Sins of the father

When Ben was 4, we had a conversation about the differential workload between mothers and fathers, and how the situation was improving, but not yet equal. I explained that Ben's dad was a much better dad than his father was to him. He vowed then to be a better father again. As a mother trying to raise sons to challenge the patriarchy, there's not much more I could have asked for.

Ben's grandfather's name was Ross. He was an alcoholic who was frequently violent, especially when his family was young. And yet, he wanted to be a better father than his father had been. Ross told the story of seriously considering killing his father when he was 8 or 10 years old because of the violence in their house. He knew it was wrong. Nevertheless, he grew up to repeat it, if not quite as viciously as his father.

Crash, by contrast, has broken the cycle far more effectively. He isn't violent, but his language still includes violent rhetoric. The ghosts of fathers past still linger in his first reactions, despite his own force of will stopping him from acting on those impulses. Feminism gets some of the credit for this too. Ross knew the violence was wrong, but society as a whole didn't really back that up. He was brought up in Broken Hill, where women were decorations, not people. His conditioned responses had only his will standing against them, while Crash's have his will and that of a society that is finally beginning to condemn violence as a response to anger and frustration.

I feel a deep sadness for Ross. I don't know the history that precedes his father, or how many generations this legacy has affected. However, I have hope for the future. The sins of the father need not continue to be visited upon the sons. Understanding and compassion hold the key. Anger is necessary to recognise the problem, but it isn't enough to stop it repeating. Ross had every reason to be angry with his father, but without trying to understand him and identify why he did the things he did, Ross ended up repeating it. Crash still has habits of thinking that were influenced by the way he was raised. However, each time he gains more insight into his father, each little bit more he understands, he gains more power. Understanding doesn't excuse, but it's a hell of a lot easier to break habits whose origins make sense.

My kids have a massive advantage over the generations who preceded them. They are being raised by people who understand how our patriarchal society fucks with men, as well as women. I want them to be angry about what has gone before them, but I want them to direct the anger to the world that allowed and encouraged it. Another man in Ross's position might not have repeated his father's behaviour, but Ross in another time and place might not have either. We are social creatures, and our job is to create a society that makes it easy to break the cycle. We can never be responsible for another person's actions, but no person's actions take place in a vacuum. If we are to be an inclusive society, we have to be able to support the Rosses of this world, as well as those people who have been able to break the cycle on their own.

There is no argument I hate more than "I went through that, and I survived without ever doing X". As much as I admire the folks who can say that, it is completely unfair to those who a hellish childhood has broken. The problem is not that the kid failed to rise above the turmoil in their lives, the problem is that we failed to help them do so. As a society, we are damn lucky that many kids manage to do it themselves, but it doesn't excuse us for failing those who can't find the strength or the way.

The way forward is not through blame, but through understanding what went wrong. The only way to stop something happening again, is to understand why it happened the first time and what needs to be done differently to stop it happening again. You can tell a person not to lash out violently until you're blue in the face, but it you don't tell them what else to do, and how to control the emotions that drive it, no punishment or consequences will ever stop them.

DUFC coming soon!

I'll be hosting the Down Under Feminists Carnival for April - showcasing posts from Aus/NZ feminist bloggers during March. I've just finished a secondary teaching degree, so I may show a slight bias towards education and young people-related submissions, but I won't go so far as to say it's the theme - if it's good, I'd love to include it!

The standard procedure to submit posts for the carnival is to submit them here. At the moment, however, Blog Carnival is refusing to let me register, so please email me your submissions as well, if it's not too much of a trauma - I'm not sure if/when the problem will be resolved. My email is ariane @ m8s.org.

So, get reading and submitting! I'm not at all daunted by this task. Not at all. :)

UPDATE: Blog Carnival has allowed me to register, and the submission form is working again. So, have at it!

What makes housework menial?

I hate housework. I spend a lot of time saying that I'd love not to have to do paid work, but then I interrupt myself and point out that this would necessitate more housework and day to day child care, and I'd go slightly peculiar if that was my main occupation.

But why? Why is housework less rewarding than the stuff I do for money? In truth, the routine work of both bore me to tears. In my paid work, it's the planning, problem solving, interacting with clients and suppliers and the basking in the glory of a successful job that I enjoy. But housework has none of that does it?

Well, yeah, it does. There are questions of organisation to minimise the requirement for mundane work. Problems of physical design to make spaces work sensibly - a constantly moving target as people's needs and possessions change. Questions of energy efficiency and evolving into a household with a smaller environmental impact. Management issues - encouraging children to do their jobs to the best of their ability along with training them to do so.

When I talk about paid work, I talk about the rewarding bits, but when I talk about household stuff, I mostly complain about the mundane stuff. While I might have good friends with whom I can boast about a particularly inventive solution to the Toy Storage Problem, I never feel self conscious discussing how I designed a portion of the infrastructure for commercial digital radio in this country. Or how I help bankers talk to one another reliably and cheaply. Why do the latter two give me kudos, while the former results the social equivalent of a pat on the head?

I don't know, I haven't done the studies, but I can't help having this niggling feeling that it just might have something to do with the fact that housework is women's work, and therefore mundane and uninteresting by definition. In my own little anecdata gathering exercise, I'll be looking more at housework as a job with, admittedly, a fairly high ratio of mundane work, but also with all the high order, glory-worthy responsibilities of a paid job. That counts for other people doing housework too, including my husband's.

Blog for Choice - even outside the USA.

It's Blog for Choice day, and given that I have never done it before, and that it has a totally USA-focussed theme: Given the anti-choice gains in the states and Congress, are you concerned about choice in 2011? - it's a little odd that I'm giving it a shot. But the universe throws up odd coincidences and this is one of them.

We watch a fair bit of Boston Legal around here, and we watched one last night which was about abortion. The whole episode was pretty ordinary, actually, but the story about abortion was particularly ridiculous.

Short synopsis: 15 year old girl asks Alan Shore to represent her to be permitted to terminate her pregnancy because her mother won't let her. There is much agonising by Alan and Shirley Schmidt about how much an abortion stays with you forever. The mother claims the 15 year old is too young to know herself and will grow up to be pro-life. [Necessary interjection - the girl is Asian, and up until this point I'm thinking "makes a change, characters who are Asian with no particular plot reason for them to be Asian". Sadly, no.] Then it's revealed that she's only terminating the pregnancy because she's carrying a girl and Chinese people don't want girl children. Shirley tells the judge all this, and judge points out that interrogating teenagers for their reasons for termination rather defeats the purpose of giving them access to it and grants it anyway.

So, in the interests of the theme, I'll leave the race issues to the reader, along with the scientific ones (girl who is showing no signs of pregnancy at all, looking for routine abortion, and knows the gender of the baby?), and stick with the various issues of choice that came up.

One of the major themes was that pro-choice ideology hangs on Roe v Wade. Apparently this legal precedent is necessary for us to be able to believe that abortion is ok. Really? What about the vast majority of pro-choice people who don't live in the USA? I grew up pro-choice, all the while having some vague notion that Roe v Wade was about divorce settlements (I may have had it confused with Kramer vs Kramer). I also have no doubt that many, many pro-choice people within the USA feel that the moral position makes Roe v Wade necessary, not that Roe v Wade is necessary for the moral position.

Then we come to "But this decision will stay with her for the rest of her life!". Yes, that old chestnut. She's 15. She's pregnant. Whatever happens next, it will stay with her for the rest of her life. It was asserted over and again that women who have abortions "never get over it". I have no idea of actual numbers (has anyone ever done a real study?), but there definitely exist women who do get over it - who barely ever think of it again after the initial recovery period - as well as women who don't, indeed ever get over it. She has two other options - raising the child, or giving it up for adoption. Particularly in Australia we hear a great deal about how traumatic adoption is for both birth mother and child (not that I buy into that as a general truth, but the stories are there, and clearly it can be), and it's hard to consider a decision that's more likely to "stay with her for the rest of her life" than choosing to raise the child. Of course, raising the child doesn't have to be a bad thing, but for 15 year olds in countries with minimal welfare and little or no public health (like the USA), the odds are against her having an even tolerable parenting experience.

They also trotted out the "life begins at conception" thing. Yes, it does. Life begins at conception. But "life" is a pretty broad category. There is far more non-human life within my skin that there is human life. There is non-human life inside every one of my cells. We wipe out life on a monumental scale every time we take antibiotics (for example) - and not just the "evil" life that's making us sick, we're also wiping out a whole heap of our allies, the other life that keeps us humming along. So this isn't about "life", it's about "human life". At what point does a bundle of cells become a human life? The fact that these cells are reproducing themselves and growing doesn't make them a whole human being, my liver can do that, and it can do it in someone else's body. They may be capable of growing into a whole human being, unlike my liver, but they can't do it without my help - not until some point around 22 - 25 weeks, depending on available technology. I don't think biology can give us the answer to when the bundle of cells becomes "human life". I think it's a complex question, and I don't believe it's a "line in the sand" thing - it's a gradual progression from cells, to foetus, to baby and so on, and each stage brings more personhood. I don't think birth is where it ends either - I think personhood is still developing for a long time after birth, although in ever diminishing amounts.

The really sticky issue was the one of gender selection. I think this is an interesting question. We have 3 kids: boy, boy, girl. We did rather want a girl when we had the third. We did some of the things suggested to increase the odds of conceiving a girl. When we were told, by (faulty) genetic testing, that we were having a boy, we didn't consider termination. But if I believe that an individual has the right to choose whether or not they continue a pregnancy, I have to believe they have that right when they're doing it for gender. What's the difference, in terms of gender selection, between me nudging the odds, and them terminating? On the other hand, when you have a society-wide situation in which one gender is preferred over the other (and it isn't always a preference for boys, I've been told that the cost of educating boys in Japan makes people select for girls), you have a problem. I'd argue that the right solution is to address the reasons why there is a wholesale gender preference in the first place, rather than place restrictions on having the babies themselves, but sometimes that just isn't practical. In Japan, at least at one point in time, you couldn't be told the gender of the baby until 8 months, even though it was still discovered at 18 weeks. That's one way of dealing with it, I suppose.

In the end though, it all comes down to that progression from cells to a separate individual with a personality. At what point on that journey does the life become equivalent to the mother that created it? This has to be a philosophical question, and therefore will never have a definitive answer. For that reason alone, we need choice, because none of us has the right to impose our answer on someone else.

30th Down Under Feminists Carnival

This months Down Under Feminists Carnival is up at Bri's Fat Lot of Good. It's a mammoth edition, should keep you busy reading for a while.

It's always a good read, so go check it out.

Also, don't forget the fab little bookmarklet that Mary made that makes it easier to submit posts as you're reading them.

What does the path to equality look like?

I went back to belly dancing tonight after all my tedious illness, and among the shimmying and chasseing and belly popping, we watched some YouTube clips of Turkish belly dancers and compared them with Egyptian dancers. There is a huge difference. If you're not familiar with belly dancing, you may not be aware that it is a family of dance rather than a single style, and the variations can be quite dramatic. I've always leaned towards the very traditional Egyptian or the more modern folkloric style - both very earthy and strong. There are also much more flamboyant styles, sexier styles, cabaret styles, balletic styles and so on. My bias has meant that I've watched a lot of Egyptian dancers and not so many others.

Here's Didem, a favourite dancer in Turkey now.

And here's Dina, Egypt's darling at the moment.

Something struck me, watching them. These two are reasonably representative of their countries' styles. Didem is young, very thin, and is contracted exclusively to the TV show she's on in this clip. Her predecessor on the show was apparently shot in the leg when she tried to leave her contract (this has all the researched authority of my belly dance teacher, but even the fact that such a rumour is believed by people says something). Dina is older, and looks very thoroughly in control at all times. She makes no grand entrances, just wanders on to stage and starts dancing when she feels like it. Dina commands respect while Didem commands attention.

And my point was? Egypt is a country where social roles remain quite rigid, both in terms of gender and class. However, the dancers from Egypt are respected for their talent, are regarded as improving with age and are not noticeably objectified. These women, at least the successful ones, are self confident, and seem to own the stage.

Turkey is, by comparison, much more Westernised, and with that, it seems the dancers are much more objectified. There is more freedom for woman to step outside gender and class roles, but at least through the lens of belly dance, they have more obligation to meet beauty standards and play passive sex kitten.

There is more than one path to equality. Rigid gender roles don't necessarily mean an imbalance in respect, although they might. In cultures where women are respected, (like Egyptian dancers) I can understand why they may not want to give that up to come to the place I, as a Westerner am at, where youth, slenderness and big boobs are the main measure of a woman, even if I can choose more ways to live my life. I don't know what the path from such a culture to equality looks like, because I don't live it, but I know they have no obligation to follow a Western lead.

If I was a dancer, I know I'd rather be an Egyptian one than a Turkish one. However, I'm not a dancer and I've worked all my life in male dominated areas, so Turkey may be a better choice for me. And that, finally, is my point. Any interim point along the way will be better for some and worse for others. There's nothing to be gained by judging the other path while standing in the middle of one's own.

Over and over....

I was going to blog about that ridiculous article berating women for daring to take a sip of alcohol while pregnant and/or breastfeeding, but why? I did it already - 2 years ago, and the refrain from the mummy-blamers hasn't changed.

From this recent one:

...a third of all women surveyed admitted to consuming at least one drink while pregnant or breastfeeding.

And from the one two years ago:

A study has found one third of Australian women have admitted to drinking alcohol when pregnant - and most would do it again.

So nothing much has changed, I notice the world hasn't come to an end, nor do we have a sudden rash of children with... well no-one has proposed any actual outcomes for low level drinking, so I'm not sure what we're looking for here. Certainly there hasn't even been a suggestion of a rise in the rate of foetal alcohol syndrome (which is no surprise, because it requires a significant level of alcohol consumption - a lot more than the one or two drinks 1-3 times a week most women seem to be talking about). So we should all start listening to the "rules" because......?

Token Resistance

blue milk has written a great post about how women are not responsible for rape. Ever.

The comments thread has been both heated and interesting. One comment struck me as both understandable and rather horrific. Darsh said "It is true that guys regularily need to press on through token resistance by girls".

This is a pretty commonly expressed opinion, and it both is a problem and reflects a problem. It's a problem because it's impossible for a person to know if what their partner is doing is "token resistance" or reluctance mixed with fear. If it's the latter, consent is clearly in question. If you can't be sure that you have consent, you shouldn't keep going.

However, it's also true that women do put up faux resistance from time to time. It really, seriously shouldn't happen*. It does happen because women are told they can't be sluts, that they need to be coy, that they need to play hard to get. They are taught from a young age not to own their sexuality. So they do, from time to time, play these games.

So what to do? I think there are two parts to the answer - the short term and the long term. In the short term, men (most often, but women too) need to just stop when their partner puts up "token resistance". It's not a fair thing to do, to pretend you don't want sex when you do, but it's understandable given how women are socialised. It's up to us all to change this habit. I'd suggest that sex ending as soon as someone starts playing coy is a great way to do this. If she's doing it because she really doesn't want to be there and is afraid of the consequences of saying no, that's the only ethical option anyway. If she's doing it because of what amounts to fucked up social training, if you can encourage her to express enthusiasm for sex actively - well everyone has a lot more fun.

The longer term solution is to actually put some sex education into sex education. Teach kids that the first step in having sex with someone is talking about sex with them. That everyone should be clearly and happily expressing their desire before anyone pokes anyone with anything. And most importantly, make it really clear that this isn't a policy of prohibition, it's a recipe for good, safe, respectful and FUN sex. If you're gonna do it, do it right.

*Unless it's in the context of well defined and discussed play.

Offensive?

The battle for hearts and minds with respect to Conroy's Internet filter is continuing, for reasons I just can't fathom. I cannot get my head around why anyone finds it hard to decide where they stand given the arguments - namely:

Anti:

• It won't work
• By telling people it will work when it won't, you're making people less vigilant themselves
• It will block stuff that is legal (both on and not on the secret banned list).
• Allowing a government to have a secret list of banned sites is the slipperiest of slopes imaginable. Tony Abbott might one day have control of that list. Think on that.

Pro:

• Child pornography is bad.

Yep, that's about it for the pro case. Of course, they're right, child pornography is bad, but the filter won't do anything about that anyway.

Sorry, that was a diversion from my point, which is that apparently many people are still swallowing Conroy's bullshit. So EFA (Electronic Frontiers Australia) decided to direct a campaign at mothers. Some people have (validly) criticised this targeting, but I'm OK with the balance of need vs sweeping generalisation in terms of the target. However, the content was abysmally sexist. In case you can't be bothered clicking through, the general gist is that mothers are technically inept and too busy looking after their families to consider the facts for themselves. Tedious at best.

This in and of itself isn't very surprising. EFA contracted an ad agency and left them to it. We shouldn't be too stunned that they used boring, sexist stereotypes - it's what the advertising industry is built on. What amazed me was the stubborn refusal by EFA to acknowledge that there was a problem with them using such a sexist campaign. Something that really struck me was that those defending the campaign kept using the word "offensive". They kept fauxpologising for people being "offended". Some people criticising used that word too, but lots more called it sexist.

There are two interesting things about this - one is that by putting the emphasis on the reaction, "offense" instead of the content, "sexism" they can dismiss the complaints as being about the people complaining instead of about the content itself. The other is that I wasn't offended. I disliked it and complained about it, but I wasn't actually offended. Lots of people never mentioned being offended. This is presumably because sexism is so common place many people, like me, read it as tedious rather than offensive. That's rather disturbing. And it also feeds into the first point. Since so many people aren't offended by this routine, pedestrian sexism, the people who mention that they are, are the objects of ridicule.

In the end the conversation was shut down because Geordie Guy decided that the comments section of their blog was no place for a discussion. Go figure. This does demonstrate one thing rather well though - if even EFA can have quite different ideas about what's appropriate on the Internet from myself and others, I really don't want politicians deciding what I'm allowed to see.

Eleventh Carnival of Feminist Parenting

I've finally had a chance to look through one of these carnivals, and not surprisingly really, it's pretty cool.

If you haven't already gone to have a squiz, go check out the Eleventh Carnival of Feminist Parenting.

Competing needs

So, have you been following the train wreck that is "On Hating Children" over on Feministe? One commenter pointed out that there'll be a rash of "I have the answer" posts on personal blogs, and I wouldn't like to disappoint.

While the argument rages with ridiculous extremes on both sides (for the record, I don't think anyone thinks that children should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want in a public space, nor do I think anyone thinks that children should never speak above a whisper, but that seems to be what both sides are accusing each other of), a few very important points were made. The main one being competing needs.

Jackie commented that she experiences sensitivity to noise, and kids being loud are really quite unbearable for her. I have a kid who is still really struggling to control his impulses, and is well known for loud, frustrated outbursts. How would I handle it if Jackie (or someone with similar sound sensitivity - it ain't that uncommon) were a friend, or just someone who regularly shares the same space? Well firstly, I'd explain to my kids that not everyone experiences sound the same way, so that at least they understood the situation. In the end, though, I'd really need to keep noisy kid(s) away from Jackie, through sensible negotiation and a bit of thought.

All good and well if I know who she is and where she might be. But what if I don't know who she is, but she's often at the same places? It seems that the only real solution is that which has been implemented on some UK commuter trains - quiet spaces. It doesn't seem at all beyond the realms of plausibility that restaurants and cafes could choose to advertise as "Quiet" spaces, or reserve "Quiet" areas. We have cafes clearly designated as "loud" by virtue of having play equipment for kids, I'm sure you could do well opening the "quiet" one across the road.

This addresses a whole range of problems - the hens/bucks night at the table next to you when you were hoping for a quiet, romantic meal, the business meeting when you're trying to study and so on.

It also strikes me that parents would be a good group to advocate for such a thing - after all, when we do manage to escape the kids for a wee while, it'd be awesome to know there was a place we could go that was quiet. In addition, if the space is not designated as quiet, then we'd have better rules of engagement with the death starers and drive-by parenting suggesters.

I don't, of course, have any answers for the rest of the battle over there, except maybe downgrading the defensiveness. It seems like a lot of people have had so many bad experiences in way or another, they've given up believing that anyone is reasonable, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just a brain dump, really

I read an excerpt from a book that ashinynewcoin linked to in The Age (that was convoluted, wasn't it?) about the entrenched sexism that nobody sees. Among other things, it described the experiences of two transgender scientists. Both found that their work was taken more seriously during the part of their life when they were men.

It makes excellent points, but I found myself automatically questioning the conclusions because it uses only 2 examples. It really isn't possible to conclude anything from these two people - it may just happen that their work actually was better during the part of their lives lived male (as a coincidence - I'm not suggesting correlation). I stand by that analysis, but for many other reasons, I'm pretty confident that the conclusions are still actually correct, even if they can't be drawn from these two anecdotes alone.

However, what this really led me to consider is how this whole thing has played out in my life. In my current career, I started out working in a company where I never reached a very high position. I was a manager, but I wasn't a regional manager or anything. As a result, I was never really taken very seriously by suppliers or customers. When I left the company, I started my own business, and I was determined to behave like the owner, CEO, Person Of Importance. It didn't work. I figured this was because my business was tiny and it didn't matter to anyone. That was probably true.

Then I was joined by two (male) partners, both of whom had been more senior than me in the company I had worked for. Almost immediately, they became the people everybody talked to. They were the People of Importance. This was for a number of reasons - they were better at it than me, they had a larger reputation in our industry and so on. The situation was as much my doing as theirs.

In any given situation, how can anyone say whether I am taken less seriously because of merit or because I am female? There have been alternative explanations all the way along, and it may well be that they are the right ones in every case, but then that's the whole point about unseen sexism - nobody thinks they are committing it, and not many people think they are suffering as a result of it.

The only way to combat this is to show people the results of studies showing innate bias against women. To make it clear that just because you don't think you're doing it, it doesn't mean you aren't. And just because you are doing it, it doesn't make you a bad person. You're doing it because it's deeply ingrained in our society, not because you believe in sexism. The trick is to take the shame out of it and to make it a point of empowerment. Make a million Facebook quizzes that highlight this ingrained sexism so that we can learn to fight it in ourselves. Treat it as an optical illusion that we can train our brains not to see, rather than a personality defect.

See how that woman's inferior? It's just a trick of society that makes us see her that way, but if you look carefully enough, you can see the truth of it, and if you practice often enough, you find it hard to see how you ever saw the illusion in the first place.

Fred Nile makes it all clear

The burqa is understood as a controversial thing. In many ways, it represents the oppression of women in the more conservative brands of Islam, but somehow the idea that men with political power could ban its wearing altogether does not look like the liberation of women.

Still, it might not be obvious which is the lesser evil - allowing men as private citizens to dictate what women may wear or allowing men in power to dictate what women may wear.

But now, Fred Nile has shown us the way. Fred wants to introduce a bill to ban the burqa in NSW.

So if you've been wondering which is the lesser evil, I say follow Fred - if Fred supports it, it's a Bad Idea. Fred has made it clear - the path is to encourage and effect cultural change such that women are never coerced into in wearing clothing that makes them uncomfortable. Legislating away one side of the choice doesn't redress cultural removal of the other side.

Feminism, self determination and peer pressure

A year and a half ago I blogged this photo, since dubbed "Vengeful Fairy of Doom".

I love this photo so much. I love the sword slung in the fairy wings and the gun holstered under the tutu. I love it so much it's my wallpaper on my phone.

However, recently, Ben has come to dislike it. Wednesday night, he asked me to take it off my phone. About a thousand voices bounced around in my head shouting about his right to decide how his photos are used, and about my right to use my photos on my phone, and about what was making him dislike it anyway. I don't know if he noticed the pause while I waited for the shouting to stop, but I asked him why he didn't like the photo - everyone else I know does. The answer was, predictably enough, that his friend doesn't like "that sort of stuff". At this point all the voices joined together to scream, "WHAT??? GIRL STUFF?????". I said, almost calmly, "What? Girl Stuff? But you know there's no such thing as girl stuff." Standard peer pressure type conversation ensued, and I left it at that for the evening.

Yesterday morning, I brought it up again. It was revealed that said friend is excessively anti-fairy. Ben believes this has its roots in "girl stuff", but he can see the friend's point about fairies being a bit pathetic. Ben has been exposed to "The Fairies", so I can see why he might be sympathetic to this position. Time to leave philosophy aside, and go into bat for fairies. I showed him some classic Brian Froud, which didn't really impress, but then I pulled out the big guns - Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book.

No seven year old can resist a bit of splattered fairy.

After he went to school, I was left to return to the philosophical questions. I still need to revisit whether he really wants me to remove the photo from my phone, and I have just re-published it here. I don't think the latter is a big deal, it really is all about his mate not seeing the photo, but I may pull it down if he really is distressed by it. I will change the wall paper if he still wants me to.

We did discuss that part of the reason the photo is cool, is that he's messing with stereotypes. In it, he's happily playing with "boy stuff"and "girl stuff" all together. I know that he's at least beginning to question these stereotypes. He pointed out, unprompted, a sentence in a home reader that said that boys think they are better at sport than girls. He was most unimpressed. I'm not too worried about this part of the message.

The question for me is how to balance his right to decide his own course with his need to not have that course too heavily determined by peer pressure and also with the cost of challenging his mates.

I'd like him to be proud of the photo, and to have the confidence to tell his friend that he's wrong, fairies can be cool, and Ben dressed as one is definitely cool.

I'll settle for him to be proud of the photo but still prefer to keep it somewhere where his mates can't see it.

I know I can't make him proud of it if he can't feel it.

PS. At the Mothers' Day breakfast this morning, my place card had a picture of a squashed fairy on it. :)

Simple steps to reduce rape culture

This post by Tigtog at Hoyden About Town is fantastic. It cites studies that show that non-violent rape may be perpetrated by men who are repeat offenders much more so than by otherwise good blokes who make one-off bad decisions.

What I love about this post, though, is that it makes sensible, practical suggestions about what everyone can do to never validate the kind of thinking that justifies rape, as well as how to protect vulnerable people without expecting those people to restrict their own lives in response to the threat of these sort of predators.

If you don't already read HAT, do read this post. Keep the tips in mind and share them with your friends. This is the kind of thing that can actually change our culture, if we just all accept responsibility for it. It's worth noting, though, that the points about not validating comments that denigrate women are much more powerful coming from men. A bloke who already hates women is unlikely to care much if a woman fails to validate his misogynist remarks. So this is a specific call for men to act to counter rape culture. Are you up to it?

Gender based ethical standards

I've often claimed that society expects less of boys and men - phrases such as "He's only a boy" are heard a lot, especially among mothers and grandmothers. But of course, I don't do that. I treat my boys the same as my daughter. Obviously.

I was just watching one of those obnoxious Nestle ads where they talk about how they are saving the world with their processed foods. It was the second one I've seen, but this one had an extra hit - the person speaking on behalf of Nestle was a woman. I was instinctively more disgusted by a woman's lack of integrity (as perceived by me) than by that of a man. Damn I hate being confronted by my own prejudice. I'll remember to be equally disgusted by men, and stop accepting it as some sort of inevitability as a result of looking like a bloke.

The ****-ist battleground

It feels to me that since I started reading feminist blogs, I have read about 347,741 arguments about whether this thing is really sexist, racist, whatever-ist, or whether it is a defensible reflection of reality/different in our culture/actually about something else or whatever. The enormous range of things that have been accused of being ****-ist is enough to make a person feel that simply being white, male, able - a member of the locally dominant group - is ****-ist. It's easy to fall back on "PC gone mad". But I can't settle comfortably on any position in these arguments.

I'm going to use the KFC ad as my example - I think it's a perfect symptom of the problem. If you missed the kerfuffle over this, you can check out one of the conversations here. It had all the elements wrapped up in one. The initial outcry was based on a culturally specific racist meme. People in the US were horrified that a white man was offering black people fried chicken. People in Australia said "huh?". Racism is a global phenomenon, but its expression can be highly localised. Simple practicality says that we can't avoid all possible expressions of racism, and context matters.

However, that's not the only problem with the KFC ad. The other problem was depicting a white man surrounded by black people and looking decidedly uncomfortable. Furthermore, he needed to, and did, shut them all up. Again, in this particular case, context matters. This as was in a series of people being surrounded by "others" (the other team, non-cricket fans - definitely not all race-based "others"), and essentially getting their own way with a bucket of KFC.

The problem with this line of reasoning, which I think is entirely valid, is that it can be made in so, so many cases. You end up with the world being ****-ist, but nothing in particular within it is. I guess this is where people who declare that there is no ****-ism find their conclusions. So how to resolve it?

I think there is value in shifting blame. If we see ****-ism as embedded in the structure of our culture, then when something resonates with that ****-ism, like the white dude surrounded by black dudes, it's a reflection of our culture and not the racist heart of the maker. The makers of the KFC ad should have responded with "We forgot just how much racism is built into our society, we'll try to counter better next time." There needs to be positive action to overcome that structural inequality, and it's everyone's responsibility to do so. The only reason for shifting the blame is psychological - people are more willing to recognise that they failed to do something positive than that they have done something negative.

It's important to see that "failing to do something positive" still has a very real negative impact on people. I'm not minimising the inherent inequalities, just looking at how we can get more people to engage in overcoming them - and hopefully stopping the "is it ****-ist or isn't it?" argument. It's not about intent, it's about whether you've challenged the ****-ist structure or reinforced it.

One other thing - this post is about all the things that we, as people who don't hold ****-ist core beliefs, do that cause harm. It's not about the people who actually believe that white, male, able etc is inherently better. In my world, the former are a much larger group, and get very defensive if they think they are being portrayed as the latter. And by "they", I mean "I", too.

So what have you done to challenge the biased structure, and when have you inadvertently reinforced it?

DUFC Number 21

The 21st DUFC is up at Rayedish's Place.

Go and have some tea with her and get into it. !

20th DUFC

 The DUFC is almost old enough to drink, and you can check out the 20th one at Pharaoh Katt's More than Sides. Well, you've been able to do so for a couple of days, but it hasn't gone anywhere.

Uncover or else

Oh FFS sake, France, could you be any less coherent?

Reading this article about the proposed French law to outlaw the burqa is an exercise in confusion and contradiction.

"The law will address an issue of security ... The proposed measure would prohibit the covering of the face in public places and on the streets, with the exception of special cultural events or carnivals."

This is Jean-Francois Cope. So we'll start with the theory that this is about security. I can see an argument that in places where, for example, motorcycle helmets are not permitted to be worn, full face covering burqas should also be excluded, as should balaclavas. Speaking of balaclavas, does this mean that they will also be banned on the ski slopes? Or would they be "special cultural events or carnivals"? It's hard to imagine that there is a need to demand that all people show their faces in all public places, but if there is, it's going to have consequences beyond women wearing burqas.

However, Cope isn't sure that it is about security.

"We can measure the modernity of a society by the way it treats and respects women"

Perhaps it's about women being forced to wear burqas? If so, then this legislation makes no sense at all. It provides fines for women who wear a burqa. So it seems that Cope is arguing that the way to stop men from forcing women to wear the burqa is to fine the women. Granted, there is also a fine for men who force women to wear a burqa, but how, exactly, could that be enforced? And besides, there is still a fine for the woman who has no choice.

While we're on the subject of contradiction, if Cope wants to be able to view France as a modern society that respects women, he may wish to consider that some women may, in fact, choose to wear the burqa in a fully informed way. While I understand the need to protect women from oppression, I can't imagine any woman who freely chooses the burqa feeling as though she has been liberated by this law. I don't know if any of the 1,900 women in France who wear it, choose to do so freely (not being psychic and all), but surely, neither does Cope.

Since Cope can't decide why the legislation is required, and doesn't address the consequences of it for other face coverings, it's pretty difficult to see this as anything but vilification and oppression of Moslems.

I'd suggest that we can also measure the modernity of a society by the way it treats minority groups. Personally, I do place the well being of the women above the well being of the religion, but I don't believe you enhance women's well being by making grand gestures without involving those affected. If the government has concerns regarding security and the oppression of women, perhaps they should take these concerns to the community involved. Perhaps they should consult with Moslem women - both those who wear the burqa and those who don't - as well as women's advocacy groups which have an understanding of these women and their communities. This may not be an easy, or headline grabbing path, but is much more respectful of both the group identity and the women involved. It might even go a step towards resolving the tension.