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.