I want a gun for Christmas.

My New Year’s Resolution will be to learn how to carry and use my new gun safely.   I will carry my new gun wherever I am legally allowed to carry it and I will abide by all laws.  I will use my new gun if I have to, to try to protect any child, young adult or innocent person threatened with being killed.  I may prove not to be a good shot – but if I can distract a lunatic trying to kill children and make him come after me, I will be satisfied.

I’ve had enough.  This Christmas is unlike any other I’ve known in my 56 years.  I can’t forget the profound pain of Newtown Connecticut.  I can’t sweep away my shock and dismay so that I can have a jolly holiday.   These are parents, just like me,  who were supposed to joyfully watch their innocent 6 and 7 year old children setting out cookies for Santa, who were supposed  to grumble and tease when their little ones shook them awake too early on December 25, trembling with excitement in this or their own holiday celebration.  Instead, the children are literally gone – and the parents are trembling because they cannot imagine life as good ever again, cannot abide the pain.

I’ve had enough of the slaughter of innocents.   We are not “healing” today because an angry young man with untreated mental illness barged into a nursing home and gunned down elderly.  No one is puzzling over the cold blooded murder of police officers and fire persons as they relax over steaming cups of coffees at the station.  Our legislators sit safely behind multiple layers of security in statehouses and the nation’s capital with armed, trained personnel a gasp away should some weapon-bearing young male out of his mind actually get through the protections we have funded for these politicians.  No, Newtown’s victims, this year’s victims, like all victim’s of these massacres, are young unsuspecting lives, lives of joy, hope and laughter who knew no cause to be wary or prepared to defend themselves from attack. 

It’s been a year of unbridled assault on innocents, harmlessly – obliviously – going about their daily business in schools, on campuses, in churches and temples and at shopping malls.   These are the places deranged, angry males favor, armed as if single-handedly braving terrorists in Afghanistan.  These males seek out seemingly safe environments, populated by innocent, unarmed people:  like only-recently babies sitting at desks for the first time in their lives, trying to stifle giggles (Newtown, MA); like young adults trudging between classrooms, tackling adult schedules and ideas for the first times, trying to focus and get it right (Oakland, CA); like excited movie fans, finally getting tickets to the opening night of a Batman movie (Aurora, CA); like peace-seeking Sikhs worshiping at their temple (Oak Creek, WI); and like holiday shoppers at a mall (Happy Valley, OR).    All this, in one year.   

Headlines proclaim that survivors, family, friends and everyone as a nation need to “heal” again from the slaughter of innocents.   This is starting to seem like some new, twisted exercise of modern life – as if we’ve entered a period of grief and recovery following the sacrifice of virgins to raging gods who humans dare not defy.  We are not supposed to be angry.  We are cautioned not to be judgmental or make decisions without a full, factual report.  We are told that this is a failure of gun regulation and we ought not to arm ourselves in anticipation of more attacks.   We are assured laws are coming soon which will prevent the next assault.  We are supposed to heal, forgive and move on.

But we all know with chilling certainty that, even as we talk, the next slaughter of innocents is in the planning.  We all know that innocence itself is under assault.   Mine is not a post to blame people, their ideas or their weapons for the death of 20 small, sparkly eyed children.   I support Senator Lieberman’s call for a professional panel to analyze the massacres and recommend measures that can actually begin to get ready to start to give a modicum of protection to the innocents.  But, meanwhile, how can we blithely, wistfully ignore that these are murders of the most innocent amongst us – as calculated to affront life itself as Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Centers was designed to cause terror?  Gun regulation may well be overdue and may help reduce casualties during future assaults on innocents.  But even the most avid gun opponents know that guns are the weapon of choice, not the subject of the attack.

For me, time for individual action has arrived.  I believe any woman with a child for whom she would lay down her life is reasonable to arm herself, the same way women on the western frontier had guns to protect their young from predators, the same way Jeanne Assam armed herself to protect her congregation.  On the morning of December 11, 2007, Ms. Assam shot 24 year old Matthew Murray who entered New Life Church in Colorado Springs “carrying an assault rifle, two pistols and a backpack holding more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition.”  Ms. Assam was on voluntary security detail for the congregation and carrying a pistol.  When Murray arrived at the church and opened fire, there were over 7,000 people in and around the church.   He killed two teenagers and injured 3 adults before moving toward the building where Ms. Assam was already alert to the sound of gunshot.  Ms. Assam crept up upon him as he entered the building and shot him.   According to authorities, that shot saved “untold lives.”

I do not know whether I could handle a gun as well as Ms. Assam did.  I do not know whether I could stop a Matthew Murray and limit his carnage.  What I do know is that I could try, that I’d have the determination and capacity to distract him and slow him down.  I do know that I would be completely prepared to exchange my life for 20 small, bubbly 6 and 7 year olds who might actually get to celebrate Christmas. 

I am told that I should not ask for a gun for Christmas.  I am told that all schools, churches, temples and colleges should not permit weapons or arm even designated trained administrators, teachers or staff.  I have heard year after year, slaughter after slaughter, that we (that is … all of us unprotected persons without armed security details) must “wait for the police to come.”  The unarmed teachers and administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary school took all this advice.  They had no guns.  Adam Lanza pursued his murderous plan while the teachers and administrators, with no means to protect the 700 children in their care against the death rampage of this 20 year old male, waited for the police.  They waited 20 minutes for their protection to arrive.  By the time their “first” responders arrived, the massacre was over.  The police did not fire a single shot.  “Waiting for the police” no longer makes an ounce of sense in today’s conditions.  In today’s world, “wait for the police” is now code for “unchecked slaughter” until the police get there.

I want a gun for Christmas.  I will learn how to carry and use my new gun safely and legally.   I will use my new gun if I have to; to try to defend the innocents we have somehow left as an unprotected target for males bent on destruction of life.  I may not be a good shot – but if I can distract a lunatic trying to kill children and make him come after me, I will be satisfied.   I have never thought of asking for a gun for Christmas before, but I never thought we as a country would face Christmas mourning 6 and 7 year children gunned down without a shot fired in their defense.  It’s a different Christmas this year – for everyone.

As we consider the 2012 election results and the large percentage of single women – as well as the significant share of married women – who favored the current administration’s approach to women’s issues, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese offers much food for thought. 

New Feminists, like Fox-Genovese, like me, start with this premise:  women raising children cannot humanely and justly be expected to provide 100% of the resources for the care of the family. 

For all of human history, men were expected to provide most of the financial resources for the care and upbringing of children they fathered, at least within wedlock, and their failure to do so warranted social, religious and legal action. The economic burden of raising children has shifted radically toward women, perhaps as an unintended consequence, as women embrace and exploit educational and economic opportunities opened to their participation only within the last 50 years through the often grueling work of feminists.  Simultaneously over the last two decades, the social and cultural expectations which defined and bounded family constitution and responsibility throughout Western history have undergone dramatic reconfiguration.  Perhaps, again, as an an unintended consequence, this reconfiguration has fueled and accelerated the transfer of responsibility and cost of children to the women who conceive, bear and keep them.  It is hardly surprising in this new reality that “progressive” feminists insist that the only legitimate pregnancies are pregnancies planned and intended by the woman.  If women are going to get assistance within this new paradigm, even for intended, planned child-raising, it must come from the government – the authority which once served as a safety net secondarily to its role of enforcing shirked obligations against men, but which, increasingly, substitutes entitlement care in their stead. 

Consider this excerpt from Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s “Feminism Is Not The Story of My Life” which I’ve entitled Women and Government (italics added).

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Throughout most of our history, it was possible to assume that women and children would be privately cared for by the men under whose guardianship they fell.   Frequently men failed in their duty, but the public services that developed to compensate for those private failures treated the women and children they served as exceptional.  Today, when men in record numbers leave women and children to their own resources, women and children who require public support are no longer exceptional.  Some conservatives may want to turn the clock back, but the growing numbers of women and children without adequate private resources testify that the clock cannot be turned back.  

So is the solution to abandon the children?  Our sterile and deadlocked discussions of abortion suggest the possibility.  Certainly, the feminists’ reluctance to regard abortion as a story about children and reverence for life points in that direction.  But then, so does the conservatives’ reluctance to regard abortion as a story about women who do not have the resources to support the children they bear and cannot readily assume that others will step in to care for or adopt the children.  Willy-nilly, these two positions have combined to free us from our obligations to women and children. 

It is as if we were, however unintentionally, treating the children as extensions of women’s sexual freedom rather than as the future of our society. 

And because society has been so reluctant to meet its responsibilities to children, it has sent a message that for women to prosper they must be freed from children as well.  Feminism has seized upon this message, arguing that to hold women responsible for children is to punish them by restricting their freedom and independence.  Conservatives, who normally express concern for the sanctity of life and the needs of children, want poor women not to have them unless, of course they are married.  In contrast, feminists, who normally want women to be able to lead independent lives like men, defend poor women’s right to become single mothers. 

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

In 1990, single mothers headed one quarter of all households in the United States, and, for black Americans, the figure rose to more than one half.  No moral pronouncements about the superiority of the private care for children can withstand these figures without risking public exposure as punitive, indifferent, contemptuous, or hypocritical.  Conservatives who continue to preach the moral superiority of the world of the Donna Reed Show are not talking about the world we live in. 

And if you do not talk about a world people recognize, they may be expected to ignore you.  A just and humane society must embrace standards that the majority of its people can, if with effort, meet, or it must support its people so that they can meet those standards. 

Without one or the other, people may well decide, as many seem to be deciding, that moral standards are beside the point.  If conservatives wish to encourage private virtue and responsibility, they need to provide social conditions that permit people to act virtuously and responsibly. 

The feminist preference for extensive public day care has an inexorable logic.  Feminists assume that mothers, whether married or single, prefer to work and need day care to do so.  They have a vested interest in the idea that children will do as well or better without their mothers as with them.  They also have an interest in the expansion of public programs, which provide women with jobs – jobs with benefits.  In 1980, women already held 70 percent of the social service jobs in the government sector.  And although the jobs do not pay as well as many in the private sector, they are considerably more secure.  In this respect, the welfare state is becoming a women’s preserve. 

Jobs and salaries play an important, if largely hidden, role in these debates.  We are accustomed to dividing federal expenditures according to the program on which they are spent:  so much for the military, so much for fighting crime, so much for social services, and so forth.  We are even conscious of the tendency of the federal agencies to allow their suppliers to jack up the cost of goods.  But we are rarely reminded of how large a share of public expenditure goes into nonmilitary salaries and benefits for the more than 2.8 million nonmilitary federal and 17 million state and local employees.  As best, we know that programs are difficult to cut, in part because the cutting of programs inevitably entails the cutting of jobs.  Since the beginning of the republic, patronage and spoils have loomed large in political struggles, and now more so than ever.  Even when administrations change, social service jobs remain difficult to cut, and today a large share of those jobs continues to go to women.  The protection of public employment, however important to individuals and their families, should not dictate our public policies.  After all, when President Clinton downsized the military, to the applause of feminists and the Left, he cut many thousands of jobs.

If we start with the needs of children, the failure of the private sector may well justify the existence, or even expansion, of publicly funded social service programs.  But it is one thing to turn to the federal government to see people through a crisis, as we done during the Great Depression, and another to regard dependence upon federally funded social service programs as a positive good.  Many personally admirable and socially responsible left-wing feminists forcefully insist that the failures of federal supports for women and children may be attributed to the demeaning conditions imposed upon those who use them.   Feminists like Valerie Polakow argue that the United States should long since have followed the lead of European welfare states in making support for women and children universal like Social Security, rather dependent upon the indignity of proving need.  The United States remains one of the few industrialized countries not to provide universal child allowances.  Western European countries also provide statutory housing allowances, health care benefits, maternity benefits, and subsidized child care as a matter of course.  Consequently, the benefits are seen as a “right” or entitlement rather than a stigmatized form of public assistance.  Thus welfare, with aura of dependence and deviation, plays a much smaller role than in the United States.  Unfortunately, those social entitlements are placing increasing burdens on the national budgets and, as already happened in the United Kingdom, even the generous policies in France and Sweden are in danger of being cut back.

When Mitt Romney nominated Paul Ryan as his VP running mate, I posted my disappointment at Facebook.  “I can’t relate to this ticket,” I said to myself.  If I – an Independent female – could not relate to the ticket, I suspected lots of other women would struggle as well.  I wasn’t mad.  I knew both men had worthy conservative credentials.  And while I tend toward conservative, I remain convinced that Republicans don’t understand women’s reality and what women need to return their lives to some semblance of sanity. Democrats don’t either.  On this subject, I can piss off blue and red in equal measure. 

Fairly, my FB friends wondered why I was agitated.  Both Romney and Ryan have educated wives who are full-time mothers and whose life choices have not been entirely unlike some of mine.  Both candidates and their wives and children live traditional lifestyles based on Judeo-Christian values I hold dear, committed to a financial conservatism that most people should follow.  So what was my problem?

My similarity to these families, these white male candidates and their wives who are so much like me, occurred, well, after my marriage.  Before my marriage, I was a working professional and single mother.  Grateful as I am for where I am, I can’t forget, will never forget, what it was like to be a woman alone, with a child and a job that both demanded 125% of me.  My daily life was a juggling act with more balls in the air than I could count, much less manage.  Even after I married, there was a constant, steady demand on my time and a gnawing sense that I just could not keep up with anything.  I did everything, but nothing well.  I escaped the frustration only when I quit litigating.  I quit the day one of the white male partners with a stay-at-home wife and a looming deadline he had failed to manage, tried to shame me into working the weekend, “I need you here.  It just seems like you are not committed to this job anymore.”

 “That’s right, Michael,” I snapped at him.  “I am part-time.  I have been part-time for several months trying to get some time with my baby, my toddler and my husband.  I am done with your thoughtlessness and demands … and I quit.” 

As happy as I am where I am, I know that I got lucky.  I had the option of staying home and shedding the stress jerks, unrealistic expectations and limited options impose on the lives of working women everywhere.  Most women, don’t.

The reality is that I am in the minority.   As much as I love my life, my reality is not the reality of most women.  The “war on women” rhetoric during the election was, in my opinion, outrageous.  There is no war on women – but there is a struggle, a deep divide that blinds us – all of us – to women’s reality.  The war, if you will, is between competing narratives about women’s lives.  Neither party  has it right and both parties are delusional.

I’m not a statistician – but I can follow the data (even if I can’t see the obvious) to recognize that married stay-at-home mothers – like me – do not portray women’s reality today – and most certainly do not portray the reality into which are daughters are being raised.  A few statistics are worthy of review. 

• “Nearly 40% of women have never been married, and fewer are in a first marriage.”
• Regarding marriage and young women, “In a dramatic reversal, the proportion of young adults in the United States who have never been married now exceeds those who are married.”

“Never married” does not mean “not mothers.”  It didn’t for me.  I gave up on a traditional family structure and went my own way.  I was not the only professional woman in 1989 having a child as a single mother – a trend which continues to grow.

• “Around 45% of single mothers have never married, around 55% are divorced, separated or widowed. Half have one child, 30% have two.”
• “As of 2011, 11.7 million families in the US were headed by a single parent, 85.2% of which were headed by a female.”  “One in four children in the United States is being raised by a single parent — a percentage that has been on the rise and is higher than other developed countries.”

Even though I am not a statistician, I think this means that “single parent family” is code for “women raising a child alone.”  

Unmarried women raising children alone is no longer an exception.  It’s the reality nearly 50% of women live day to day.  Whether they are raising kids alone because they never married, got divorced or abandoned, the new reality is that nearly half of the women in the United States have primary responsibility for raising their children. 

I am not going to review statistics on how much financial contribution these women are getting from men who call themselves fathers.  In my case, I had my daughter “without benefit” of father and that decision, many women have made and are making.  That reality exists for many women who cannot find, much less extract money from, the man who fathered their child.  But even if women receive some amount of support from fathers, it is not ever enough for the single mother to be a fulltime mother, like Ann Romney or like me, now.

Which is not to say, that women juggling work and children wouldn’t love to be stay-at-home moms, or, at least, have more at-home time than at-work time to spend with their children.  The 2009 Pew Report “The Harried Life of the Working Mother” gave loads of notice to Dems and Reps alike that the lives of women were running off the rail.  “A strong majority of all working mothers (62%) say they would prefer to work part time.”  This year, the media waves exploded over Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” explaining why she – for one – had decided to leave her job, get out of the workplace and into her home with her kids – where she wanted to be.  Whether by survey or anecdote, no matter how you cut it, women are drowning in responsibility, yelling for help and begging for more family-friendly options in their lives.

Is anyone listening to the voices of women?

In this world of impossible female responsibilities and expectations, abortion and contraception are not moral issues to most women.  They are issues of survival.  No matter how much a woman wishes that a man in her life would make an unexpected pregnancy into an “unplanned joy,”  many women no longer incur such pregnancies with a known and legitimate father on the hook emotionally and financially, much less interested in becoming a partner in parenting.  If women are to be the ones to raise children, if they are to foot the bill and carry the full load of responsibility, then contraception and abortion to women become more functions of financial planning and survival than the fate of their souls.  The conservative option – that all single women live celibate lives until somehow becoming one of the increasingly rare women to find a man who wants to get married and start having kids, if the woman is still fertile – seems delusional. 

On the other hand, the progressive feminist and liberal tendency to applaud, praise and push this inequitable burden of expectation and load of often heart-breaking choices upon women as necessary to achieve “equality” to men is also mind-numbing.  Women are unhappy, often miserable, bearing this load.  That the sexual patterns of promiscuous men and the measures of success of the capitalist male do not promote the well-being of most women seems oddly irrelevant in the progressive agenda being peddled to women.  In this way, the progressives, too, are fueled by ideal delusion.

Amidst this messy morass of stubborn narratives, the 2012 Presidential elections returned the following numbers which would surprise only a cocky student who felt no need to attend class – like a Dem or Rep who has been willfully ignoring the reality of women’s lives.    

• “According to national exit polls, the president won the women vote by ten percentage points, 55 percent to Romney’s 44 percent. Obama, however, lost married women by 7 percentage points, 46 percent to Romney’s 53 percent.”

No surprise.   The progressive liberal narrative offers more support and benefits to women trying to negotiate the maze of career, relationships and child-bearing alone.  Singlemothers.org, for example, considered re-electing President Obama “critical” and reminded its constituency that “single moms raise great presidents–Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama!”  The conservative insistence that it’s all about “getting married, gals” appeals to a majority of women who, in fact, have a golden ring.  But even married women, often working and bearing the load for children, medical decisions and home care, are losing conviction that the traditional formula for a happy life delivers. 

So … we are back to the basic question …. just what DO women want?  And, just as important, will either party listen?  More on that soon – but feel free to email, leave comments etc. on what you think!

Online Letter to Terry O’Neill

President, National Organization of Women

Dear Ms. O’Neill,

Every feminist thanks you for taking a stand against the brutal attack on 14 year old Pakistani Malala Yousafzai.  Malala was targeted to be killed by the Swat Valley Taliban for her advocacy for education for girls.  The Taliban took responsibility for the October 4 assault in which the assailant boarded a bus, called out for Malala by name and then shot her in the head.  Malala did not die, and continues to improve in a hospital in London.  

The Taliban has justified this cold-blooded attack, which you rightfully decry, citing the Quran, Shariah law and religious precedent:    

“If anyone thinks that Malala was targeted because of education, that is absolutely wrong, and propaganda of media. Malala was targeted because of her pioneer role in preaching secularism and so called enlightened moderation. And whomsoever will commit so in future too will be targeted again” …It is “not just allowed … but obligatory in Islam” to kill such a person involved “in leading a campaign against Shariah and (who) tries to involve whole community in such campaign, and that personality becomes a symbol of anti-Shariah campaign.” 

At the core of Malala’s objectionable “preaching,” lays her young love of education and her conviction that girls, like boys, have a right to attend school.  Malala wanted to become a doctor – an ambition that evolved into an activism so that all girls would have the opportunity to become doctors.  It was this activism – on behalf of the equality and dignity of all girls – that motivated the Taliban to silence Malala.  It was this activism – in a culture where Malala’s own mother refused to be photographed because she is a woman – that motivated the Taliban to send a brutal, horrific message to all females who would seek their dignity and equality in spite of systemic oppression and discrimination based upon the condition of being female.

Malala’s bloodied body is the cruel reality of misogyny – the distrust, dislike and oppression of a person for the condition of being female.  Every feminist joins you, Ms. O’Neill, and NOW in recognizing that “Throughout the world, countless young girls are robbed of their childhood through violence, forced marriage and lack of access to health care or education.”  Whether these denials of basic human dignity to the female arise from religious beliefs, customs, or even by consent of females, depriving females of fundamental human liberties should give rise to objection from all feminists throughout the world.  To ignore the violence and indignities encourages and condones a disdain for the autonomy and equality of the female.  It is brave of you to take this stand when doing so might trigger violence against you, just as threats have been made against journalists who have dared to cover the story over objections of the Taliban. 

In this we can join together, progressive feminists, new feminists and feminists of all waves.  Physical attack, forced marriage, revenge attacks and genital mutilation – all of which occur with frightening frequency throughout the world – warrant our efforts to work together and demand education and legal parity for women.

As you note in your statement, these problems are not limited to particular countries or parts of the world.   Our work can and should begin within our borders.  NewFeminism.co encourages you and NOW to exercise your voice for the basic dignity of all females, that no female is denied her fundamental autonomy for the condition of being female.   It is vital that those of us fighting and struggling for the dignity of our gender dialogue on the scope of degradation of the female – including females aborted due to sex selection, females used and degraded in pornography and prostitution, females reduced to indentured pregnancies, and females killed as “incidents” by drones and military strategies.  If we do not insist that the condition of being female is never a justification for destruction and exploitation, that – in fact – the condition of being female is as worthy and equal to that of the male – then we will fall short of creating a world where the female can live with the same respect and dignity of the male. 

That all too often it is women themselves perpetuating, encouraging and commercially profiting from the destruction, humiliation and exploitation of other females does not change the nature of misogyny.  We must engage this struggle aware that violence and discrimination against women comes not only from highly visible misogynist men of radical groups like the Taliban, but from other women as well.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali offers a startling account of the role of women in oppressing their own gender in her memoir Infidel and the chilling narrative of her genital mutilation and physical abuse. 

Women themselves can think of femaleness with distrust, dislike and hostility, certain that men, maleness and masculine attributes and ambitions are superior to the female. Consider, for example, the widespread abortion of females for sex selection.  This is destruction wrought by women against the female fetus because she is female.  Commercialization of reproduction – fueled by demands from older, less fertile women – is creating a vast and lucrative industry that seeks to reduce the younger, fertile female body to a commodity, rivaling the dehumanizing and objectification that unchecked pornography has nearly normalized in a Western world shaped by male demand for sexual exploitative entertainment.  In India, a reproductive industry flourishes off the indenture of impoverished women for nine months of paid, regulated, commercial pregnancy.  In each of these instances, the female is subject of violence, discrimination and exploitation based upon the condition of being female, regardless the gender of her oppressor.  Education is critical, as you assert, not only to empower girls, but also to give women the intellectual tools to break from traditional customs and modern cultural practices that offend and destroy the female.

We must not let politics or the pressures of commercial interests blind us to these forms of degradation and violence.  To ignore any form of discrimination and violence nurtures and perpetuates a  dangerous drift to denigrate the female – her body, her attributes and her autonomy – as inferior and less worthy of protection within a male paradigm.  We must combine our resources to say “No” to all discrimination and oppression against the female. We must join efforts to say “Yes” to Malala’s dream for the education and life-long dignity of all females throughout the world.  As you astutely ask, “If a 14-year-old girl can risk her life standing up to the Taliban, what actions can we take here in the U.S. to advance the rights of girls?”  Creating dialogue and forging cooperation between feminists is a good place to start.

Sincerely,

Marjorie Campbell

www.NewFeminism.co

I need to get this off my chest:  my husband is not my best friend.  He’s never been my best friend and never will be.  I experience some envy of the young brides and long-married wives who contentedly call their spouse “my best friend.”  Facebook has a site called “My Husband Is My Best Friend” with over 170,000 “likes”! I don’t doubt that some husbands are capable of female-friendly friendship.  But mine is not and, well, his relation toward me is not anything I recognize as friendship, not in terms I understand.  I am not complaining.  For me, not being best friends is the cornerstone of our marriage – and I love my marriage just the way it is.

In fact, my marriage – to this man who is most definitely not my best friend – rescued me from a foolish pursuit and restored my sense of self as a woman. 

In my youth, I adopted progressive feminism’s delirious ambition to “level” the playing field between the sexes by coaxing and coercing women into behaving more like men.  I gave this pursuit a long, honest try, even as I grew skeptical whether being more like a man was actually making me happy.  But I plucked away at the enterprise.  That is, I plucked away at it until I married a man.  Coming into close quarters with my “feminist” goal horrified me, and finally disabused me of my own agenda.

Husband is a verb – “to manage, especially with prudent economy” – that describes mine better than the noun.  Just calling him spouse, partner or companion says nothing about him.  He could call me the same, his “spouse or partner or companion,” as if we are just alike, friends who got married.  Husband, in its verbiage, works better by hinting there is difference between us.  In my marriage, it works especially well because my husband wears his tendency to manage, direct and control all things with pride and tenacity.  He is stereotypical “male” in this way – the kind of overbearing Alpha male that caused my own mother to comment “I’ve never cared for men like that.” 

I don’t mind that my husband is an Alpha male and incapable of being my best friend.  He is, after all, my husband:  my one-of-a-kind, stand-alone, close call with being male.  He’s exactly what I needed to unfurl my female self which had curled up in shame and deference to my feminist agenda.  He is both amazing and terrifying and I am happy to keep it that way.  I would not have become the wife (and mother) that I am without his maleness regularly confounding me, annoying me and astounding me. 

What he lacks in empathy (which he once described as “Greek to me”), he supplies in courage and resolution. His enormous capacity for technical detail and reasoned analysis leaves little room, or interest, for emotive and interpersonal connection (which he, literally, entrusts to me).  He cannot fret over – what he calls “remote” – risks because then he could not set off on motorcycles, road bikes, downhill skis or 4-wheel drive vehicles with his like-minded males friends to “have some fun.”  Nor can he worry about offending “sensitive” people, the type who would forbid his weekly night of steak, cigars and brass banter with the “boys.” 

It is beyond dispute that, were I to try to join him in his ways, I would be an utter and complete failure.  I would cry, tremble or hug when my empathy got the better of me.  I would say “thank you,” “I’m sorry,” and “I forgot to tell you . . . “ only to derail a deal he’d patiently and purposefully assembled over weeks.   I would (and have) endangered others and crashed at speeds I had no business attempting.  I have stomped out of his steak dinners in dismayed disgust.  In other words, if my husband is the man I once longed to be, my ambition was a waste from the start.

My marriage is a great relief to me.  I don’t have to be a man to level the playing the field.  My husband can be the man he is and I can be the woman I love to be.  I can supply empathy, nurturing, connection, patience and listening in all the creaky joints, knowing with passionate certainty that my husband needs me in order to be the best man he can be – just as much as I need him to be the best woman I can be.  That’s a level playing field. 

Our field is quite lively, level and loving, I think most people would say.  We have spirited play, and tremendous exchange, between ourselves.  Often, we are amazed at how entertaining and provocative our differences are.  We often opt to be alone together because it’s fun.  I’d say, we are like two halves of a heart.  He’d probably say it’s more like a flame and a good cigar. 

To give you an idea, here’s one of our favorite stories. 

Over several evenings in the company of friends, my husband noted that I came away with far more personal information about the lives, troubles and joys of the people with whom we had just spent several hours.  While always more versed in their new audio equipment and current reading, he felt challenged to come away with something more, something personal that he alone found out and could share with me for a change. 

After our next evening out with Dr. Bill and his wife, my husband prodded, “Did you know that Dr. Bill is taking a sabbatical?”  

I shook my head “no.”  My happy husband described our friend’s plan to take leave from his medical practice and move abroad.  Grinning, my husband poked, “You did not know any of that, did you?  Ha!  She didn’t tell you, did she?” 

I paused, feeling sorry for him, and responded lightly, “No, she didn’t mention the sabbatical.  But, honey, did Dr. Bill tell you that they are getting divorced?”  He sulked the rest of the way home.

No, my husband is not my best friend.  He’s my … husband – and I am his wife.  Our marriage is built upon our differences, and I hope and pray it stays that way.

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.  ~Gustave Flaubert 

Note:  this post contains strong and offensive language.  Feminists fuss over misogyny, the more radical camp insisting that man’s disdain for women has steered the course of all human history.  New Feminists and dissident feminists like Camille Paglia view most female-unfriendly behaviors by men as far more complicated than a sweeping hatred of all things female.  Despite these differences, all feminists do agree that, in its rawest, most hate-driven form, misogyny can and does pose a real threat to girls and women.

It’s important to remind ourselves that raw, gender-based hatred exists.  It is a  shameful condition, so frighteningly repugnant that those compelled by hatred of women often opt for denial and blame of others, rarely getting the help they require.   Men obsessed with a hatred toward girls and women often surface only in violent outburst, such as the 2009 shooting of 4 women during an aerobics class.    

Most women have caught glimpses of misogyny.  We often experience it as a suspicion, a suspicion that the man addressing us uses a particular tone or body language because he hates women, not us in particular.   We sometimes hear or read this type of misogyny in rants about Eve’s destruction of men, the suffragettes’ ruination of civilized society, or feminists’ conspiracy to emasculate all men.   Recently, I encountered blatant misogyny head on – how it ended reminded me that women need to talk about misogyny, not just disagree about it.   

 I am a 56 year old, graying mother who wears glasses.  I was alone, seated in my 2006 red, dented Accura throughout this incident.   

After Mass one recent Sunday, I took Lombard Street to the freeway here in San Francisco.  There was a last exit on that route into Crissy Field, a bay front park I can cross to my home on the opposite side.  It was a rather abrupt, tricky exit from the left hand “fast” lane, used almost solely by locals familiar with it.  I often took this exit to avoid the high speed road and enjoy the park and views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

My timing was unfortunate.  The exit was clogged and backed up.   I hit my brakes and broke a sweat:  I was stopped dead on what is supposed to be a moving exit ramp.  Ahead, I could see a full sized tractor trail truck trying, incredulously, to back down the exit ramp.  Fearful of being rear-ended, preparing to call 911, I watched the confused drivers ahead of me crowd against the concrete barrier or edge onto the wet, grassy shoulder, opening narrow passage for the big rig in its effort to reverse down the ramp.  Suddenly, a car shrieked to a stop behind me.  The driver – a neat, 45ish, lean male – jumped out and started jogging along the ramp toward the truck. 

“Good,” I thought, “this guy will sort out the nonsense.” 

I lowered my window and said, “He’s trying to back out onto the highway … I am afraid we are going to get rear ended sitting here.”

He stopped and looked at me oddly.

“We won’t get hit,” he said dismissively. 

“Oh but I got hit just a block from here,” I replied, recalling the day a distracted commuter plowed into me at full speed on this same stretch of highway.

The man turned toward me abruptly.  “Don’t be a drama queen,” he barked nastily, totally … I mean totally … shocking me.  I gave him a quick salute, smiled and said, “Yes, sir,” expecting he would move on. 

He did not. 

Instead, he moved aggressively toward my car.  “What the fuck did you say?  Don’t fuck with me you cunt,” this man shrieked, his face contorted, his hands fisted.

I was in trouble.

“How about if I pull you out of the damn, fucking car you cunt and beat you right here and break your fucking arm?”

This irate, ranting male was now less than 5 feet from my car.  I had no escape.  I felt pretty certain he would break the window if I closed it.  My only hope was to say something that calmed him, but all I could think was “Oh God this is going to hurt.”

I drew in a deep breath and said as calmly as I could, “I am laughing here.  I am trying to use some humor, sir.”

With that, he veered toward his car, but stopped again, turned and came straight back at me like a confused, violated animal. “I’m going to take you the fuck out of that car now, bitch.  I am going to break your arm.” 

By God’s grace only, I made eye contact and gently, very gently, said, “Is this going to make you feel better?”

That stopped him.  He glared at me, snorting with rage, and shouted, “You are a CUNT.”  He turned, got in his vehicle and sped backwards down the short stretch of ramp into oncoming traffic. 

He was gone.

Several days later, when I described the event to an older friend, a psychologist, I was still shaky and mystified.  Nothing in the span of those minutes made any sense to me; I could no more fit this man’s behavior into a cause and effect flow than I could understand why a tractor trailer truck was backing down an exit ramp into oncoming traffic. 

“Why,” I asked my friend, “why didn’t the guy break my arm?  I have no idea why he stopped.”

“Because,” she explained, “you made it about him when you asked if he would feel better.  I’ve heard this many times from women, women who are about to be assaulted or are being assaulted and they ask the attacker how he feels, or something personal about him.  These men are acting from hatred and rage against all women – and when you ask about him, you become a person to him.  And he’s not angry at you individually.  He doesn’t know you at all.”   

Misogynists like this fellow, we must remember, are filled with hatred toward the female, at all of us as a whole, much more so than anyone of us individually.  We live with these men in our midst, each of us potentially the next victim for their rage.  This is what hatred of women looks like, misogyny that can kill. 

Upon this, I think all feminists can agree.

NewFemininsm.co is dedicated to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a scholar whose thinking and manner inspired this blog and provides the foundation upon which New Feminism is growing.  With this post, I introduce her background and bio.  I look forward to posting excerpts from her work which help us consider and discuss New Feminism and how New Feminism informs and impacts our daily lives.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was an accomplished historian and professor of women’s studies who “roiled both disciplines with her transition from Marxist-inclined feminist to conservative public intellectual.” New York Times.  Prior to her death in 2007, she resided in Atlanta with her husband Eugene Fox-Genovese and worked at Emory University as the Eléonore Raoul professor of humanities.

Both a feminist herself and a convert to Roman Catholicism, Fox-Genovese clarified and challenged the presumptions and consequences of late 20th century feminism. She consistently sought meaningful dialogue on the stresses and contradictions confronting women in daily living, conflicts which she believed resulted from the “difference between women and men” in a legal, political and social world focused upon “the rights of women as individuals.”

If women, she earnestly asked, pursue their fulfillment as a matter of “individual right or a market transaction,” who will bear the “responsibility for the values that embody our humanity . . . nurture, care, patience, self-sacrifice?”

One online bio of Fox-Genovese describes her life as follows:

“Elizabeth Fox-Genovese began her career as a specialist in French History, developed expertise in women’s history in the antebellum South, and ultimately came to be known as a leading conservative feminist. With degrees from Bryn Mawr College and Harvard University, she began teaching history at Emory University, where she was the founding director of the Institute for Women’s Studies and began the first doctoral program in Women’s Studies in the United States.

Having started her career as a Marxist, Fox-Genovese became increasingly aware of the conflict between Marxism and human rights and dignity. Her conversion to Roman Catholicism in the 1990s coincided with a shift to pro-life advocacy, and her outspoken
expression of her views and critiques of liberal feminism brought her notoriety on the left and admiration on the right.

The author of a number of scholarly works, including Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South and Feminism is Not the Story of My Life: How Today’s Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women, as well as The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview with her husband Eugene Genovese, she was the recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the Cardinal Wright Award from the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, and the C. Hugh Holman Prize from the Society for Southern Literature.”

While Fox-Genovese developed and contributed substance to New Feminism, she also, importantly, mirrored that substance in a New Feminism manner of discussion and dialogue. Mark Bauerlin captured this aspect of New Feminism:

“As is well known,[Fox-Genovese’s] anti-abortion position put her at odds with her field, and even though she founded the first doctoral program in women’s studies in the United States, she earned little credit for it once she went pro-life.

More than that, Fox-Genovese was the object of widespread animosity at her own university, and before I even knew her I heard and overheard dozens of smears, whispers, and denunciations at faculty gatherings and in lounges and at the next cafeteria table.

Here is the remarkable thing about it. . . . not once in private or public conversation did she ever utter any statement of a personal nature against them. Fox-Genovese was sharp and incisive about intellectual matters, and she played no favorites, arguing in a firm and patient manner with everyone including her husband whenever she found important disagreements. (Rarely did she quibble over the small stuff.)

But gossip and slight weren’t her thing. She stood in the middle of heated and rancorous debates that extended from national legal policy to local politics at Emory, but never did I hear her descend into detraction. Time and again the bait was offered, and she held back. No cheap shots, no easy dismissals, no reliance on like-minded auditors for reassurance. Her example continues for the many students and colleagues she affected over the years, and academe is a lesser place without her.”

Allow me to add:  her example continues for New Feminists determined to engage an often aggressive and combative culture in urgent dialogue about the health, well-being and future of women and their children and families.  May we live up to her standard.

While apparently not true, gossip had it last week that another celebrity couple had decided to create a family, this one with harvested eggs, unidentified sperm and a gestational surrogate.  The upset appears to be the veracity of Ellen DeGeneres’ and Portia di Rossi’s plans, not the prospect of their piecing together component parts and processes to create a living child.  That industry, the commercial enterprise of removing reproduction from a fertile human female united to a fertile human male through intercourse, creeps steadily into our daily lexicon almost without notice.  “Creating a family” – as in Simms itself – is the new, unmitigated good – an adult objective so presumptively worthy that doubts and objections to the commercialized simulation of natural human reproduction often meet with hostility or stony silence.

This is the emerging reality:  we “create” – not “have” – a family, both euphemisms for acquiring a baby, that little creature who turns a couple into parents.  We use to “have” children, giving God or nature primary role as their “creator;” but our postmodern language elevates the human to creator, the want-to-be parent(s) in charge of literally designing, creating and funding children legally their own into existence, while redefining human concepts of lineage and ancestry.  Children are no longer the prerogative of nature and intimacy, linked biological to an identifiable line of human persons – they are creations of man, an optional accessory available to any adult in need of his/er own family.

 This is a radical shift in paradigm. 

But it is evident everywhere – and often expressed in a context designed to discourage dialogue.  Consider the following quote from an activist during a recent press conference held by “Catholics for Marriage Equality,” a group opposed to reversing that state’s narrowly passed legislation permitting same-sex marriage.   

“I never want our own son or any of our children to be alone—in sickness or in health.  I want each of them to have the security and joy of a family that they create, and for that family to have the legal protections that come with civil marriage. “(Italics added) 

No one – certainly no mother – could possibly take issue with this sentiment.  Who would dare object and say, “But how do gay men and their male partners “create” their own children?” – as if wishing upon them loneliness, illness and despair?  

It is hardly surprising how little awareness – or concern – we seem to have regarding this new class of commercially created child, or “ComKids” – children who, for the first time in human history, will not know their biological origins, are intentionally separated from adults intimate to their conception, gestation and birth and whose very being will have been purchased in whole or in part as a commercial transaction.  In demands that the government legally entitle all adults to the same “security and joy of a family” that living persons have known as biologically conceived and connected children, there is an eerie disregard for the fundamental differences which ComKids will bear and suffer.  

The lack of concern for the fate and future of this experimental class of human being can not be excused by blinkered focus upon the living adult and an expectation that children, like pets, will dutifully love their “parents” and not experience – or, at least, not voice – feelings of loss and longing for biological ties or information denied them.  Nor is it possible to deny that being conceived, gestated and birthed as a commercial transaction can and does matter to human beings.  One need only watch the testimonies in Anonymous Father’s Day or read Robert O. Lopez’s recent “Growing Up With Two Moms: The Untold Children’s View” or review Mark Regnerus’s summary “Queers As Folk” to recognize that this new class of children do and will have a new class of emotional and developmental issues as well as a list of demands for information, rights and protections.

Let us, for the sake of fairness, allow the questions and voices of ComKids – children designed, conceived or acquired through purchase of any component of the reproductive process – into the discussion of family configuration and creation.  And let these voices – and their questions, concerns and demands – be as inextricably associated with “creating a family” as are the prevailing concerns that adults not grow old alone due to infertility; incompatibility; homo-, bi-, trans-, or poly-sexuality; disabilities or any other impediment to child-bearing by sexual intercourse between a fertile man with fertile woman. 

What are the rights of ComKids?  Do they have a right to know their biological origins?  Do they have a right to know the identity of the person whose sperm, egg or womb made possible their life?  Do they have a right to know the terms and conditions of the contracts that lead to their existence?  Do they have legal recourse against fertility clinics, egg brokers, surrogates or any other party under normal contract and tort law? 

These questions beg consideration now – before we further populate a class of children with no more rights or recourse to information about their identity than African-Americans enslaved to suit the needs of their masters.  These are good questions to consider now, as adult humans shift into the role of creator, creating children for themselves so that they will not feel alone or unloved.

Children have no voice setting public policy.  They are legally, physically and emotionally dependent.   They cannot vote.  They cannot form non-profits, produce surveys or express their preferences.  Their rights are severely limited, by the law of the land and by the intimacy of family operations.  They live and die as charges of adults they did not choose – much like the old (and firmly rejected) status of women, indentured servants and men without property.

It was once the prerogative of women to be the voice for children in society.    “Women and children” were clumped in social policy discussion, with the women – the early feminists – battling for laws to protect children, their development and the stability of their families.  Women championed temperance in efforts to protect children, especially children living in poverty, from the devastation of alcoholism.  Women championed child labor laws, eliminating the commercial practice of exploiting children for near-slave labor.  Women championed charitable and governmental welfare so that mothers and children abandoned by men could survive and live.  The chronicle of women’s accomplishments on behalf of children made and shaped U.S. history and fodders a rightful criticism that patriarchal accounts of history are simply prejudiced against the role of women in modern life.

Have women abandoned children?

Why are women so willingly advocating now for rights to terminate unborn children, rights that redefine parenthood to suit adult sexual orientation, rights redefining marriage as an adult-centric relationship, rights giving legal recognition to three or more adults over a single child, and even rights to genetically modify children to suit adult desires – all without a whimper of concern for the impact upon the children?  Children have literally no voice in the experimental social policies that are fundamentally altering the natural conditions under which children have been nurtured for centuries.  Today, redwood trees and gray wolves have more effective advocacy and protection from invasive changes to their natural environment than children do.

Let me say, first, that it is ludicrous to argue that children do not need a voice – that they are malleable creatures who will grow and thrive in whatever conditions adults thrust upon them.  Children, by common sense, have definite needs and they no more “adapt” to changes made without regard to these needs than do redwoods or wolves.  Culturally, we all seem to agree (so far) that children should not be the secret sexual objects of coaches or priests – but beyond that, dialogue on social policy issues seems to strategically avoid asking, “What is the impact upon children?”  We seem far more interested in what it takes to nurture a sapling or cub than we admit to knowing about how to nurture emotionally healthy human children.

Who will take up the voice of children – those little creatures locked into human configurations they did not choose, increasingly endowed with genetic history that will be hidden from them, expected to adjust their development and affections to an array of adults with legal demands and self-gratifying expectations upon them?

A major source of “voice” for these children is slowly – but steadily – emerging in the memoirs, articles and documentaries presenting to the public the reflections of children who grew up within experimental circumstances.  Three examples come immediately to mind:  Dawn Stefanowicz’s frank and generous account – Out From Under:  The Impact of Homosexual Parenting; Jennifer Lahl’s interview-based Anonymous Father’s Day; and, most recently, Robert Oscar Lopez’s article “Growing up with Two Moms:  The Untold Children’s View.”

Each of these focused, earnest pieces share with anyone willing to listen the reflections of adults who grew up in truly modern circumstances: Ms. Stefanowicz with a sexually active bi-gay father; Ms. Lahl’s interviewees as offspring of purchased or “donated” sperm and undisclosed fathers; Mr. Lopez without male adults of influence.    Each of these accounts offer insight into the world of the modern child – through the voice of an adult now developed, focused and readied to share the effects of the social experiment upon them.

These voices arise against the torrent of disapproval adults invested in the experiment can summon.  Like the Catholic Bishops and Penn State administration, adult investors in movements like marriage equality or commercial enterprises like reproductive technologies seem trigger ready to invalidate, discredit or denigrate the experience of these real people who suffered real harms as literal guinea pigs.  It is a terrible reality that Lopez, for example, could not find a shred of sympathy or validation for being cut off from male influences in his developing years – and what that came to mean in his life as a struggling teen and young adult – until making contact with an academic sociologist who published a widely circulated study about children raised in same-sex family settings (which, that too, the marriage equality investors would discredit and bury.)

These struggling brave voices need help, support and encouragement – just as the victims of clergy and coach abuse needed community validation and encouragement. These are the voices of the new “underdog” – the children abused, neglected, manipulated, lied to and deprived of claim to caring, child-centered environments in which they might have what they need – just like the struggling sapling and the vulnerable gray wolf cub.  That these voices seem threatening to policies or products that dominate adult agendas makes them cruelly vulnerable.  Like any underdog, they come from a position of no power, subject to social distain and public lynching.

It is a chilling reality, that their voices, the voices of children raised in social experiments, have become the new underdog.

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