Stay Away

A while ago I received an anonymous question asking something like, “If you had a best friend who became a soldier and fought in a war would you hate him?” I can’t remember the exact wording. I wrote an extensive answer and then buggered up my posting, deleting the whole thing. But that question and my answer have stuck with me, lingering on.

I presume I know who the anonymous questioner was, and I think it was asked of me because of the comments I made on a reblog of a soldier who was telling Occupiers to shut up and get a good job like he has (killing people, of course). It could have been asked of me for countless other reasons though, so maybe I don’t understand the motivation at all. Doesn’t matter, though.

The answer to the question (necessarily paraphrased by time, space and my mind) is not difficult: “No. I would not come to hate someone I loved for becoming a soldier.” And if you are who I think you are I love you as much as I always have.

I might be ashamed of my friend for making the choice he made. I might pity him for the damage his choice has caused. I might sympathize with him because he lives in a world that made him feel like it was either the only career open to him or the best career open to him. I might love him despite the things he has done. I might stop talking to him to avoid causing him pain with my diametrically opposed opinions. But I wouldn’t hate him. Not that.

When it is someone I haven’t loved, however, someone I have no attachment to, I would and could and often do hate them. I’m not Christ. I am a man living now, surrounded by a blind society of circus horrors, and I know what is right and wrong — and I know that what I know is right and wrong doesn’t match with what “society” sees as right and wrong.

But I don’t hate him. I love him. I am fucked up badly, though, and I can’t talk do him because of how deeply it would hurt me (and how deeply it hurts me just to think on it). So I’m sorry to him. I fail. But I fail honestly.

I would agree with the satire of this Black Monopoly board entirely if the Chance and Community Chest spaces remained. White America is careful to keep that glimmer of hope alive, that dangling carrot of financial success or the Presidency, so that all the Go to Jail spaces and cards will be tolerated. Just a sliver of hope makes the board work.

(via sonofafieldnegro)

Laird Cregar was a wonderful actor. Back in the 40s, he was a contract player with 20th Century Fox, and he slowly became a star. It finally happened in 1944. After four contract years and fourteen movies, Cregar starred alongside Merle Oberon and George Sanders in The Lodger, where he played a doctor named Slade who turned out to be Jack the Ripper. 

The eminent Robert Osborne, Hollywood historian, talked on TCM one night about what happened to Cregar after his star turn.

It seems that Cregar, a large, imposing figure (often over 300lbs), hated his body. And suddenly he was a star who 20th Century Fox wanted to cast as a leading man. So what did he do? He took amphetamines, the classic weight loss pill of the day, and starved himself into a matinee idol. He died months later from a heart attack. His crash diet destroyed his heart. He was 31.

This was in 1945. It still happens today. 

But to hear media tell it only 6 out of 10 women quit things they love because they hate their bodies (although I’ve not been swimming for two years — my favourite sport — because I hate mine). Only women are prone to self-esteem issues tied to their weight and appearance. Only women are made to feel badly about themselves, and manipulated by society into anorexia and bulimia. It doesn’t happen to men. 

But it does, and it has, and it’s just as prevalent. It happens to all of us.

So I want women and those who care about women to keep talking about how we destroy the feminine body image and force media to do the same, but I want that discussion to move hand in hand with a discussion that addresses the fact that I can’t look in a mirror because I hate my body. I want the discussion about the Karen Carpenters to continue, but I want it to continue along with a discussion about the Cregars. And I want people to realize that a society wherein women feel compelled to engage in cosmetic surgery is the same society that makes men feel compelled to take steroids, rather than discussing the former with sympathy and writing off the latter as male weakness and criminality. 

I want the discussion to address it all. Can we do that? Please?

When those of faith try to convince you that science is a religion all its own, simply remind them of the primary distinction: scientific beliefs are always changing in the face of new evidence; religions ignore new evidence to maintain belief. “There is no shame in not knowing.” 

ihateallyourgods:

There is no shame in not knowing 

I grew up in a working class family with bourgeois pretensions that came from a mother who’d fallen from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. I was marked from birth as the great hope to rise in class. The earliest hope was that I would rise quite high indeed — that I would become a professional baseball player. There was potential, but my hip disease got in the way, and I was forced to switch to Plan-B. 

Plan-B was academics. I went from being a pseudo-Jock (who was a full out nerd on the side), to an intellectual in the span of a couple of years. I had the gift of being fairly intelligent despite my athletic streak, so the transition wasn’t too hard, but it was a bit longer than it needed to be because I had to make up for my shitty athleticism & apathy tainted grades. 

Eventually, I was the first from my family to graduate university and the first to go on to post-graduate work (for which I am now saddled with crushing debt).

But here’s the thing … in all that push to move up in class, to be “better” than my parents, I missed the education in handiness, which remains (whether we like it or not or whether it is fair or not) a male gender birthright and demand. If a woman is good at these things she’s independant and strong; if not, she has other interests. If a man is good at these things it is expected; if a man is bad at these things he is something of a failure.

I am something of a failure. I need to call a plumber. I need to call a roofer. I can’t change my oil. I know nothing about cars (though I can change a tire). I take my bike to a bike shop. Blah, blah, blah. None of this would be a problem if my bourgeois work paid enough to afford hiring the necessary folks to do the things that need doing, but it doesn’t. So things remain in a shit state, and I am unable to tackle the tasks. And the fact that these things remain undone because I can’t do them makes me ashamed of my “unmanliness.” Right or wrong.

Just as I started to write this, Erika called the plumber to report on our leak. Here’s what she said: “Well, the leak’s been going on for a few weeks, actually, but I was away, so my husband just threw a bucket under it.” Ouch. That about sums it up.

lustfulkitty:

May is National Masturbation Month - and I hope you’re all celebrating in style!!!

Yep, it’s true. May really IS Masturbation Month. It was started in San Fran a while back to honour Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders who was forced to resign for suggesting that masturbation “should be taught” and that it was a natural process. As an inveterate masturbator, I agree with and applaud Elders. Spread the word. Promote masturbation. And talk to your kids about it because there’s no reason for them to keep their hands off themselves. 

Here are some of the consequences of Feminism’s abandonment of the Staying-At-Home principle:

1. A slow down in wages: Big business loves the abandonment of staying-at-home because it allowed them to freeze salaries for men and women while the inflation rate exploded from the seventies until now. The more women came to work and chose not to stay at home, the less important it was for employers to pay their individual employees a wage that could support a family. In effect, business got two employees for the price of one. Men and women come to work, they get equal or nearly equal pay, and together they make “double salary” but that double salary is no longer a chance to “get ahead.” It is theoretically so, but practically it is now a necessity. In the early years of women at work it really would help families improve their situations, help them flourish, but as the years have passed and business has been “forced” to freeze wages and make cutbacks, and since the giant lower middle class no longer expects to have a job that will allow one parent to stay-at-home, the chance for improvement has disappeared. Now it’s how families get by rather than get ahead.

2. No mobility for the lower classes: And one thing this necessity of a two income household has done is to make it even less likely for the lowest classes to move up to that lower part of the middle class. There was the possibility — for the briefest of periods — for the proletariat, for working class men and women, to move up in the world by making the choice of two incomes, to make it so their children wouldn’t have to work industrial jobs (which is another topic for another time) or, for the poorest, service jobs. With endless, bone-wearying, debilitating hard work they could “elevate” themselves by defying the expectation and social norm of a stay-at-home parent and pour their energies into two incomes (albeit minimally waged incomes). It required hard work squared, but it could be done. That mobility is gone now. 

3. Middle class and upper class women are the beneficiaries: As always with social change, the lower classes are left behind. As more and more middle to upper class women flourish in the workforce, and take their place alongside men for equal work and equal pay, lower class women continue to struggle in the same minimum wage jobs they’ve always worked, with the same terrible benefits, the same poor working conditions, the same social conditions and the same insecurity. The richer women in our nations now have the luxury of feminist protection, while the poorer women have the exploitation they’ve always had, but now they’re convinced by everything they watch and hear that this exploitation is a right that benefits them and that they should appreciate it rather than seeing it as a weight that drags them down. A corollary of this is their inability to organize within their minimum wage traps. The unions that could protect them are impossible because their jobs are too insecure to risk being fired, and they tend to believe unions are dishonourable (another topic for another time). 

4. Three stay-at-home categories remain: Staying-at-home does happen still, although it is rarer and rarer, and once again the three types of family who have a person staying-at-home are separated by classes that keep them apart and make it almost impossible to empathize or understand the situations of the others. First there are those who are too poor. These families, often immigrant families with mothers who only speak their native tongue, have a mother who “stays-at-home” to take care of the children while the husband works multiple jobs. These families are generally too proud (or too illegal) for welfare, and barely scrape together a living, and those mothers almost always work a difficult part-time job, quite often as some form of poorly paid domestic or janitorial help. They’re not exactly stay-at-home, but close enough for those who count to categorize them that way. Second are the middle class families who decide to have a parent stay-at-home. The parent can be a husband or a wife (the decision over which stays at home is usually decided by which spouse makes the most money if the family isn’t religious, and it is usually the wife if the family is). These families become willingly poor (certainly placing themselves in the lower levels of the middle class) by sacrificing their second salary to a principle, religious or otherwise. Third are the rich families. This is, again, where the stay-at-home parent is almost exclusively a mother. These are mothers who have the help of domestic employees, have plenty of time for volunteering (a form of work, perhaps?) and never have to take a part-time job or work-at-home for extra money.

So those in the first category have no choice and no hope of escape; those in the second category put themselves at an economic disadvantage; and those in the third category simply continue as they always have. But nowhere in these categories do we see the domestic work that is done by the stay-at-home partner being valued appropriately, nothing approaching what our feminist mothers fought for in the seventies. 

5. Distance increases between children and parents: This is not to be confused with the infernal “family unit” that social conservatives trumpet on a regular basis. This is simply a truth. With two parents working, a child spends more of his/her young life with child care workers (a whole industry of people who are paid to care for our kids. Another topic for another time) than with his/her parents. Just as spouses know that they spend more waking hours with the people they work with than each other, children are now spending more time with those who watch them than those who made them. And this necessarily means that the distance between parents and their children is increasing. Social impact aside, families are missing out on an emotional life with one another that benefits simple happiness (and a huge opportunity to improve their educational life). 

6. Decrease in Primary Education quality: All of this has changed the focus of primary school education. Reading, writing and arithmetic are no longer the primary concerns of elementary school teachers, modelling behaviour is, which is just a fancy way of saying “raising children.” Our current curricula are all about shaping the way our children behave and the ways they see the world. Sure the “three Rs” still occur, and they’re still important, but their importance is diminished in the face of making children behave, moulding children’s attitudes towards authority, inuring children to surveillance and control (even elementary schools have cameras everywhere now, for “their own protection,” of course). And a significant reason for this shift in education is the fact that children don’t learn the necessary skills at home anymore. Both parents are working within a year of a child’s birth, and children are raised by someone other than their parents, someone who usually has (too?) many children to care for, someone whose main concerns are getting through the day, minimizing liability, and collecting a pay cheque. A culture with parent’s staying-at-home is a culture with superior primary school education. Sadly, it is a quality that we’re never likely to get back. And, once again, work for which women in the past deserved to be recognized has been diminished or belittled or disappeared entirely — without ever gaining the recognition it deserved. 

I hear now and then about how unnatural our world is today, about how we’ve driven the natural from the planet, and I understand from whence that thinking comes, and I agree with it to an extent, but I can’t agree entirely. I can’t because even in our self-critical moments we are arrogant to the point of hubris. Just look at this shot. The juxtaposition asks it all in a question: which is going to last? the natural or the unnatural?

And we all know the answer.

But I have another question: is anything in this shot unnatural?

When I was a kid and watching the feminist movement in popular culture, through the lenses of my stay-at-home Mom and the shows she watched and books she read, I saw a feminist movement that had two primary concerns: 1. equal pay for equal work; 2. recognition of “mothering” as equal work.

Thirty years later, feminism’s remaining goal is the first and the second has not only been abandoned but villified. And right there is how feminism betrayed itself and women.

The right to work if one so chose and make a comparable wage stopped being the right to work and became a necessity to work (more on that in a future post). Working outside the home became the only way to be a “successful” woman — to live up to one’s potential. Somehow being a mother, raising kids, running a household, became exactly what men had always been saying it was: a dodge, nothing serious, not work, pathetic really. Suddenly women embraced that idea, the idea their mothers and grandmothers had been fighting against. They were told and came to believe that they were “better” than staying at home, and as soon as that shift in thought occurred, staying at home became a joke, it became worse than working in the “real world.”

So today we have people like Hilary Rosen, saying: 

What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country, saying, ‘Well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues, and when I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing.’ Guess what? His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing, in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why do we worry about their future. (italics are mine)

Now I agree with some of what Rosen says and implies. Clearly, Ann Romney has never had to face the financial realities that the vast majority of mothers and fathers have to face. She has never had to work because her family wouldn’t be able to eat if she didn’t. Her world can afford the best schools. Her world removes worry about her childrens’ future. 

But Rosen also said that “His wife has actually never worked a day in her life,” and even in context of the rest of her paragraph, the statement is ugly. It clearly suggests that staying-at-home isn’t work at all. An insult that would have caused anger and solidarity amongst the feminist ranks rather than silence. Moreover, the fact that a woman, especially an intelligent woman like Hilary Rosen who is coming from a position of tacit feminism, could refer to another woman as “his wife” without bothering to use her name, to make that woman another man’s property, is belittling and dismissive.

Stay-at-home Moms are written off as right wing religious kooks today. The North American left, particularly the North American feminist left, sees staying-at-home as an embracing of the patriarchy, as a failure to “live up to potential” based in outmoded religious doctrine. And so they attack it with venom, they indoctrinate against it, and they devalue it to the detriment of everyone. 

Staying-at-home is work. And those who do it should hold their heads high, no matter what their motivation.

So I asked my class, “Is rape ever okay?”

And they responded with a resounding “No!”

“How about an imprisoned child molester?” I prodded.

As a group I was met with resounding silence. Shades of grey everywhere it seems.