Casual Sexism

This isn't specifically a post about motherhood.  But if we want mothers to be trusted, respected and taken seriously, we need women to be trusted, respected and taken seriously.  And something that eats away at that respect every day is best referred to as casual sexism.  It's not overt, woman-hating, rape-apologizing, pay-discriminating, health care-denying sexism that most reasonable people recognize and dislike.  It's much more insidious, and it plants the seeds for all of the other stuff.  The problem with casual sexism is that it's used, usually unknowingly, by people who say they support women's equal rights.

Some examples:

TV shows that depict all (or most) female characters as irrational babies.
Any TV show with a "dumb blonde" character.
Jokes where the punchline is some variation on "women are confusing"
Jokes where the punchline is some variation on "women are crazy"
Jokes where the punchline is some variation on "women are inferior to [insert male-appreciated thing here: beer, cars, football]"
TV commercials that sell things by saying some variation of "only for men - too tough for women"

AND crucially:

The dismissive response you get when you point out the underlying sexism in any one of these things.

Casual sexism comes from a quiet underlying assumption that women are irrational, infantile, weak, untrustworthy and unreasonable.  If this assumption sits underneath all of our cultural references, it becomes easy and natural to make jokes about how incomprehensible "women" are and not even notice that you've insulted your friends, family and audience.  If this is underlying our jokes, what we're saying is that women are all the same.  This one thought alone is poisonous.

When women are automatically and unquestioningly assumed to be universally inferior and irrational, not only do they not deserve respect or trust, but it's also a lot easier to treat them with violence.  This is not a minor point.  Casual sexism seems unimportant, but it sets the stage for discrimination and violence.

So many times, I have questioned the underlying assumptions about women in jokes or TV shows or movies and been told that I'm finding problems where there are none.  That I'm overreacting.  Sometimes I tell myself that.

But I think a good smell test is to ask yourself: Does this joke/tv show/commercial rely on an assumption about women's weakness or inferiority?  If it does, and it's not questioned, it lays the basis for all the "real" overt sexism and misogyny that most people do tend to recognize and oppose.

If we all just agree that women are infantile, and let that be an assumption that we're all working from, sexual discrimination comes easily after that.   The premise of a joke is a commonly-shared understanding.  If that premise is, without any self-awareness or irony, assuming that women are lunatic harpies bent on the destruction of men, it's not "just a joke."  It lays the groundwork for all kinds of really horrible things down the line.

So please, the next time you hear a joke or watch a show that doesn't pass the smell test, call it out.  Call it out in front of your friends, family and most importantly your children, and let them know why it's wrong.  Until we start pointing out that we're working on bad assumptions, all the rest of the bad stuff that's happening to women right now will be a lot harder to stop.

Sweating the small stuff might be the best way to protect ourselves and our daughters from a culture that doesn't trust us to behave like adults.

I don't want to have to tell my daughter that there are people in the world, lots and lots of them, who believe that the little boys in her preschool class deserve the right to someday tell her what to do with her own body.  That those little boys should someday have the right to dominate her, discriminate against her and force her to be pregnant and give birth against her will.

I don't want to tell her those things.  And I won't have to.  Because these insidious little jokes that go by unchallenged and the stupid roles that women (STILL!) play on television and the shallow and infantile female exemplars that we teach our children about are doing that job, quietly and secretly, without me having to say a word.

Let's start fighting this at the source.  Stop the unquestioned acceptance of casual sexism.  Forty years ago, people made casually racist jokes all the time.  Those who questioned those jokes were laughed off as overly sensitive and overly political.  But casually racist jokes, while certainly not gone, are not publicly acceptable anymore, at least not in most national media or in relatively educated circles of progressive people. Unfortunately, I know dozens of educated, progressive men who would publicly make a casually sexist joke ( "women are so confusing!") without hesitation, but would never publicly make a casually racist joke ( "black people are so [fill in blank]!").  The same can be said for many television shows.  There is ample room for progress here.

A final note to the guys who make these jokes.  Some of you make these jokes because you are mad at one particular woman.  Please imagine instead that you were mad at a man of color.  Would you turn to facebook and post a litany of racist jokes?  Less likely.  Because you understand that man of color to be one person who has wronged you, not the embodiment of his entire race.  Please, if you can try just one time, try to consider that women are also individual people.

Women are not all alike.  We do not all think the same way.  We do not all treat you the same way.  We are all real human beings who have the same kind of brain as you do, and we deserve to be treated that way.  Furthermore, we do not owe you anything.  We have bad days and get grumpy.  We sometimes don't feel like talking.  Sometimes we find people unattractive.  We have not betrayed you.  We are just people with opinions that are as valid as yours.

Instead of extrapolating your anger at one woman to all other women, try instead to feel just a little bit of empathy and human understanding.  Imagine feeling frightened for your safety on a regular basis, being ordered by large men you don't know to smile when you're having a terrible day, having perfect strangers comment on your appearance on a daily basis,  hearing your elected officials discussing your genitalia and what you should be allowed to do with it, being told that if you are unfortunate enough to be raped that you will be forced to be pregnant for the better part of a year and then forced to give birth to a child you are frightened of and angry at, and then at the end of a long day seeing the people you love and respect making jokes with your inferiority as the punchline.

It needs to stop.  We need to stop laughing it off.  Call it out when you hear it.  Call it out in front of your children.  Casual sexism is the base upon which all of this other terrible stuff is built.  We need to stop it at the source.  And teach our children to do the same.  If we're lucky, by the time our kids are grown they'll know casual sexism when they hear it and they'll stand up and denounce it, and we can finally stop having to listen to our elected officials needing to clarify that despite their prior statements, they actually believe raping women is bad.

Caring for a Newborn: It's Kind of a Big Deal

I've recently heard from a few different friends, at home with newborns, who've said variations on the theme "I'm ok, I sleep 3 hours and then feed the baby and then sleep another 2-3 hours, so that's 6 hours of sleep, which is plenty."  No naps?  I ask.  "No, I have stuff to do, and 6 hours is ok.  I feel fine."

Ok mama.  I know you are a superhero.  I've seen you accomplish amazing things.  You are a tough lady.  But this newborn thing, this is different than the other stuff you've done.  First of all, two 3-hour naps is not 6 hours of sleep.  You may feel ok, but you are sleep-deprived.  You are.  6 solid hours a night isn't even really enough when you're taking care of a crying baby all day.  You're not even getting that.  In a few months time, when you come out of this fog, you will realize that it's a fog.

Let's try a test.  Where are your keys?  What did you have for breakfast this morning?  Did it take a normal amount of time for you to answer those questions?  If so, you can skip the rest of this.

I know you just want to feel normal, and go to bed at your pre-baby bedtime, and wake up at your pre-baby wakeup time, and get stuff done around the house like you used to pre-baby.  And you will, in a few months.

But right now is newborn time.  It's not normal, it's not permanent, and you don't have to pretend everything is ok.  You can and should treat yourself like you're severely ill.  If you had a vicious stomach bug, would you go to bed and wake up at the normal times?  Would you get up and clean the house?  No, you'd probably take care of yourself, get as much rest as possible, and wait until you were feeling better before you got back to the normal routine.

That's what you need to do now.  You don't win any contests by going to bed at 11 or washing dishes when you could be napping. Go to bed when the baby goes to sleep and it is dark outside.  That might be 8pm.  You are not lazy.   If the baby wakes at 7am, eats, and then goes back to sleep for 2 more hours, you do that too.  You are not lazy.  Let your partner deal with the dishes and laundry if they can.  Outsource housework as much as possible.  You are not lazy.  You are already doing more housework than anybody else, simply by caring for a baby.  Baby care is work.  It's hard work.  And you should be proud of it and count it as a major accomplishment every day.

You're keeping a baby alive by feeding it every 2-3 hours, changing diapers, and holding, rocking and soothing it when it cries.  Nobody in the world should expect you to be doing anything else right now.  Especially you.

Time Out Despair

Time Out Despair: The sinking feeling of failure that descends upon a parent one second after administering the time out, particularly when the time out is accompanied by furious screaming.  Thought content includes - "how did we get to this point?" "why couldn't I prevent this?" "I do not like this child." "I am a total monster and miserable failure of a mother."

Skip to 10 minutes later, everybody playing happily, hugs administered, tantrum purged, feelings discussed, despair totally forgotten.

If only I could keep a hint of the 10 minutes later feeling tucked somewhere inside the time out despair.

Ignore Your Kids Sometimes

I was sitting with my two girls tonight.  Penny was loudly demanding her milk, teddy, lovie AND blankie, all together, all delivered immediately by me.  When I asked for a "please", she repeated the word sarcastically.  When I said "your teddy is 3 feet in front of you, go pick him up yourself," she moaned and whined and yelled "get him for me!"  Mabel, during this exchange, was crawling around the room.  She was exploring alone, pulling herself up to stand, sometimes falling down, hard, on her butt. Then looking around, finding another place to explore, and heading there.  She bumped her head on a chair, she toppled over a few times.  No crying.

I thought about it for a minute.  If Mabel had been my first kid, I would have been following her around the room, watching for any hint of imbalance, my arms precariously raised to catch her at any moment, so she wouldn't get hurt.  In fact, I did that with Penny.  I spent all of Penny's infant months in constant contact with her.  Watching her every move, preventing falls, fulfilling requests.  And the result of that was that her falls, when they happened, were worse.  She was bad at recovering from a fall, she wouldn't catch herself, she never learned how.  Mabel, on the other hand, has grown into a fearless adventurer, off to get the thing she wants as soon as she thinks of it, struggles be damned.

It made me realize that the thing that people often derogatorily refer to as "helicopter parenting" comes in two forms.  One form is an aggressive, "you will be what I want you to be" type of parenting.  But FAR more common is a fearful, protective well-meaning type of parenting.  A parenting strategy that says "when I give attention to something, I do a better job at it" and "I will not emotionally neglect my child, I will always be there for her so she won't ever feel alone" and "if I love and protect her all the time, I can't go wrong."

But looking at my two girls, I realized that, actually, it's good to leave a kid alone sometimes.  Obviously, everything is a matter of degree.  If we're talking about parents who leave their kids alone in front of the tv for 6 hours a day, this message doesn't really apply.  But if we're talking about parents who really, really try very hard to give their kids the best chance and the most support and the unquestionable message that they are loved, all the time, no matter what, this message is important.

Kids need time alone.  They need for us not to be watching them sometimes.  Not totally neglecting, just looking in another direction.  I could hear today, from her little slappy hands on the floor, what part of the room Mabel was in. But I didn't see her, and she didn't see me, so for a few minutes at at time, she was, as far as she knew, alone.  And when she fell down, she had to deal with it.  And she seemed, really and truly, to love it.  Penny didn't feel that until she was 2 years old.  And I think I did her a disservice.

The funny thing is, when you give your kid a little space, you give yourself a little space too.  And tonight, after Penny and I settled our dispute, and Mabel was happily pulling herself up to stand under the dining table, I read 5 pages of a novel, sitting on the couch.  It was great.  It's just another reminder that it's not a sustainable or natural parenting technique to spend all your time watching and worrying about your kid.  You, as a mom, are expected by nature to have other things to do.  So do them.  You'll love it and so will your baby.