Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

"relief parenting" is like calling "babysitting" - it's your kid, you are parenting

i've been fortunate in my freelance work of late that they allowed me to have days off occasionally or come in to work late when the nanny's schedule was in conflict with our work schedules. anyway my wife and i work about the same amount of hours and she's the one who is still feeding our little man at night since we're cosleeping. it's been far tougher for her than for me, since i don't have a 15 month old pawing at me at 4 AM. my mornings now that i'm off work consist of playing in the living room with him, making him breakfast, taking him on walks, teaching him words, reading with him. i think it's fantastic! it shifts things. it's also made us want to move to a cheaper city soon so we don't have to devote ourselves to insane schedules in order to merely have a decent place. we'd like to work normal hours and have a nice place for him.

xp -- phrase was used in a tongue-in-cheek manner, but thanks for the correction guys, I was really not aware of my role in my own daughter's life

er I guess that was also in reference to mh's post, sorry for overly defensive post, touchy subject

to backtrack a little, what I was really trying to get at was the way the baby spending the vast majority of time with mom impacts parenting. For example, multiple times a week K has screaming fits where nothing I can do will calm her down, but when mom finally comes over she stops immediately. This was something I didn't understand prior to being a parent, when I assumed it would always be like "Ok now my turn to get up, now your turn to get up." Sometimes this works, but sometimes it just does not, because K is more bonded to her mom than she is to me by virtue of time together and breasfeeding.

fathers are terrible parents & terrible ppl in general

pretty sure after the first year or two it becomes a depressing "I could leave work earlier today, but my kid barely acknowledges me anyway, better to work an extra hour because we'll need the money"

always good times on the feminist theory thread

I missed the beginning, how did this thread get on to fathering? Pretty sure we could use a fathering thread.

it was about breastfeeding

I always feel like posting a lot when someone mentions something I can't do, because I certainly can post.

I mean, it is an issue of relevance to both gender and feminism, I guess, although if it's becoming too much of a threadjack we could start a new thread.

dadsplaining

There's a whole board about parenting isn't there

But I think it's not out of place here, today's thread convo

all of this is about feminism anyway
i think the article that L posted a link to earlier today points out why: it all comes down to relationship. Can everything that has to do with other people (which i would argue *is* everything, socio-culturally speaking), parenting-related or otherwise, ever be always "fair" and/or "equal"? I don't think so, not at this time in history anyway, but everything can be reflected upon in light of a broader definition of equality + individual circumstances. Reflection like this is really not that hard to do nor does it take more than 2 seconds, but it's hard to get into the habit of. I think that part of what that article is saying is that when you have kids, you (though unlikely all parents do) become more reflective on your relationship to your child, to your partner, parents, siblings, and by extension the world. Of course, there are other ways to do that without having a kid, but having a kid seems to force the matter, is how I interpret that.

I always feel like posting a lot when someone mentions something I can't do, because I certainly can post.

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Thursday, September 13, 2012 4:34 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

irl lol!

But to get back to Hurting's earlier comment:
I think women and men have internalized the idea that women = primary babycare giver to a greater extent than they often realize.

This reminds me of that recent study that men in management were less likely to promote women in their employ or hire women if they had stay-at-home wives (I may be misremembering part of this). I am not sure what the baseline here is, in that there's probably still a sexist bias in the absence of this variable, but this is kind of a self-fulfilling belief. If you are a man married to a woman who is a primary caregiver, or if you are a woman acting as a private caregiver, then you are more likely to have internalized this idea as a universal thing than someone for which that isn't the case.

I have my suspicions this also applies to children who grew up in that situation.

p.s. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, my dad was kind of a workaholic, so I fall into the latter category but I like to think I'm learning.

yes, the problem is the judgment of experience (especially from a place of believing in a universal), as if one way of being a loving, caring parent is better than another way (breastfeeding or formula, stay-at-home mom, working day, vice versa, etc)

or for that matter one way of being a person is better than another way (man or woman, rich or poor, etc.)
this is what i mean about everything being in relationship constantly - we are always making judgments, and some of those judgments keep us alive and well, while many are mistakes (hopefully to learn from... on macro and micro levels)

(i meant working dad not day in that last post)

I do wonder sometimes about how my unconscious attitudes about this stuff are overdetermined, e.g. my father was a warm and affectionate dad, but he was also the primary breadwinner and a slight martyr about it and not there anywhere near as much as my mom. And now here I am.

the louis ck youtube has 0 to do with what i am saying. i said i would like to not have kids in part because i don't think it's possible or think it's too difficult to maintain a distribution of household/childrearing work that would be acceptable to me given how stuff is. i think it is unfair and i can avoid that challenge by just not doing it. i am not disagreeing that dads can try hard at it and do a good job and i am not offering an opinion on anyone's particular arrangement. not having kids does not mean i can't have an opinion on how i feel about myself having kids. and it's assholish to say parents > nonparents.

yeah, that's sort of why i took most of the day to post itt, trying to get where that comes from and why it makes me angry

some good (tho very new yorker) satire: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2012/09/17/120917sh_shouts_allen?currentPage=all

not that that louis ck bit isn't funny - it's funny bc it's him and he's good at being that loveable asshole 'this is my experience, disagree or whatever, that's what i see' stuff. obv he's not actually saying that non-parents don't have problems or profound experiences.

yeah i get what he is saying. he's not talking about me though because all of my complaints are completely legitimate and everyone else's are petty bullshit until they have seen for themselves what i've seen.

I like being in a marriage where we both work like a team. When J. works we both are in work mode. I wake up early, before he does, get breakfast on, put lunch together, turn on the coffee pot...he tends to August while also dressing, we drive to the job site, drop him off, get back home and start our day. In the last job we moved from a house to a motel and breakfast was not as easy to do, so he'd grab it at the yard. Errands included grocery shopping (daily, those motel fridges are small) for his lunches and our hot plate dinners, doing regular laundry and his work laundry. Then we'd wait for the call to pick him up. He'd get home and have an hour or two of down time, showering, decompressing then we'd eat dinner and hang together. Six days a week. Now that we are on a small break between jobs, there are no schedules and we pretty much hang as a family all day. J. helps with August, makes dinners... We keep each other in check, it is not without a few kinks some weeks.

Compromise and appreciation go far. In the last marriages I was all too aware of the inequality for lack of both. This team work strategy is all new to me but works.

harbl: I know what you are saying too...I felt the same for years and years.

well exactly, right - comparing our problems to other people's problems (or successes) in a more-important/valuable vs less-important/valuable way does not lead to much in the way of social equality and personal-political understanding! i see feminism as it is now saying that equality is in who we are not on a hierarchical scale of what we do or how we do it, but in being alive and in relationship with everyone/thing else. <-- maybe a bit of utopian mutual respect thinking but i'm gonna stick with it

xps

xp (to tera) That's kind of what weekends are like for us, and I always am struck by how well, but just BARELY, it works when we are BOTH in full gear all weekend getting shit done and handing off K to one another, and I always think "it would be great if it could be like this every day, but how the hell does H do this by herself?"

it's assholish to say parents > nonparents.

― horribl ecreature (harbl), Thursday, September 13, 2012 7:10 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I meant "harder than" not "better than" fwiw

yeah i appreciate a lot that it is hard. i don't so much mind hard stuff but i think it is too hard or a different kind of hard than i want to do.

yeah, and I think not doing it because you don't want that particular kind of hard is a very good and valid reason to not do it

I am the last person who will try to talk you into having kids if you do not want them, and I love being a dad

That Jenny Allen NYer article is pretty hilarious!

these ppl are ridiculous

http://www.1flesh.org/rebellion/

"we are a bunch of college students"

the part where they explain how contraception leads to abortion by creating a culture of not wanting children

i hope it's not bad that the part about birth control making women less stunning than usual makes me laugh.

"creating baller graphics and video"

Can't wait for these kids to all get herpes

"hormonal contraception is associated with...HIV infection" fuck these people

this is a popish plot

among ye

do these advocates of awesomecy have any experience that tells them how much more awesome this one 2 one sex is or are their results merely speculative

stopping myself from posting the latest horror from overcomingbias.com

lol, i read the headline and was like "not something i think i'll enjoy reading about here" and skipped it

it is just straight detrimental.

straight up.

so i've been reading ellen willis' no more nice girls collection and there are so many quotes i want to post to ilx. there's this particular essay where she gives a list of questions "most likely to get a group of people, all of whom like each other and hate Ronald Reagan, into a nasty argument," and of course I thought of ILX immediately. I know we've done a few of these before but i'm really tempted to make a poll thread out of them.

Is there any objective criterion for healthy or satisfying sex, and if so what is it? Is a good sex life important? How important? Is abstinence bad for you? Does sex have any intrinsic relation to love? Is monogamy too restrictive? Are male and female sexuality inherently different? Are we all basically bisexual? Do vaginal orgasms exist? Does size matter? You get the idea.

here's the other quote i read that i thought belonged on an ilx thread somewhere:

On the family, debate is now virtually nonexistent, at least in the mass media; the idea that the problems besetting contemporary families might have something to do with the structure of the institution itself -- that domestic life may need to be transformed, rather than shored up with one or another palliative - - has dropped from public view, a mind-boggling feat of collective repression.

If anything, this repression has become more complete in 2012 (the quote is from the collection's intro which i think means it was written in 1992?), esp w/ the rise of marriage equality as major cultural progressive touchstone (where Americans of all kinds seem to aspire to create new families, but families nonetheless). Um - also this one:

But the [anti-PC] campaign has hit a nerve because it gets at something real. Coercion and guilt-mongering -- the symbiotic weapons of authoritarian culture -- inevitably provoke resistance; when the left uses these tactics it merely encourages people to confuse their most oppressive impulses with their need to be themselves, offensively honest instead of hypocritically nice. Perversely, racism and sexism become badges of freedom rather than stigmata of repression, while the roots of domination in people's rage and misery remain untouched.

Anyway, I thought about posting this stuff in her RIP thread but I don't really know a ton about Willis (except that she's a really compelling, provocative writer who I enjoy reading) and I'm more interested in discussing her ideas anyway. I'm happy to move this stuff to that other thread, or to start a new one entirely though if ppl don't think it really belongs here.