Good Enough

I've been reading a very short essay called "Never Just Pictures" by Susan Bordo because my students have to read it and I'm always one step (only) ahead of them. It's a typical essay written in the 1990s about body image in fashion advertising . I've read it before, but isn't cool how different things resonate for us at different times in our lives. In her discussion of how it is that we find super-skinny, nearly-dead-looking people attractive, she says:

Freud tells us that in the psyche death represents not the destruction of the self but its return to a state prior to need, thus freedom from unfulfilled longing, from anxiety over not having one's needs met. Following Freud, I would argue that ghostly pallor and bodily disrepair, in "heroin chic" images, are about the allure, the safety, of being beyond needing, beyond caring, beyond desire. Should we be surprised at the appeal of being without desire in a culture that has invested our needs with anxiety, stress, and danger, that has made us craving and hungering machines, creatures of desire, and then repaid us with addictions, AIDS, shallow and unstable relationships, and cutthroat competition for jobs and mates? (Seeing and Writing 239)

And I am thinking about how Auburn's football team can "win" but not win at all because it wasn't a "good enough" win. Do you think we expect too much? Of our football teams? Of our bodies? Of our selves?

Will we wind ourselves in a knot so tight that it implodes? At this point, implosion and death feel like the only ways out. Is there another route out of our over-worked, over-stressed, over-competitive, under-nurtured lives?

When I start to think about "having my teeth fixed" or about "buying that diet pill" I think I may have lost touch. Yet, I do think those things -- and more often than I care to admit. I listened today to two BEAUTIFUL women discuss the shortcomings of their calves and having plastic surgery to "fix" their problems. I mean, they have bodies I would KILL for. But they aren't happy either.

I don't know. I just wonder if we might start preaching a philosophy of "good enough" and what the hell that might sound like. Maybe like (as a start):

so just let me try
and I will be good to you
just let me try
and I will be there for you
I'll show you why
you're so much more than good enough...

--Sarah McLachlan "Good Enough" from Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, 1993

1942

In reading and responding to Ang's post on Co-ed softball, I remembered something I learned recently.

C's grandmother told me that when she was pregnant with C's father, she was asked by her mother if "she was really going out like that" when she was about 6 months pregnant. Apparently, in her mother's time (C's great-grandmother's time), women did not go out into public places after they were showing. Yes, this was 20th century America.

So when I hear about the debates over breast-feeding in public, I guess I should remember that while we have a long way to go, we still have come a long way.

Banned Book Week

How many banned books have you read?

Muscadines and scuppernongs

Not only is there a difference between fat and skinny asparagus, there is also a difference between muscadines and suppernongs (beyond the purple/yellow).

I used to think that the color was the only difference, but I've been buying them recently, and there is a taste difference too. Muscadines are sweeter. They are also what grew in the backyard of my great-grandparent's house, and they are, therefore, triggers for all sorts of memories with each seedy bite.

Now, a woman checkout clerk made a comment to me as I was purchasing my muscadines the other day. She said, "Are those tha grapes with all them seeds in 'em?" I smiled and said, "Yes. But they are worth it." She looked at me as if she doubted that.

All in all, I think that they are worth the seeds, just as fresh cherries are worth the pits. So few things are left that are wild in this suburban landscape. (I keep hearing Ani say "Spring is super in the supermarket, and the strawberries prance and glow. nevermind that they're all kinds of tart and tastless as strawberries go. meanwhile wild things are not for sale anymore than they are for show")

So, I've been buying blackberries, blueberries, and muscadines. I've been thinking how they were all better when I picked them myself. When they ripened on the vine. When they were free.

Complaint #684

I like shoes. Yes, yes, I know all of the gender implications there. But just wait, it gets worse:

Some of the shoes that I like best in my closet are shoes that also hurt my feet, which, of course, I do not like. As a rule, I try to stay away from shoes that hurt my feet. But occassionally the aesthetic value wins over the comfort value. Friday and today I wore (two different pairs of) shoes that hurt my feet.

Why do I do this?

How many men who do this to their feet? How many women who do not?

Academic women still at a disadvantage

Check out these excerpts from The New York Times, September 18, 2006

"Panel Says Institutions Hinder Female Academics"
By CORNELIA DEAN

Women in science and engineering are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and outmoded institutional structures in academia, an expert panel reported today.

The panel, convened by the National Academy of Sciences, said that in an era of global competition the nation could not afford such underuse of precious human capital. Among other steps, the report recommends that universities alter procedures for hiring and evaluation, change typical timetables for tenure and promotion, and provide more support for working parents.

...


For 30 years, the report says, women have earned at least 30 percent of the nations doctorates in social and behavioral sciences, and at least 20 percent of the doctorates in life sciences. Yet they appear among full professors in those fields at less than half those levels. Women from minorities are virtually absent, it adds.

The report also dismissed other commonly held beliefs that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families, and so on. Their real problems, it says, are unconscious but pervasive bias, arbitrary and subjective evaluation processes, and a work environment in which anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a wife is at a serious disadvantage.

=====================================

I added the boldface.

Wow. Especially with all of our long talks about domestic work, this rings a bell for me that I don't want rung. Even in academics, where I tend to think that people understand the problems of sexism, the institutions are filled with the expectation that working people don't do the domestic stuff.

Gathering the data

Let's beat a dead topic...

Been talking to women lately. (Nothing new about that). But after the conversations here during the past week or so, I have been asking some of the women that I know what their experiences have been in regards to housework.

Here is the data so far:

I've talked to 6 women, all of whom are in relationships (some married, some living with partners, and some of the partners are female, some male). All of the women are white, highly educated (most with graduate degrees), middle to upper-middle class, and most have working partners who have college educations.

All of the women I talked to have had (some bigger than others) problems in their relationships because of housecleaning. In general, it seems that they want things cleaned more often, more deeply, or more regularly than their partners are willing to do voluntarily. The ones that can afford it, have (or continue to) hired outside help to solve the problem. The others do their best to either just tell the partner what they want done (hoping that they don't become nags) or swallow their desires for a clean house as often as possible. Two have children, and that does indeed, they claim, make the problem both worse and more important to solve.

It could be that my friends are like me. That actually makes some sense to me, so this little survey is probably not representative of anything fair and unbiased.

But in any case, I'm not the only woman out there are struggling with this. One friend even said that she felt every man she'd ever lived with or dated expected women (either her or their mothers) to do the cleaning if any cleaning was to be done.

It seems to me that these women (and me) want clean living spaces and our partners are less worried about it (some to the point of never cleaning without being asked, begged, or nagged).

Women: am I wrong?

Partners: why don't you want to live in a clean space? I'm going to take you to my mother's house and show you what living in a house that hasn't been cleaned in 20 years looks like. Maybe you'll change your minds. I took Tyler there once, she nearly vomited.

I mean, I know that we were (or most of us were) sloppy/dirty as teenagers and college students, but at some point, many of us grew up and decided that if we wanted to have dinner parties, if we wanted our house value to stay up, and if we wanted to enjoy sitting in our living rooms, we had to dust, sweep, mop, do dishes, vacuum, and clean the sinks, showers, tubs, and toilets.

Attack away.


I will keep asking questions. I'll keep you updated.

When I first knew...

Aunt B over at Tiny Cat Pants had a post the other day about the moment she first knew she was a feminist.

I have such a story, though I would argue that I didn't know anything about "feminism" at the time. But this was a moment when I first knew that something was "up" in the world that I didn't understand or like.

This is a story that I sometimes tell (with a little variation) to my freshman as a moment in my life that I can chart as a "life changing event."

Okay. Here it is:

I was around 7 (give or take a year) when I was sent home from school for having head lice (this is the part I usually skip). It was horribly embarrassing because they call you out in front of the entire class, call your parent, and send you home. Mom was mad because she had to come get me, and she was not happy about the lice. So we went to the drug store, stocked up on the appropriate medicines and combs, and went home to treat my problem.

So, I was scrubbed and combed, rinsed and repeated more times that my scalp wants to remember. It was a painful process. In the end, it was decided that my hair had to be cut off. I don't remember caring too much about the hair, to be honest; I just didn't want to have lice anymore. The hair went.

Soon after, I was in K-mart watching another kid play a hand-held electronic football game. I stood behind him and yearned to play, but I was too timid to ask for a turn. I don't know how I was dressed, but I imagine I had on jeans and a t-shirt. I was not thinking about anything but the lights and beeps of that little football game when a woman approached us from behind and said to (what I think must have been ) her son, "Let the little boy play too."

I looked around me. No one else was there. There were three of us: the mother, the boy playing the game, and me. I was the boy she referred to. Me? a boy?

After the confusion, I understood that my haircut, the simple length of my hair, must have made her mistake me for a boy. This had never happened to me before even though I always wore masculine clothes and no jewlrey, because (I reasoned) I had had long hair for as long as I could remember. I realized that the way I look (my hair, my clothes, the toys I am interested in, the shape of my body) signifies my gender, not my biological sex. I also realized that I was attached to the label of "girl" and that I did not want to be a boy, even if I didn't mind looking like one, acting like one, or having the benefits that come from being one (remind me later to tell you about motorcycles).

The root of my "gender chip" (see previous comments on this post) seems to reach to this moment. There may have been other moments, but this is the one I remember.

Me: wanting to play football, unwilling to assert myself, and shocked by the news that I seem (to others) to be something I am not.

Firing the Yog Teacher

So, what does Anklebiter mean when he says, "fire your yoga teacher?"

I mean, is it because it was after yoga class that these thoughts came to me?

Is it that yoga now takes up a lot of my time? Or that I talk about yoga too much?

Is it that my yoga instructor is a woman?

Mmmmm

If I were to fire her, should I find a new one? I mean, is it the teacher or the practice that is objectionable?

Anyone?

What I meant to do

I meant to write a post on Friday about the grocery store. I'll get to that shortly.

I meant to watch all of the football game on Saturday.

I meant to call back several people this weekend.

I meant to take some new pictures to add to my flickr account.

I meant to finish grading another set of papers.

I meant to finish that chapter in August.



None of it is done.

I'll start with the first on the list, even though the vehemence has now dissipated.

The grocery store.

I was buying groceries last Thursday night after yoga class: a woman with a half-full/empty cart in Kroger at 8:30 pm. Only one clerk was working. The line to check out was about 5 people deep, so I stood there (unwilling to pick up a magazine to pass the time) and watched those around me.

In front of me three women, with carts fuller than mine, thumbed through copies of Good Housekeeping and People. A man walked up behind me to join the line. He carried a hand-held basket containing 3 or 4 items. Another man was using his credit card to buy his single bag of items.

Finally, a clerk came and opened the "Express" line (for 12 items or less), and into that line skirted 3 more men, all of whom had hand-held baskets.

I thought of my previous post and the responses in which we are all careful to argue that gender and sex are not the same thing. But there we were, women with full baskets and men with a few items.

I had to ask myself, why was I doing the shopping? How much of the shopping did I normally do? I was startled at my own answer: most of it. And most of it is done alone but for two people.

Someone told me recently that I have "a chip on my shoulder about this gender thing." Yes, I think I do.

And today in one of my classes a white male told a black male that he was stereotyping because the black male said that white people always think he is white when they hear him on the phone because he doesn't "sound black." Yes, I think he was stereotyping. Or at least he was generalizing.

But the problem is, it is easy to stand in the position of power and condemn those of us without it for our complaints. Even if those complaints are over-generalized and stereotypical, they may hold some validity.

There were four men in the grocery store; all of them were buying less than 12 items. There were four women in the same grocery store; all of them were buying 20-50 items.

So, I know that I can't say that women do the shopping based on that one account. But doesn't that one account mean something (especially when it seems to match account after account from my own past and the accounts of some others)?

What I mean to say is, the person is political right? When is the personal enough?

telling stories

Sometimes a story doesn't get to the heart of it. But it is all I have.

Sometimes I fly around it, circling like a sea gull, hoping that I will find a moment in which I can dive right to the center and grab it by the throat.

My new therapist has me searching through that same old pile of rocks that I've searched through time and time again, but she has offered me a lens I've never tried before. The rocks are filled with glowing embers and streaks of color that I missed in every previous shake down.

Sometimes a story is worth a million pictures. A little girl, a little boy, an explosion that upturns a country and a house in the rural South.

An endless desire to clean up the pieces, to sweep away dirt from childhood, follows me from there to here and fuels a flaming need to keep a house tidy. Another gripping compulsion to take care of them, to fill in their gaping holes with my personal successes walks under me like my favorite shoes.

Sometimes a story is not enough. But I pick up each brick, each piece of crumbled mortar obediently because that is what I do. I obey. I behave. I put the bits in an order I can understand, even if I can never find the heart.

Memory like tourism

When responding to Jeff's New Orleans' post, I thought of a poem I wrote quite a few years ago.

For me, digging through my own history/memory has been similar to my experiences while traveling. There haven't been many times when I was willing to do the work necessary to really see. It seems that we (USA) are having the same trouble dealing with post-Katrina New Orleans.

Here's the poem:

Memory like Tourism

She visits each place in her memory like a rich tourist who can afford nuances without effort. Dressed in a silk pantsuit, she travels with hand-crafted leather bags which hold her entire wardrobe. Porters lift and carry each piece for francs or yen or pesos. Cooks in the kitchens slave over crackling hot-oiled pans. Wait staff deliver tender fish fillets on silver dishes with domed covers to keep any dirt or germs away from her mouth. A maid turns the crisp sheets open and tucks the starched ends tightly underneath.

She visits museums, churches, and ruins; she sees only clean lines of famous painters and relics of a glorified past. Beneath the glory, in cramped but spotless quarters, workers sweat as they polish the frames, utensils, and menorahs. A man smashes his finger as he moves a Renoir from a basement; he clears space for the next exhibit.

Her visits to childhood, to yesterday, sample emotions like her tourism. Hidden underneath the guided tours are hosts of events she does not care to think about.

Nothing to complain about

Between looking at Jeff's blog and spending the day shopping and trimming the hedges, I feel like a jerk for complaining all the time.

Today, I feel lucky. Spoiled, in fact.

Thank goodness for days like today. It is a nice change of pace for me with my constant sulking.

I hope your evening or morning is going well.

Hypothetical

Let's say, hypothetically, that two people live in a house that is much too big for them. Both people work but one of the two works much longer hours (let's call this person: B). That person, person B, hypothetically, doesn't have (or doesn't make) time for housework, so for the first (oh, let's say) year that they live in this too big house, person A does all of the housework.

Pretty soon person A gets sick of it. So person A arranges for outside workers to do the work. But person B is more conservative financially than person A and wants to save that extra $200/month. So, person A says, "well, you start doing your half, and we'll cancel the service." Person B is happy happy. But person B doesn't begin doing the work. The next time the service comes, person B becomes angry stating, "I thought we were going to cancel the service."

Person B sulks and is mean for two days. Person A is now not only tired of housework but is also tired of person B's attitude. But person A is too OCD to live in a dirty house.

Is person A, hypothetically, out of her mind?

Update: Person A, as the previous line reveals, is female. Person B is male. For person A, there are upsetting underlying (and historical) gender inequalities in expectations about housework. This complicates matters further, and in some ways, puts person B in a no-win situation. In some ways, however, person B is upholding stereotypes.

How then, when males are still willing to participate in long work hours and to leave "home" off of their lists of things that are important and when females are still unable to forsake "home" for money or success, are we ever to escape these categories of male breadwinners and female homemakers? Especially when outside assistance (which, theoretically, would level the playing field) angers person B.

Okay, I'm done.

I think.

Week end

One nice thing about being employed outside of the home is that the days of the week have meaning again.

I mean, it is FRIDAY. And that means something quite different than when you work at home everyday, get out of bed when you are ready to get out of bed, and only worry about what time it is when you know it is nearing yoga class time.

This week, Friday means that I've returned my first set of papers to the students (i.e. I don't have any papers hanging over my head waiting to be graded), I've successfully dealt with a student who may have been walking too close to the edge of my tolerance (i.e. she gave me a paper today --oops, that does mean I have one paper to read -- but it can wait until Monday), I've just come home to a house cleaned by professionals (i.e. I don't have to do any cleaning for at least three days), and I went to the grocery store yesterday (i.e. repeat last i.e. and replace "cleaning" with "food shopping"). In a sum total, that means that I'll be able to sleep, take yoga classes, go on long walks, and read stuff written by people who can write for the next two days.

Oh, and my neice will be three tomorrow. Happy Birthday Lily! Three? wow

Anyway, yes, I am glad it is Friday. I may even find the time to think up some decent blog. Who knows? The possibilities are astounding.

:)

Steve Irwin

I will miss the crocodile hunter.

I don't really have much to say here, but I logged on to You Tube and saw a few "tributes" to Irwin (picture slideshows set to "I will remember you" and the like) as well as a few "jokes" (that included a clip of stingrays and was titled, Irwin's last video). Those were in poor taste, I thought.

When I found out he had been killed, I did feel like the world lost something.

I'm not much for "spiritual" thoughts, but I'd be lying if I said I don't think that this planet is like (or is) an organism. When something happens to the finger, the toe feels it. This helps me make sense of my depression when I hear news of war, disasters, and tragedies. It may even be true that the organism is bigger than I know, and that might explain some strange joyfulness I sometimes feel: maybe they are making peace on X10 in the 9890 galaxy.

In any case, I think of the son of a good friend and how Irwin inspired him to look closely at snakes and other creatures without squirming. Even in helping to make that change in one kid, Irwin did a lot. I feel certain he helped millions of us make very similar changes.

So, to those who keep making jokes: Fuck You.

For the rest of us, a moment of silence. Or even better, give a dollar to Wildlife Warriors in his name.

Whew -- teaching is hard

Well, I think I'm a teacher again. Just when I start to think that I'm a hard ass and that I must expect too much from the students, I talk to another teacher who tells me that this is how they (the students) all are now.

I'm having a hard time believing the state of the our children. I'm amazed by how many whining students come to me wanting me to let them slip by the guidelines, how many have their mommies send notes (I'm not kidding) telling me that my policy that students can't turn in late papers is unreasonable, and how many students think that becoming defensive and obnoxious will actually make me take them more seriously rather than making me want to fail them immediately.

Other teachers say that this is where students are. More and more parents take their children off to college and spend a full week in the college town helping them adjust to their new (presumably harder) lives. Remember driving away from home with the car packed? What a great feeling; I didn't want any parental transition period. I must be the last of my breed. My friend that just sent off her daughter to Athens says her daughter is the only one in her dorm that knows how to do laundry. She's holding training sessions in the laundry room with all the girls who never had to wash clothes before. At what point to we harm our children by coddling them?

This week I almost told a parent that she was ruining her daughter's chances for success in life. I held my tongue. I don't want to parent the parents.

All of this is to say that I hope that I am finding some rhythm in teaching again, and that I will be able to post more often. Don't hold your breath.

Even when I'm not posting, though, I'm seething about something. :)