men

As much fun as I’m having over here, I hate it that geography and book tour are keeping me from being with Dadio (pictured left, with yours truly) on Father’s Day this year. To ease my angst, I’ve been soaking up a bit of the bloggy goodness going on around Dad’s Day this year as I get ready to hit the road. A few highlights:

With trademark savvyness, Cali Yost at Work + Life Fit blog reminds us work/life negotiations are an “everyone issue” and reports on a just-released Monster.com survey where 58% of fathers felt their employers should be more considerate of their needs as working dads, and a majority appreciate having a flexible work schedule.

Lovely piece via Women’s eNews on the evolution of the father-daughter bond…

Interesting “resource kit” page for journalists covering same-sex parents, over at G.L.A.A.D.’s website, via Pseudo-Adrienne over at Liberal Feminist Bias…

Congrats to Feminist Dad on the birth of Edie Andrew, and kudos to him in general! I love this guy. You’ve gotta check it out…

And P.S. Heartfelt congratulations to Michael Heller on becoming a dad this week!

These comments are just too good to leave as comments, so I’m elevating them to post status. Thank you, Veronica, Marco, and Feminist Review for weighing in on my recent post about Knocked Up! The points you all make are quite excellent and astute.

Veronica said…

I haven’t seen it, but I know I will. My lust for Paul Rudd aside…Isn’t it just horribly difficult to watch a movie without our feminist alarms going off? I try so hard to turn it off and enjoy a movie, but like you, after some time that ‘guilt’ creeps over me and I have to face the fact that if they had done this or that, well you get the picture. From 40yr Virgin to Ron Burgundy, we get just enough feminism to keep us smiling.

Marco Acevedo said…

OK, boyly-boy Marco here… I thinks it’s fair to say I loved the movie with some of the same reservations… it’s clearly a geek fantasy dressed as cautionary/coming-of-age fable, while managing to feel honest in its character interactions. But I resent the idea it’s an every-guy movie. We don’t all feel the need to bond by nesting together in our own refuse, or to be that crass in front of the ladies. The constant pop-culture-referencing, though, is pretty spot-on.

FeministReview said…

While I agree that the female anatomy (esp. when being used for procreation) should not be on par with fart jokes as a grossout gag, I think that some might be taking this a little too seriously. Your entry is a balanced review of this film (I viewed the film in much the same way), but the Slate review annoyed me. It’s not necessarily Apatow’s job as a director to address abortion as a viable choice for women. But he does. Katherine Heigl’s character considers it and decides that she wants to keep the baby. She made a choice. And it was completely her’s. That’s something. Just because the character doesn’t choose abortion doesn’t mean that she’s the product of a man’s misinformed imagination. And I also think that Apatow shows that even though his male characters are completely clueless, they are harmless schlubs. While much of the guy bonding is comprised of misogynist endeavors (porn sites, sex mimicry, blow job jokes), it’s not malicious. I am not saying it’s right and I don’t think Apatow is either. He’s not claiming that he or any or his characters are in touch with the female psyche. At least they are trying.

My post on Knocked Up is now up at HuffPo. Check it out, and tell me if you agree/disagree!

(And ps Jessica was a hoot on The Colbert Show last night! Loved that she opened by giving him a t-shirt that said “Feminist Chicks Dig Me” – cuz we do.)

As I mentioned, I came home from a very heady feminist conference this weekend in the mood for some slightly lighter fare. So on Sunday Marco and I went to see Knocked Up–the original plan was Spiderman 3, but Judd Apatow won out. Yesterday, my dear boy sent me the links to reviews in Salon and Slate. “Both positive, but Slate has gender issues.”

So did I.

Let me say first that I enjoyed the movie, wholeheartedly. I laughed. And I cringed. Maybe it was my feminist hangover from the conference, but I pretty quickly got the sense that Knocked Up was a pregnancy movie for boys by boys. Which is great. I mean, we need those, and we need them badly. Men are parents too. It’s about time we had some sensitive stories about what it’s like for men to become fathers–when they’re so-called ready and especially when they’re not. I love that the Ben character (Seth Rogen) walks the three miles to the gyno’s office even after Allison (Katherine Heigl) throws him out of the car, and that he eventually reads the pregnancy books. And Apatow’s portrayal of male bonding throughout the movie was disgustingly sweet–by which I mean disgusting at times, according to this perhaps-too-easily-grossed-out girly girl reviewer, but I get it: genuine and sweet.

Still, I agree with Slate’s Dana Stevens, who comments that, in this movie at least, Apatow doesn’t get (or write) chicks as well as he writes (and gets) dudes. Knocked Up is eons from being misogynist. But the movie’s two basic premises–that, boom! young rising professional Allison wants to keep the baby, recent-life-changing-promotion-notwithstanding, and that she’s willing to take such a heartfelt second look at the guy who severely grossed her out the morning after–struck me as forced vocabulary. This is Guyland indeed: pregnant is “knocked up,” abortion is referred to in euphemism (“rhymes with ‘shmashmortion”), and (spoiler alert!!) the geek gets the prom queen. In other words, it’s a fantasy about the sensitive slacker who, learns, through impending fatherhood, to grow up–and gets the girl. (The girl, to be fair, finds love where she least expects it. Fairy tale endings for all!) (Spoiler ends here.)

When the lights came up and my beloved dude turned to me and said, “I loved it!”, I didn’t want to be a spoilsport and offered up an enthusiastic, “Me too!” But truth be told, my love’s qualified. Sure, I’m willing to suspend disbelief when the Grey’s Anatomy hottie grew soft on a guy she couldn’t even get through breakfast with, and even after he flunked the second date. But when the image of a crowning baby head elicited the same “eew!” as the scene where Ben’s roomies transmit pink eye by farting on each other’s pillows (don’t ask), my grossdar got offended. Next time someone makes a movie about pregnancy for guys, maybe someone could throw us lingering feminist girly girls a little more than just a bone?

There’s just too much bloggy goodness going on today around the blogosphere and elsewhere for this girl to take in. So here’s my quick round-up of cheers, props, and commentary:

Cheers to Marc over at Feminist Dad for spreading the TRUTH about the opting-out (non)phenomenon. And props to Marco for his beautiful post (yes, I’m biased) over at Hokum today, which is part of MotherTalk’s Dangerous Boy Friday – a blogging bonanza in which bloggers are posting in response to that #6-on-Amazon phenomenon, The Dangerous Book for Boys.

Academia still seems to be dangerous for grown up girls seeking tenure. Caryn McTighue Musil sounds off over at Ms. on the hurdles facing women in academe, including “The Baby Gap”(women with babies are 29 percent less likely than women without to enter a tenure-track position, and married women are 20 percent less likely than single women to do so), and The Today Show this morning actually had a nice little chirpy segment on how working mothers get screwed when returning to work, facing significant salary cuts over time. But finally, there are solid messages out there now about how companies can do better – check out Sylvia Hewlett’s new book, Off Ramps and On Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success, and Lisa Belkin’s piece yesterday in the New York Times on the “opting back in” revolution, where she reports on corporate programs designed to recruit seasoned women with names like The Opt-In Program, as well as the new businesses cropping up to service this population, like HR Opt-In, MomCorps, and Flextime Lawyers.

Moving from work/life to writing/life, since I’m obsessed by the reception of books on feminism (personal interest, yeah, as well as professional and political yadda yadda), I’ve been following the coverage of feministing.com founder Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism with baited breath — and pretty much want to throw up. I’m sure I’ll be in for it too. Some publicists say, no such thing as bad publicity. Maybe, but my heart goes out to Jess who I hope KNOWS that she has written a fantabulous book (which is doing well, thank you very much, as far as Amazon rankings are concerned – and I urge you to buy it! buy it!). Anyway, Jill Filipovic over at Feministe has posted a passionate defense of both Jessica and her book, which has spawned over 100 comments. Here’s Jill:

Jessica wrote her book in a very particular way: She wrote it to make feminism accessible to women who might otherwise reject it. That is her purpose. Railing against capitalism and telling women that feminism is a movement which will not make your life any better doesn’t really seem to further that goal, does it? Neither does blathering on about how awesome high heels and pornography are. Jessica does neither….We need feminists like Jessica who do the very tough work of reaching out to women who are otherwise uninterested in feminism — feminists who are patient and generous, and who listen to the concerns and experiences of younger women without branding them stupid or not feminist enough.
What does Jessica get for doing that? She gets branded stupid and not feminist enough. She gets mocked by other feminists.

Amen, sister.

And to end this roundup on an up-note, if you happen to be in the Apple next week, be sure to check out:

A Reading with Girls Write Now
Thursday, May 24, 7pm
at 520 Eighth Avenue (b/w 36th & 37th sts.) on the 20th floor

Come out to hear girl writing mentors Pooja Makhijani, Maggie Pouncey, and Terry Selucky read their own fiction, nonfiction and poetry, plus special mentee emcees Phantasia Johnson, Lindsey Romain, and Briana Wilson.

GWN is a fantastic organization that nurtures and nourishes a future generation of women writers by hooking them up with mentors. The org is run by a group of women in their 20s and 30s who are unstoppable. If you can’t go to the reading, at least stop by their website and check them out. (Congrats GWN, on your new online home!)

Marco’s gorgeous review of The Dangerous Book for Boys is now up on his blog, Hokum. Here’s an excerpt from his review, to whet your appetite:

Its contents have a distinctly Anglophile charm: segueing from stickball and rugby rules to Morse code to cloud formations to marbling paper and cutting italic nibs (!!), Dangerous seems intended for some unlikely jock-geek hybrid, equal parts introvert and extrovert. In fact, what with chapters on polar exploration, navigation, historic battles and the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, some might argue that the Igguldens have compiled a kind of throwback primer for young male WASP imperialist-adventurers educated in the classics; indeed a great part of the books’ appeal is its obstinately old-world presentation (the Seven Wonders are illustrated by what look like reproductions of Victorian postcards). The Age of Imperialism did coincide with the broader cultural impact of the Industrial Revolution, and so technology enabled not only global travel for the original tourist class, but also the wide dissemination of travel literature to a reading public, including the first generation of young armchair adventurers (boys and girls: remember lonely little Jane Eyre sitting cross-legged “like a Turk” on the window seat, browsing a natural history of the “bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland”). Some boys of that generation may have ended up becoming colonial administrators and big-game hunters, but other boys and girls of that generation became anthropologists and naturalists for the enlightenment of future generations.

Read more

(How much do I love him for referencing Jane Eyre?!)

Just a quick announcement that in time for Father’s Day, my partner, Marco, and my colleague and friend, author Paul Raeburn, will be appearing here soon with thoughts on boyhood and fatherhood respectively. Stay tuned!

The enterprising, fearless ladies over at MotherTalk have invited me, along with hundreds of other women, to blog today about a fearless moment in my life, or a moment when I started becoming fearless. So here we go.

My father taught me if not to be fearless, then to die trying. He taught our golden retriever how to swim by throwing her off the pier, and he taught me how not to fear sailing by taking me out in a storm. I learned to love rain after my father dragged me outside to watch the lightning roll in over Lake Michigan and straight into our backyard. Together, we learned not to fear skiing by staying out during a mountain blizzard in Wyoming, yodeling fearlessly at the top of our lungs all the way down.

But none of this prepared me for the courage it took to leave a marriage at age thirty-five. I wanted kids of my own, and I knew that leaving the marriage — corrupted as it was — would postpone that dream, if not vanquish it. Up to that point, I had led a comfortable life. Leaving would leave me financially insecure. But I did it. I left. And I didn’t die.

With that leave-taking began a new life — one more thrilling than a sail in a storm, more charged than lightning, more exhilarating than a Wyoming blizzard. Leaving put me in touch with my truest instinct for self-preservation. And life will never be the same again.