When I was little and went to the grocery store with my mom, I liked to occupy myself by looking at greeting cards. There were funny cards, cheesy cards, stupid cards, pretty cards, sentimental cards — and I found it all very interesting.  But perhaps most interesting of all were the cards for those people turning forty or fifty.  They actually disturbed me a little bit.  There was so much color on all the other ones but when you got to these, it was like they were the death cards.  And if you didn’t know how to read you might as well have assumed that that’s exactly what they were.  Cards for the dead people . They were almost always black and they might even have a reference to a grave stone or something else rather morbid.  You’d open the card and there would be some sort of half-hearted, well, at least you can celebrate.

To little me, this was very confusing.  Birthdays were supposed to be a great thing! When and why do they become so terrible?  And if they are so terrible, why even celebrate them?  Why buy a card?  Why not pretend they aren’t even happening? Unfortunately, as I grew older, I began to realize that this indeed is the coping mechanism of choice for many people — pretend they’re not even happening or get drunk enough to forget they’re happening.

And what’s even sadder is that that age — 40 to 50 has lowered dramatically. Ironically, as our life expectancy increases it seems that we become more and more afraid of getting older.  Now it’s not the dreaded 40.  It’s the dreaded 30.  Because the end of your twenties is like the end of your life.  But it seems to trickle down even further.  I can count on one hand the number of peers I have who are actually excited about turning anything above twenty-one.  Indeed, you hear some version of this all day or all week long on your twenty-first birthday:

Enjoy it! It’s the last birthday worth celebrating anyway.

To make matters worse, it’s not even the first twenty years that are considered the prime.  It’s roughly the years between sixteen and twenty-one.  So while the adults are all wishing they could go back, with each year our culture is shoving the ten-year-olds further and further into a desperate climb towards the day they can get their license or the day they can drive off finally to the freedom of college.  We literally act as if life is only great for six or so years.  And we counsel those living them to live them well as they pass quickly and they’re gone before you know it.

Maybe I’m too idealistic, but this just doesn’t seem to cut it.  To live a life in which you believe that six out of your eighty or so years are going to be anything worth your time doesn’t sound like a life very much worth living.  There has got to be something more. There’s got to be a better answer.  Especially for women.  For women are probably the most plagued by this syndrome.  We all know how increasingly mature little girls are starting to dress.  And we all know how much older women are increasingly desperately pouring themselves and their money into “miracles” of botox and tucks and suctions and add-ons and push-ups and cover-ups.  Women are told a lie that with each year gets stronger and stronger.  And this lie is that their sexual prime is what defines them.  And that the time before and after it will never measure up.  If we were animals, I could maybe understand this lie, and it might not be such a lie.  But we’re not animals.  And I’m pretty sure life has more to offer.  And I’m pretty sure that most of us would agree it does.  But even if we won’t outright say it, why do we continue to perpetuate the lie?

I believe we do because we are part animal.  And we have instincts.  And when we start down the road of instincts, when we start to let instincts take over, we begin to forget about everything else.  We all know how increasingly sexualized our culture is becoming.  But why at such a fast rate?  And why is it so overwhelming?  Because instinct is strong.  And when let to run wild, it runs wild and it knocks over everything in its path.  We have, as a culture, let the sexual instinct rule.  Just listen to the beats and the grunted words coming from so many of the songs on the radio.  Sometimes they don’t even sound human.  And I would argue, that at some point, they aren’t human anymore.  We have resigned ourselves to the part of us that is enslaved to the instinct. And once we are enslaved to the instinct it is very, very difficult to turn back.  Even if we have many wonderful things in our life at thirty we can’t help but gaze backwards at the women younger than us, increasingly anxious as we see ourselves looking older and getting further and further away from that prime.  The more sexually focused our culture becomes, inevitably the more sexually focused we become.  The more instinct driven the advertisements and people and movies and music around us become, inevitably the more instinct driven we are pressured to become.  Because our culture is our pack. And in the wild, the pack defines your survival.

But the good news is, we are not all animal.  We are human.  And our humanity raises us above the silliness of the pack.  Our humanity allows sexuality to be merely a facet of who we are, and even still, our humanity makes sexuality so much more beautiful than it ever was when ruled by instinct.  Humanity has so, so, so much more to offer. Humanity is not the time between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one.  Humanity is eternal.  But we cannot know and fully understand and fully reap the benefits of being human until we learn to stop looking backwards (or forwards) in anxiety.  We have to accept where we are and until we do that we will never know what that point in eternity has to offer us. Sadly, too many ten-year-olds will never have known the beauty of being ten.  Sadly, too many forty-year-olds will never have known the beauty of being forty.  And sadly, too many people will have lived and died without ever having known the beauty of being human.  All they will remember is the crazy party days of satisfied instinct.  That will be the summit and high point of their lives and how sad that is.  So I challenge us to resist being slaves to the instinct.  There’s no need to be.  (Besides, it’s a losing game anyway!  There’s no rush and there’s no ticking clock.  And to live like there is, is to miss life itself.)  So celebrate your birthday this year.  Tell everybody how old you are and how proud you are of it because it’s a beautiful and amazing thing.  And the more you choose to act like it, the more you’ll believe it and see how true it really is.  In turn, you will then give others the courage to be human too.

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.

Humility is one of these great virtues which can make us soar.  If practiced, it can bring us great peace, as St. Anthony of Egypt was to find:  Abba Anthony said: ‘I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said, groaning, “What can get from such snares?” Then I heard a voice saying to me, “Humility.”’ (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers).  

Humility allows us to understand and accept our own limitations. If we know our limits and work with them, they teach us why we need others, why we need to work together in a community, not thinking we can do all things by ourselves.  If we can accept ourselves, our weaknesses, we can accept others and their weaknesses.  We can learn to love and respect each other without trying to manipulate them.  Even if we know the truth, we are still limited in its execution, and we must be willing to accept such limitations, otherwise we end up in bitter distress, taking it out bitterly on those who do not agree with us.  Ilias the Presbyter said it well: 

Truth without humility is blind. That is why it becomes contentious: it tries to support itself on something, and finds nothing except rancour. (“Gnomic Anthology I” in The Philokalia. Volume III.)

By truly knowing and understanding ourselves, we do not try to become something which is impossible for us to be and we avoid frustration by our lack of success.  This is not to say humility is about accepting unjust impositions upon ourselves, such as social constructs meant to limit us and prevent us from achieving our full potential.   

Humility is not humiliation, though humiliation often tries to use humility to force a given end on us.

For example, it was quite common throughout the centuries for society to treat women as incapable of many tasks, such as rational discourse, and women were told that humility required them to accept such declarations without challenge.  Time and time again, brilliant women would allow such humiliation to keep them from self-perfection; if they entered into social discourse, they would do so with the caveat that they are women.  Even if what they said was good, they would still qualify their thoughts, “But what do I know, being a woman?”  This is also true in many other situations.  Slavery was often kept in place through such humiliation.  Aboriginal peoples would often be humiliated by “civilized society,” being told to take their proper place behind those who conquered them. The history of humanity includes a history of humiliation, of one group or another finding a way to lord it over others through a claim of superiority. 

Humiliation works on and corrupts the virtue of humility.   It uses ideologies to promote its agenda.  If there is any challenge to the system, humiliation seeks to turn back and repress that challenge by socially disabling and humbling the transgressor. 

Humiliation often uses the rhetoric of humility, twisting it from within, taking phrases and statements of truly humble people and turning the spirit of humility into the legality of humiliation.  Humility, on the other hand, seeks self-transcendence: by accepting the limitations of oneself, one can reach out to others, to become strong together in communal society, allowing one to perfect that which one is great at and give it to the community.  Humiliation is about self-destruction, about finding a way to encourage some person or another to admit defeat and not strive to better themselves, but to be trapped by the expectations of another.  Humility relies on truths, allowing one not only to know their own limitations, but also their strengths. Humiliation twists the truth, never allowing one to know their strength, but only to see, and be trapped by, their own weaknesses.  Humility is about truth, while humiliation is about the falsification of humility: so-called false humility is the end result of humiliation.

Humility is the opposite of pride, while pride is the foundation of humiliation.  Humility seeks the integral good of the whole person, while pride only seeks the elevation of the ego.  Pride wants to create a vision of reality which cannot exist, and impose that vision upon the self (destroying it from self-transcendence) and upon others (by trying to push them down through humiliation). Humility allows for unity and love and is needed to heal the rifts which create disorder in the world.  Those who have and those who have not, those who consider themselves victors and those who consider themselves losers all have need for humility and a true and honest assessment of oneself and of others.  In this way, humility promotes finding ways to come back together and heal the rifts.  Pride works against humility, seeking to belittle and destroy the other.  If I am a “have not”, my pride wants to humiliate the “haves”; if I am the winner in a contest, my pride seeks to humiliate the losers so they will not threaten me in the future.  Humility wants what is best for all, while humiliation only wants a simulacrum of the best for the ego. 

Humility is not an easy virtue to achieve.  Humiliating oneself can create false-humility, but this drifts toward a nihilistic self-hatred.  Seeking to be humble, we often become our own worst enemies.  We let our pride create a vision for the self and then look down upon ourselves for not meeting our own requirements.  The true battle is the battle for humility within, a battle which allows us to love and be loved, to accept that there is good within.  Humility prevents us from imposing false expectations on ourselves, and so we do not get hurt even when others seek to humiliate us.  But if we have not learned humility, but practice self-humiliation, our pride is hurt even worse by the humiliation done to us by others: we take their words to heart, and turn it in upon ourselves, destroying ourselves even more even as we erroneously believe that we are being humble.  

Humility is one of the most important and yet most abused virtues.  True humility sets us free from false expectations, while false humility creates socialized inferiority leading to the humiliation of one or more people for ideological reasons or as a result of pride.  If we want to move forward as a people, if we want to make sure as a society we do not wallow in our own pain and sorrow and self-destruct, we need to embrace humility – true humility, not the false humility of humiliation which we so often confused with true humility.  If we want to know how to save ourselves as well as our society from the damage of pride and humiliation, the voice spoken to St. Anthony is as prophetic to us today as it was to him.  There is only one way: true humility.

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

One of my favorite pieces of marital advice I’ve ever heard was given to me by my friend when we were just teenagers looking at clothes in my closet. She said, nonchalantly,

My mom told me that the secret to marriage is to make sure you always wear pretty pajamas.

We probably laughed and didn’t talk much about it, but it forever stuck with me.

Around the same time I was looking at pictures of myself from when I was about four years old and I noticed how unique my outfits were.  Almost every other picture I was in a princess gown or an animal costume or a vintage dress from my great grandmother.  It was the age when we would play dress up just because.  The age when you assumed you were beautiful and adorned yourself as such.  The age when you didn’t question if it was appropriate to wear ruby red slippers to school.  The age when you dressed totally impractical, and yet you never thought twice about it. Nearly everything you did was impractical.  And how freeing such an outlook was.  Little girls in their princess dresses have such confidence, such happiness.  They’re so human and they’re so beautiful. But what happens?  Somewhere along the way they put away their personality and don Abercrombie jeans so as to win approval of girls and the sexual attention of boys.  And through this process, they lose something so precious.  They may even forget to wear pretty pajamas.

Too often, we think of beauty simply as a means to an end.  And that is the problem with the little girl who grows out of dress up.  She forgets what it was like to dress up just because.  Dressing up becomes simply a tool for getting something.  Her own beauty becomes meaningless, except for whatever it can do for her.  And so we hear of the married woman who “gives up.”  The married woman who stops caring about what she wears or what she looks like.  She’d found her guy, checked off her list. Now what else was there to do besides watch TV and live vicariously through other people trying to check off their lists?

But here is where my friend’s mom’s advice comes in.  Always wear pretty pajamas.  We are instinctual beings.  We are animals.  And so there is a natural explanation for why the eleven year old begins to see her beauty as a means to an end.  But we are more than animals.  We appreciate beauty for more than its practicality.  Beauty lifts us to heights beyond the realm of instinct.  Beauty nourishes us and gives meaning to our lives.  Beauty enchants us and gives us hope.  And one of the greatest things anyone can ever have in their marriage is hope.

Therefore, if you want your marriage (or relationship, or just your life in general!) to be full of hope, if you want it to be transcendent, if you want it to be more than instinct, do the things that don’t make sense.  Do the things that aren’t practical.  The things that are beautiful just because.  Like pretty pajamas when you’re sixty-five.  Like pretty pajamas when you’re nine months pregnant.  Like pretty pajamas when you may feel entirely unattractive.  Like pretty pajamas because you’re beautiful and because your beauty, not just your sexuality, is what gives you purpose and meaning, and it is what in turn, enchants a man, even when he has, in the world’s terms, gained everything he can practically gain from you.  When the practical has expired, when instinct has been fulfilled, it is beauty that must remain to keep us going, to give us reason, even more reason to live and to love.

I’ve made a rule for myself that I will always light a candle when my husband and I have dinner.  There have been many times when I have said oh but we’re eating really quickly or ahh the table is a mess or I’ll light a candle after I clean everything but every time I make such an excuse, I know in the back of my head that I am making a mistake, that I am depriving us of something, perhaps incredibly simple, but something perhaps more important than the meal itself.  Precisely because we don’t need candles.  The animal says, we just need to eat.  But the human recognizes that the things we need most are the things we don’t need.  The things we need most are the things that are impractical.  The things that are simply beautiful just because.  I used to always wonder why my mom insisted that we “set” the table with pretty napkins rather than plain old paper towels.  Wouldn’t paper towels be easier?  But now I understand. When I light a candle, it gives meaning to the meal I cooked.  And it tells my husband, or my husband tells me when he lights a candle (which he is much better at doing!) that we’ll love each other beyond what makes sense.  We’ll love each other even when our bellies are full and our senses satisfied.  That we’ll dance around the kitchen just because and that we’ll continue to hold hands even when our children are grown and our hair is grey. Because that’s the kind of love that means the most.  That’s the kind of love that sets you free—the kind of free that you were when you were four years old.  The kind of free that makes you human.

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.

When I first met Alana, I was at Columbia University Law School screening my documentary film,  Eggsploitation.  I had done an earlier screening during the day at Fordham University Law School and noted at both of these screenings “they” were following me.  They being the women who typically attend my screenings to give me pushback and reject and/or discount the message of the film, that “donating” (often times it is selling) your eggs is risky and potentially quite harmful to young women.  These women who follow me around are someway involved in the fertility industry.  They are reproductive lawyers, egg brokers, women who they themselves struggled with infertility and used egg donors and/or surrogates to conceive.  Understandably, these women have issues with the film.

But on this particular night, I noticed in the back of the auditorium, a young woman holding up a card board sign which read, Anonymous Us.  I had only recently heard about this website and the project which was being run by this woman Alana S. Newman.  At one point during the Q and A period of the night, Alana raised her hand and was called upon to ask her question.  She challenged the audience to consider the children being created in this enterprise, the children intentionally created and largely separated from their biological mothers and fathers (in the case of sperm donation) and half-siblings.  Her message resonated with many in the audience.  I chatted briefly with Alana after the screening.  She was off to play music at a gig she had that evening and she handed me her music CD which was packaged in a paper bag.  That music I would later use in my next film, Anonymous Father’s Day, which highlights the stories of donor-conceived people – including Alana herself, one of the people interviewed in this film.

The next day, while reading my google alert news on the film, I was mortified to see Alana referred to as “Shark Tank Girl” by one of the women attending the screening.  This woman maintains a blog on third-party reproduction and had attended my screenings at Fordham and Columbia Universities.  She wrote:

I was civil and level, as neutral as I could be in my questioning until Shark tank girl-well ,I only took one little pot shot, couldn’t help it. I asked is there a model by which ART is practiced elsewhere that they think is done according to their standards and that they would consider acceptable and I got an answer that made no sense-it might have, but it was just blah blah blah, nothing substantive. Which was when Shark Tank girl chimed in on how in other countries there is a homestudy done just like they do for adoption, to see if it’s a home and family fit to be parents. My pot shot was-maybe they also do a better job of screening donors too (this girl supposedly passed through and donated twice herself). I reminded the Panel that I was asking about all ART and not just Donors and that in adoption there are different risks & liabilities for placing an existing child compared to who is entitled by law to have children through any form of reproduction.

Why on earth, I wondered, was this woman calling Alana “Shark Tank Girl”?  I couldn’t imagine an older woman calling Alana by such a pejorative name.  I mean, as an older woman myself, watching another older woman ignore this young person’s very real pain and concerns and calling her names?  So I emailed Alana, who gave me the backstory.  Alana had once been invited to speak at a workshop for people considering having children via reproductive technologies – she felt she had been thrown into a shark tank because her message was not well received and she is seen as an enemy of the infertility industry.

Since then, I’ve appeared on the Dr. Oz, addressing these issues, with Alana in the audience.  And of course “they” were there too.  Alana’s attacker wrote again here:

Shark Tank Girl stood up to say that she is 5 months PG, that she has been an Egg Donor and is a Donor Offspring herself, here at The Dr Oz Show to say that Anonymous Donor Conception is wrong because it strips the child of their rightful PARENTAL connection to, you guessed it, the Donor. A parent and a donor are not the same thing. 

Recently, Alana has come under fire again for her latest piece calling out the “new sexual predators” as it relates to older women and gay men needing young fertile women in order for them to have a child.  Of course her analogy went over like a lead balloon within the industry.

Here’s what I know about Alana.  She is strong and powerful and gentle and loving.  She has a heart for people struggling with infertility but wants to be sure we don’t harm others, exploit the poor, see or treat children as commodities in our desire to pro-create.  She’s fearless in her willingness to go anywhere and talk to anyone – even if that means being thrown to the sharks.