is a single mama in the city, super-savvy editor, writer, video host and shameless shoe whore.
Guess what? Grrrl power isn't hurting our boys. So what is?
Tuesday, May 20, 2008 Let us go back to the days of combat boots and a newly-pierced belly, of protests and grassroots activism and smoking clove cigarettes while producing a 'zine that spilled out all the secrets and desires and soul-borne poetry that wrapped around a thesis and papers and so much reading and highlighting and scribbling notes in the margins that the text itself became illegible. Yes, those were (as you know by now all too well) the grad school days.
Perhaps these days have been on my mind because I've been speaking to Lulu a lot about what she's been talking about in her off-hours. Regardless, I was reminded this morning over coffee and reading the news on my laptop how many times I (and we in our dusty little office in the corner of the Language Arts building where we could reasonably be ignored of our blaring Ani DiFranco and laughing over the frustration of committee meetings with the president of the college or dean of whatever) entertained this question:
"Women Studies?! Well, where's the Men's Studies?"
To which, we (in our infinite wisdom and indelible snark before snark was even in our collective lexicon...oh the olden days) delighted in replying:
"Oh, that's the rest of the college."
Yes yes yes, you've heard it (and probably here) a thousand times. It is just so freaking true. And I was puzzled every single time I fired off that reply how the addition of one area of study could threaten so many people. No one was arguing when agriculture or Russian history or entomology were adopted into other departments. Was I so wrapped up in my Sharpies and posterboards that I didn't hear western civ people or anthropologists or pursuers of paleophytology studies all defensive and worried about the students waving around dried cicada shells and combine parts?
I brushed it off to being Oregon -- home to the crunchiest and most conservative people I've ever met, all in one big, beautiful, tofu-and-jello-mold potluck of a state.
The crazy thing is, that theme, that question, that strange and competitive and threatened defensiveness has also made its home at my table right here in Chicago. The topic is back to boys and girls but the conversation is around parenting and our kids and who will get or be or inherit what.
My friend Charlene and I had our own conversation about this yesterday. It was a quiet IM talk about how frustrating it is to hear people stereotype boys and their abilities or inadequacies as verbal, sensitive, intuitive people in their early years. As mothers of boys, our sensitivity is heightened. We don't want our kids pigeon-holed.
We talked about how many times, at the sandbox or some kiddie party, other parents have spouted off about how boys don't have the verbal skills/emotional intelligence/relationships/sensitivity/whatever that girls have. Could there be big, sweeping truth to those statements? Sure. Sometimes. But not every time.
And even if it is, we agreed we don't want our boys to hear that, to fulfill that pigeon-holed prophecy of who they are or should be or could be.
It makes me anxious because it always feels like to me that there are only so many words to be doled out among preschoolers, so many kids who walk early or sleep through the night first, only a few open slots for nurturing children in the playgroup. That is, of course, not the reality, but the air is thick with that competitive spirit. Or at least with the need to snatch it up for your own kid to have or live up to in this time of their life.
As I read this wonderful and affirming article about all that feminism has brought for girls and women and how that has not, studies are showing, detracting or subtracting anything from boys, I felt like my worlds of empowering women and raising a boy were coming together.
I am all about working for a world of equity, for lifting up girls in the areas where they have been ignored and neglected. I am a feminist and always have been and always will be, long before the combat boot grad school days and long after my son is out in the world on his own. But I also don't think we have to scramble for space as we dissect and redivide what is doled out to the genders.
We are still incredibly male-centered in many aspects of our culture and collective conversation. We have an opportunity to change that (with Women Studies among many other radical and liberal activisms) as we sit around the sandbox, comparing notes and creating space for our kids to be who our kids are. That, to me, means not assigning what is male or female or inside the little box someone else decided long ago they need to be in because of the way they were born. I'm also not going to teach my boy that by being pro-grrrl power, there is somehow less for him or that he isn't as this or as that because he's a boy or who he inherently is.
My boy happens to be verbal and sensitive and nurturing. He also loves cars and trucks and dinosaurs and t-ball. He often wears my necklaces and he inevitably has a scrape on his knee and bruise on his shin. Where he falls among the girl and boy characteristics, I could care less.
That conversation is for the rest of the preschool.
Or college. Or other part of the park. Over here, we're listening to Ani DiFranco, talking about stegosaurus scales and making some sweet protest signs with our friends.
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