Blogger and career guru (and newly married friend!) Marci Alboher just posted about my Recessionwire column, Love in the Time of Layoff, over at Yahoo’s Shine.  Her piece is titled “When Your Man or Woman Gets Laid Off.” Writes Marci (and oh how I heart her for so many reasons):

The column is so readable because it talks stuff few people are talking about. Like what happens to a heterosexual relationship when a woman suddenly becomes the sole breadwinner, what happens when someone who’s used to office culture suddenly gets used to the rhythms of home life, how two people (one of whom is pregnant with twins) can avoid driving each other batty when suddenly confined to a 650 square foot apartment.

Like any good serial narrative, Love in the Time of Layoffs had a major plot twist this month: Marco is back to work, albeit in a freelance gig. Questions abound for interested readers. Will he keep the job? Will the couple inch back into their former patterns again? What will happen once the babies arrive …..?

Good question.  Time (like, gulp, hopefully 4 more weeks) shall tell….!

The brilliant Colleen Jameson penned the following tips and generously gave permission to Girl With Pen to republish them. You can read more at No, Not You.

Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work!

1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.

2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!

3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!

4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.

5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!

6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.

7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.

8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.

9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!

10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.

And, ALWAYS REMEMBER: if you didn’t ask permission and then respect the answer the first time, you are committing a crime- no matter how into it others appear to be.

P.S. Thanks to Ampersand for the pingback that put these tips on our radar.

A quick note about why it’s been so quiet over here this past week: We’ve been under construction…and I’ve been, um, on bedrest with early contractions but so far doing ok.  Please bear with us!  A host of new columns and new bloggers are coming SOON.  Here’s a sneak peak at just some of the brand new monthly columns coming down the pike:

Gender Specs (Leslie Heywood, Editor): the latest on gender analysis in evolutionary psychology and other sciences

Bedside Manners (Adina Nack, Editor): applying the sociological imagination to medical topics, with a special focus on sexual and reproductive health

Body Language (Alison Piepmeier, Editor): Because control of our bodies is central to feminism. (“It is very little to me to have the right to vote, to own property, etc., if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right.” –Lucy Stone, 1855)

Global Mama (Heather Hewett, Editor: myths and realities of motherhood and family life in a globalized world

Mama w/Pen (Deborah Siegel, Editor): reflections on emergent motherhood, feminist and otherwise

Stay tuned!!

Sticks and stones my break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

A rhyme I’m sure we’ll all familiar with, perhaps one that we hurled back at someone teasing us as kids. We teach our kids that words don’t hurt, when we know darn well that they do. And science has proved over and over that words impact the way that we take tests and perform in the classroom (anywhere actually). It’s called stereotype threat:

…the fear that one’s behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of a group with which one identifies. This fear can sometimes affect performance.

One recent study [pdf] on stereotype threat had women taking math tests and looking for the cause of poor performance due to the threat.

Because it is not enough to say we know stereotype threat exists and then lather women and other stereotyped groups with love. Why does a woman excellent in math crumble under the weigh of mentioning that “girls don’t do math” before an exam? It seems that our brains spend precious time and energy sorting out our feelings about the stereotype during the exam AND not just that, but it lingers. Thus if we fear the math in a class, say economics, we will fear everything that goes with economics.

We know that economics and statistics is far more than just algebra and geometry, but if that is our weak spot, we will focus so much on that, that we just might submarine our efforts. During graduate school the #1 class that caused students to flunk out was stats. During that year long course (two semesters!) I heard women say time and again, “I’m just not good at math.” My program had also experimented with teaching a math prep course using a computer program before the semester started. Despite the fact that I am a total math geek and my favorite class in high school was geometry (Mmmm….proofs….) and I have a bachelors in science, I was floored at how much basic algebra had rotted away over the years. I am pretty ashamed that I can’t just tell you what sine and cosine mean off the top of my head.

But here’s something I learned in my years working in a lab as an undergraduate: Scientists have reference books on hand. They aren’t doing science off the top of their brilliant heads. Yes, they have it pretty much in their heads, but when it comes time to do an experiment or calculate the frequency of fish fins flapping, they reach for a book or list of formulas. Scientists being pure geniuses is a stereotype!

Lesson? You do need to remember how to calculate wavelength during an exam, but once you get past that, you can whip out that formula sheet anytime. Yes, you will need to know certain things off the top of your head, but when you study the same molecule over 20 years, things will start to stick.

The next time you sit down at that math exam  and you start to sweat, stop and breathe. Remember that you are you. If you miss one problem, no biggie. No one is perfect. But do you want to spend your energy remembering that one jerk teacher who said you can’t do it or do you want to prove to yourself how much you kick ass? OK, so maybe love does have a place in killing off stereotypes.

PEACE.
It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.

In spite of myself (or maybe because of myself, as Marco might say) I’ve somehow made it to the cusp: the third trimester. The home stretch. Music to my ears. I can’t imagine how it’s possible that my body itself will stretch further to make room for these growing babes—2.10 lbs each as this trimester begins, as good as singletons at this stage, huzzah! But I have confidence my body will still expand, even if it continues to choke me out along the way.

Just as I believe my body will continue do its bizarre miraculous thing in spite of what I think or say or do (pu pu pu), I’m slowly starting to have confidence that my intractable mind will stretch to incorporate motherhood, too. I still need some convincing on this front, but things are looking up.

As usual, it’s friends, parents, and spouse who are helping me believe. The other weekend, Daphne, her mother-in-law, my mom, and Marco helped shovel out boxes from the storage room—I mean, babies’ room—to clear space for two new beings. Once I could see the floor in there, I immediately started fantasizing about a rug. A sickeningly sweet baby-style area rug with clouds and moons and stars. “Of all things the babies will need, you’re fixated on a rug?” asks my wonderfully practical friend Rebecca from California. Indeed, I am. It’s the first bit of gear I’ve been able to get excited about, now that I believe these babies are going to be real. This weekend, I picked one out. I ordered it. No small victory here.

The rug makes it real. The fact that at 7.5 months with twins I look ready to pop makes it real. During trimesters 1 and 2, I grew reluctantly accustomed to a sense of the surreal, the unreal, the insane. It’s not a comfortable state of being; I’ve resisted it every step of the way. The reality—two babies growing limbs and organs and fingernails inside me—has been too much to fathom, leaving me barfing with vertigo, body and soul. Working at a start-up this whole time has been a terrific distraction, and while frenetic, in many ways its timing couldn’t have been better. It’s given my mind something all-encompassing to do.

But now it’s time to start putting my feet on the ground, feel the rug beneath me, find a way to steady my head long enough to find a pediatrician and buy a crib.

The rug. The crib. The changing table. The trappings of two babyhoods that have not yet arrived are symbolic, and yet they are more. They are signs of my belief, material affirmations of the unbelievable coming true. Today, Daphne gave me two pairs of booties (pictured above). The babies have hiccups. I believe they are going to make it to reality. And I believe their mother just might too.

(Gratitude to Sarah Saffian for sending me the epigraph to this post.)

Are people really having less sex? Well, at the very least, it looks like they are having less sex outside of their committed relationships, according to a new study written up in Scientific American. But it also looks like people may be making up for having less sex outside of committed relationships by talking about it more. And that is good news for sex.

First the news: In each category surveyed—gay, lesbian, straight—people report fewer affairs now than in the 1970s. Everybody has changed in terms of monogamy: gay men do it (where do it means doing non-monogamy) 59% now versus 82% in the 1970s. Nowadays, straight men do it less—14%. Meanwhile, 13% of straight women and 8% of lesbians do it. As we keep seeing again and again in recent surveys on monogamy, women—lesbian and straight—still report fewer affairs than their male counterparts, but they are catching up with the boys, as UW psychologist David Atkins has shown. On the one hand, affairs overall may be on the decline because of STDS and the like; on the other hand, women may be catching up because they have greater autonomy and economic independence.

That is all interesting, but this is also potentially good news for wild, free-for-all sex. The investigators from Alliant International University in San Francisco showed that over the same period people have also increased how much they talk to their partners about the idea of sex outside of their relationship. (What’s happening in those conversations, report these psychologists, is that they are talking about outside liaisons, and deciding against them.)

But the other discovery here is about the talking. Increasingly, this study hints, people are talking about the notion of sex outside their relationship–talking about forbidden, off-the-approved-roster sex with someone who isn’t an official or legal sweetheart–even if in the end they decide against it. Conversations like that—no matter what the outcome—mean that more and more people are acknowledging, countenancing, and admitting that they and their partners are completely capable of having sexual fantasies about someone other than their official one. We all know that being in a committed relationship doesn’t change our brain structure and doesn’t stop a great, diverse sexual imagination about all manner of things, people, and situations. But when people don’t talk about it, they have to tell one another lies, and pretend like their fantasies don’t exist.

So, maybe people are saying no to the reality of sex with their hot new colleague, but if they are saying yes to a conversation about it with their partner, it might mean that those partners will be better at dreaming up their own edgier, more interesting sex. And, by the way, in a world where women have greater sexual freedom to have affairs, they also have greater freedom to acknowledge desire and have conversations about it that can lead to fewer affairs.

-Virginia Rutter

Somewhere within my past year’s reading the book Maiden USA: Girl Icons Come of Age by Kathleen Sweeney came into my orbit.  It seemed ideal as I traced the history of girls onscreen, on television, and within other forms of media.  Yet I wish I could give Sweeney’s book a more enthusiastic thumbs up.  Listed as a “media artist and writer” Sweeney has taught at various colleges and been active in media training programs for girls.  Her book began as a “curatorial project of films and videos by teenage girls entitled ‘Reel Girls/Real Girls'” which premiered in San Francisco.

Sweeney casts a wide net and she ranges from exploration of the Riot Grrrl movement to a chapter called “Mean Girls in Ophelia Land” which tracks the rise and fall of the “mean girl” movement within popular writing as well as on screen.  She correctly identifies that for the most part the Teenage Girl, (as she capitalizes it) was a “passive helping noun linked to Daddies, Brothers, and Boyfriends,” until certain cultural zeitgeists began to shift. As cultural interest in girls gathered momentum, the growth of what Sweeney names a Girl Icon has grown.  Sweeney is right on point when she chases this emergence through the past almost 20 years.

The book moves at a fast clip – her quick categorizations of Neo-Lolitas, Career Girls, Geek Girls, Cyber Chicks, as well as Supernatural Girls, Amazons, and Brainiacs, among other labels, often struck me as too glib.  Her most intriguing point is what now defines an Icon in contemporary culture, as well as her reinsciption of the term into the word “Eye-con.”  Sweeney calls an “Eye-con” an “image scam that must be navigated and brought to awareness by analyzing and naming its syntax,” not unlike a stereotype.  Eye-cons do their most damaging work, she says, when viewers are unconscious of their influence.  Within the pantheon of the “Eye-con” is the “Girl-con” she says, which are “Icons of girlhood which posit girls as inevitable Victims.”  Examples are “anorexic adolescent models selling a form of starvation beauty.” Media literacy demands that viewers name the Girl-con and then look beyond to alternative role models as Sweeney says she wants to consider Girl Power Icons for the new millennium against a “backdrop of current and retro Girl Iconography.”  Her writing about visual representation and even semiotics is at its strongest when she is doing this kind of analysis.

Yet, while impressive in scope, the book’s very breadth also serves as its limitation as depth is sacrificed for a sweeping survey of the cultural landscape. Sweeney’s enthusiasm for her subject is most strongly felt when she describes her first-hand work with girls.  Her final chapter “Girls Make Movies: Out of the Mirror and Through the Lens” was the most intriguing to me.  Sweeney’s passion as an activist comes out as she describes some of the current programs working with girls to advocate media literacy and develop their skills.  She mentions Reel Grrls in Seattle, Wash., and GirlsFilmSchool in Santa Fe, N.M., among others.  The book’s list of resources is also wonderfully thorough. I suspect undergraduate students would enjoy having this book assigned for its abundance of popular culture references, generous use of chapter subheads and discrete categorizations.

By contrast, another book I came across during my research was Mary Celeste Kearney’s Girls Make Media which became indispensible to me for both its range and its depth.  Kearney is an academic, now tenured at UT-Austin and the book’s research is admirable.  Neatly divided into three sections “Contexts,” “Sites,” and “Texts” Kearney also traces girls’ historical participation with media.  She delves into girls’ entry into the web, also the impact of the Riot Grrrls, zine culture as well as independent filmmaking.  Her focus on what happens when girls take over media production is what makes this book compelling.  At the same time, she contextualizes the institutionalized practices that have keep girls from participating fully.

Particularly exposing is the deeply entrenched sexism in the field of filmmaking (the idea that cameras are too heavy for female techs to lug and “peer networks” or “structures of acquaintanceship” that boys use covertly, but effectively, advance their ambitions and deny girls access).  Kearney’s cataloging is vast and its impact is felt as she reveals just how much girls who make media have to say.  She includes writing about the need for single-sex media education but steps beyond it to show what girls really do when they’re given access to media tools.  Their work often centers around exploration of identity and re-inscription of messages about gender roles that crack open a universe of deeply felt and powerfully smart dialogues about what most girls experience but hadn’t yet had a place to express.

Some of the titles Kearney includes tell a whole story: films such as Taizet Hernandez’s “Are You a Boy or a Girl?” which explores “real-life gender-bending of a young female” or Hernandez’s film “We Love Our Lesbian Daughters,” which explores coming out experiences and Kearney says offers “A rare glimpse into the lives of queer young Latinas” but focuses on sexual identity over ethnic identity.  She groups films about sexual abuse such as “Love Shouldn’t Hurt” by Tamara Garcia or “It’s Never OK” by Arielle Davis, and includes a cache of films about the ubiquitous doll such as in Lillian Ripley’s “What if Barbie Had a Voice?” Just a fraction of other titles include: “Looks Like a Girl” which “broadens young lesbian representations beyond white, Anglo culture,” and “Body Image” by Mieko Krell, meant to “raise awareness about girls’ different relations to and strategies for negotiating dominant beauty standards.”

When exploring girls’ zines Kearney includes telling excerpts as this one from “Bikini Kill: A Color and Activity Book” about why female youth should enact social change: “To discuss in both literal and artistic ways those issues that’re really important to girls: naming these issues, specifically, validates their importance and other girls’ interest in them; reminds girls that they aren’t alone.  To make fun of and thus disrupt the powers that be.”  Even a smattering of the zine titles reads like a found poem: The Bad Girl Club, Bi-Girl World, Lezzie Smut, The Adventures of Baby Dyke, Geek the Girl, Angry Young Woman, Pretty in Punk, Housewife Turned Assassin, Angst Girl, Pixxiebitch, Ladies Homewrecking Journal, From the Pen of a Liberated Woman. The book’s website is also a wonderful resource as the power of the girls’ voices can be felt shouting through the distance.

Girl With Pen’s newest Guest Blog comes to you from the awesome Therese Shechter, documentary filmmaker of I Was a Teenage Feminist and The American Virgin. Here, Therese susses out the sexism in the retro TV fave, thirtysomething.

Was thirtysomething anti-feminist propaganda?

There’s been a recent outpouring of hype now that thirtysomething‘s first season is finally out on DVD. If you missed it, the show was an hour-long drama following the lives of a baby boomer-clique living in late-1980s Philadelphia. The show was so popular it even spawned a pithy new suffix of its own. (Twentysomething, fortysomething . . . You get the picture.)

I loved the show because it reflected my own life at the time as a young single career gal surrounded by married and breeding friends. (This was pre-history before Sex and the City). But the mirror it held up to me was warped and disturbing in a way I just couldn’t put my finger on … until I read Susan Faludi’s critique of the show in her 1991 book Backlash:

In ‘thirtysomething,’ a complete pantheon of backlash women is on display–from blissful homebound mother to neurotic spinster to ball-busting single career woman. The show even takes a direct shot at the women’s movement: the most unsympathetic character is a feminist.

Bingo. Through interviews and production materials, Faludi created an astonishing portrait of a show filled with a weirdly aggressive sexist agenda. For example, scripts were specifically written to make wife-and-mom Hope fail at any outside work she ever tried. Repeatedly — and laden with guilt — Hope returned back to husband, home, and child. And lest this plotline seem accidental, it was the clear intention of writer Liberty Godshall (wife of co-creator Edward Zwick) to urge women to stay home while their children were very young:

I wanted to tell women don’t try it–unless, one, you really need to, or you really really want to. Because while the successes are there, the failures and the guilt are there too.

Ironically, Mel Harris, the actress playing Hope, was back at work 9 months after having her real-life baby, stating that she felt she was a “better mother and better person” because she worked. Female viewers told market researchers that they wanted Hope to get a “real” job. The creators disagreed. Faludi quotes co-creator Marshall Herskovitz in a men’s magazine interview about his distress over the women’s movement:

I think this is a terrible time to be a man, maybe the worst time in history … Men come into the world with certain biological imperatives. Manhood has simply been devalued in recent years and doesn’t carry much weight anymore.

Although everyone on the show was miserable some of the time (my friends and I called it “thirtysuffering”) the single women got the worst of it. Melissa wasn’t given any backstory at all until actress Melanie Mayron created a photography career for her character. She was described simply as “man-hungry.” Faludi quotes Mayron as saying:

I remember that message of just because you’re a single woman you must be miserable. That’s not like me or any of my friends.

Career gal Ellyn was also a bitter caricature whose character development was helped only somewhat by the lobbying of actress Polly Draper. She recalls her audition where producers described Ellyn as:

the kind of person who was so irritating you would walk out of the room whenever she walked in. And they wanted her to worship Hope and want to be exactly like her. And I said, ‘Wait a minute, can’t she be okay in her own right?’

Apparently not. She was single and career-oriented, so who could ever love her? In fact, writer Liberty Godshall had considered making her a drug abuser but settled for a simple bleeding ulcer and being dumped by her boyfriend.

Gary, the lone single guy had a decidedly different arc, happily running through women without a neuroses in the world. In season two, he meets the feminist character Susannah. Faludi describes her as:

a social activist who works full-time in a community service center in the city’s ghetto, tending to homeless men and battered wives. Despite her selfless work, the show manages to portray her as inhumanly cold, a rigid and snarling ideologue with no friends.

After Gary gets her pregnant, she’s determined to get an abortion,

But then, at the clinic, she hears the biological clock ringing. “I’ve always put things off,” she confesses to Gary, tearily. “I just can’t make assumptions about the future anymore.” He is triumphant, and she has the baby.

After almost 20 years, I’ll probably find the show lame, with its late-1980s fashions and weirdly sexist messages about how I should live my life. Sad to think I ate it up back then — even with its sour after-taste.

Postscript:
Melissa Silverstein at Women & Hollywood wrote a excellent piece about the several talented women that came out of thirtysomething (although none quite achieved the same level of success as the men) and noted that Zwick and Herskovitz went on to create the groundbreaking yet short-lived series My So-Called Life. I loved that show and especially Claire Danes in the starring role. But I remember wondering about the characterization of her mother: A totally unpleasant and uptight career woman who spent most of her time verbally castrating her nice-guy husband. Now it all makes sense.

About the Author:

Therese Shechter is a filmmaker, writer and activist whose documentary I Was A Teenage Feminist is probably screening in a women’s studies class near you. She’s currently making a documentary about society’s attitudes towards virginity and writes the blog The American Virgin on the same subject. Her production company Trixie Films is based in Brooklyn. You can find Therese’s work on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and more Facebook.

As we celebrated Women’s Equality Day* yesterday, we want to talk about one of the most enduring signs of the gender equality gap — the differences in how men and women spend their time on an everyday basis. Many of you have probably heard of the term the “double-shift” when talking about women’s work outside and inside the home, and anecdotally, we all have examples (“I came home from a 12 hour work day and had to pick up his socks.” Or “After work I had to pick up the kids, clean the house, and cook dinner.”) The recently released American time use survey proves what we’ve known all along: women bear the burden of household work.

A couple of snippets:
• At 5:10 pm, 17% of women are doing household activities – 11% of men are.
• At 7:40 am, 11% of women are doing household activities – 6 % of men are.

Really, do check out the link – they’ve done a cool interactive chart where you can compare time use according to age, gender, race, employment, educational attainment, and size of household. Categories vary from “household activities” to “eating and drinking” to (our favorite!) “relaxing and thinking”. The only downside to the chart is that you cannot compare by multiple qualities – for example, are black women doing more household activities than white women at 5:10? Then black men? What about black single mothers? And Hispanic women over 65? (You get the picture.)

Internationally, feminist economists have been arguing for the inclusion of household work into overall GDP estimates – where traditionally, the bulk of women’s work was uncounted, as it did not take place within the marketplace. For the past few years, the United Nations Development Fund has been tracking Gender, work, and time allocation in its Human Development Report. Although only 33 countries reported on time allocation in 2007, the results are nonetheless interesting – globally women aren’t faring that much better in balancing free time and personal care and family care.

Even the “wunderkind” countries of Northern Europe women seem to be putting more time into the children and the chores then men. In Norway, while women and men spent approximately equal amount of time on themselves, women spent more time cooking and cleaning (2:14) than their male counterparts (0:52). Women also spent double the time (34 mins) that men (17 mins) did on childcare.

In Nicaragua, a moderately developed country where interestingly even the one country where women and men have relatively equal free time women, women are the primary caregivers for the children (1:01 hours compared to the 17 mins men spent with the kids), the cooks and cleaners (3:31 hours to 0:31 mins) and less likely to be involved in market activities 28% to men’s 74%.

It is no surprise that the least developed countries have the widest disparities with regards to time. Women in Benin spend much more time (8:03 hrs) on market and non-market activities combined than men (5:36 hrs). Beninese women don’t have much time for themselves (1:32hrs) their children (45 mins) or their household chores (2:49 hrs) and yet they still spend more time on everything, except themselves, than their men. I’m exhausted just blogging about it.

Virginia Woolf spoke of the need of one’s own room and time (and of course money) when writing fiction. And truly, all of these things are needed for most successes. Who knows how much more the world could gain from women if more men got more involved in activities beyond the market? There are signs that times are changing, however: although recent studies do not indicate more equality in household chores, they do point to a shift in younger men’s (Gen X) attitudes and behaviors around fathering. Looks like we are one step closer to taking ALL work activities seriously, whether inside the market or out. And that’s what we call equality.

* Don’t miss the National Council for Research on Women’s tribute to Women’s Equality Day on their blog, The Real Deal. (Full disclosure: both Tonni and I have posts up! We did them in our personal time.)

Catblogging, because I couldn’t resist: Here’s Tula, settling into her favorite nook in our new home… (And props to Virginia for the coining of Tula’s new nickname.)