Hug Database

A recent article on Huffington Post is about how babies benefit from openly affectionate parents, especially fathers.  But I would like to spend a moment to think about how being openly affectionate affects the parents as well.

Without meaning to sound too corny, I think the ability to love is like the working out; the more you work out, the more you are able to work out.  In order to truly love your child, you have to show your child that you love xir.  Not only is this what it actually means to love somebody, but if your child doesn't know that you love xir, s/he can't love you back so it makes it more difficult to go on loving xir.

On top of flexing your "love muscles," being affectionate also helps us as people by reminding us that we are not alone.  Men in particular are taught that they have to make their own way in the world, but that is a myth.  Nobody can make their own way, with the possible exception of a hermit who makes all his own weapons out of twigs and rocks.  Apart from that, we all rely on our society and their is no such thing as a self-made man.  When we are affectionate to our children, we are reminded that we are vulnerable because we rely on them emotionally, just as we realize how much our parents actually rely/relied on us.

However, the mere vulnerability is not scary enough.  Throughout our childhood, we were taught that the kind of love that parents and children feel for one another is not properly masculine.  Boys who love their parents are mama's boys, or goody goodies who are perfect targets for other boys who are trying to prove their masculinity through gratuitous displays of violence.  This violence scars men for life and leaves us afraid to show affection, even to our life partners and our children.

The author of the article (David Petrie) explains that, "when the time came to give my daughter her morning bottle, I'd pick her up, I'd look out the window to make sure that no one was driving through the corn fields to surprise me at my door, and then I'd quickly say, "I-love-you-I-love-you-I-love-you" before cradling her in my arms and plopping the bottle into her mouth."  That kind of fear doesn't just come from healthy gender roles that we all should play.  That kind of fear derives from the perpetual threat of violence that was beaten into all of us as children and continues to this day.

The good news is that his regiment of "I love yous" worked.  He worked out that "love muscle" and can now say I love you at will.  He has liberated that small part of his life from the oppression of traditional masculinity.  I can tell you from experience that it feels great to be free!

The Costs of Fatherhood

In an article entitled "The Different Costs of Motherhood," the economix blog on the New York Times outlines a study showing that women with simpler job skills who have children make roughly the same amount as their peers, while women with more complex job skills who have children make 20-33% less than their peers.

While making the comparisons between these groups of women, they briefly note that men's careers are hardly affected by children.  Men succeed in earning more money by putting their families second, or more accurately by convincing themselves that earning more money is doing their proper service to their families.  They are willing to move their families from city-to-city, and work endless tedious hours in order to ensure that they and their family succeed.  In the survival of the fittest capitalist mindset, people either succeed by constantly growing and consuming more, or they fail.  But at what cost?

The sacrifices of a higher skilled father is actually being made, not just by him, but by the entire family.  When a father makes the choice to be as flexible as his childless peer and move to Dubai to pursue the big opportunity, he is either leaving his family behind, or taking his family along.  If he is truly as flexible as his childless peer, then the opinions, desires, and needs of his family in making that move cannot be considered.  He must be the captain of the ship.  A captain is an exalted position, but the things that really matter in life have nothing to do with one's ability to captain one's ship.  His position as a loving husband and father will always be secondary to his position as an earner, and that is the key to a life of alienation, even as he is surrounded by people who he loves.  Like the kidnapper who tells himself that his hostage wouldn't leave even if he opened the cage, the father competing with his childless peers lives in perpetual cowardice that his family is actually only a swinging door away from leaving him.

The lesson to be learned from this story is that rating equality based solely on earning potential simply misses the point.  A well lived life has nothing to do with one's CV.  The fathers who are competing with their childless peers should aspire to making 20-33% less than their peers.  We need to keep in mind that this study showed that the gap exists mostly among those with the highest earning potential, those Americans who are already making ends meet comfortably.  These fathers are saying that the difference between living comfortably and living extravagantly is worth the time with their children.  Unfortunately, we can easily calculate ones ability to consume the earth's resources by figuring out how much money we make (an overtly traditionally masculine calculus), but we still have no calculus for connecting with our loved ones.

Sexist or Feminist

Now it's the time where I pick a couple of subjects loaded with symbolism and rate them on the sexism scale.
1= Sexist (tends to add to the problem of inequality and misery through traditional gender roles)
5= Neutral (either is really neutral or is used by both sexists and feminists to further their goals)
10= Feminist (creates happiness by breaking out of traditional gender roles)

1. High Heels: Some lip stick feminists claim that wearing high heels is feminist because it is a reclamation of femininity, but I think it is crazy to think that it is a feminist act to wear high heels because it is "pretty."  Why?  Because pretty means sexually attractive according to the traditional masculine notions.  I would believe that it was actually pretty in a non-sexist way if it was considered attractive on men as well.  So on the sexist or feminist spectrum, high heels are neither, but women who wear them claiming that doing so is a feminist act are kidding themselves.
   Score-3
2. Stay at Home Moms: Many of them certainly feel under attack.  There was a time when being a stay-at-home parent meant wearing a pretty pink dress, hosting Tupperware parties, and denying oneself the option of a career.  However, that time is gone.  In the modern era, after three decades of movement towards women's liberation, things have changed.  Sure, there are still barefoot and pregnant types who are kept home by their evangelical husbands of the opinion that their wives should be submissive, but many of the stay-at-home moms that I meet (as a stay-at-home dad) are vigorously reclaiming the art of child rearing, which is the most important work of our society.  The biggest potential pitfall is the continued inequality of numbers between stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads.
   Score- 5

Man Whisperer?

Sometimes I feel like I spend so much time on this blog attempting to figure out how to make feminism better that I forget to rant against the blatantly sexist ignorance coming from the right wing gender bigots.  Well, now's my chance.
 
Fox News' (that's a good place to start ranting right?) Pop Tarts (even the column's name is offensive) recently reviewed a book called "The Man Whisperer."  (The book title goes on attempting to sound pseudo intellectual by including a colon.)  The basic gist is that women can control men by remembering that men "want nothing more than to be 'the man' in the relationship, the one who provides for and protects his woman."

Pop Tarts makes a point of telling us that the person writing this quote is female because she understands that what they are saying is sexist, she just doesn't understand that it is sexist to both women AND MEN!!!

If men are unable to handle successful women, it is because they themselves are still trapped behind the expectation that they should be 'the man' in the relationship.  Liberated men love powerful women.  Masculinity is enforced partly through alienation.  A man who is insufficiently manly is uncool and undesirable.  Although some women have started to see generosity, kindness and other paternal qualities as attractive, many men and women are still incredibly hostile towards men who are "pussies," "wimps," "pussy whipped," or "weak."

A man who is entrapped is, of course, terrified that his partner will find him weak and feminine.  When a man's partner is more successful than he is, the threat is that he will die alone (although even saying it makes me sound weak and effeminate, which is why most men never admit it).

The answer, of course, is not to perpetuate that fear by playing the damsel in distress to the armor bedecked power lifting white knight.  It is not to "stroke his ego" as the authors of "The Man Whisperer" suggest.  The answer is to liberate your partner from the fear of alienation by exposing masculinity for what it is; a snare entrapping men into being oppressors with fragile egos who need to be broken like horses.

Prince Charming

Nothing could be more true than that women have been stereotyped in children's films.  For too long, women were weak and helpless, awaiting the savior in the form of Prince Charming who would not only protect them from their peril but also marry them therefore giving meaning to their lives.

However, the films often focused on the women.  Aaron Sorkin defended his treatment of women in his new film "A Social Network" recently by saying that the multiple sexy women were objectives for his main characters, not characters in the themselves.  These Prince Charmings acted the same way in old children's films from Snow White, to Cinderella, to Lady and the Tramp, and Beauty and the Beast.  The women were weak, it is true, but the men in classic children's films were only objectives for those women to reach, overcoming their weakness by, either through brains or beauty, attracting a suitable mate.

Under the ill conceived influence of Third Wave feminism, modern children's films have attempted to make their films less sexist by making the women beautiful, brainy, and kickass.  In Princess and the Frog, and now Tangled, the princess ends up saving the incompetent Prince Charming more than once.  Rather than recreating the medium, these films have simply reversed the roles while hanging on to the discriminating values of a society that is not getting any closer to gender equality.  Now women are expected to be both man and woman, the rescuer and the rescued, while men are now impotent paralyzed objectives.  Even in this, they are still objectives because any woman worth her salt is still not worth any salt without a man, even if that man is utterly incompetent.

If we have women who can do "man things" in these films, why is it still impossible to have men who do "woman things" without it being a moment to laugh at that man's ridiculous incompetence?  I do not blame the film makers.  Film makers are merely the architects of the neurotic dreams of our society.  The particular neurosis in these films is the inability to accept that traditional women's skill has any value for men.  Equality will never be achieved until we can overcome that inability.

Sarah Palin is Right!

Well, almost right at any rate. Here is a remarkably insightful quote from her new book which was released yesterday. “The women’s movement used to be about honoring for women the same God-given rights that our country honored for men. It used to be about dignity and hope. It used to be about respecting women by respecting their choices—whether it is to be a nuclear engineer or a stay-at-home mom—not denigrating them when they aren’t sufficiently like men.”

• She has correctly identified how second wave feminism has been portrayed in the popular consciousness, and why there is a backlash away from feminism today.
  

• However, she is wrong in so far as she thinks that feminism writ large has ever really been about “denigrating” women's choices. Even if some women in the movement were resistant to the “stay-at-home” mom ideal, many (if not most) feminists had children themselves, loved their children, and were willing to fend off Grizzly Bears to protect those children (regardless of whether or not those Grizzlies spoke with a Minnesota accent).

• Palin is ridiculous in so far as she accuses liberals of being bleeding heart soccer parents who spoil our kids, while at the same time accusing us of being cold hearted bastards who “denigrate” stay-at-home moms.

• Her answer to the problem of second wave feminism is to put the “girliness” back into the newly liberated women. She does not understand that “girliness” is a bribe to keep women from true equality.

• Lastly, her style of feminism is a direct result of the Pandora's box opened by the lipstick sex-positive third wave feminists who tried to liberate sex, fashion, and one night stands without reclaiming child rearing, housekeeping, and relationship building. It is a short walk from “Sex and the City” feminism to "Pit Bull in Lipstick" Feminism.

So how can feminists break free of the unfair portrait that Sarah Palin has had so much success selling to America? We must reclaim traditional women's knowledge by sharing it with men. When men realize what they are missing, society will no longer look to the likes of Palin for expertise on gender equality because they will realize how completely Sarah Palin has been lying to us all along.

Home Ec-quality 101

A massive home economics movement would help equality. Without knowing about work that has traditionally been the purview of women, men could not possibly understand the true value and skill involved in such work. The Kamahamaha Schools in Hawaii used to have cabins where their female boarding students lived with orphan infants and young children to learn the best practices of raising children. They were eliminated in the 1950's, but why? Why can't we start day care facilities, or classroom sharing that are set up in a similar way, of course under strict adult control. If we made these classes mandatory, the benefits would be significant.

• Everyone, including men, would have knowledge about basic child rearing, including appropriate divisions of labor.
• Fathers would be able to have at least some limited experience with babies under supervision before the were on their own.
• The entire society would benefit from basic parenting skills, which is the fundamental building block of any society.
• Free or low cost childcare would be built in, and both parents would be able to contribute financially as well as with real labor, creating more economic security for poor families and middle class families alike.
  
  Most importantly, by having class time to explore the actual science of household management, we would all value these skills that have been relegated to a lower status. In fact, this work is very important, if not the most important part of life, and should be recognized as such and taught in our schools once again, but without the division of sexual differences. We can never have true equality until we start to realize that traditionally feminine tasks, like child rearing and housekeeping, are critical to our society. We can never see these tasks as equally important as business skills unless men and women are equally knowledgeable in these tasks. Learned helplessness is in fact not learned, but a lack of learning that creates perceived valuelessness.
  

Men Not Liberated Enough for Sex Work

An interesting article interviewing Australian sex worker Zahra Stardust details how she came to embrace sex work, saying that "at [bachelor] parties, strippers would use measures of crowd control, humour and taunt to dominate, humiliate and ridicule their male subjects." In the past when I have criticized sex workers for reifying sex stereotypes, many women defended the role of the sex workers. Let me be clear, I am not willing to comment on whether the sex worker is liberated or successfully acting towards women's liberation, but I do know that sex work plays into the neuroses that ensnare and oppress men. Men are not able to be directly oppressed by women. It requires the intervening act of another man to oppress and reassert masculinity in men. Here's how it works when Zahra dominates her audience.

• Men at strip clubs are there for the purpose of proving their masculinity. Enjoying and objectifying women are merely means of proof. While the women are performing for them, men are able to convince themselves that, as one conservative blogger put it recently, God's law is still in order and women are still subordinate to men.
  
• Men who go to strip clubs alone are considered strange, at best. You're supposed to go with your buddies. Why? Because it does no good to prove masculinity to yourself. You have to prove it to somebody, because it isn't real unless it's recognized.
• As Zahra is dancing, her audience is commenting on her dancing in degrading ways in order to convince themselves that, despite the 1960's, they are still hyper masculine. In the world of traditional masculinity, if you are not hyper masculine you risk abuse (sometimes merely social alienation, but often physical violence is employed to prove your weakness while being ostracized). The traditional object of abuse is woman. If men are subjected to that abuse it is a way of saying, "you are like a woman."
• Lucky for all self-threatened masculine men, a strip club provides ample opportunities to act abusively towards women who are required to shut up and take it.

At the end of the article, Zahra admits to being an idealist. I think that might be the weakness of the many in the 3rd wave. They believe that men are not in need of liberation, that men are in on the joke when women use sex as a liberation tool. Unfortunately, as one who talks to a lot of men about liberation (in fact, as one who is obsessed with figuring out what it would mean to be a liberated man), I can confidently say that men are still frightened of the dynamic at play in sex work, even the most liberated of men. They may want to see the women in front of them as individuals and skilled entertainers doing the same thing with sex that great philosophers do with paradoxes, but to believe that, they'd truly have to be idealists.

Baby Shower

I have been dis-invited from a baby shower. At first I was furious, but now it just makes me sad.

I am sad because I am a primary care-giver for a baby. My experience seems relevant to the soon-to-be mom, and they disallowed me from coming simply because I am not the right gender.

I am sad because the ritual of a baby shower is a significant opportunity to sit in a circle of sages to discuss child raising, and though many mothers will be in the room to share that wisdom, it will be kept as a secret from the father's of their own children.

I am sad because children that are hurt when their fathers are not invited to share and hear these lessons.

I am sad because instead of using this opportunity to share traditional women's knowledge with men and therefore recognize its inherent value, the women at this shower are ritualizing that knowledge so that men cannot understand it, and therefore cannot acknowledge it.

I am sad because fathers already have disadvantages when their child is born because they were not invited to partake in child rearing in their own childhood, and those fathers will feel all the more lonely, abandoned, and frightened when their child is born. They will feel either frightened or they will simply leave the childcare to their partners.

I am sad because these same women will expect their partner to help out in the first weeks of the child's birth, but because their partner will have no idea how to help, a great percentage of these women will be disappointed with their partners and unable to initiate sexual contact with their clueless partner for up to three years (see the previous entry at the end of October).

I am sad because I love being a part of my child's life, and these women want me to stay in my "place" and it makes them uncomfortable that I would rather talk about my son than hit golf balls and chug beer.

Although it is inappropriate for a straight male to admit it, when I was dis-invited, it made me very sad.

Oh well.

Why Charter Schools are Sexist.

There are a lot of reasons to believe that we need school reform, but there are a lot more reasons to be resistant to charter schools. One of those reasons is that charter schools are sexist.

Charter schools are often pitted against the public schools because of the new-found belief that teachers are getting a sweet gig.

1. First of all "what?" Teachers used to be thought of, appropriately, as people who had way too much education to be making the pittances that they were making. These teachers aren't making a heck of a lot more than they were two decades ago, neither are their jobs more secure. They are simply public servants. Sure, they need to live, eat, and have health care, and even be rewarded for bringing their experience back to their school districts year after year as opposed to going off to a private school, but they aren't being paid nearly what private sector professionals with similar education, experience and skill are being paid. The only reason teachers do what they do is because they care. They are not out to get our kids. Teachers are spending everyday in the classrooms looking our children in the eye and telling them how to become better people.
2. If there is a reason that this particular union of professionals is being attacked, I suggest that it is because it is the most successful, and one of the earliest, jobs that women could do professionally. Even before women were entering the so-called 'worlds oldest profession,' women were staying home with the children from the tribe and teaching. Is it not a little suspect that at the same time that women are losing seats in the house of representatives for the first time since 1930 we are scape goating a union that is overwhelmingly women for the downturn of our education system, and therefore the downturn of our economy, our morality, and our status as a nation.
3. Similarly, we have trumpeted the successes of "Teaching for America," an organization that turns teaching into a therapeutic job, like working the cash register at Target or the grill at McDonalds. The fact that charter schools are hiring teachers that are not certified speaks to an ideology that believes that pedagogy is meaningless. Charter school advocates are essentially saying, "Teaching isn't a profession that takes years of training to know how to do well. Teaching is something that anyone with an education can do." The education that they are speaking about is an education in the traditionally male academic realm, as opposed to the traditionally female realm of pedagogy.
   

None of this would matter if charter schools were outperforming public schools, but the numbers repeatedly show that they are not. The results are mixed when looked at from the up and down numbers, but when one takes socioeconomic status into account, it is clear that charter schools are getting people with a higher SES and doing more poorly with them than public schools would have, and that more and more often, children in difficult SES are getting lost in the schools where the children of people who are too busy dealing with their own difficulties to advocate for their children go. The only reason that we ignore the facts that charter school are a complete and total failure is to perpetuate the myth to which all of us try so desperately to cling. Charter schools perpetuate the myth that traditional feminine knowledge, such as teaching, is unimportant, intuitive, and easily picked up along the way. By not valuing this knowledge, we condemn it to being left out of the public dialogue and the oeuvre of things that we value as a society.

Meninists?

A blog called Meninist envisions a supportive role of men in feminism, but it neglects the basic facts about masculanization. It is not enough that men simply sit on the side lines like cheerleaders for women to catch up to men. Men must recognize how they too are oppressed and fight back.

Women will not attain equality until men too are liberated. Why?

1. Some schools of feminism have focused on equalizing pay and working conditions by getting women out of the home and into the work place.
2. At the same time, they have not made any effort to get men out of the workplace and into the home. If you don't believe me, see my last blog where I talk about how ill equipped men are to raise infants.
3. But when we say that women make too little, instead of saying that maybe men work too much (and therefore make too much), we are saying that domestic labor is not meaningful work because it is not "paid" work.
4. We degrade women by saying that the traditional realm of women is not as important as getting paid. We also oppress men by telling them that domestic labor was exactly what they thought it always was; thankless.

What we should be doing is not supporting women, but coming to the awareness that men and women should support each other in our scramble for equality and progress. After all, if we legitimately believe that the world will improve with more women in positions of so-called "power," should it not be equally true that the world would be better off with more men in positions of care-givers? Until we tell ourselves that power and money are not truly important, but a sideshow keeping us from equality, we will never actually recognize the important things in life.

Another Product of Masculinization: Less Sex

This months Parents magazine included a story about how new parents have less sex, often having no sexual interest at all.

First of all, the article is written entirely from the perspective of new moms. It seems safe to say that if there is a problem with a couple's sexual health after the birth of a child, that problem affects both parents, and a magazine with the title "Parents" should address the challenges of both moms and dads.

But the article also managed to be sexist against women by implying that all of the problems with a healthy sex life were because moms just weren't interested in sex anymore. It put all of the onus on women to find their libido and get back into the sack. The article quoted many women and studies that said, "67 percent of wives report a major drop in happiness and a significant increase in hostility in the first three years after having a baby" and "my husband was not there for me" and "libido goes hand-in-hand with a helpful husband" and "when a partner hints at sex, it often feels like yet another demand on her." Yet, the reasons behind this lack of libido are said to be evolutionary. Every woman in the article seems to imply that if their husband would help them out more, they would feel like having sex more, but then they conclude, not that husbands should learn how to better engage with their children, but esentially "that's just how it is." Why wouldn't they look more closely at the role that men are playing in this problem? Because they don't want to face the facts...

Women cannot be fully liberated until both genders are liberated.

These men spent their entire lives living in ignorance about how to raise an infant. The stuff of infant childcare remained mystery to the partners of these women right through pregnancy. Even at the baby shower, when all of the tools for raising a child are discussed, secrets are shared, stories are swapped, and a group of people set about preparing themselves for the task ahead, many times men are not welcome. Why is that? Is it not enough that we keep boys out of practicing for their role of fatherhood by not letting them play with baby dolls, by not writing them into the babysitters' club, by sending them outside when it is time to feed baby or give her a bath? Do we also have to find it creepy that men are preschool teachers, or kiss their babies in public, or even go to the party to celebrate and receive gifts on behalf of their child?

And then women are surprised and depressed that their partners are unable to jump right in and help during the early years of their children's lives. I want to suggest a cure to these sexual problems. Baby college. Just like in the Harlem Children's Zone, send your partner to baby college (and maybe you should join him) so that when it comes time for him to leap in and help, he can do so with eyes open, instead of being scared.

To read more about what fear does to create masculanized men, please read the first 5 submissions of this blog.

The Wheels on the Bus

Equality in parenting is the flagship of men's liberation. Just as women are fighting for equality in the workplace, men are fighting for equality in the home. Sometimes, we deny domestic equality to ourselves, as when we make the conscious decision to watch sports instead of doing domestic labor. Some of it is not voluntary. Like yesterday, when I was riding on the bus with several people, and all of them were enamored with the 7-month-old in my lap. Luca was fascinated with all of the attention, taking it all in by staring at each of his fans in the eye, which is a gender difference in and of itself. Boys who have been in daycare do not make as much eye contact as the girls in the crib next door, though boys who have been cared for by family members make as much eye contact as girls who are also cared for in the home.

When Luca turned his engrossing stare to me, I started to sing "The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round." Immediately, all of the people on the bus looked away from me uncomfortably. While I have seen strangers join in preschool songs for babies when mothers sing to them, I have noticed that I can bring an entire room to its knees by singing the controversial "Old MacDonald," or a treasonous daddy/baby rendition of Sandra Boynton's "Philadelphia Chicken." This subtle ostracism will continue, just as the Greek ostracism did historically, for about ten years until Luca is entering an age when it is acceptable for men to forge relationships with their children. Why are we afraid of men showing affection to their children? Do we believe that all men are lurking pedophiles? Are we threatened by improper masculinity? Are we just unused to the concept, like elementary schooler's are unused to romantic kissing, and even many adults are unused to same-sex kissing? Whatever the cause for this discomfort, it is real and it is limiting equality movements in gender, race, and class.

Daddy Kisses

According to Stroller Derby blog http://blogs.babble.com/strollerderby/2010/09/22/should-dads-kiss-their-daughters-on-the-lips/ "An anonymous woman, who signed her letter “Want My Husband’s Lips for Myself,” finds her husband’s habit of kissing his 5-year-old daughter on the mouth to be “a sexual gesture and very inappropriate.”"

The writer's opinion derives from the belief that man are unable to control their sexual desires. We used to say that women were bringing it on themselves when they were raped because everybody knows that men can't control themselves. Second wave feminism, meanwhile, has rightly convinced that blaming the woman for their sexual assaults is wrong, but we haven't internalized the necessary corrolary that men are fully and completely in control of their sexual urges.

Masculinity makes men out to be animals, incapable of true relationships with women because they become sex machines the second they get a peck on the lips. I say, kiss your daughters, kiss your sons, kiss your friends. Liberate your lips! Let's have a national kiss your loved ones day and continue our liberation from masculinity.

Institutionalizing Women's Work

Parenting has long been the province of mothers, and so the expertise in parenting has been developed over the course of millennia by women. This has led many to claim that the women's work of parenting was intuition based, and discredited as not knowledge based. However, much of what these women developed was valuable. Many children were raised successfully, healthfully and literate despite great odds. The best of the parenting technology developed by these women was often discovered by the wealthy (the oppressors) and used with their own children.
Powerful kings and wealthy lords deliberately sought out lower class women to raise their children, and often supplemented the technologies of these women with educators from Aristotle to Galileo. Eventually, America got into the act by forcing black women to raise the children of wealthy white slave owners, a trend that continues with chains of indebtedness and advertising driven desire instead of iron to this day.
During all of these millennia, women's work was used by the oppressor against the oppressed, even though the technology was developed almost exclusively by the oppressed. This is par for the course with human history. Education was used in exactly the same way until it was institutionalized to create equality by offering public schools and then by (attempting to) desegregate them in the 1950's. All technology is harmful until it comes into the hands of the people and becomes a tool for equality.
Starting in the 1950's, cognitive science started to make the women's work of parenting available to the people. It turns out that a lot of things that women have been doing for millennia were right, and a lot of other parenting techniques were harmful.
The Harlem Children's Zone has had an immense amount of success sharing this traditionally women's technology with people who never had access to it. The base of the Harlem Children's Zone is parenting classes. In this way, they began to institutionalize women's work and value it society wide, and as a result of giving it value we are creating equality. The Harlem Children's Zone has gone from having schools that were desperately below average, to average and above in only a little less than a decade, not by changing how children are educated, but by giving children's parents access to the best parenting technology. This technology was pioneered, hypothesized, and tested by women exclusively, and now it is being valued by society at large. More importantly, it is being valued as a skill by men, who are coming to realize that women's work may not be "intuitive" and therefore exclusive to women, and may therefore be accessible to everybody, the same way that office work and leadership roles are not exclusive to men.
This institutionalizing of technology is what made America great. Universal access to neccesities such as public education and governmental decision making create freedom precisely because they create equality, not in form but in fact. And it is this idea that continues throughout Europe, but has come to wither on the vine in the hands of people who proclaim themselve patriots while actively attacking the very thing that makes the country histroically notable. I suppose if I were busy attacking everything that was good about my country, I also would want to shout louder than anyone else in the room "God bless America!!!" because, like an abusive husband, I wouldn't want the country to wake up and realize that I was not contributing.

Encouraging Risk Taking

We've all seen the stereotype of the father figure who watches his children playing out in the road while sipping a beer and leaning over to another man saying, "teaches 'em to watch out for traffic." This stereotype plays in to the traditional fatherly role as mostly a passive observer until it is time to protect the child physically from outside threats. While both the passive encouragement of risky behavior, and the physical protectiveness seem like opposites, what links the two roles is that they are both seen as not nurturing. In the last posting, I pointed out how protectiveness actually can be nurturing, so far as it enables our children to take risks. Here, I'd like to point out that encouraging risk taking is also nurturing. However, like protectiveness, if it is taken too far it can become harmful, even becoming neglectful. It is truly sad when a father does not participate in the child rearing to the extent that his children take unnecessary risks without his knowledge. On top of being harmful for the children, it also denies those men the most significant and enjoyable task of life, i.e. child rearing.
Men and boys take more risks when testing and in business. This risk taking has helped men ask for raises more often than women, and helped boys take more educated guesses on the SATs and ACTs than girls which results in higher scores, even though boys have worse grades on average than girls. Being able to take a risk is probably the thing that men are most able to turn to their advantage over and over again. If men are dominant in our society, one of the reasons is that they are far more willing to take risks. Particularly with girls, but also with boys, men in our society are in a better position to encourage safe but meaningful risks on a daily basis, from the playground to socializing. This talent is extremely important to the traditional women's work of parenting. We should not take seriously the stereotype of the bad father watching closely while his children to play with fireworks while Mom stands disapprovingly in the background. We should laugh at that stereotype because we know that those kids will score higher on the SATs than their peers, apply to more prestigious schools, seek more salary raises, and maybe even allow their children to take more risks than the children of the inactive father next door.

Protectiveness

Men often use their urge to protect those around them as a tool for controlling those persons. We tell our loved ones that they cannot do dangerous things and deny our loved ones the ability to make their own mistakes and get hurt. We have to realize that our children have to be able to fail and get hurt or they will never become adults. However, there are times when all parents need to stand up and be a straight up papa or mama bear. Through questionable methods, men are given the tools at a young age to be forcefully protective and keep our children from harm. By harnessing this talent effectively, and channeling to healthy protectiveness, men can use it to make our children feel safe enough that they are willing to try, fail, get hurt, and then try again.

Men's Gift for Parenting (and Other Feminine Things)

Just as we have come to acknowledge the gifts that women bring to the work place, we too should acknowledge the gifts that men bring back home. While we have this discussion, we must be careful not to accept women's or men's talents as inherent. We do not know how much of these traits are inherent and how much of these traits are learned because the overwhelming societal pressures put on us from infancy through until the day that we die. However, by acknowledging gender traits (be they nature, nurture or more likely a combination of both), we can have a discussion about which gender traits are a benefit for care giving and housekeeping. After all, the most important thing we will ever do in our lives is raise a child, and housekeeping is a part of all of our lives.

Since I became a father, I have noticed that some traits that I have associated with masculinity have helped me be a better caregiver. While, traditional masculinity often keeps men alienated from their role as a father, by examining masculinity and masculinization, I have been able to break from the harmful parts of masculinity, while attempting to keep those parts of masculinity that are helpful to care giving. The next few blogs will include discussions of some of those traits that are traditionally associated with masculinity, how they can help dads become better dads, and how they can hurt dads deeply by alienating them from their children if they go unexamined.

Who is We The People?

Lately, I have been trying not to let this blog become party political. However, I will comment here on a Tee-Shirt that I witnessed several Tea Party Members wearing because it is the kind of thing that might go unnoticed if you didn't think particularly on the gender and race implications, and that is what this blog is for.

The shirt said, "I Am, We the People." This is one of two possible kinds of claims. It could be an historical claim. As such, it is accurate, but not exactly surprising. Clearly our founders meant older wealthy white males. According to a New York Times poll recently taken, the Tea Party is mostly exactly that. Note that if this were a woman of color making the claim that she was "we the people," it could also be seen as historical, but as recognition of how far the U.S. has come since 1982.

The shirt could also be a political statement. This is more likely what the wearers meant, because it is a more assertive and less obvious meaning. However, it has an equally racist and sexist meaning. The wearer is saying "I am, we the people" as opposed to you or they whoever you or they are. This divisive statement seems to reflect the position of Glen Beck that those who disagree with him are socialist, which is a scary and strange foreign political philosophy and therefore unAmerican. This defines the tee shirt wearer as a real American in exactly the same way as the historical meaning does, by holding as a positive example a political system that deliberately excluded those who were foreign and strange, namely black Americans, and those who were drawn to philosophies that resembled modern socialism, namely the Mechanics and the Guilds of New England. Those people were deliberately excluded in 1782 because to include them would be to diminish the power of the rich white male almost completely, a fear clearly expressed by the tee-shirt wearers even today. The insidious racial and sex question that lies below the surface is "Who then is a real American." I think we know what the wearers answer would be.

The Plague of Individualism

Sometimes, despite my better efforts, I somehow manage to explain some of this blog successfully to someone. Their answer usually is, "I just try to treat everyone like an individual." As though I were trying to treat people like 6 headed hydras or something. "I'm sorry..." they seem to be saying, "I can't tell whether you are a boy or a girl, and if I could, I would ignore it." Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but when I meet a man, I treat him differently than when I meet a woman. For one thing, I don't speak to men at the urinal. To be fair, I've never tried speaking to a woman at the urinal. Also, I don't look men in the eyes until I am introduced. If you women (or people who identify as women) out there don't beleive me, try walking through Harlem or South East DC dressed as a man and looking everybody you walk past in the eye. I promise you will be beat up, or worse. I make decisions about people before I even meet them. We all do, it's how we survive.

We can't see individuals. All we can see are balls of social shit that we call individualism. So just get used to it. You will never be color-blind, you will never be gender-blind, you will never be able to see the "individual," and you will never be able to float like a butterfly to the rainbow land above the clouds. Jews have been trying to get rid of the badges of slavery for 6000 years. How are we able to overcome race and gender in less than 40? Hint: we're not.

Pro Male Hall of Fame

Thank you to Dove for Men for commercials that make men look sexy, attractive, and fulfilled while highlighting their relationships with their children. The new Dove for Men ads are not pinpointing fatherhood as the point behind the ad, or trying to pigeon hole men as fathers, but just showing men as whole beings, and including in that whole being a portrayal of these men as kind and loving, even affectionate fathers. When I watch these ads, I am more confident than ever that the movement of which I write is already underway, and I am optimistic for my own sons future in this society.

Hall of Shame? All of the super bowl ads, and the Olympics Tide ads that could easily say "To their parents, they are all champions." but instead decides to say, "To their moms..." thereby leaving me to wonder, and what about me..? Do I have a place in this process?

Red Tent or Speak Easy?

Over the past several months, I have joined my wife on perhaps the most magnificent and meaningful activity of human life. Week after week, I have watched her grow my child. During that time, I have attended 9 appointments to her midwives, and witnessed her give birth. I have witnessed and felt more than I knew I could or was welcome to witness and feel. Most of the time, I was the only dad in the waiting room. I attended and helped to plan a baby shower where only one man showed up (thank you Damian). Throughout the entire process, women and men alike were astounded when it was made evident that I had done my research and that I had opinions on how Luca would start his life. Like the Tide commercial that ran during these last Olympics ("To their mom's, they're always kids"), the entire process was aimed at moms, and the word dad never even came up.

However, I was welcomed by the midwives and doulas, and the women in my life who wanted to talk about the baby. If I felt uncomfortable, it was only because there was a bouncer to the door of my masculinity asking, "Are guys really supposed to be here? Oh yeah? What's the password?" At my wife's first appointment, the midwife proceeded with the gynocological exam without asking me to leave the room, and casually offered to show me the cervix. It was clear at that moment that the flap to the door of the "Red Tent" was wide open, and it was only my self-oppression, my inner-masculinity-bouncer, that kept me from going in. But I went in. What was the pass word? A simple, "Thank you, yes."

The Sadness/Madness of Groping

Sexual assault and sex work has long been considered linked to sexism against women, but part of the point of this blog is that all oppression of women is at the same time self-oppression. Groping (a.k.a. sexual assault) is one obvious example.

A woman who is sexually assaulted is ashamed by the attack and also deeply hurt, and we should not downplay that fact, but we should also consider how it is always true that men are the ones who are overwhelmingly the sexual assaulters. What is it about maleness and masculinity that leads men to such unhealthy sexual relationships with the people around them that they are driven to, or aroused by, forceful and violent interactions with strangers whom they are victimizing? While there are some who say that groping is inherently male, I disagree. Groping is inherently masculine, but not male. Men are not bad people somehow evolutionarily driven to sexual deviance any more than women are evolutionarily unable to handle themselves in the work place, or driven to "hysteria" by over-exercise. But men are trapped in the self-oppression of masculinity, and one of the rules of our self-confinement is that our relationships cannot be overly healthy or loving. We must remain aloof, the bread winner, the cowboy with no ties to our families or our lovers who inevitably make us weak or (horror of horrors) "pussies." But we are still sexual animals and have a need for affection. When healthy love and sex are not available to us, we will fulfill our needs through unhealthy desperate means. How better to remain aloof and unhealthy, while satisfying our sexual desires than to make our victims into the objects of our affections ? No movement for women's equality will be complete until men are free of their self-oppression, because as long as men need victims, women will have to be those victims.

Formal Equality= Global Warming Skeptics

For some reason, global warming skeptics seem to believe that a snow storm, or a cold snap disproves the basic and easily proven fact that the global temperature is, in fact, rising. No matter how many times reasonable people try to explain to them that warmer air means moister air and therefore large storms become more likely, or that single weather anomalies are not particularly relevant to the global climate, they will not believe any data unless it is easy and straight forward. What does this have to do with formal equality?
When people say that equality under the law is enough, they point to successful women and black men, rather than looking at the larger statistical picture which shows that schools are more segregated than before Brown v. Board, that neighborhoods are more segregated than before 1968, and that the unemployment gap continues to grow with almost 40% of black men in the District of Columbia unemployed. They would like to point to Barrack Obama and say, "see, there is no more racism because a black man is president."
Occum's razor applies to scientific theories, not the data being collected to prove those theories. Occum's razor does not support using only one datum. That's not how one simplifies a test. In order to be valid, we must collect as much data as possible and then find the most simple explanation for all of that data. When we collect all the data, we see that despite a cold winter here, or several big snowstorms there, the global temperature is actually rising, and despite a black man being president and a woman appointed to secretary of state, the senate is still mostly older white men. To ignore these facts is stupid, ignorant, or part of a deliberate attempt to undermine America and the world.

Man Up!

Although, the Super Bowl Ads last night did not have as many bimbos offering themselves to the male viewers, they were still laden with anti-man/ pro-masculinity content. While the typical anti-man ads are filled with beautiful women in a way that (obviously objectifies and dehumanizes women and) undermines the male viewers understanding of healthy sexual expectations, the ads last night offered an entirely different way of undermining men. One Dodge commercial spent a long time talking about what men give up everyday. What were these inexcusable slights to men? Things like listening to your spouse as she talked about her day. Atrocities like caring about what your spouse buys and wears. One commercial for a hand held television showed a man following around his bimbo girlfriend with a bright red bra draped across his shoulder and looking sad and emasculated. How were these men supposed to escape or excuse the shame that they feel by supporting their partners? CONSUME!!!
These ads are trying to shame men into buying products that can "save" their masculinity. But, at the same time, they are shaming us out of healthy relationships, and even good sex. There is something erotic and delicious about brazenly following around your girlfriend with a bright red bra draped across your shoulder as if saying, "that beautiful woman is sharing her sexuality with me, aren't you jealous?" These ads are trying to undermine the importance, the deliciousness, and the meaningfulness of our relationships with women. Don't let them succeed. Do not be a slave to shame. Masculinity is not worth being saved.

Daily Show Watchers are Stoned Slackers

Bill O'Reilly told Jon Stewart that Daily Show watchers were all stoned last week. Just a quick note, Bill. In my law school, if you hadn't watched the Daily Show that day, there was someone in the study group who could give you a play-by-play, and if none of us had watched it, we would stream it on our laptops during a study break. Perhaps some of us were stoned, but there were enough of us who passed the bar and have gone on to successful careers (and still watch the Daily Show everyday), that I'd be hard pressed to call us slackers. P.S.- as a response to the complaint that Fox News is pushing an agenda, not reporting the news, the critique rings hollow. It's most reminiscent of Pee-Wee Herman's famous "I know you are but what am I" rhetorical tactic.

Formal Equality

The new face of discrimination is formal equality. The Supreme Court can hide behind formal equality when they legalize the exclusion of persons of color from colleges, or the exclusion of women from higher ranking jobs. Most recently, the courts have fallen back on on formal equality to give the rights of citizenship to corporations. They use the argument that labor unions and trial lawyers will be able to spend as much money as they want on campaigns, so it's okay that corporations are able to spend as much money as they want on political campaigns. First of all, they are implying that there are only two possible points of view, that of the labor unions and trial lawyers (which somehow is the same) and that of corporations. Just because trial lawyers support democrats, and labor unions support democrats, doesn't meant they could get along if they had to wait in the same line at Dennys. This formal equality bigotry is pervasive and unstoppable, but worse, it is entirely ungrounded in facts or reality. This February, coming off a fantastic Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I have to think that MLK didn't see this coming, and he would have been upset that the country is using his name, and his most famous words, to promote formal equality at the expense of actual equality.

The Problem With the Economy

We experimented with replacing government regulation with insurance and derivatives to create a sustainable and secure economy. It started in 1980 with Ronald Regan, and ever since then the economy has been fraught with turmoil, up and down like a manic depressive 1950's housewife. This latest crash proves, beyond all doubt, that derivatives do not secure risk, but only secure profits. It is time to bring back the Roosevelt regulations and remember that the Republicans are the banks' booty call, not populists defending the people. If we cannot be excited about Democrats, because they are all moderates, we can at least agree to be excited about marginalizing the Republicans, and none of their desperation should be considered anything more than tantrums intended to defend Wall Street, or at least the corporations that make most of their profits being traded on Wall Street.

Hidden Brain

Please don't fool yourself into believing that saying nothing about race and gender, or raising your child so-called race blind and gender-neutral will keep your child, or yourself, from making assumptions based on race or gender. Science has proved that by saying nothing, we say that the status quo is correct. Three-year-olds are already able to make assumptions based on race, and gender assumptions start in the womb. If you don't talk about it, you foster it. So I propose this challenge. Think and talk about race and gender everyday. If you work with only white people, think about why that is. If you work with people of color, think about how you interact with those people and if your "hidden brain" may be making assumptions for you. If you work with women, do the same. If you don't work with women, quit.

Okay, New Format.

I loved the MANifesto, and I finished it, but became aware that no one was reading it. Which is okay. Therefore, I'm going to try to go to a shorter format that is less dependent on reading the previous submissions. I understand that our Twitter generation is not able to grasp complex topics as often because of our wanting boil things down into shorter formats, and that is why I am eschewing complex topics, and trying to boil complicated issues into short paragraphs. This is doubly great, because our generation is extremely impulsive, and I think I can turn this blog into something way more impulsive, and hopefully, from time to time, amusing. Therefore, Right Be Done, is now equality based turrets syndrome with a hint of "fuck you." If nobody reads it, at least it will be cathartic.