feminist blogs

This is about a weightlifter and parent, not necessarily in that order.

The New York Times ran this in sports.

I loved her story, but I didn’t love the story, not the way they covered it. The whole thing starts with a very traditional-role narrative. First, the reporter sets it up:

Melanie Roach is a former gymnast who owns a gymnastics facility. Her husband is a state legislator. At 33, she is the mother of three young children, including 5-year-old Drew, who is autistic. And she can lift 238 pounds over her head.

Then, he (Greg Bishop) spends the first half of the piece talking about her role as the mother of an autistic child:

The problems she encountered in competition were nothing compared with the challenge she confronted with Drew after his autism was diagnosed in 2005. Roach said she was preoccupied with everything he would never be able to do — school dances, church missions, college classes. He did not have bad days; he had bad weeks, bad months, filled with relentless tantrums.

“It was literally in a week my life changed,” Roach said. “I went into depression. I went through a mourning process. Almost like I lost a child.”

She said she would kneel at his bedside every night, praying he would get better.

Not that I didn’t like that part of the story. In fact, it resonated with me quite a bit. I have young children with health problems — though not autism. So I felt a profound empathy with this fellow parent whose parenting challenges can be overwhelming, and I liked that part. But I saw it as positioned in the story in a way that it would not have been with a man.

The piece goes on:

“She learned that no matter how much money and time she put into it, she couldn’t change the outcome,” said her husband, Dan. “That has really helped with lifting. In the end, it’s the same concept.”

Without her experiences as a parent, the rest is a conventional sports narrative. She converted from gymnastics to weightlifting (so did US Olympic weightlifter Tara Nott, BTW; I think that’s a more common conversion than might immediately be apparent as both are dependent on explosive power, flexibility and balance and reward short people). She was an overnight sensation and set a record in 1998, but then injuries took their toll; she had several comeback attempts and a lot of pain and finally back surgery; now she’s the aging vet looking for one last shot at gold. She’s paid her dues and trained through a lot of pain to get here. That’s a conventional narrative, but it’s a good story. I’m totally with her on that. Go Melanie!

But the reporter’s interpretation of the interplay between Melanie Roach, Champion Weightlifter and Melanie Roach, Mother bothered me:

Thrush can tell immediately how well Roach is balancing the complexities of her life. He said he knew Roach was struggling with the pressure at the national championships in March, when she successfully lifted only two of six attempts. To qualify for Beijing, she must finish fourth or better in the 53-kilogram weight class at the Olympic trials in Atlanta on May 17.

“You’ll have an opportunity to be an average, everyday woman after August,” Thrush said he tells Roach when she seems distracted. “You need to be selfish now.”

Team Roach marches on through a life that Dan Roach described as “organized chaos.” Bonnie Kosoff, Melanie’s mother, moved in recently to take care of the children. Summers and Thrush travel to events.

“You know how they say it takes a village to raise a child?” Kosoff said. “Well, it takes a village to get someone to the Olympics, too.”
The changed outlook remains. Had Roach gone to the Olympics in 2000, she said, she would not have three kids or the business. Had there been no Drew, she may never have learned what Thrush tried to teach her all along — the concept of slow and small but steady and incremental progress.

But the biggest change that Drew inspired was in Roach, the athlete. She now enjoys the Olympic quest, 14 years after it started.

(Emphasis supplied.)

I don’t know Melanie Roach and I can’t speak for her. It’s possible that this reporting is completely true to her own interpretation of her experiences. Or it could be the reporter’s positioning. But I think that the reporter is highlighting things that would be true but taken for granted for male athletes.

If a man of 31, an international class athlete, were headed to the Olympic trials after a career of triumph, injuries and comebacks, with three kids and a spouse, it would also be true that it took a village to get him there. But I don’t think it would get much attention. I think everyone would just call it normal. But when a woman has kids, how she negotiates the demands of the rest of her life is The Big Question, the one that prompts several paragraphs in a major newspaper. It’s not just the way the role of mother is presumed to take over a woman’s life; it’s especially that this presumption goes unexamined.

And it wasn’t just the reporter. Her coach’s juxtaposition of “average everyday woman” (clearly a pejorative there) with high-level competition and positioning her ambition as “selfish” is exactly the problem. When men compete, they represent. The village isn’t just supporting them, they are bringing the triumph home for their family and friends, communities, nations, etc. But this guy is telling his lifter that she’s doing it all for herself. Way to motivate, coach!

I don’t have a good line to summarize this. I liked the athlete and I was bothered by the way it was framed.

p.s. there is a lot in the article that I didn’t raise. She’s Mormon, she had three home births, a few other things. It’s an interesting read for several reasons.

Good news:

Disability rights advocates and medical ethicists praised a precedent-setting ruling Friday by the Illinois Appellate Court denying a bid to sterilize a mentally disabled woman against her will.

The woman, identified only as K.E.J. in court records, isn’t capable of raising a child on her own, but her guardian failed to prove that sterilization would be in her best interests, a three-judge panel in Chicago ruled unanimously.

[ . . . ]

The ruling was the first appellate opinion on the issue in Illinois.

 

“It’s extraordinarily significant” because it guarantees the disabled a court hearing, said Katie Watson, a Northwestern University professor who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief in the case on behalf of about two dozen medical ethicists.

[ . . . ]

K.E.J., 29, suffered a brain injury as a child when she was struck by a car. As a result, she cannot be left alone to operate a stove or perform most household chores.

The woman lives with her aunt, who was appointed as her guardian in the mid-1990s. In 2003, the aunt filed a “petition for tubal ligation” in Cook County Probate Court, arguing that her niece had a bad medical reaction to other birth-control methods.

At a bench trial in 2005, K.E.J. testified that she hoped one day to have children. “I will love taking care of them,” she said. “I will love, you know, to see how they grow.”

Seeing our atrocious history on forced sterilization in this country, I’d say that this ruling is oh, several decades overdue. I personally found both Pregnancy and Power and Killing the Black Body to be excellent primers on this subject as well as great books (but I’m sure that there are other great books I haven’t read that focus primarily on this issue — if you know them, leave the titles in the comments). But the simple version of the facts is that for many decades, America participated in and promoted forced sterilization of those who were deemed unfit to pass on their genes. That included women of color, the poor and those who were referred to as “feeble-minded” — disabled women (the phrase was also used to justify sterilization of other socially-scorned women, like those who were promiscuous or sex workers). Many people believe that this is still happening, like with the Norplant situation several years back (also covered in Killing the Black body), and there is more or less undeniable evidence that it is still happening to non-English-speaking women and the disabled.

We often treat disabled people as though they are undeserving of certain things in life, and sexuality and parenthood are pretty high up on that list. I do not think that being unable to raise your children on your own makes you unworthy of giving birth to and raising children. And I certainly don’t see any justification for a forced-sterilization of a woman who has made it clear that her wishes are otherwise; we need to see it as equally heinous to forced-birth and forced-abortion. By it’s very nature, a fundamental right is not conditional, and believing in reproductive justice means believing in it for all. And so I applaud the court and congratulate disability activists on this win; I can only hope that the success continues.

via FRIDA

Word. Obama at a town hall meeting:

“When it comes specifically to HIV/AIDS, the most important prevention is education, which should include — which should include abstinence education and teaching the children — teaching children, you know, that sex is not something casual. But it should also include — it should also include other, you know, information about contraception because, look, I’ve got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information.”

Emphasis mine.

A baby shouldn’t be a punishment — but that’s exactly what babies become when you force pregnancy on someone. The “pro-life” movement very much uses forced pregnancy as a slut-punishing tool, placing children squarely in the category of “punishment” rather than “joy.” Yet somehow they manage to argue that they’re the ones who actually care about children — even as they cut off children’s health care; even as 100 percent of the worst legislators of children are “pro-life;” even as they think babies should be physically forced on women instead of joyfully and openly wanted.

Good on Obama for calling that out, however quietly.

Do yourself a favor and go read Lauren’s post about a Dear Prudence column that Emily Yoffe vomited up:

Judging from her latest piece, Emily Yoffe, Slate’s advice columnist, is going after Dear Abby’s job. Incensed that Dear Abby stole her advice thunder by insisting that the rape of one man’s sleeping wife is obviously a big ol’ lie, Yoffe tried to up the ante by writing a concern troll piece on single parenting, concluding that the real problem with single parents, namely single mothers, is that they don’t feel enough proper shame for their failed attempts at parenting, i.e. shame for their stupid, destructive children. Yoffe cushions her assertions with a bit of social science that leaves out wide swaths of information about the realities of why single parents opt to remain single, and tries to couch her concern in economic blither and psychobabble blather. There’s so much wrong with her essay that I sprained an eyeball by rolling them so hard, starting with the ever-present definition of “single parent” as “unmarried woman.”

I prefer “dumb whore” — it keeps things simple[.]

Lest you think this is some kind of aberration on Yoffe’s part, I invite you to take a trip through the archives here at Feministe. She’s got several opinions about children, namely, that if you’re married, it’s your duty to have them regardless of whether you want to have them or not (and Yoffe knows that you *really* do, no matter what you say), and if you aren’t married, you should be, you irresponsible slut. And while you’re at it, keep your husband happy by doing all the work without complaining and let him fuck you even if you don’t want to.

This kind of out-of-control globalization, wherein wealthier women are able to rent the wombs of poorer ones, makes me extremely uncomfortable.

I’m certainly sympathetic to the plight of couples who can’t conceive for whatever reason. And it certainly makes sense for women to voluntarily carry someone else’s pregnancy if it means making a lot of money. But I think it’s possible to be skeptical of this situation without passing judgment on the people involved in it, most of whom are doing the best that they can in tough circumstances.

An article published in The Times of India in February questioned how such a law would be enforced: “In a country crippled by abject poverty,” it asked, “how will the government body guarantee that women will not agree to surrogacy just to be able to eat two square meals a day?”

One could argue that surrogates are simply providing a service like any other. But I’m not sure that we want to turn reproduction into a service industry. The inequalities here are so stark — and the carrot of thousands of dollars so tempting for women in a country with astounding poverty rates — that writing if off as purely business is inadequate.

“Surrogates do it to give their children a better education, to buy a home, to start up a small business, a shop,” Dr. Kadam said. “This is as much money as they could earn in maybe three years. I really don’t think that this is exploiting the women. I feel it is two people who are helping out each other.”

Mr. Gher agreed. “You cannot ignore the discrepancies between Indian poverty and Western wealth,” he said. “We try our best not to abuse this power. Part of our choice to come here was the idea that there was an opportunity to help someone in India.”

In the Mumbai clinic, it is clear that an exchange between rich and poor is under way. On some contracts, the thumbprint of an illiterate surrogate stands out against the clients’ signatures.

Thoughts?

I’m going to make “Feministe Feedback” a regular feature here, given that the last two reader-response threads went really well (see: Raising Feminist Daughters and Talking to Your Partner About Sexism). I’ll try to do it weekly, although I think it’ll depend more on when questions for the peanut gallery are posed.

This week, the question comes from a regular reader a close friend of mine in “real life.” The background is this: She and her husband (both 24) have taken in her husband’s 13-year-old cousin, who we’ll call A. They don’t have any other kids, and they only have A temporarily. Today, she emailed me with this (identifying information redacted or changed):

So. Today when I was home at lunch, A was saying how if his friend was gay, he’d punch him. I asked him why. Being gay is wrong, and being straight is right. I asked why again. No answer. So, I pulled up your video of Ellen, found the boy’s name, and googled the article. Then, I read it to A. I also told him about the 17 year that was killed (I sent you the article, I”m bad with names). Then I asked him if he thought it was okay that these guys got killed. He replied no. I asked why. He said they only needed to be beat up. To make a long story shorter, I continued asking questions, and discussing this with him. I was starting to get pretty upset. [My husband] jumped in a few times. A said it was okay for girls to be gay, but not boys. No answer for why that is. So I told him he had to think about why, and we were going to finish this discussion when I got home.

Jeez.

A is a smart kid. He’s pretty well versed in women’s rights. His mom was definitely a feminist. Wouldn’t even carry or use the word ‘purse’- only bags, lol.

I’m sure his parents have had gay friends, so this was pretty surprising to me. So we are going to keep talking and talking and talking about it.

Good thing is, is that I think having [my husband] hear this conversation made my point to him about how it all starts with a joke. And then snowballs into a 14 year old thinking its okay to kill someone.
I’ve never been stern with A cause I haven’t had to, so I think I kind of freaked him out because I was being really stern. If he was older, I would’ve been pissed, but I was trying to remain calm. He’s young, and really its not his fault. Hopefully I can get most of my point through to him. He’s a sensitive kid, so [my husband] asked him how he would feel if someone decided that being Mexican was wrong, and beat him up. (A is Mexican and Italian).

Having a 13 year old is hard.

Sure sounds like it.

So, Feministers: How do you talk to kids (your own or others’) about homophobia? How do you explain that homophobia is wrong to a 13-year-old who is steeped in it every single day, and who probably constantly hears “gay” as an insult from his peers? Any strategies for my friend and for other parents, guardians and folks who interact with kids?

Following up to the thread about discussing feminism with male partners:

How does a father teach his daughter about feminism?

I’m the father of a nearly five-year-old daughter, and I want to raise her to be fully aware of the misogyny around her and not be afraid to confront it and fight for herself. I know my role in this- I need to make sure that she is not afraid to question authority and that she is a critical and independent thinker. That’ll probably go most of the way, I hope. But are there any books that you guys can recommend that might start her thinking about her identity as a woman? Preferably sooner rather than later- I figure giving her The Feminine Mystique will work at thirteen, not so much at six.

I do feel a bit of urgency about this- we’re living in the most conservative county in Texas (well, might as well say the galaxy). I know that lecturing her about it just won’t work, especially as she confronts what I assume will be some pretty rampant misogyny in the school system down here. I’m looking for something that’ll get her questioning what’s happening around her on her own.

Suggestions? Advice?

This is satire, right?

Fay Weldon is a long-time feminist activist, and I have to hope that this op/ed is simply a satirical response to the suggestion of a British politician that all teenage girls should be sterilized. But it reads awfully seriously. And whether or not she meant it, the commenters at the Daily Mail sure seem to be taking her seriously — and agreeing with her proposal. Plus there’s the fact that Weldon “found God” a few years back and has been spouting some seriously anti-feminist rhetoric ever since. I want to believe it’s a joke, but I’m not so sure.

Last week, an intriguing proposition was mooted by Government minister Dawn Primarolo.

Teenage girls, she said, could be steered towards what is described as “long-term contraception”.

This is now possible thanks to the development of contraceptive jabs and implants which can last up to five years.

In other words, there is a way of effectively sterilising girls for a lengthy period of time.

At what age? Well, doesn’t 12 until 17 sound rather sensible?

This would have the advantage of bringing down the teenage pregnancy rate, so high in this country it makes us a disgrace among the nations - the worst offenders in Europe.

The abortion rate would fall sharply. And silly young girls could get on with the education that is meant to produce serious, responsible taxpayers, not benefit recipients.

Now, many people will see this modest proposal as little short of horrific - nothing less than state interference in our reproductive lives.

But think about it: it might not be such a bad idea.

The rest of the op/ed just goes downhill from there.

I’m all for improving access to education and decreasing the teen pregnancy rate, but not at any cost. And forcing all girls to be sterilized is a pretty high price to pay. It’s simply wrong. It’s a violation of bodily autonomy and basic human rights, just like forced abortion and forced pregnancy. It is not something that any pro-choice person should ever consider reasonable.

It’s also something with deeply racist roots. Forced and coerced sterilizations are not neutral propositions, and have long been used as tools of control against women of color and others “unfit” for parenthood. These kinds of suggestions cannot be separated from that history. And, no matter who they’re directed at, suggestions that we should take away the reproductive rights of an entire group of people are inherently problematic and worthy of strong feminist opposition.

I’ve been following the media reactions to a story from Colorado about a young transgender girl in the 2nd grade and the usual gang of clowns are doing their “moral outrage” acts. It’s all fairly predictable, but it’s still fun and somewhat illuminating to pick apart what’s being said, so let’s take a look, shall we?

For starters, if you have questions about young trans kids (and many people do) an excellent resource is the TransYouth Families Advocates FAQ. This group was started by four mothers with transgender children, and their material is written for families who are trying to deal with and understand their kids’ struggles with gender.

The story in question is pretty straightforward. The school district has been working with TYFA and is doing a pretty great job at accommodating the trans child’s needs; they’re making sure pamphlets and counselors are available for students, parents, or faculty who have questions, and they’re making two of the school’s unisex bathrooms available for the trans child to use. Sounds fairly reasonable, right?

Well of course, Neil Cavuto on FOX News doesn’t think so. (Video courtesy of GLAAD.)

I can’t transcribe the whole thing, but he starts off by calling it a “bizzare story,” then brings on a child psychologist to serve as the punching bag for the usual interruptions and “what, are you crazy?” remarks that always seem to be the bread and butter over at FOX News. Let’s see how many myths and fabrications Cavuto managed to rack up:

1. “Bending over Backwards” Part 1: Schools have to build unisex bathrooms to accommodate kids like this, costing taxpayers thousands… or millions!

Yep, he actually says “millions” at one point. Fact-check: nobody has ever actually built a unisex restroom on behalf of trans people, and I have to say it’s not likely to happen anytime soon, either. The most “extreme” accommodations that I’ve ever heard of in this regard are reclassifying one or two bathrooms among mnay as unisex or all-gender — and that’s usually in settings like colleges, or LGBT community centers. And that’s not even the case here; the NBC affiliate in Colorado that reported this story simply said “two unisex bathrooms in the building will be made available.” Of course it’s easier to whip out the hyperbole and assume that expensive construction is going on, but anyone who did a little fact-checking would realize that trans people in these situations are usually asked to use an existing unisex bathroom. In a school, that’s often a single-occupancy bathroom in the teacher’s lounge or the nurse’s office.

And let’s be clear, this is usually a compromise. Trans employees and students aren’t asking to walk to the other end of the building, or in some cases take an elevator to a different floor than the one they work on, or go across the street or campus to a different building because they want to. Trans people are forced to because institutions can’t figure out another way to segregate us from people who might be uncomfortable sharing a restroom with us. Most trans people identify as one gender or another and tend to use the appropriate bathroom in say, a relatively anonymous public place like a movie theater or a restaurant. It’s only in contexts where coworkers, bosses, or other students know someone’s trans that this kind of problem comes up, along with the “unisex bathroom” compromise.

Approximate cost to taxpayers: possibly the price of one or two extra keys to bathrooms that are normally locked. Approximate cost to trans student: segregation from everyone else’s bathrooms, and less convenience since there are only two she can use. OK, what’s up next?
(more…)

Title stolen from Doug, who basically says everything I would have.

It’s not an uncommon story: Teenage girl grows up in a conservative town; teenage girl gets pregnant; teenage girl has baby; town is scandalized. But here, the teenage girl got her life together — being a mother pushed her to be more responsible, and she got her grades up and stayed in school, despite having the odds stacked against her. Her fellow students took notice, and wanted to write a yearbook story on her — but the conservative, likely “pro-life” administration would have none of it.

Her classmates decided to write about Shipman’s story of choices and challenges in the yearbook.

But school administrators said the article would glamorize pre-marital sex and send the wrong message.
…
Mr. Crummel said that Ms. Estes and Ms. Shipman were well spoken and articulate at the board meeting. He believes principal Cash made his decision because the yearbook story was in conflict with the school’s position of abstinence-only education.

And therein lies the entire crux of the anti-choice movement: They are willing to actively deny reality in order to promote their ideals.

Ms. Shipman’s existence, and the existence of her child, are in conflict with the school’s position of abstinence-only education. The majority of Americans conflict with the school’s position. Reality conflicts with the school’s position. As Doug writes:

Ahh, now we see what this is really about: that “abstinence-based curriculum” failed dramatically in at least one instance, and now they want to make sure that instance is kept under wraps.

The Shipman case is a microcosm of everything that is head-slappingly screwed-up about the right wing’s attitudes toward sex and pregnancy. Basically, the way they think things should work is this: If you’re in high-school, you should only be exposed to an inaccuracy-laden form of sex education that is no more likely to keep you from having sex than other forms of sex ed. When you do go ahead and have sex anyway, chances are you get pregnant, because you never got any accurate information about birth control or contraceptives. Once you get pregnant, you have to carry the child to term, because abortion is wrong — but even if you do keep the baby, we’re still going to shun you and treat you as a leper because you never should’ve had sex in the first place. And God forbid you work hard, finish your schooling and make something of yourself, because then you’re “glamorizing” teen pregnancy and demonstrating to your peers that God doesn’t automatically make pregnant teens spontaneously combust in a fireball of shame. Here’s a question: How many pregnant teenage girls will see a story like this — in which another girl did everything she was “supposed” to do in handling her pregnancy, yet still got treated as damaged goods by the Powers That Be — and figure that, if that’s as good as things get when you actually “choose life,” they might as well get an abortion?

Of course, working to create circumstances that will actually increase the demand for abortion is nothing new to the right wing. But not only are they working against reducing abortions, they’re working against teenagers — particularly girls — at every single step of the process.

Indeed.