What if I don’t want to be sexy?

Let’s see if I can get through this post about body image and issues without telling you what kind of body I have, and you see if you’re comfortable not knowing at the end of it, okay?

Much as I try not to be Twitter incrowdy (my excuse for never blogging), this did arise from a Twitter “event”. One idiot was promoting “managed anorexia” because he felt only thin was valuable, and a lot of great people responded by trying to get #curvesaresexy trending. Then some less great people started labelling thin bodies as unsexy, and some other people objected and…

This is how it goes, though. Bodies – pretty much invarably women’s bodies – are where the discussion is at. Whether we value curves, bones, or all kinds of bodies, women’s bodies are a site for discussion in a way that men’s are not. And I don’t think that changing the object is as helpful as changing the subject. Laurie Penny put it beautifully in her moving piece on recovering from anorexia:

[T]he real breakthrough came when I stopped defining myself merely by my dress size. Once I started to believe that my worth as a person had nothing to do with how my body looked to other people, I began to give myself permission to take up the space I needed.

Put it like this: if offered the chance to never be treated as a body-object again, on the condition that neither would anyone ever find me sexy again, I’d take it. That is, of course, from the vantage point of being a mother, and therefore devoid of public sexuality in most environments anyway. (Seriously – for a start, it takes about 12 times the effort to communicate that I am, in fact, a lesbian, once people know that I’m a mother.) And I’m in my mid-30s, so moving past the realm of mainstream sexy, anyway. But not moving past the point where my body is a defining factor in how I am perceived, how I perceive myself, and where who I am is positioned in culture. Worthy of notice or not worthy of notice, that judgement in itself requires that my body be noticed. Unsexy, mumsy, frumpy, dykey, MILF, invisible because physically unremarkable, all of those require an evaluation of my body.

And I would just rather not. I don’t want to be a mainstream or a countercultural or a fetishistic sex object. I want to be a subject, and my subject, largely, is not my own body, or even my own sexuality. I want my daughter to stop thinking it’s important to call me “pretty”. I want her to stop thinking it’s important when people call her that. I want to remove the instinct I have right now to tell you that, of course, she is beautiful. Can I tell you she’s valuable? That you are? That I am? Can we leave it at that?

Who benefits?

I’m not sure how I feel about higher rate taxpayers losing Child Benefit in general. As a believer in Citizens Income, universal benefit is a good thing. However, the people complaining that a household income of £44,000 (the lowest possible – this would be for a single-income household) is “just getting by”, as someone on BBC Radio 4 news did earlier today, are wrong. It’s twice the national average income, therefore, logically, the average two-income household earns only that much. And they’re insulting the millions of families who get by on far less. Mine, for a start, and we do far better than “get by”.

However, what I’m sure of is that this is an attack on women, and on the way the welfare state can seek to support their empowerment.

It was a big deal when it was decided that CB would, by default, be paid to the child’s mother. It was, probably, the biggest single act of redistribution of income within households that the welfare state has ever achieved. Now, CB will be withdrawn based on household income, and not paid to women who, as non-employed mothers, have no other income in their own name. That is a regression, a typically Tory acceptance of the traditional macro-economic view that everyone in a household has equal access to the household’s money. That is not true. There are many men who control their female partners by controlling their access to money, and non-employed mothers are among the most vulnerable. (And there are people in all other gender combinations of relationships in the same position, but typically it’s the former.)

So the Tories have decided that child benefit does not belong to the mother by default, but to the household. A backward step for mothers. We need to watch this government like a hawk: they do not understand gender, and they do not care to improve their understanding.

This is just a quickie post – also have a look at Caroline Crampton in the New Statesman on the implications for the National Insurance gap for stay-at-home parents

Job-sharing MPs? Yes please.

(Just a note – I love my RebelRaising identity, but have lots to say about things other than parenting, so I’ve decided to revive this blog for all of those things. Parenting, (green, feminist, radical) politics, and possibly some knitting.)

This post started as a comment to Stephen Glenn on this post, entitled “Is Job Sharing MPs Idea Sexist?”. Green Party of England and Wales leader Caroline Lucas has proposed that MPs be able to jobshare. Stephen argues that it’s retrograde to suggest that “offering women part-time jobs” is the best way to retain/ get talented women into Parliament(s). So here’s what started as a comment to that.

What a load of nonsense. Other people with caseloads job-share all the time – doctors, nurses, therapists, teachers. And MPs already have constituency workers who form part of the team on constituency cases; ministers likewise have civil servants in their teams (some of whom might be job-sharing). If it would be completely impossible for someone else to take over your job if you fell under a bus, you’re doing your job wrong.

As for “demeaning to women”, what’s demeaning to women is saying that, because we have the Equal Pay Act, we should just pull ourselves together and participate in the all-hours, all-consuming job world, when the reality is that it is still women who do most of the household and childcare work. It might be nice if this were not the case (though in my two-female-adults household, I’m not sure what the other options are, apart from maybehiring a houseboy), but I don’t see why we should be willing to wait for utopia before women can have tolerable lives as parliamentarians. And what is demeaning to both men and women who want a life alongside work is to suggest that this doesn’t have the potential to make them people with richer experience, and hence better representatives of their constituents.

Two problems: parliaments demand unreasonable things from their members; and women are, on average, dispropotioantely unable to meet those unreasonable demands.

Personally, I think that even if job-sharing were only a part-time stop-gap to get women able to meet the demands of an M(S)P job until we reach that glorious utopia where everything is equal, it would be worth doing. Saying “but there shouldn’t be sexism, so we won’t do anything to address its real effects here and now” is just nonsense.

But more importantly, I think, why should it be the business of women and others who are unwilling to give up their lives to this all-consuming job to “get over it” and do so? Isn’t there a problem with Parliament(s) if standing for them is something ordinary folks with family commitments and hobbies cannot consider? Doesn’t it lead to a Parliament full of weirdos and anoraks? Now, I’m both a weirdo and an anorak myself at times, but even if I could get and afford someone else to mind my kids all day every day, evenings and weekends as well, I would actually not want to do that. But I think I’d be a pretty good representative, both in Parliament and as a caseworker and in all those other things M(S)Ps do. You might disagree (and indeed, the people of Edinburgh North and Leith did disagree this May, placing me a (fairly respectable) 5th. Love y’all anyway.) but surely you can think of someone who would?

Let’s release the Parliamentary potential of a much wider part of society – disproportionately but not exclusively women. Support Caroline Lucas’s proposals.

It depends where you stand

I’m a lesbian mother (no, really, stop me if you’ve heard this one before), but most of the time, I have more in common with other feminist mothers – trying to raise a boy and a girl in a world that thinks those two tiny facts are all they need to know about them, and hating that. Not all lesbian mothers are at all radical (why should we have to be?) and lots want to be just like the next two-parent two-vehicle two-gender-system-buying family.

So, yeah, radical mamas are my people, really. And most radical mamas, like most mamas, are in relationships with men, whether or not they identify as queer. And in most cases, our challenges are the same because we live in the same patriarchal shitheap of a world.

But sometimes, it’s not the same  world. And I catch that when we’re talking about being a “good feminist”. Because apparently I’m a “good feminist” because I don’t live with a man, shag a man, wash up after a man. Or at least, that’s what I hear when they joke about the “bad feminist” status of being in a relationship with a man. “Ooh, the feminist orthodoxy will get me!”

Because you know who’ll get me? You know who the fear is of? You know why I don’t feel confident dressing my boy in “girl colours” like you do? Because I might look good to some imaginary feminist orthodoxy, but I sure as hell look bad to the people who actually have power. And they use it against people like me.

That’s my world. And, however feminist a space might be, it’s sometimes a world that shows up more in the myth than the practical acknowledgement. Other mothers make hard judgement calls, too. This isn’t the Oppression Olympics. But like everyone else, I have moments of realising that “my people” are not my people. They are the sons and daughters of life’s total denial of those who are slightly more different.

The forces of darkness

I’ve always thought of patriarchy (and am starting to think of kyriarchy) as a colonising force that has, literally, camped out in my brain (okay, not literally camped, but is literally present in the structures of my brain). I can send rebel forces in to resist those ideas when they arise; I can take land back; I can build my own ideas and clear space for those of others. But I can also, sometimes, be overwhelmed by the power of those forces that a lot of people over a lot of time have sent in. They hold their positions fiercely, and when my guard is down, they take their opportunity.

And becoming a mother was one of those opportunities. It’s all so new, every little thing such a new and specific challenge, and, frankly, I’m always so damn tired. To be the rebel mother, I have not only to be a mother, but also to be a mother in ways that, at most, I’ve only seen demonstrated by one or two people, or have only read about, or have only extrapolated from things I believe in other areas of my life. And if the rebel mothering forces fail, the ground will be held by powerful, culture-wide ideas I’ve been taught and have absorbed all my life.

I had smugly thought that being in a same-sex relationship meant I got a free pass on having to deal with gendered dynamics at home. And, yeah, my partner and I were together for nine years before we had children of ours (she has older children from a previous relationship), and in that time, we didn’t have gender-founded issues to address between us very often.

But then, I gave birth to our two children, and gave up working and studying (and then worked part-time). And I was tired, and I was Mummy, and I couldn’t remember how to question what a Mummy is. Ah, responds the colonised brain, a Mummy does everything for her child, and is happy to. A Mummy respects the working-for-pay partner as “really” working, and counts her own hard labour as something else. A Mummy doesn’t seek to be listened to as if her day really counted. A Mummy takes the day shift, and the night shift, and the organising, remembering, managing of the household, and thinks she isn’t using her brain.

I hate bathing my children. I seriously considered not writing that, because it’s supposed to be such fun. But I’ve always hated it. My partner, on the other hand, loves it. But for a long time, I thought I had to do it, at least some of the time, because it’s totally unacceptable for a Mummy to be absent from a whole area of parenting. It was a year or more later that it occurred to me to ask: why? Well, because I’m only doing this little tiny thing, mothering, not using my expensive education and my apparently-atrophied brain, so I must do it right, must love it all, must not burden the proper worker with tasks that are necessary rather than a fun extra to the kids’ day.

I’m working pretty hard now not to be The Mummy (a sort of bandaged zombie, right?). The howling toddler, the stroppy four-year-old, those belong to both of us (and to their dads) just as much as the joyous zaniness of two small kids in the dressing-up basket does. The broken nights, the vile nappies, the food on the floor, the dried-up felt tip pens, the friendship drama: we’re a family, and the children should expect their love, care, comfort and discipline from all their parents.

And I have a daughter, and I have a son. What will they think a Mummy is, if they come to be one, or come to be the partner of one? Will it be easier for them to resist?

As I left for work one day last week, Firstborn said mournfully: “You’re not nice to your children and you don’t spend enough time with us. I decide that [Partner] is my biological mummy.”

After I’d finished trying not to laugh at her, we discussed how my bio-motherhood is immutable, but that doesn’t mean I have to be the only one who spends time caring for her; likewise, because Partner isn’t Mummy (usually, though terms vary) doesn’t mean she can’t be the one who’s simply There. Or, indeed, that one or other Daddy can’t be that person, as well.

So I like to think I sent a small rebel platoon into her brain. I hope her forces are stronger than mine. I’m her mother, after all, and that’s my job.

Hobbled

Another post about buying stuff, of course. These pics are from December, actually, but: Here are some boots I wanted to buy for Firstborn – cute, and zip-up so she might actually manage them herself:

Until I saw the soles:

Seriously? In Scotland, in winter, for a child of four? No grip at all?

So we got her these:

Which obviously were from the “boys” section of the shop.

It isn’t the first time I’ve notices that shoes marketed to girls often have no tread on the sole, but with winter boots it seems even more marked.

I don’t think there’s much more I need to say about it than that. If little girls try to run or climb, they clearly deserve to fall and be taught a lesson.

Inheritances and taffeta

Just a quick link for you from the excreble Guardian Family supplement:
Gay Godfathers Rule

Oh, where to begin? With the stereotype of gay men as childless, rich and brimming with “good taste” and bonhomie? With the cheerful encouragement by the mothers of the writer’s (three-out-of-four) female godchildren that he will, better than any actual woman, police conventional femininity? With the fact that the article might be mocking the parents who think in this stupid way about their fabulous gay friends, but is probably dripping with self-hate? Because he talks about his status as a qualified counsellor and the experience of growing up gay and isolated, but the quotes from the parents are all about inheritances and taffeta.

My kids have gay actual fathers, as well as, in Secondborn’s case, a gay Oddfather.  Just occasionally, people take my comment that one of Firstborn’s dads is much better at plaiting her hair than I am, and run with it. Gay men have such flair for these things, don’t they? I bet she’ll have lovely clothes as she grows up. They’re sorely disappointed when I point out that he works in tech support and keeps  a pile of What Car magazine in the downstairs toilet. Not to mention that he’s a good feminist ally.

I still have a shred of hope that this is a belated April Fool or, perhaps more likely, that all of the Guardian weekend supplements have been infiltrated by performance artists literally making a mockery of liberal Middle England. If not, I’ll get back to you when I’ve finished bashing my head off the wall.

(I can’t, in all seriousness, actually manage to write “hat tip”, but I got the link and a healthy dose of articulate rage from the fabulous Glitzfrau.)

Sacrificing choice

So, I wrote this article for the F Word, and there have been comments (scroll down – that’s not all the comments I’ve had, though). Mostly, actually, supportive and pleased that someone’s talking about breastfeeding from a feminist perspective. A few have disagreed with my take, and this one I’d like to address:

On that, I can’t see how ‘battling through’ breastfeeding when it is agony is healthy, and it feeds worryingly into patriarchy’s ‘mother as martyr’ dynamic

And then, of course, there’s the now infamous Case Against Breastfeeding article. In that, too, Hannah Rosin frames breastfeeding as a “compulsory self-sacrifice”.

Okay, so, say I’d written an article about becoming a mechanic. I initially found the work really physically hard. Because I hadn’t yet gained all the skills I needed, I burned my arm on a hot engine.  I hated it.  I dragged myself into work every day for a month. But this is what I’d always wanted.  I was determined to stick with it. Gradually I gained skills, got strong, proved to be really good at this. Now I’m making progress in my career and my sense of self has been transformed. Who would have thought someone like me (a woman, someone who doubted herself) could do this? Wow! Feminist role model; personal triumph.

Or I was a doctor. Punishing hours; awful things happen; many skills to learn. But I got good at this, and people got better! All that early hard work has made me fulfilled, skilled and able to help other people. Isn’t it great that there are women gaining those skills and doing those jobs?

Say I was a nurse. Hard physical work; hard emotional work; lots to learn. But I learned, grew, and got huge emotional and intellectual satisfaction from my work. That’s a  bit sus, isn’t it? Emotional satisfaction from nursing? From doing a traditionally female job of looking after other people?

But in fact, I am not a mechanic, a doctor or a nurse. I’m a breastfeeding mother. I get huge emotional rewards from it; I feel like it’s a worthwhile thing to be doing; I know, also, that it is the best feeding option for my children, and a straightforward and healthy way for them to bond with their mother. But that’s suspicious. Going through difficulties to succeed at nurturing my own children is the wrong kind of narrative for a feminist to take pride in.

It’s got to  be a different story. We have framed so much of feminism as about choice; so much of feminism is about choice. But a narrative of motherhood can’t be like a narrative of a profession. Motherhood isn’t entirely abstractable – you have to be someone‘s mother. Motherhood is a relationship, or a web of relationships, not a qualification. It’s unfair: you just do  it, you just are that kid’s mother, whether you’re better than the infertile woman next door or not. Furthermore, since you are that kid’s mother, there are things you can do that nobody else (pretty much) can do. And breastfeeding is a key one there. So, to a degree, there is no choice: the best food for your child is one only you can make (wet nurses and milk banks being vanishingly rare options). Which is a bummer when it’s hard to do, because of work outside the home, because of pain, because of inhibition, because of hating it.

Yes, it’s every mother’s choice to breastfeed or not. But let’s not pretend it’s a neutral choice, or that it’s a choice made in a vacuum.  Let’s not deny evidence and silence individual stories in order to fit in with a currently orthodox feminist notion, any more than we silence feminist voices to fit in with the patriarchy. Let’s also be clear that demonising any broad sweep of opnion, be that breastfeeding advocacy or formula-feeding advocacy, is a stupid move. I’ve never said formula feeding mothers are “selfish” or that I “pity” them, despite both those words being used in comments to my article.

There are a lot of problems with the notion of “choice feminism” (oh, so many problems…). Breastfeeding brings some of those to the fore very actutely. Let’s react like a mature, self-confident feminist movement and examine those problems. Meantimes, I’ll continue to breastfeed and other people will continue to interpret that in ways that are about them, not me, and definitely not my children.