Monday, December 27, 2010

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!

Sunday, December 19, 2010

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.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

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

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

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.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

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.