with less conflict.

Previous posts in this space have noted the gender-specific needs of women and girls, especially following crises that exacerbate their pre-existing vulnerability. In Haiti, sexual violence, poverty, hunger, and disease were already destroying the lives of women before the earthquake. Aid targeted to these populations, it is argued, is more effective for women and girls, and benefits the wider community as well, rather than coming at the expense of men. However, in addition to being a specific target for aid, the particular position of women renders them more effective as the conduit for relief, as aid organizers are now discovering.

This isn’t the first time international aid organizers have harnessed the power of the “girl effect,” the phenomenon of targeting aid to adolescent girls who start a chain reaction, multiplying the effect and reach of the initial investment by passing it on. For example, if a girl has an income, she will reinvest nearly all of it for the benefit of her family. If a girl has a goat, she will sell the milk, send her children to school, breed more goats, hire others to care for the herd and sell the milk, and so on. Disaster zones around the world have begun to focus on women’s ability to maximize and enhance relief operations. Countries funneling aid to the developing world, including the United States, are implementing the practice as well, as is evident from the numerous mentions made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Further proof is documented in the work of Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools. If a girl in the developing world receives at least 7 years of education, she will be older when she marries, bear fewer children, increase her earning power, and have healthier children. She is less likely to be beaten by her husband, less likely to die in childbirth, and more likely to be capable of supporting herself economically. There is a growing consensus that women may be the most effective agents of change on the planet, due to their ability to multiply the value of a resource and their willingness to share it with others.

The conclusion that women in the developed world must also be capable of transformative change cannot be far behind. After all, the girl effect arises from gender, not geography. Why aren’t women in the industrialized world also seen as offering exponential opportunity for optimizing human potential, sharing responsibility for governing, producing, educating, caring, healing, and leading? The impediments that exist, which make mothers more likely to live in poverty, and women more likely to work in low-paying jobs, cannot be the result of our lesser capacity or inferior potential. They cannot be the natural consequence of an inescapable truth of innate gender disparity. If the girl effect is true (and it seems more than amply supported by the evidence), then maternal poverty and women’s limited representation in certain aspects of society can only be the result of artificial distinctions, man-made barriers, and social constructs put in place and continually reinforced by learned behavior… which can be unlearned, with intentional, deliberate, and informed action. Distributing food aid via women, reducing violence and aggression, and getting more food to more people in less time following a disaster is precisely what such action looks like.

On February 4, 2010 John Carroll University, a Jesuit school in suburban Cleveland, was the site of an LGBTQ protest that interrupted a basketball game. At issue is the university’s refusal to provide anti-bias protection employment policies.

University officials are letting LGBTQ colleagues hang out to dry. These officials defend their decision stating that employment policies are based on state and federal laws. Since state and federal law doesn’t include sexual orientation or gender identity and expression protections, they argue, the university doesn’t have to, either. But, as Bridgette P. LaVictoire reports on the blog LezGetReal, this explanation conflicts with an official university statement:

Rather than rely on the limitations provided under current federal and state law, the university strives to achieve a much higher standard based upon its Jesuit and Catholic mission and teachings.

Backpedaling JCU President Robert Niehoff says the policy should not be changed because it would go against “traditional Catholic moral teaching.”

Don’t let us down, John Carroll University! We expect more from an institution of higher learning. Don’t we turn to universities to lead the way in advancing knowledge and eradicating injustice? That’s the idea, anyway. In the meantime: JCU, we’re watching you! And so is Perez Hilton who tweeted, Awesome! RT Watch: Jesuit Students Stage Gay Rights Sit-in at College Game.

The peaceful demonstrators staged a sit-in while the university band played “Hot Stuff.” Police hovered nearby and the protesters were escorted from the floor without incident. You can watch the whole thing here.

P.S. Many thanks to Kate Arons for tipping off Girl With Pen about this issue!

This month BODY LANGUAGE welcomes Suzanne Kelly, writing her first guest post for Girl w/Pen!, as she takes to heart the literal matter of body language.

Suzanne teaches in the Women’s Studies Program at SUNY New Paltz.

A few weeks ago, scanning The New York Times for something weighty, I fell upon feminist science writer Natalie Angier’s thoughtful retelling of a new study in the burgeoning field of embodied cognition. The study revealed how our ability to process information is not a function of the brain alone, but of language’s perpetual play with and through our bodies as a whole. Angier explained how when study participants were asked to think of a past event, for example, they consistently “leaned slightly backward,” and when they were asked to envision what was to come, “they listed to the fore… ”subliminally act[ing] out metaphors in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.”

That “the body embodies abstractions the best way it knows how: physically,” as Angier put it, that it literally “takes language to heart,” comes as no surprise to me. When I’m writing and it seems as if the words won’t budge, I’m also often crumpled up at my desk – legs tucked under, torso rounded. If I stretch, realign, and maybe go for a run, the flow usually returns. When my ideas are at their stickiest so too, it seems, is my body.

That our thoughts, however intangible, are more than the sum of what goes on inside our skulls is also hardly a revelation to those of us who have long positioned the body’s knowledge at the heart of feminist theory and practice. Still, studies like this (and brilliant writers like Angier who are skilled at bringing their importance to light) always give me hope, especially when they’re given voice by the mainstream media. Might this be a sign of a new legitimacy of the body, one from which feminism could no doubt benefit?

I have written elsewhere about the value of “the sensuous classroom,” of education that takes seriously the presence of the body. If our “bodies embody abstractions…physically,” as this study suggests, what do we learn, not only from our own bodies, but from being in and around the bodies of others? In thinking about the transmission of ideas and the potential for changing consciousness, what is lost, for instance, in teaching Women’s Studies classes on-line, engaged in conversations about bodies, while removed from each other’s? How do we significantly combat unattainable body images, or think seriously about questions of disability, when our bodies are not part of the venue?

These same questions hold for our activism, as well. Would consciousness raising groups have proved as powerful had they happened on cell phones? What did those women’s bodies communicate to one another that gave them the courage to leave unhappy marriages, end the cycle of violence, and love other women? That enabled them to fight for legal abortion, childcare, and better wages?

Because body centered issues remain central, if not heightened, feminist concerns today – from the image of the female body, to eating disorders and the foods around which they revolve, to abortion and contraception, to health and its care, to intimate partner violence, rape and sexual assault, and, of course, to sex itself – it seems more vital now than ever for us to place our bodies front and center, to give them substance in our conversations as well as in our collective actions.

Of course, as we speed toward a near-virtual future and as our physical distance from each other exponentially grows, it becomes more of a challenge to find ways to speak, to share, to formulate conversation, to engage thought and transform it into action – in the flesh. But we can do better.

No doubt, our bodies know it.

This week there’s a heated thread running through the Park Slope Parents listserv about the appropriateness of reprimanding other people’s misbehaved kids in public spaces. The thread hits a nerve, because I definitely used to be that cranky person who scowled silently when other people’s children ran reckless in a crowded restaurant or played freeze tag in the checkout line. And then something changed. My twins were born. Since their arrival, that wave of annoyance that wells up when somebody else’s child whoops it up at the very moment I crave peace has not exactly subsided, but it’s transformed. Now, instead, I get curious. I project: What will my children be like when they’re that age?

Until I had my own, I was never a kid person. I hated babysitting. I was raised sibling-free. I grew into a grown up who often found kids who weren’t related to me bothersome. In my twenties, I knew (hoped?) that I’d want a kid of my own one day, but only vaguely, the same way I thought it might be nice to have a puppy. Rarely did I think concretely about what it might be like to be pregnant, or raise a child, or be someone’s mother. There were times in recent years when I actually wondered if the ubiquitous maternal instinct would kick in when my time came, or whether it would pass me over. I knew that if I had kids I’d love them. But would I love being their mother?

As part of a generation raised to view the so-called phenomenon of abandoning hard won careers for full-time motherhood with a healthy dose of skepticism, my unease about whether motherhood would suit me also meshed with fear. Coming to late motherhood in the shadow of all those dread media stories about women opting out, part of me feared motherhood for its very lure. I wouldn’t be able to quit working once I had a child, due to financial necessity, but I wondered if I would wish I could.

Now that the twins are here (4 months old next week!), and I’m engaged in compelling work with like-minded collaborators–some of whom are themselves similarly struggling to make work fit with motherhood as well as the other way around–I’m not so worried about being tempted to abandon my other life’s work. It’s not merely financial. It’s core.

And as for my proclivity to scowl at other people’s children, and my worrying whether maternal instinct would kick in? While I don’t think I’d call this instinct, my maternal lens has come into focus since my babies arrived. To wit: On a snowy day like the one we had this week, my Brooklyn neighborhood is a cornucopia of cuteness. Kids stuffed into snowsuits slide by our apartment window, pulled by their parents on toboggans on their way to the park. Must be something about the coziness of winter and all those teeny mittens. I pass a child on the icy sidewalk holding his father’s hand and flash forward to the day when my son and my daughter will be walking by my side, each of their mittened hands holding one of my own.

I’m thrilled to share news that Veronica Arreola has been awarded an Impact Award from the Chicago Foundation for Women.  Read all about it right here.

In addition to penning our SCIENCE GRRL column of course, Veronica the Assistant Director of the Center for Research on Women and Gender and directs the Women in Science and Engineering Program at UIC. She has worked with numerous feminist organizations including the Chicago Abortion Fund, National Organization for Women and Women In Media & News. She’s a veteran blogger who contributes to a handful of sites including Kenneth Cole’s AWEARNESS blog, and Chicagonista. Veronica’s writing has appeared in Chicago Parent, Bitch, Ms., Alternet, RH Reality Check and in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Motherhood. She has appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times as well as on WFLD TV and WGN Radio. She was featured in an Emmy Award-winning story on WGN TV, “The B-Word.” Veronica has received the UIC Chancellor’s Committee on the Status of Women’s 2007 Woman of the Year, and she is a graduate of the Women’s Media Center’s Progressive Women’s Voices training program.

Join me in sending her congrats!

Last month a research paper hit the education wires with a vengeance. Apparently girls can learn to be anxious about math from their teachers. Holy crow!

Considering that the vast majority of teachers in elementary schools are women, can we pin the dearth of women in science & engineering on Mrs. Hart (my second grade teacher’s real name!)? Ashley doesn’t think so:

But could the girls’ math anxiety be passed on from their male teachers as well?  We won’t know from this article, because no male teachers were part of the study. I also believe that this study does show us some interesting data about female teachers and their female students.  But I also believe we cannot blame female teachers for this whole problem, and in order to figure out what really changes girls’ attitudes toward math and science, we need to conduct a study that is fair to the teachers and the students, and that requires a study that includes teachers and students of all genders.

She has some good points, but after reading the study, I have to disagree. The lack of men teachers in the study is the lack of men teachers period. I also believe that at this moment, we need to focus on why girls learn to be anxious about math. Because despite girls being well represented in higher math classes in high school, they still don’t believe they have what it takes to go into science & engineering. Women who drop out of science and engineering have the same GPA to women who stay [PDF]. And women who leave science & engineering do so with higher grades than the men who stay [PDF]. Anxiety is a real issue with women and girls and we must address it. I also think we need to reexamine how we teach “success” to girls and women.

Tracy Ormsbee confesses that as a mom she has said math anxious things to her daughter, but studies have shown that parents and teachers are two of the top influences in how children choose career paths. If Mom is always avoiding math and Mrs. Gerry (hey to my 1st grade teacher!) is too, what message does that send to a young girl? A girl in the midst of puberty trying to figure out if it’s true that boys don’t like smart girls?

Mrs. Gerry & Mrs. Hart never sent a whiff of math anxiety my way. In fact they never let me slack when it came to math. They set a standard that other teachers carried on until I was in high school.

While I don’t blame women teachers for their math anxiety or for the lack of women going into science & engineering, I do think it is something to examine and address.

I just had the honor to listen to President Shirley Ann Jackson and one of her points about increasing our production of American-born scientists & engineers (men and women) is to increase the scientific literacy of every teacher out there. How can they steer a girl with mad math skills towards computer science if they don’t know what computer scientists do?

Instead let’s take this study and look at how much math and science our elementary teachers do need to know. Let’s look at what their continuing education is teaching them about science & engineering (another point from Pres. Jackson). There isn’t time for blame. There’s only time for action. Let’s get to it.

Just a quick take here: for those who didn’t see it, check out The New York Times article on gay marriage in Mexico City that ran yesterday, here.

st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) }

Last week, my sons participated in their school’s first school play—a charming production of “The Sound of Music.” While my fifth-grader worked the spotlight from the mezzanine, my 8-year old played one of the Von Trapp boys, appearing in the scene in which Maria dresses her charges in dungarees she fashioned out of floral curtains. (Yes, it was adorable!)

But let’s get right to the gender point here: Out of 150 kids who voluntarily signed up for the cast, only 20% were boys—and most of them were in the younger grades. While dozens of older girls donned nun’s costumes, only a handful of pre-teen boys participated. The fifth-grader who played the Captain enjoyed a hearty applause after hitting all the right notes in “Edelweiss,” but his male peers were in the audience, not onstage with him. When I asked other folks why this was the case, I heard that most boys were too busy with sports to commit to two weeks of rehearsals. Or, they just didn’t think being in the play was cool.

According to two professional directors who teach acting classes and orchestrate children’s productions in our community, the percentage of boys in our school play was actually rather high. At one local theater program, only 10 to 15% of six-to-eight-year old kids are boys. At another, a recent casting call for “Peter Pan” attracted over forty young thespians, but only three or four boys. Ultimately, the Lost Boys were played by girls.

What’s up with this? “It’s a societal thing,” says Dan Ferrante of the Westchester Sandbox Theater in Mamaroneck, New York. Traci Timmons, of the Bendheim Children’s Theater in nearby Scarsdale, surmises that when parents guide their sons’ extra-curricular activities, they usually prioritize sports over the arts, even if their boys show interest in creative activities. As boys get older, some dads fear a stigma of effeminacy or homosexuality often connected to men in theater. One positive sign is that sibling involvement can attract cross-gender interest. When brothers come to see their sisters perform, they want to be part of the excitement the next time around.

Parents are always hearing about the character-building benefits of team sports for kids of both sexes: they promote cooperation, persistence, self-confidence, healthy body awareness, the list goes on. True enough, but can’t the same be said for performing arts? Ms. Timmons argues that acting can enhance kids’ self-confidence, reduce feelings of social apprehensiveness, build literacy skills, and foster emotional sensitivity. For decades, feminists (and parents in general) have rightly fought to ensure gender parity in athletics—but what can we do to increase boys’ involvement in the arts? Even the popularity of Disney’s “High School Musical”—in which Zac Efron plays a jock who eventually learns to love the limelight on stage as well as on the basketball court—doesn’t seem to have made much difference.

Kids’ free time is limited, and they can’t do it all. But it’s a shame that boys who would otherwise enjoy—and benefit from—theatrical pursuits avoid them because they’re worried that their friends will think it’s uncool or “girly.”

Next fall, Benji will move on to middle school—but Eli will be in fourth grade, and he’s already planning to be in the school play again. Rumor has it that next year’s musical might be “The Wizard of Oz.” I hope they won’t have to cast a girl as the Tin Man.

In January, tragedy struck the Los Angeles suburb of Manhattan Beach.

Investigators believe that 24-year-old Michael Nolin killed his girlfriend, 22-year-old Danielle Hagbery, because Hagbery was breaking up with him. Apparently, Nolin then committed suicide.

This murder-suicide story is tragic all the way around. We hear about situations like this all the time. But while the details of this case might still be fuzzy, one thing is for sure: The report published in The Daily Breeze perpetuates the worst of victim-blaming and misguidedly frames the issues.

The story headline reads:

Police believe romantic break-up fueled Manhattan Beach killings.

But romance and break-ups don’t cause murder. Violence and aggression do. Let’s revise and edit, shall we?

An accurate story headline would read:

Police believe violent aggression fueled Manhattan Beach killings.

But the problem doesn’t end with the headline. The article quotes Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s Lt. Dan Rosenberg who provides so-called tips to women on preventing their own assault.

I would insert a snarky “yawn” if the issue wasn’t so absolutely critical!

Daily Breeze reporters Larry Altman and Andrea Woodhouse quote Los Angeles Sheriff Department’s Lt. Dan Rosenberg as saying:

“Danielle Hagbery’s death should serve as a warning to other young women that they need to look out for themselves — such as not going to the boyfriend’s home — when a relationship goes sour.

“This is one more tragic end of a dating relationship where these young women should be aware of it,” Rosenberg said. “Ladies need to be vigilant when things go sideways with boyfriends.”

Seriously. Really?

I’m willing to accept that Lt. Rosenberg was well-intentioned but seriously misguided. And, if so, then Altman and Woodhouse are complicit in their equally misguided decision to include these “tips” in their article.

Badly informed comments such as Rosenberg’s perpetuate a serious problem: Blaming the victim for her own death. This profoundly shifts the attention from the real issue. Presuming it’s true that boyfriend Michael Nolin killed Hagbery before turning a gun on himself, the warning must not be directed toward victims.

Ladies don’t need to be vigilant. Murderers need to not kill.

If this was in fact an instance of “one more tragic end of a dating relationship,” then men need to be aware of their own potential for violence and prevent it from happening. The best way to end violence is for the violent person to stop. Prevention is the real solution.

On February 1, 2010 I sent a letter of concern to eight Daily Breeze editors and reporters, and to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. This letter called out the newspaper and the sheriff for what violence-prevention educator Jackson Katz calls linguistic shape shifting, where language obscures men’s responsibility for violence.

The letter of concern includes signatures from authors, professors, public speakers, advocates, and community activists, experts across the country who work in preventing gender-based violence and sexual assault.

The letter concludes by offering support: “There are plenty of community-based resources and educational materials on the subject of preventing male violence against women. Please do not hesitate to be in touch if you would like to avail yourself to our services and resources.”

To date, not one of the individuals or agencies receiving this letter have replied. The silence is deafening.