Ten Things To Do Instead of Shopping

Friday is Buy Nothing Day, y'all.

In honor of consuming less, living more, preserving natural resources, reducing waste, and modeling responsible behavior for my kids, I'm avoiding the mall on Friday. Of course, this is easy for me since I don't live near a mall, I don't generally enjoy shopping, and I absolutely cannot stand the "holiday bustle" of retail environments during the holidays. Really, it's just an excuse for people to be irritable and entitled and shitty to the person making their latte. You work in a coffee shop in a mall for three Christmas seasons, and you'll despise it for the rest of your life too. But I digress.

In honor of Buy Nothing Day, I've decided to compile my own list of Ten Things To Do Instead of Shopping. Here we go:

1. Bake something yummy
2. Play in the snow
3. Read some awesome blog posts
4. Serve lunch at the soup kitchen
5. Make a sock monkey
6. Read a book
7. Play a game with your kids/friends/neighbor/partner/whomever
8. Sort through your closets and bookshelves and toyboxes, and send unused items to the thrift store
9. Read the newspaper all the way through while petting the cat who insists on sitting on your lap while you read the paper, and drink your coffee at a leisurely pace because goddammit you don't have to work today
   
10. Make homemade holiday decorations.

What did I miss?

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Drown the Dolls

In order to prove that I am in fact still alive and able to blog (albeit from under a mountain of work and miscellaneous life stuff I need to deal with), I'm writing a post that basically just asks a question.

I've gotten a couple of emails about this art project: Drown the Dolls. It purports to be a feminist response to our oppressive beauty standard as embodied by Barbie. The artist has created a series of photographs and paintings of Barbies drowning. When I look at the images, though, I don't so much get the message that the beauty standard is being drowned as that images of violence against women - especially attractive women - are both acceptable and visually appealing in our culture. In fact, in most of the images only portions of the doll's body is shown, which is another disturbing feature of our visual culture.

Am I being too sensitive? What's your take on this? Is this a constructive feminist statement or a continuation of a disturbing trend in how we portray the female body?

How it's done

Dear Mainstream News Media,

In light of your repeated failures when reporting on news stories involving transgender individuals, I would like to bring to your attention a recent story found on a college basketball blog, of all places. The post can be found here. As you read through the story you will notice some things that the author does rather effortlessly:

1. uses the correct pronouns consistently, all the way through
2. never refers to the individual's "real" or "actual" sex or gender
   
3. recounts the individual's history in a respectful way that situates the person in his relationship with gender without making it salacious or sensationalizing his story
4. positively notes the respectful way that the individual's school has responded to him
5. never suggests that the individual has some sort of political or sexual agenda motivating his gender transition
   
6. talks about the individual's feelings about his original gender assignment in a straight-forward way that encourages compassion and preserves his dignity.

None of these things appear to have required a superhuman effort on the author's part. None of this required arduous editing and rewriting. Perhaps this is because the author appears to have simply approached the story as if it were about a real human being, deserving of just treatment and human compassion.

I propose that this approach could serve as a model to guide you in your coverage of news stories involving transgender people. Just think of them as humans, and treat them with the kind of respect that you want to be treated with. I promise you, it's not that hard.


Thank you for your time,

Rachel

That about sums it up

My Favorite Election Night Moment: Christine O'Donnell's Concession Speech

Democrat Chris Coons defeated Republican Christine O'Donnell by 18% in the Delaware Senate race, but in her concession speech, she announced "we have won." And you know what? She's right. Well, "we" didn't win anything, but she sure did, which is why even compared to some of the night's victory speech's, O'Donnell's was among the most enthusiastic.

So, what was she so damn happy about? She was happy about winning what matters, duh. O'Donnell received the most news coverage of any candidate in the midterms, quite a feat considering few had heard of her before the primaries and she never posed any kind of serious general election threat. That she received the bulk of that coverage for being a clown doesn't matter either. What matters is, she's a star now.

Book deals, speaking engagements, maybe even a reality show if we all pray loud enough. Those are the rewards that await Christine O'Donnell, and with just a moment of listening to her speech, you know she knows it. Chris Coons might have gotten the most votes, but all he got out of the election is one of the shittiest jobs in the country.

So, congratulations to Christine O'Donnell, the biggest winner of the night.

November 3 at 10:00AM by Matt Tobey over here.

You know what to do

A question on natural childbirth

Last week I got a question in my inbox prompted by That Post on Natural Childbirth that I haven't had time to answer yet. Around the same time this awesome post: Baggage Check appeared on The Unnecesarean, and it made me think about the same question again. So here's the question:

Given your experience with NCB, and given your wish to avoid both the extreme natural birth advocacy and the dogmatic medical model of birth that's so dominant, what will you tell your girls when they're old enough to be having their own babies (if they choose to have babies)?

I have to admit that I'm not sure what I'll be thinking or feeling about it that many years down the road. But I would say something like this now. "Natural childbirth is not perfect and it's not easy, but it's doable, and it's worthwhile." I didn't have a traumatic birth experience, but I didn't have a conflict-free one either. I didn't glide through it with no effort or emotional distress, but it wasn't anywhere near impossible or as dangerous as we've been taught to believe. And if I hadn't had to consistently resist the medical staff involved, it would have been a lot less stressful. But in the end you can't know how things will go, and you should be prepared to utilize whatever resources you honestly need. The hope is that you can use the technological resources to your benefit rather than being coerced into following a script that requires you to submit to them whether they're necessary and/or helpful or not. And the hope is that you'll come out of the childbirth experience feeling stronger and more confident/supported/heard than you did before. That would be a perfect childbirth experience.

The Fallout

Trigger warning: sexual abuse.

So, remember how my uncle the molester went to prison and my grandpa the molester died and I promised some posts about that shit and then I never posted anything? Yeah...

I just spent a few days with my bestest BFF helping with her wedding, and when we get together we talk a lot, and about everything, even in the midst of frantic last minute wedding preparations. So the topic came up, and it occurred to me that one of the most pervasive experiences you have growing up as a kid who was sexually abused is that you always wonder what each experience is like for "normal" kids.

Of course, I've thought about this before. When my grandpa died I felt really sad - more than I had expected since I basically have no relationship with him, and haven't for years. But that's what I felt sad about. Not sad that he had died so much as sad that he had made it so that I didn't want a relationship with him. Sad that I lost out on that experience. And this was exacerbated by the fact that my grandpa was actually a pretty good grandpa to the kids he didn't molest. He was funny and quirky and playful and helpful and attentive and just so deeply flawed and terribly damaged in this one way that made all the rest of it useless and out of reach for me. For most of my cousins, he was a great grandpa, and they had a really good relationship with him. It would be easy to dismiss the lost relationship if he had just been an all-around asshole, but of course, that's rarely the case. So it's much more complicated than we tend to think, and how we tend to portray abusive relationships in pop culture.

I didn't always just feel sad about it. Through the years I've felt kind of guilty at times when I would go home to visit and would have no interest in interacting with him. And then that guilt would trigger anger that he made it that way and that my family wasn't better at giving me an escape route from having to see him all the time. And this stuff is so complex and subtle that it takes years to sort out. I think over time I got really good at recognizing the emotions and thinking my way through them and finding my own escape routes, or being evasive and emotionally distant when there was no other escape route. And I got over the whole guilt and resulting anger thing. So now what's left is the sadness that the experience of having a healthy relationship with a grandpa through your teen years and young adulthood (my other grandpa was pretty awesome all the way around, but died when I was 12) just wasn't an experience that was available to me.

Thinking about my reaction to my grandpa's death got me thinking about this dynamic where the abused child is always aware of the difference between hir experience and the imaginary "normal" experience. I think this is especially acute during those years when you're exploring your sexuality and navigating intimate relationships with peers. These can be uncertain times in themselves, but it seems like the experience of abuse heightens the uncertainty and undermines the confidence you may have otherwise had. Of course, it's impossible to know, since you've never experienced this developmental phase any other way, and kids tend to have an exaggerated sense of this fictional "normal" person. So this is something I need to give a little more thought to, but I'd be interested in hearing if other people had this same experience. I think it's important to talk about this stuff because there's such a tendency to either act like abuse victims are thoroughly damaged, completely powerless creatures, or like everything is in the past and thank god we can move on now that you've worked through this thing and it doesn't effect you anymore.

More later...

Picture of the day

From growingupheroes.com.

The Art of Womanliness, Redux

A comment from the previous post:

Jack Danger Canty said...
This blog post and discussion fascinates me. So much so that I wanted to find out what, exactly, a site would look like if these same principles of honor, kindness, integrity, etc. were written for an all female audience.

So I built one: artofwomanliness.heroku.com

It takes the live site at artofmanliness.com and translates it so that the gender of every piece of text is swapped. We now have, for example, a complete article on "Archetypes of American Womanliness"

As I read it I think "most of this makes sense, though these archetypal ladies seem to have poor relationships."

Funny!

Happy Coming Out Day

Monday Miscellanea

A former Guantanamo prisoner describes the experience as "Kafkaesque" and sues the U.S. government.



Senator Jim DeMint thinks that sexually active unmarried women and openly gay individuals should not be allowed to be teachers. Apparently single, sexually active, straight men can totally pull it off, though.



A shift to HTML 5 will give marketers unprecedented access to the info on your computer. Sing it with me

marketing makes the world go 'round
it makes the world go 'round
some marketing firm soon will target you
if no one's targeting you now ...

In North Carolina a court ruling curbs zero-tolerance school policies, which are all too often extreme and over-reaching, and serve to further marginalize the very students who most need help and support from their schools and communities.



And in other news mainstream American obstetrics confirms that research has little or no impact on how they practice medicine. In spite of a new study (which confirms a number of previous studies, incidentally) showing that light consumption of alcohol during pregnancy is not only not harmful to the child but may in fact involve some benefits, American obstetricians remain committed to their anti-alcohol dogma. Among other things, the study found

Boys whose mothers were light drinkers during pregnancy were 33% less likely and girls 31% less likely to have behavioral, emotional or intellectual problems than nondrinking mothers.

Both boys and girls in this category were also less likely to have hyperactivity: 27% and 29%, respectively, and scored higher on measures of cognitive functioning.

The opposite was true of children born to mothers who were heavy drinkers. These children were more likely to have problems across the board.

Of course, European doctors and moms have known this for years decades centuries. But why would we let the facts intrude upon our practices? Everyone knows that pregnant women are not to be trusted. If alcohol in excess is harmful to a developing fetus, then we must forbid pregnant women from alcohol consumption altogether. The poor dears won't be able to grasp the concept of "light drinking." And even if they could process such a subtle concept with their delicate lady brains, they probably wouldn't be able to limit their consumption of alcohol once they started drinking anyway. Everyone knows that self-control is not a female characteristic.