My year as a slut, part one

Commenter Bernie rightly observes that if my 13-year-old self were in middle school today, I'd blend in with the herd. I'll address that issue in another post, but for now let it remind us of the importance of context.

Cast your mind back to -- or imagine if you're too young or were too coked up to recall -- the early 1980s. Brooke Shields caused an uproar by intimating that she went commando in her Calvins. The most famous American Martha was not Stewart but Quinn of MTV. Nancy Reagan ordered us, uselessly, to Just Say No. And in a conservative, suburban enclave somewhere in Texas, a pack of dipshit adolescents was misconstruing The Official Preppy Handbook as a straight-up style manual.

The popular crowd at my school wore -- completely without irony -- French-braided hair, Calvin Klein jeans or pleat-front khakis, penny loafers or Top-Siders, argyle socks, and, of course, Izod or Polo shirts draped with Shetland-wool sweaters. They were vicious, insecure, crazy with media saturation and hormones, and attired like miniature buyer's agents out for a day of property showings. Lesser mortals dressed New Wave or like stoners. You could get vertigo from all the checkerboard Vans shuffling up the stairs.

I didn't have the cash to go preppy, but I'd worked on a new look and attitude all summer. I was using fewer "big words." I'd studied the magazine beauty hints designed to correct every flaw a girl could possibly have, and boy were there a lot. I had accepted Joan Jett as my personal savior, which may have been the only smart decision I made. I was going to be cool and I wasn't going to let anyone's judgment bug me.

A few days into the school year I was feeling great. I got a compliment on my new look from my favorite teacher, a brassy Texas gal who knew from tons of makeup. Random girls told me I had really pretty eyes. A bitchy popular girl tried to yank off one of my long, purple thumbnails to prove it was fake, then sulked when I yelped in pain and the other girls glared at her. Life was good. I looked totally fucking awesome.

Problem was, I didn't understand that looking totally fucking awesome would make some people think about fucking, and that made me bad. Or, as Twisty would say, "Bad, bad, bad."

It turns out that whether you mean to or not, making people think about sex -- not hard to do in the hormonal swamp of middle school -- can generate hostility. I soon had three primary tormentors, each with his own territory and personal approach to demeaning me. What they had in common was their low social status, the fact that everyone but me ignored or approved of what they were doing, and their enthusiasm for telling me I was a slut.

The first boy who called me a slut to my face was a lower-tier jock with big glasses in my science class. Let's call him Jerkoff. Jerkoff was always talking to his lab partner about "foxy" girls he'd seen after school, describing their anatomies in crude terms, always checking out of the corner of his eye to make sure I heard what he was saying. I thought he was a complete loser.

One day he noticed me giving him the hairy eyeball as he spewed his porn monologue. He stopped rambling and looked me over.

"You're such a slut," Jerkoff said. His lab partner, a boy so dull that I can't recall his name or face, cackled with glee.

"Up yours," I replied. It was a dialog we would repeat with surprisingly little variation for the next few months.

Thinking about this as an adult, I'm not sure how a boy could sit in the front row of a classroom describing girls he'd like to fuck and openly calling a classmate a slut without the teacher noticing it and putting a stop to it. I have a theory, but that's for later.

Then there was Phys Ed, a time of torment under the best of circumstances for a girl who spent seven full days out of every twenty-one bleeding like a stuck hog. What better way to spend that time than trotting around in the heat with cramps and with a maxipad the size of a surfboard stuck inside a polyester, double-knit, short-short uniform? Add in a skinny boy we'll call Dick who was building social capital among the other boys by insulting me in graphic terms and you've got a recipe for no damned fun.

Why didn't I kick his ass? I weighed about 90 pounds. My tall, ex-jock dad, afraid his only daughter might blow away or die in a door-slamming accident, had started me lifting weights over the summer. I didn't exactly bulk up. And although I was always looking for one, I never got an opportunity to kick Dick in the crotch without witnesses.

Whenever the girls' and boys' groups were together during PE, we were under the putative supervision of a coach. Why didn't I complain to him? Because I would have died before I'd tell a grown man the things Dick was saying to me. Further, Dick was crafty enough to perform his monologues out of the coach's earshot. That would have made it my word against his and possibly that of the snivelling boys who wouldn't dream of saying such things themselves but who were delighted to hear Dick doing so.

And unlike science class, where everyone ignored the sniping between Jerkoff and me, gym class was turning into a pile-on. When I wasn't being tormented by Dick and his snickering pals I was being picked on by a bug-eyed girl who relished pointing out flaws in my appearance. This hurt me more than the nasty comments from Dick, because she and her little clique knew what Dick was saying to me and were just adding to it.

Don't think my school days were one big faux-slut-shaming event. My grades were still good. I certainly wasn't the only girl catching hell for being female; my two best friends were early bloomers and the recipients of a lot of unwanted bra-snapping and ogling. We and our wider circle of girlfriends bonded in our loathing of the creeps but spent most of our time talking about music, clothes and the boys we could stand.

There were some. Three in particular treated me like a real person. None of them stuck up for me when I was being ridiculed but they never joined in, either. To me that was something. Two of them eventually hinted that they wanted to go out, but by mid-year my hide was so thick and my tongue so sharp that I kept all males at arm's length. Boys, even the nice ones, were presumed guilty until proven guilty*.

I had achieved a tenuous social balance, managing to be mostly content and functional despite the routine torments of a small but persistent pack of twits. But as with any halfway decent thing in middle school, someone was about to make a point of fucking it up.




*It wasn't such a bad policy. Of those three guy friends, one drifted away in high school, one remained a platonic friend through college, and the third later pinned me to his dorm-room bed and told me the only reason he didn't rape me was because I was "so trusting," but that if he did then I shouldn't scream because it would alert the other guys in the dorm and they would want to watch. Sometimes a nice guy is just a Nice Guy.

Halloween. Pffffft.

The boys were all dressed up in their tiger costumes, more than ready to head out for candy begging. Hombre came in from bringing Easter Beagle and Woodstock, the rabbits, in for the night and told me that Woodstock was dead.

What the hell? He was spry as could be when we took him out to the 'rabbit tractor' this morning, the weather today was cool and perfect, he had a great veterinary checkup last month, and as far as I know he and Easter Beagle didn't get hold of anything poisonous.

Hombre has taken our sad kids out to trick-or-treat and I'm waiting for the overnight vet clinic to open so I can see if I need to bring Woodstock in for a postmortem and Easter Beagle in for a checkup.

Pfffft.

My year as a slut: preamble

When I was 13 years old, I accidentally became a slut -- the girl that boys made nasty comments about and grabbed at in the stairwells, the one the 'nice girls' wouldn't talk to or defend. I was a target and invisible at the same time. I was also a virgin who hadn't even managed a first kiss. Go figure.

For two decades I didn't talk or think about my slut year because I blamed myself and I was still angry and confused. But something Twisty wrote last week about Halloween tartwear hit me right in the brain:

The Times, like everybody else, is preoccupied with what women look like. They wonder why on earth would liberated women [women are now deemed '‘liberated'’, see, since second-wave feminism was such a rousing success] want to costume themselves as brainless receptacles for male incontinence? Perhaps it'’s because Halloween has been co-opted by today'’s sassy empowerful women who want to show the world that they'’ve gotten the memo from Dude Nation: non-sexy is a non-starter. Halloween is now '‘a "“safe space"”, a time to play with sexuality'’.

As long as the sexuality being played with is male sexuality, and that said sexuality as practiced by women is acknowledged by all as "“bad."” Bad, bad, bad. It is not insignificant that the title of the NYTimes slutty-Halloween article is "“Good Girls Go Bad, for a Day." Halloween or no, women rarely experience the exhilarating joys of empowerfulness when they neglect to glorify the phallus by taking a self-esteem hit.”

During my slut year, friends, every day was Halloween. I just didn't realize it.

It started as an innocent attempt to be cool. I was alarmingly skinny, shy and smart* -- the trifecta of social death in middle school. I'd spent the previous school year trying to fit in with the preppie crowd and concealing my grades from even my closest friends. And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for the end-of-year assembly.

My double life was revealed to the entire student body when I was called onstage -- by my real, matronly first name, not the nickname everyone knew me by -- to receive a cheap plastic trophy from the principal for getting straight A's all year. He might as well have guillotined me. I stood before my peers in my pink cotton dress and matching espadrilles, revealed as a dork and a fraud, all my fitting-in work undone. A cool acquaintance casually handed down the verdict: "You didn't look like a geek."

The next school year, the year I turned 13, I was going to do better. Over the summer I had discovered three things that I thought were going to be a big help: fashion magazines, makeup and MTV. I know now that this was tantamount to accepting a ride from a drunken stranger carrying a knife and a length of rope, but at the time they seemed like my ticket to coolness.

My first step was to do what the magazines said. Per the instructions in some rag, I painted layer after layer of noxious purple crap on my long fingernails until they were so glossy they looked fake. I spent at least an hour on my nails each week. My hair was a gimme -- long, straight and blond so I didn't need to "correct" it too much. I spent hours playing with my mom's old makeup and the new stuff I'd spent my allowance on, trying to mimic looks I saw in magazines and on TV. By the time 8th grade started, I'd honed my makeup routine to a 30-minute morning ritual, followed by the curling-iron and a shower of hairspray.

I have one picture of myself in full paint from that year. I was sitting on my mother's sofa at a family Christmas party. My hair was past my shoulders and my face looked like it belonged to someone else: perfect and perfectly vacant.

Cosmetics firmly applied, my next step was getting new clothes. No more prairie skirts and ruffled blouses. My parents wouldn't spend outrageous money for the preppy attire that was the de facto uniform at my school. That left Early 80's Crap: minidresses in teal, fuschia and black, t-shirts in the same colors, and designer jeans.

The jeans were a problem. When I say that I was alarmingly skinny, I mean that my neighbor's granddaughter thought I had four breasts because my ribs stuck out so far. My parents, my grandmother, my entire extended family were always exhorting me to "eat, eat!" I did, but there wasn't enough food on the planet to match my nervous metabolism. Because of my bizarre waist-to-hip ratio, any jeans that wouldn't fall down were pretty snug through the butt, and even wearing those I could stick my hardbound American history book down the front without much trouble. Not that I went around performing that trick; that wouldn't have been cool at all.

When school rolled around, I figured I was as cool as I could ever hope to be: a faceful of pink and purple makeup, shiny nails and a trendy wardrobe. I looked like the girls I saw in magazines and onscreen, and I had no idea how much trouble it was going to cause me.



* Book-smart, that is. If I'd had an ounce of common sense or sense of self, I wouldn't have done what I did.

What you can do for Iraq

Regular readers know how much I love Women for Women International. Today I love them that much more: After deteriorating security in Iraq last year forced program cuts, Women for Women is restarting its full program to help Iraqi women. They've got 500 women who need sponsors this month to provide year's worth of job skills, rights training, direct aid and small-business help. The group plans to help a thousand more Iraqi women next year.

Security is still a serious issue in Iraq. Unlike Women for Women's programs in other countries, there will be no letter exchanges, no last names, and probably no photos from Iraq. But these women will still get help to rebuild their lives.

When I think about what it would be like to live in a country that's so unstable and violent that my correspondence could endanger my life, and when I think about how that situation came to be, I feel sick. I want to help. I want a woman in Iraq to know from experience that an American woman cares about her and wants her to be safe and successful.

Think of it as a charitable act or as a self-interested resentment-mitigation project, but please think about participating and tell them I sent you.

Block walkin' beats

The boys and I have been block-walking for the last few days for Karen Felthauser, our state rep challenger. It's been a better introduction to the electoral process than anything I'd had when I was Rocketboy's age. The first day we talked about why we were putting out flyers. He knew who the candidate is but wasn't sure what office she's running for.

"Uh, Democrat."

This led to a long chat about parties and offices, incumbents and challengers, and local issues. Rocketboy wanted to know why fewer people vote in local elections than in presidential ones. I told him I don't think the media covers local races especially well and that people are busy. Even if they have time to vote, they may not feel well-enough informed to cast a ballot. Our job was to try to change that, by reminding people of the upcoming election, the issues at stake and our candidate.

One of Felthauser's key issues is public education. Hombre, playing devil's advocate, asked me to explain why I'm backing a pro-public-school candidate even though we're homeschoolers. Karen herself expressed surprise that a homeschooler would back her candidacy. So here's why.

I've made it clear before that we're independent learners because that's what works for us. Yes, I have ideological reasons for going this route -- an education customized to my children's ability and interests; a desire for multi-age, multi-situational socialization; freedom to schedule vacations and visits with family when it works best for us. And that's fine and well for me and my family.

Back when I was new to homeschooling, I had that convert zeal and began to wonder why public schools were needed at all. It was fellow homeschooler Dru who smacked me upside the head (but in a good way) when I first met her in person. She reminded me that opting out of public school, even when it takes a great deal of sacrifice, is an option born of privilege. Not everyone has that privilege or wants to make that choice so for the sake of our society we'd better make sure the public schools are good.

And frankly, better public schools serve my own interests. My house is worth more when the elementary down the street is well-regarded. And should my kids ever want to go there -- or should I need to send them there -- I want it to be good for them.

So that's my endorsement for the day: Karen Felthauser. Remember that Texas early voting runs through November 3.

Vote ahora

It's early votin' time in Texas, today through November 3. Find your polling place and go, y'all. I'll have more election-season goodness throughout the week.

"By mine elf!"

It's not an oath from the turkey-leg vendor at the Renaissance Faire. It's Hurricanehead announcing his newly hyperfocused reason for living: "I do it by mine elf!" Except for that which he cannot yet do by himself. Then he'll ask for my help and rage or squirm when I provide it because in an ideal world he could do it by his elf.

When I stop to think about it, which is rare because I'm usually dealing with some child-related mini-drama, being two seems like an awful lot of work. My earliest memory comes, I think, from some time in my toddlerhood: Me, looking way up at a bunch of relatives milling around in my parents' living room, a holiday party maybe. I can feel my fists balled up and my body shaking with frustration. All the grownups around me are talking, no one is paying any attention to me, and I have something to say but I don't know the words. That's all that first memory is, a full-body sense of anger and irritation that I can't express myself with words, that I can't do it myself.

Because of that I try to be patient with Hurricanehead, although it's not easy when I'm trying to get somewhere on time and he has to extricate himself from his car seat and the car with all the zip of a snake drooping over a tree branch. I take a deep breath and remind myself that this is important to him in some hidden, inner way. And that later, when Hombre gets home, I can get out by myself.

Baby fix

Casey at Expectant Waiting has a post on the emotions and concerns that go into deciding whether or not to have more kids. It reminded me of a talk I had with a friend last week about the sense of mortality that comes with deciding you're done. Because Hombre had the Big Snip* a couple of years ago, I get asked about it every now and then by friends who are -- presumably with their partners' cooperation -- considering vasectomy.

Even though I had perfectly good reasons to give up on babymaking, there was still a period of mourning and adjustment once the deal was done. My breedin' days were over. Just like that, all that stood between me and the reaper was the hope of grandchildren. Should that hope be dashed someday, I'll have to face reality without a tiny human shield.

And it is a mortality issue with me. I've been baby-fever-free ever since the day I drove Hombre home and tossed a bag of frozen peas in his lap. I don't miss the all-night nursing buffets, the explosive baby craps and the stunning fatigue. I'm too old and too busy with my kids to go through that again. And I would be far too afraid. I don't remember most of my pregnancy with Hurricanehead. I was too scared to think about what was happening. When H'head was born he came out quiet, and the doctor remarked that there was (as there had been with Baby D) a true knot in the cord. In the second or two before I saw that Hurricanehead was alive, I felt the most paralyzing, suffocating sense of terror I'd ever had. It's not something I'd willingly repeat.

But kactus' post today got to me, especially that photo in the middle of the piece. Hurricanehead is well past the baby stage. So I was delighted when my cousin called this evening asking if I could take care of her 3-month-old son tomorrow. It's perfect. I get a cuddly little lumpkin at the gurgle-and-coo stage who doesn't throw toys or say 'poophead' or hide my glasses. And when the day ends and I need some time to myself and a decent night's sleep, I get to hand him back to his mama and go on with the next stage of my life.



*It was actually the Big Cauterization. Hombre said it was no big deal, "except when I saw the smoke rising from my balls."

This is not my beautiful Twinkie

How did I get here?



A commenter wants to know if I'm a "real redneck." Nope. The title of my blog comes from a Ray Wylie Hubbard song and pays sideways homage to the redneckier aspects of my family history and culture. I love my family dearly, not least because they taught me that you can clean tar off your skin with a gasoline-soaked rag. One of my early memories is me and my dog Sherman playing with a few Schlitz Malt Liquor* empties on the back patio while my tired dad was supposed to be keeping an eye on us. Shermy slurped out the backwash and then ate pea gravel until he puked.

I have ancestors who were literal rednecks: crop pickers who tried to avoid sunburn while doing hard jobs that paid badly. I can't claim to be a redneck because I've never had to work that hard. Due to my parents' good luck and relentless effort both before and after my birth, I grew up red-state suburban, a lifestyle that carries echoes of redneck culture but which is its own entity. And now I can't even claim that. Having jettisoned the social-Darwinist mores of the milieu in which I came of age, I'm now in territory that feels as liberating and uncharted to me as I suspect a sturdy red-brick tract home and a two-income household must have felt to my folks when they first set out.

When I was five and begging for Dolly Madison Zingers to liven up the Twinkie-and-Ding-Dong snack rotation, or when I was ten and stuffing grasshoppers into a tennis ball at my aunt's ranch to use for fishing bait, or when I was sixteen and shopping for the exact same kind of Liz Claiborne bag that every other girl at my high school had, I never would have expected to grow up and hear this sentiment expressed in my kitchen:

"Oh, god! Not hummus again!"

Thank you, Rocketboy, for showing me where I am on my journey.



*I loved those commercials with the Bull. It was the Kool-Aid Man for grownups.

INFJ

Ooh! Know what else I learned at Rethinking Education? I learned why I'm not much of a "group" person and how to change that if I'm so inclined.

Eric N. Best of the Mariposa Group led a discussion on creating genuine communities. It's one of those things most of us say we want but may not have the skills to get. I know I didn't. I'm still not sure I do. But I have a better idea now of what's involved.

Best talked about the Tavistock research project that started in the UK some 50 years ago to study the community-building process. Best says that M. Scott Peck references this in his work; I'm completely unfamiliar with Peck so if you know anything about his ideas please chime in.

At any rate, the key notion was that there are four stages to building a real community:

First is a "pseudo-community" in which people meet and exchange pleasantries and keep everything on a polite and superficial level. As an introvert I find the small-talk and meeting-new-people stage to be a lot of work. I tend to join groups with trepidation and only if I'm very interested in what the group has to offer.

Next, of course, comes chaos as people realize their differences and start bickering and judging. Best says this is the fight-or-flight stage. People hash it out or hit the bricks. Traditionally, this stage is where I recoil from the group, email list, blog discussion, or whatever, because I assume that's all it has to offer and to hell with that.

But wait, says Best, next comes emptiness! This is a good thing because it means people have given up trying to change each other. When people aren't fighting but aren't feeling especially friendly, Best says, it creates space for something new to develop: freedom.

The final stage in creating a real, rewarding community comes after the dust settles and people express themselves honestly and are accepted even if others disagree. Best says this fourth stage usually proceeds pretty quickly after the third, "empty" stage has been reached.

How to nurture those good groups is a topic for a night when I haven't spent 90 minutes pushing a flatbed cart through Lowe's. It involves jazz theory and the phrase "please sit down and shut up." For now I'll say I've found Best's information handy as I navigate my social life and my independent learning community. If I flee a group while it's still in chaos, then I've gotten all of the conflict with none of the rewards to come. Best to take a deep breath and hang around for the payoff.

How do you deal with group dynamics? Or do you prefer not to?

Statistically improbable Sunday

Phrases I encountered going about my rainy, suburban Sunday:

"parasites making you fat"
"young Unitarian king of Transylvania"
"emerging pencil-fighting culture"

Hurricanehead has learned to tantrum like a pro so my time at the keyboard has been limited. Here's hoping that ice-cream bribes (there I go with the food again) will calm things down.

Punished by rewards

You're not supposed to use food to motivate kids to act right. I learned this years ago when I was free to study Montessori and other early-childhood thinkers without the practical distraction of children of my own. Ideally, children are motivated by love and good role models to do right because they want to, without external rewards like treats and star charts.

It's an ideal I aspire to but sometimes, like yesterday, I just want the kids to act right in the appliance store and I'm willing to ditch my principles in an effort to get results. This "whatever works" approach is why I now have tater-tot burns all over the inside of my mouth.

The appliance store, a small, local place I've dealt with for years, is very near a Sonic. The boys were getting tired and silly after other errands, but I soldiered on. I let them know I expected quiet, calm behavior in the store and promised that if they aced that we'd run by Sonic for a treat.

They flunked. I took care of my appliance business, tried to keep a lid on the tag-playing and the cackling, and beat it. My announcement that there would be no treat led to a flurry of hasty, halfhearted "sorry, Mommy"s, but I decided that wasn't enough. I wanted the consequences to really stick.

I loaded the kids up and drove to Sonic. I pointed out that I was the only one who had behaved myself in the store. I ordered what they would usually get -- tater tots for Hurricanehead and a malt for Rocketboy. Then, as we drove away, I tucked in. Hurricanehead was shocked into silence, but Rocketboy was apoplectic. I guess they never thought I wouldn't be suffering their consequences along with them.

I still needed an oil change but I couldn't take a hysterical kid to the dealership, so I drove around eating. The tater tots were greasy and too hot -- disgusting, really -- but I had a point to make so I choked them down. When we got to the dealership I finished the last of my shake, took the kids to the little playroom to wait, and let them know that I expected better behavior there.

Their comportment was flawless. But my motivational gambit was a wash at best: I had consumed a day's worth of calories in ten minutes to make a disciplinary point. Plus those tot burns. I've got to focus on intrinsic motivation. Failing that, I'll bribe them with something inedible like stickers.

All better now

Thanks to everyone for their kind wishes for Hurricanehead. He's all better and back to his normal sneaky, wild self, much to my delight and his brother's dismay.

The rabbits hardly broke stride after their spay and neuter last week. They're cohabitating now and they spend all their time napping in a heap or taking turns eating from the same veggie chunk or chow bowl. They're so cute together that it's actually kind of gross. Woodstock is less twitchy now than he was when we first got him, and Easter Beagle seems less inclined to bite chunks out of my hand so I'd say the arrangement works for everyone.

Now I'm off to knit with my chicks-with-sticks posse. I'm just about finished with a log-cabin style blanket for my incipient niece/nephew, due on Thanksgiving Day. Did I mention that Baby Bro has been up to more in Boston than just music studies? Well, now I have.

Childhood viruses cause dementia

Oh, yes they do. Spend five days straight with a sick-yet-wakeful toddler and you'll find yourself drooling and grunting, too. Yesterday I truly began to fear for my cognitive skills. I was led to believe that I had hallucinated rabbit testicles.

In my post about our newest bunny I mentioned that Woodstock had been presented to us as a girl, but a quick inspection on my part found quite the opposite. I'm not a vet (as commenter Val, the vet, can tell you) and I don't always identify snakes correctly but I'm pretty sure I know balls when I see them.

I scheduled a fixin' for both Woodstock and Easter Beagle so they could live together without spawning. Even in side-by-side crates they were acting lovey-dovey from day one. Woodstock spent all night every night thumping his hind paws on the floor, creating an awful but studly racket. One morning I awoke to find that Easter Beagle had made a small nest of fluff from Woodstock's fur, which I suppose she pulled through the bars of the crates. Cute and all, but eewww.

After rescheduling once to accommodate Hurricanehead's puking schedule, we made it to the vet Friday morning. Hurricanehead tripped going in, so I had two skittish rabbits and a shrieking, sick, bleeding toddler on my hands. Good times. I left the rabbits to their surgical fate and went home to try to get someone, anyone, to take a nap.

The phone woke me a couple of hours later. It was the vet tech, telling me that both bunnies were actually female and did I want to go ahead with the surgery. I decided yes, mainly for the reduction in tumor and cyst risk, but also because I wanted to get off the phone and review what had happened to my powers of perception. How on earth, I thought drowsily, could I have mistaken a female for a male? Sleep deprivation, cabin fever, whine exposure and endless rounds of laundry were killing off not just cells but whole sections of my brain. Me get stupid, I thought. I tried to go back to sleep but was too freaked out to really pull it off.

When I got the post-op call, the tech sounded sheepish.

"Well," he said, "I wanted you to know that when we got that little guy under, he relaxed and those testicles popped right out. He must've been scared and clenching. Good thing you decided to go ahead with it."

Bless Woodstock's little nads, I wasn't losing my marbles after all. Not completely anyway. I still don't know when Hurricanehead will be completely recovered, how long it will take me to catch up on all the things I left undone this week, or how much make-up sleep I need. But I never should have doubted myself. No matter how tired and distracted and overworked I am, there are some things I just know, and no one can take that away from me.

I guess this means it's our turn, right?

Because everyone else has tried to control the Middle East and it worked out so well for them.

Feminism and me: five things

Evil Mommy tagged me for this, the perfect ready-made topic for yet another sick-kid day.

Five things feminism has done for me:

1. Feminism made it okay for me to be smart. I did a fair amount of acting dumb to fit in as a young adolescent, but my parents made it very clear that they valued my intelligence and expected me to do so as well. I've already written about how they steered me well away from anything that smacked of old-style "girl stuff" in school -- no home ec, no typing, no pep squad.

2. I didn't have to get married for sex and I don't have to worry that an unplanned pregnancy will derail my life.

3. Back when I worked for pay, I was able to work in my chosen field rather than just the old secretary/nurse/teacher roles, and I was able to get jobs and keep them without having to play any sexual or subservience games with my bosses or co-workers.

4. I manage the money in my marriage. When I was at UT, one of my history professors said that as a young newlywed, she'd had to go before a judge to get permission to invest money as part of a club she was in. Apparently a woman running loose with money was highly suspect and subject to legal scrutiny. I've never encountered any of that. People seemed to have learned that money is money.

5. I'm allowed to be healthy. Unlike my mother and her friends, I was never told not to exercise on the grounds that it would damage my uterus. I, not my husband or my parents, get to make my healthcare decisions. I don't have to keep cranking out babies until I drop, either.

Now, with all that said, I'll also address Amanda's query as to what feminism still needs to do. Looking over my list above I'm struck by how most of my feminist benefits stem not only from social progress but from class privilege. Freedom not only isn't free, it's pretty expensive.

The smartness thing seems to have been innate, although I feel it slipping away with each night spent tending a barfing toddler. But sexual and reproductive freedom are most definitely the privilege of those with money. A teen who accidentally gets pregnant and doesn't have the money to abort may find herself shotgunned into a bad marriage that lasts years before she's left destitute, undereducated and overburdened with kids. And the overall healthcare-money connection is so strong in this country that it just about goes without saying.

As for work, the fact that I was encouraged to work outside of traditional women's jobs was a function of my parents' upwardly mobile expectations for me and the fact that they could afford to live in a school district that placed a high premium on academic achievement -- funded through property taxes. My schools had me and some of my friends taking the SAT or PSAT for practice every year from 8th grade on as a run-up to the National Merit competition. Meanwhile, across town in a poor district, my dad taught in an unairconditioned classroom where the indoor temperature often reached 100 degrees. Guess how much test prep the smart girls there got?

So the one item on my wish list for feminism is for it to create a social structure in which you don't have to pay to practice your theoretical rights and freedoms, where they are accessible as a matter of course, as part of the human decency we would ideally accord each other no matter what physical form we take.

And now I tag you all -- what's feminism done for you, and what should it do next?

Image found at The New Charm School

It's a sickness, I tell you

I don't know what virus Hurricanehead has, but it's certainly worn out its welcome. I called on my zombie-arts training to get through the last two days with minimal sleep but I'm achey myself and reaching my crankiness threshold. So I might as well talk about the way some dude killed my yoga buzz Saturday morning.

When I get out of yoga class I'm about half-stoned because I am very good at clearing my mind during meditation and relaxation. I don't know why and I don't care to speculate because no flattering theories suggest themselves. When Hombre and I took hypnobirthing classes, my instructor said I stayed deeply out of it during one session while my three-year-old tried to destroy a plastic skeleton in her office. I had to take her word for it.

Saturday I had to fax something after yoga. No, I don't have a fax machine or a fax utility on the computer. I only recently got an electric pencil sharpener, and I figured why make space on the desk for something I rarely need, unpack it, and learn how it works -- or worse yet, try to get software to work right the first time with Windows -- when every little mail store in the world has a fax for hire?

Now I know exactly why. One, it cost me fourteen dollars to send this particular missive. Two, I had to listen to a middle-aged white guy tell me his take on politics.

Please don't ask me how that second thing happened. I was still groovy from yoga and not paying attention to the drift of the small talk. Next thing I know, we're talking about how no one in Congress seems interested in upholding principles, and before I can change the subject -- and before my fax is done -- I get to hear about how the Democrats are craven and shameless because they abandoned Joe Lieberman.

I thought about focusing my mind and launching a response, since we were having a conversation and all, but then I realized it was no longer a discussion. It had become a lecture. I decided to cling to what remained of that calm feeling I'd had just five minutes earlier. I listened, sort of, and got the idea that he thought Lieberman had been treated unfairly because, after all, he'd been in politics a long time. Then my lecturer said he was going to vote against all the incumbents in November. No cognitive dissonance there.

Sure enough, the monologue continued unabated until my fax was done and paid for. Did he learn anything from our little chat? I don't see how he could have. Did I? Yes. I learned that in his self-described conservative worldview, party loyalty counts for more than right action. I learned not to talk to strangers right after yoga. And I learned that it's best to have your own office equipment.

Keep your shirt on for a good cause

If you don't already know about the blog that's raising money for breast-cancer research by asking women to send in rack shots and charging random guys to look at them, then I'm not going to spoil your day by bringing it up.

But if you do know and are as skeeved out by the concept as I am, see Twisty:

I mean, from where I sit, breast cancer isn’t about boobs. It’s more about, oh I don’t know, death. Still, whatever bangs your box, I guess.

So, for everyone who doesn’t send me a fun picture of their fun boobs, up until, say, midnight Tuesday, I’ll donate $1 to Breast Cancer Action. So go for it. The Sitemeter’s ticking.

Click already.

Sick boy

I don't know what kind of cold virus Hurricanehead has, but for a sick kid he's got a lot of energy. Energy he spent waking us up all night, throwing tantrums, trying to destroy the stair gate with his little feet. May you have a better Monday than ours.