I know. I know from the moment the door opens I will be entering a world and that fist impression will stay with me for the rest of my life.
I am twenty-two years old. I have met the man who i want to be my husband, the father of my children. Although I haven't told him this, there is a silent understanding, not yet officially breached.
He has invited me to his former home, the home of his parents. I will be entering their abode with all the foreboding of budding youth, hope, future, stretched out before me.
I am shaking, and the world is turning oh so slightly, spinning in time to the beating of my heart, the pounding in my temples from freight.
Richard stands seemingly disconcerted beside me. He is humming softly to himself as we wait for the answer to his incessant knocking, the sound of a man saying, open up, I belong here. This is my home.
He forgot his keys.
Of all days to forget his keys, the day he is bringing me, his maybe "intended" into the family fold for the first time.
That all-important meeting of the people, his people, them and me.
The door handle moves. Richard turns towards me, his eyes peering slightly over the top of my head.
"Nervous?" he asks.
I think I am about to faint. Am I nervous?
My mouth is dry, my lips feel as if they haven't moved in hours, or is it days.
I am standing next to Richard with his close proximity as my sole support. Am I nervous?
I smile slowly, letting the pull of my feelings force the opening of my lips as I am about to lie, to say "Oh no," in that nonchalant, almost coquettish gesture I've used so often. But I know this time I would never be believed.
Richard sees me struggle and laughs.
"Don't worry, ma petite," he says. "You'll get through it. After all, think of the many years I survived with them".
'That isn't the point,' my internal self rebels against his attempt to soften my edges, to calm me down. You might have survived them but what if... what if they hate me, what if they have no other intention for the rest of their lives than to devote themselves to my destruction, to our destruction, of rendering you and me asunder, finito, gone and done forever and ever...
Oh, can this be happening to me! I moan on and on, internally wishing, hoping this moment would end and somehow it would just be me and Richard alone and then
I hear a lock unlock and a second lock unlock and the door opens and two people, not one, but both of them stand before us.
They are in the doorway, we are still outside
and they said in unison
"Welcome to our home" and they kiss me, they kiss me "hello."
And Richard says, "I warned you."
Linda Zises
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
[blackfemlens] Pink Princesses, Blue Commandos
By Sikivu Hutchinson
My daughter is no princess. Loud, assertive, and headstrong, she would just as soon as stomp on a castle drawbridge with her big size six feet than pine coyly from it, twirling a dainty lock of hair waiting for a Ken doll suitor. Yet the multi-billion dollar media marketing regime is poised to shoehorn her 2 year-old self into being one. As any parent with eyes and a pulse knows, a trip to Americana’s favorite non-unionized big box retailers is a crash course in the enduring power of gender segregation. Trundling through the “girls’” toys aisle, maneuvering the explosion of pink frilliness, one expects to bump into June Cleaver or Donna Reed. Baby dolls, play ovens, play houses, strollers, dress-up kits, make-up and the ubiquitous princess accessories, addle the senses. Around the corner in the boys’ commando-in-training section, trucks, balls, science kits, building sets, Legos, blocks, action figures, guns and other rough n’ tuff paraphernalia signal a return to the jungle of discovery, adventure, violence and enterprise.
In the ostensibly secular democratic West, this surfeit of consumer options represents “choice,” rather than cultural indoctrination. Parents can just vote with their pocketbooks and not buy these products. Unlike in the fundamentalist monolithically gender repressive Middle East little American girls certainly aren’t programmed to be subservient. Women in power broker positions abound and capitalist consumption is politically "neutral."
Indeed, proponents of shattered glass ceilings point to recent job data that suggest American women are actually making bigger employment gains than are men. The decline of the construction and manufacturing industries has severely limited men’s job opportunities. Coupled with the higher proportion of women in four year colleges, American women would seem to be making out like gangbusters.
There are serious flaws in this premise. First, the gender wage gap shows no signs of narrowing. According to the Center for American Progress, women are the primary breadwinners in over 1/3rd of American families. Women are still relegated to the lowest paying service industry jobs in child care, clerical work, domestic work, and teaching. And black women, who are more likely to be single working parents than are women of other ethnicities, remain at the bottom of the gender wage ladder. Secondly, and most egregiously, the new job data fail to account for the double and triple burden of women’s work. Regardless of whether they are custodians or corporate execs, women continue to be saddled with the majority of child care, housework and adult caregiving. The minute a working mother hits the door down time and breathing space are sacrificed for an array of cleaning, parenting, cooking and counseling duties. Sacrifice is a woman’s creed and to-die-for duty. And it is this message that the big box retailers’ flotilla of pink baby dolls, strollers, play houses, et al. are designed to instill in little sacrificial princesses in training.
The ubiquity of this social programming inspired two British women to start the Pink Stinks campaign, which targets retailers who market gender segregating toys and accessories. Yet the flip side of pink stinks is the dominion of blue. When my students presented a workshop on gender stereotypes in retailing to a group of their peers, the sole male participant commented that he had been targeted for not conforming to the model of “hard” masculinity because he liked to do hair. For young men, any activity that is remotely associated with caring or nurturing is feminine and therefore “gay.” As feminist writer Derrick McMahon notes in his article “Boys and Baby Dolls:” “Boys who wish to play with baby dolls are seen as punks, sissies, and weak…parents are quick to tell little boys that they have no business playing with baby dolls.” While young girls who “crossover” and express interest in traditionally masculine pursuits like car maintenance or science are tolerated as tom boys going through a phase, boys are punished with the heterosexist stigma of being less “manly.”
The consequences of this are exemplified by the epidemic of black male homicide. Trained to be hard, swaggering, aggressive and indifferent to the value of each others’ lives as mere “niggas,” young black males are inured to the violence they inflict upon each other. What would it mean then for the future of African American communities if there were a paradigm shift, and boys were raised to be caring and nurturing? Biological determinists argue that boys gravitate to cars and guns because they are genetically hard wired to do so. In her groundbreaking book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, neuroscientist Lise Eliot debunks this assumption through painstaking analysis of scientific studies on alleged innate sex differences. She argues that there is “little solid evidence of sex differences in children’s brains” and that adult perceptions of gender difference strongly influence children’s behavior.
As my daughter begins to navigate the minefield of gender norms and expectations she’ll be constantly told what is proper for a girl. She’ll be hounded by peers, adults, the media and organized religion to be sexually desirable to men on the one hand and chaste and virginal on the other. In a nation of liberated “post-feminist” women, she’ll be propagandized with the contradictory message that romancing kitchenware, cooing after baby dolls, and being a precious, sweet “daddy’s angel” are the keys to fulfillment. And as a third generation feminist she’ll be ably equipped with her loud mouth and big feet to storm the drawbridge of gender conformity.
Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a Senior Fellow with the Institute for Humanist Studies.
My daughter is no princess. Loud, assertive, and headstrong, she would just as soon as stomp on a castle drawbridge with her big size six feet than pine coyly from it, twirling a dainty lock of hair waiting for a Ken doll suitor. Yet the multi-billion dollar media marketing regime is poised to shoehorn her 2 year-old self into being one. As any parent with eyes and a pulse knows, a trip to Americana’s favorite non-unionized big box retailers is a crash course in the enduring power of gender segregation. Trundling through the “girls’” toys aisle, maneuvering the explosion of pink frilliness, one expects to bump into June Cleaver or Donna Reed. Baby dolls, play ovens, play houses, strollers, dress-up kits, make-up and the ubiquitous princess accessories, addle the senses. Around the corner in the boys’ commando-in-training section, trucks, balls, science kits, building sets, Legos, blocks, action figures, guns and other rough n’ tuff paraphernalia signal a return to the jungle of discovery, adventure, violence and enterprise.
In the ostensibly secular democratic West, this surfeit of consumer options represents “choice,” rather than cultural indoctrination. Parents can just vote with their pocketbooks and not buy these products. Unlike in the fundamentalist monolithically gender repressive Middle East little American girls certainly aren’t programmed to be subservient. Women in power broker positions abound and capitalist consumption is politically "neutral."
Indeed, proponents of shattered glass ceilings point to recent job data that suggest American women are actually making bigger employment gains than are men. The decline of the construction and manufacturing industries has severely limited men’s job opportunities. Coupled with the higher proportion of women in four year colleges, American women would seem to be making out like gangbusters.
There are serious flaws in this premise. First, the gender wage gap shows no signs of narrowing. According to the Center for American Progress, women are the primary breadwinners in over 1/3rd of American families. Women are still relegated to the lowest paying service industry jobs in child care, clerical work, domestic work, and teaching. And black women, who are more likely to be single working parents than are women of other ethnicities, remain at the bottom of the gender wage ladder. Secondly, and most egregiously, the new job data fail to account for the double and triple burden of women’s work. Regardless of whether they are custodians or corporate execs, women continue to be saddled with the majority of child care, housework and adult caregiving. The minute a working mother hits the door down time and breathing space are sacrificed for an array of cleaning, parenting, cooking and counseling duties. Sacrifice is a woman’s creed and to-die-for duty. And it is this message that the big box retailers’ flotilla of pink baby dolls, strollers, play houses, et al. are designed to instill in little sacrificial princesses in training.
The ubiquity of this social programming inspired two British women to start the Pink Stinks campaign, which targets retailers who market gender segregating toys and accessories. Yet the flip side of pink stinks is the dominion of blue. When my students presented a workshop on gender stereotypes in retailing to a group of their peers, the sole male participant commented that he had been targeted for not conforming to the model of “hard” masculinity because he liked to do hair. For young men, any activity that is remotely associated with caring or nurturing is feminine and therefore “gay.” As feminist writer Derrick McMahon notes in his article “Boys and Baby Dolls:” “Boys who wish to play with baby dolls are seen as punks, sissies, and weak…parents are quick to tell little boys that they have no business playing with baby dolls.” While young girls who “crossover” and express interest in traditionally masculine pursuits like car maintenance or science are tolerated as tom boys going through a phase, boys are punished with the heterosexist stigma of being less “manly.”
The consequences of this are exemplified by the epidemic of black male homicide. Trained to be hard, swaggering, aggressive and indifferent to the value of each others’ lives as mere “niggas,” young black males are inured to the violence they inflict upon each other. What would it mean then for the future of African American communities if there were a paradigm shift, and boys were raised to be caring and nurturing? Biological determinists argue that boys gravitate to cars and guns because they are genetically hard wired to do so. In her groundbreaking book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, neuroscientist Lise Eliot debunks this assumption through painstaking analysis of scientific studies on alleged innate sex differences. She argues that there is “little solid evidence of sex differences in children’s brains” and that adult perceptions of gender difference strongly influence children’s behavior.
As my daughter begins to navigate the minefield of gender norms and expectations she’ll be constantly told what is proper for a girl. She’ll be hounded by peers, adults, the media and organized religion to be sexually desirable to men on the one hand and chaste and virginal on the other. In a nation of liberated “post-feminist” women, she’ll be propagandized with the contradictory message that romancing kitchenware, cooing after baby dolls, and being a precious, sweet “daddy’s angel” are the keys to fulfillment. And as a third generation feminist she’ll be ably equipped with her loud mouth and big feet to storm the drawbridge of gender conformity.
Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a Senior Fellow with the Institute for Humanist Studies.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Yoga on the Great Lawn:New York City 10,000 strong
So this is what women's liberation looks like, I thought, sitting on the grass of the great law in New York City along with more than 10,000 mostly women awaiting the start of a yoga class followed by a drumming session.
It hadn't rained yet and on the stage was this pot-bellied man sporting a huge Afro, fully clothed with a huge beard that hid everything except his eyes. Clearly, he did not fit in. But neither did the images projected onto a larger-than-life screen viewed by the assembled many and by the helicopter circling overhead, images of first a man's head and then a woman's projected without benefit of neck or a hint of shoulder. How un-yogish can you get!
But the women didn't seem to mind or notice. The audience of thousands did what Yogini's do. They focused, ignored what didn't belong, and had a good time. They sat in groups, teacher and students all mixed up talking, looking at their fellow yoga practitioners.
It would be hard to find a more strikingly beautiful group of woman anywhere in the world; and on full display, clad mostly in spaghetti-strap tank tops and tight Lycra pants. Only the privileged members of the "work crew" were told to wear the uniform: grey, knee-length pants and light blue tops which covered everything (which in this place, at this setting, was less than "in the spirit"). Tank tops would have been more appropriate.
The Cooperate stage show seemed to go on endlessly while the audience awaited their fate. To go on or cancel and promise a "Rain date".
A compromise was struck.
A little Yoga - downward facing dog, plank, upward facing dog, mountain pose, hands to heart in prayer to whatever or whomever, and the sound of a long long long OHMMMMMMMMMMMM filled the Lawn and entered into the minds and hearts of all.
The benefit of being seen in public without having to "cover up" and without fear of man's stares are extras to the benefits of Yoga, the spiritual, physical, emotional discipline that women are embracing world wide.
This day's event is the result, almost the culmination of a new Woman's Liberation Movement and I'm loving it!
Next onward to California's Love Fest
then back to New York for a promised Rain Date.
Maybe this time it will be 20,000 strong and more.
Linda Zises
Criticalwomen.net
WBAI Radio
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